SOURCE: Axelrod, Alan. “New World Genesis, or the Old Transformed.” In Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale, pp. 53-96. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983.

[In the following essay, Axelrod examines possible old world and new world sources for several of the characters and narrative elements in Wieland.]

James Yates, known to the community of Tomhannock, New York, as a naturally gentle man, industrious, sober, and kind, threw his Bible into the fireplace, deliberately demolished his own sleigh, killed his wife, his four children, and his horse shortly after nine on a December evening in 1781. That afternoon, a Sunday, there being no church nearby, several neighbors had gathered at Yates's house to read Scripture and sing psalms. So cordial were his spirits that he persuaded his sister and her husband to remain until nine, long after the others had left. They engaged in serious, interesting, and affectionate conversation, Yates addressing his wife in more than commonly endearing terms. He spoke of his happy home and of how, tomorrow, he would treat his wife to a sleigh ride as far as New Hampshire. Before his sister and her husband left, they all sang one more hymn.

Upon his capture and interrogation Yates told how he took his wife upon his lap and opened the Bible to read to her. Their two sons, a five-and a seven-year-old, were in bed. Eleven-year-old Rebecca sat by the fire, while the baby, a daughter aged six months, slumbered at her mother's bosom.

“Instantly a new light shone into the room,” and two Spirits appeared before Yates, one at his right and the other at his left. The latter bade him “destroy all his idols, beginning with the Bible.” Although the Spirit at his right hand attempted to dissuade him, Yates obeyed the first, calling it his “good angel,” and cast the book into the flames. Bolting from her husband's lap, Mrs. Yates snatched the Bible from the fire, but before she had time to utter a word, Yates threw it in again, holding his wife fast until the book was completely consumed.

Seizing an axe, Yates ran out the door and broke up his sleigh. He ran to the stable and killed one horse, striking another, which, however, escaped. When he returned to the house to tell his wife what he had done, the “good angel” reappeared: “You have more idols, (said he) look at your wife and children.” Without a moment's hesitation, Yates ran to the bed of his two sons, caught the older one up in his arms and threw him against the wall with such force that he “expired without a groan.” He next seized the younger boy by the feet and dashed his “skull in pieces against the fireplace” before the child could even awaken.

Seeing that his daughter and wife had fled with the baby, Yates again took up his axe “in pursuit of the living.” His wife was running with the baby to her father's house half a mile away. Yates called to her, but she only screamed, redoubling her pace. Within thirty yards of her, Yates hurled his axe, gashing the woman's hip and causing her to drop the baby girl. Gathering the infant in his own arms, Yates threw her against a log fence. He had now lost sight of his wife, though the track her bleeding hip left in the snow was easy enough to follow.

Within eyeshot of her father's house—inexplicably—she turned and ran across an open field back to Yates's own door, whereupon all her husband's “natural feelings” welled up within him: “Come then, my love (said I) we have one child left, let us be thankful for that—what is done is right—we must not repine, come let me embrace you—let me know that you do indeed love me.” With that, she embraced Yates in her “trembling” arms, pressing her “quivering” lips to his cheek.

“This is also an idol!” a voice spoke behind him, and breaking instantly from her, Yates wrenched a stake from the garden fence. He leveled her with a single stroke. Realizing that the blow might only have stunned her, he struck again and again until he himself could not recognize one feature of her face.

Then he heard moans and sobbing coming from the barn. It was Rebecca, who begged her father's mercy so affectingly that once again “natural pity” took possession of Yates. He thought now “that to destroy all my idols, was a hard task.” So, taking her by the hand, he asked her to sing and dance for him. And while she danced and sang, Yates pondered: this pity and these feelings were not “in the line of my duty.” Convinced of his momentary error, he caught up a “hatchet that stuck in a log.” Presently, Rebecca's forehead was “cleft in twain.”

Theodore Wieland's ritual murder of his family had its genesis in the James Yates tragedy. Brown suggested in his prefatory “Advertisement” to Wieland that “most readers will probably recollect an authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland.” As early as 1801 a reviewer recognized this as an allusion to the murders in Tomhannock, a case (Carl Van Doren concluded in a 1914 article for The Nation) indeed familiar to Brown's contemporary readers. Perpetrated in 1781, the Yates atrocity was not news by July of 1796 when it first reached print as a complete account in The New York Weekly Magazine. However, it did excite sufficient interest among the public to merit reprinting a month later in the Philadelphia Minerva.¹

In his Nation article, Carl Van Doren cataloged enough parallels between the Tomhannock and Wieland tragedies to confirm the 1801 reviewer's speculation that the actual case had inspired the fictional one. In addition to the generally parallel situations of “divinely inspired” murder, Wieland shares with the Yates atrocity such details as the murderer's extended confession, a wife killed with her four children (two boys and two girls—the baby, in each case, a girl), and the mangling of a corpse beyond recognition (Yates's wife and Wieland's foster-daughter Louisa Conway). Both Yates and Wieland protest their innocence not of the deed, but of crime, insisting that they obeyed the will of a superior Being. Both are cast into dungeons and loaded with chains: Yates escapes twice and is recaptured, while Wieland also twice escapes and is twice retaken, only to escape a third fatal time. Wieland attempts after his third escape to kill Clara, as Yates had attempted to kill his sister immediately after the slaughter of his wife and children.²

An outline Brown apparently drew up shortly before the composition of Wieland reveals the influence of the Yates murders in even greater detail than the finished novel.³ We first note that, in the outline, Theodore is called Charles, and, like James Yates, he has a wife and four children. Like the Theodore of the finished novel, he also has an adopted daughter. His conversation with his family on the night he kills them is “affectionate, solemn, foreboding misfortune,” as Yates's conversation had been “grave … but interesting and affectionate.” At midnight Charles hears “vocal sounds” and sees a “light” and a “figure,” much as “a new light [had] shone into the room” when Yates looked up to behold “two Spirits.” The “figure” Charles sees “forewarns against Idolatry”—echoing the idol motif that is very much a part of the Tomhannock murders, although absent at least in explicit form from Wieland. Then Charles (433):

… Destroys 1 some favourte [sic] ^in-animate object. an organ.

	2. greyhound.
		200.
	3. children 2.
omen	4. Wife [crossed out] Ward.
Command	5. Ward [crossed out] Wife.
Repugnan[c]e	6. Sister.
Resolute
Interval of [crossed out]
Repenting

Yates had conducted himself similarly, destroying (1) his sleigh, (2) a horse, (3) two children, (4) his infant daughter and his wife, and (5) his older daughter. He ended (6) by attempting to murder his sister. Twice Yates faced his “Command” with “Repugnan[c]e” and had intervals of at least near repentance. But he is finally and fatally “Resolute.”

More significant than the details Brown drew from the account of the Yates atrocity is the central thematic concern Wieland shares with the Tomhannock murders; these murders, like Brown's novel, dramatically manifest the complex effects of New World extremity. Wieland bears two subtitles. The first, “The Transformation,” reflects the horrible change Theodore (like Yates) suffers, turning from a civilized, gentle family man to, from all appearances, a monster. What we shall be exploring now is how this transformation reflects the national environment and culture: the “American Tale” that is the second subtitle.

James Yates, the Charles Wieland of Brown's outline, and Theodore Wieland in the finished novel each delivers, upon capture, confessional narratives aimed at justifying the transformation they have undergone. James Yates exhibits nothing but contempt for his accusers. After coolly relating his deeds, he refuses “to confess his error or join in prayer,” praying instead to a deity he addresses as “Father”: “My father, thou knowest that it was in obedience to thy commands, and for thy glory that I have done this deed.” This seems to have impressed Brown, who, in sketching Charles's confession, elaborated upon Yate's contempt, particularly emphasizing its intellectual ramification:

Thou, omnipotent & holy! Thou wast the prompter of my deed. My hands were but the instruments of thy will. I know not what is crime. Of what action caused [?] evil is the ultimate result. Thy knowledge as thy power is reverenced[?]. I lean[?] upon thy promise I cheearfully [sic] sustain the load of pain of [infaming] hatred wh[ich] erring [?] men lay upon me. In thy arms of thy protection I entrust my safety. In the fullness of thy justice I confide for my reward.

Charles now addresses judge and jury:

You say that I am criminal, Presumptuous man! Thou deservest that the arm of righteous [?] vengeance should crush thee. Thus impiously to usurp the prerogative of thy creator! To count thus rashly on the comprehension of thy views: on the fall [frail?] pervading property of thy foresight!

(437)

Having acted at what he believes the behest of God, Charles sees himself placed far above the faulty “comprehension” and “foresight” of presumptuous mankind. While much of Charles's outline confession finds its way into Wieland substantially unchanged (see pp. 176-7), the intellectual significance of revelation is further developed in the finished novel. Theodore Wieland's religious mania is depicted as the result of an intellectual errand, a quest for absolute truth. Theodore testifies:

My days have been spent in searching for the revelation of [God's] will; but my days have been mournful, because my search failed. I solicited direction: I turned on every side where glimmerings of light could be discovered. I have not always been wholly uninformed; but my knowledge has always stopped short of certainty.

(165)

Having isolated the intellectual dimension of the Yates-Wieland murders, we may decide that they are not so much “American” as biblical. It is as if both Brown and Yates had drawn upon Genesis, the twenty-second chapter, in which Abraham, hearing the voice of God command the sacrifice of his son Isaac, obeys, like Yates and Wieland, without hesitation. Abraham puts aside the dictates of what James Yates called “natural feelings” (for Isaac is his only son, whom he loves) in obedience to what he perceives as an absolute truth transcending them. It is this leap of faith, of course, that inspired the epistemological fable Søren Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling, embroidered upon Genesis, chapter 22. The self, a vessel of “natural feelings,” is itself the means through which the absolute truth of God's command contrary to those feelings must be apprehended. Like Abraham, Yates and Wieland believe implicitly in their ability to apprehend divine truth. The transformation from loving husband and father to murderer they see as a transformation from the state of fallible mortality motivated by the relative truths of nature to an infallible state of divinity as agent of God's truth. Pondering the mortal consequences of his divine deed, Yates for a moment considers dragging all the dead into his house, setting it afire, and attributing the carnage to Indian massacre. “I was preparing to drag my wife in, when the idea struck me that I was going to tell a horrible lie; and how will that accord with my profession [that the killings were an act of divine truth]? … No, let me speak the truth, and declare the good motive of my actions, be the consequences what they may” (28). Absolute truth must not be pleaded with lies before the relative justice of men.

The manner in which the Abraham and Isaac story became an American tale is complex, likely involving more than the direct use of “native” materials. This we shall examine presently; but first, and more simply, we should observe that Brown's version of the biblical episode is a grotesque criticism of the intellectual blindness behind the Abrahamic leap of faith. This critical view is abetted by—may even have been inspired by—the extremity of wilderness life. Although Brown may have been familiar with Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur's observation that vast wilderness space fosters among Americans a (healthy) “religious indifference” because zeal cannot be transmitted over any great distance,⁴ the novelist would have seen that, in the case of James Yates, precisely such wilderness conditions nurtured fanatic notions. Yates's Tomhannock, remote from city and established church (Yates was accustomed to conducting impromptu services himself) concentrated in itself the newness of the New World. Yates's act, like Theodore Wieland's, was born of that world, a wilderness isolated from the emotionally and intellectually tempering influence of city civilization and organized religion. Their immediate environment helped make antinomians of Yates and Wieland, each of whom is convinced that he enjoys an original relation to the absolute.

If the wilderness offers nothing to check a misguided leap of faith, it does, ironically, provide a model after which the tragic consequences of the leap may be fashioned. The blackest irony of James Yates's action is that in performing what he sees as God's will he commits an atrocity worthy of the stereotyped “godless” American Indian. His project of slaughter bears more than a casual resemblance to a particular account of Indian atrocity written by a young gentlewoman named Ann Eliza Bleecker. Her History of Maria Kittle (“A Pathetic Story Founded on Fact”)⁵ was popular enough to go through two printings before 1800. Set in Tomhannock, the hometown both of Mrs. Bleecker and of James Yates, the story relates with pornographic zeal the lurid details of cruelties practiced by Indians upon Maria and her household. The Indians attack primarily with their “tomahacks,” cleaving in twain as handily as Yates the foreheads of their victims. Not content with a single deadly stroke, they beat their victims' corpses beyond recognition. Maria's pregnant sister-in-law falls victim to a “tomahack” blow between her eyes:

Her fine azure eyes just opened, and then suddenly closing for ever, she tumbled lifeless at [her attacker's] feet. His sanguinary soul was not yet satisfied with blood; he deformed her lovely body with deep gashes; and, tearing her unborn babe away, dashed it to pieces against the stone wall.

(35-6)

The Indian's “tomahack” can be readily recognized in the axe Yates uses to destroy his sleigh, kill his horse, and wound his wife, before battering her lifeless face beyond recognition with a fence stake. The hatchet he drives between his daughter's eyes is even more closely identifiable with the Indian weapon. (The word is of French origin, but the OED indicates that hatchet was almost automatically associated with the Indian by the end of the eighteenth century.) When he does not resort to hatchet, axe, or fence stake, Yates dashes members of his unfortunate family against the nearest wall or fireplace. Recall, too, that after he surveyed the slaughter, Yates contemplated blaming it on Indians, as if to certify the completion of his “savage” transformation.

As a group of phenomena, the Yates case, Maria Kittle, and Wieland do not so much represent a chain of influence as they do a web of culture. Mrs. Bleecker might have drawn the violence of Maria Kittle directly from examples of Indian hostility in upstate New York; or she may even have modeled her book's violence on the crime of her white Tomhannock neighbor, who proved himself so precocious a student of Indian-style mayhem. Beyond doubt, Mrs. Bleecker knew Yates and knew of the murders. Bound with Maria Kittle in Bleecker's Posthumous Works (1793) is a letter dated December 1781 to Miss Susan Ten Eyck, the person to whom the epistolary Maria Kittle also is addressed. “JAMES YATES,” Mrs. Bleecker writes, “a few nights ago murdered his wife, four children” and (as she reports it) more than one horse as well as a cow. Mrs. Bleecker further remarks that “by all appearances [Yates] is a religious lunatic” (151). Though she forbears to relate to Miss Ten Eyck the particulars “of cruelty too horrid to mention” (unwonted reticence from the author of Maria Kittle!), she had apparently seen Yates at close quarters after the murders. The New York Weekly Magazine account of the murders mentions that after his capture Yates was held some time at the house of a “Mrs. B——-r,” and a year after the murder a “Mr. Bl——-r” (note that there are enough blanks for the “eecke”) sent some fruit to Yates in his Albany “dungeon.”

We may speculate on how conscious Brown was of the profound implications of the Yates story when he appropriated it for Wieland. Did he realize, consciously and articulately, that Yates had partaken of that “eucharist” Richard Slotkin described, the act betokening New World transformation through “communion” with the wilderness? Brown does make Clara Wieland say, after she has read the first part of her brother's confession, that Theodore's deed “was worthy of savages trained to murder, and exulting in agonies” (174). Advised to leave the country because Theodore will not rest until he has killed her along with the others, Clara protests: “I live not in a community of savages; yet, whether I sit or walk, go into crouds, or hide myself in solitude, my life is marked for a prey to inhuman violence” (189). The white residents of James Yates's Tomhannock were entitled to similar protests, no doubt. But the town's very name sounds like “tomahack.”

While the evidence is very convincing that Brown was familiar with the Tomhannock murders and used them in Wieland, Edwin Fussell suggests that the book also owes a debt directly to Maria Kittle.⁶ And it is true not only that the Posthumous Works of Mrs. Bleecker were published by T. and J. Swords, the firm that was to print much of what Brown wrote, but also that Ann Eliza's nephew, Anthony Bleecker, was a member with Brown of the intimate New York Friendly Club.⁷ In this manner Brown must have found himself caught up in a complex web of influences that made up the conditions of existence in his nation and that caught him up in the writing of an American tale. Brown's outline for Wieland suggests that he was not moved to compose his tale directly. The invention of an American Abraham proceeded along a circuitous route, apparently, via Yates and Kittle, the Bible, of course, but also through Europe in the form of a minor poem by the novel's namesake, Cristoph Martin Wieland. By recalling what Brown told John Bernard about his habits of composition, how literary ideas worked in his mind unbidden and practically divorced from consciousness, and by examining the outline for Wieland, we can speculate on how the novelist wove the variegated strands of multiple influence into the fabric of his book.

Preceding Brown's outline proper are columns of more than one hundred names, among which we recognize Conway, Bedloe, Lorimer, Dudley, Pleyel, Edny, Wyatte, Inglefield, Carwin, and Welbeck as characters in Brown's fiction. Not “Wieland,” but “Weyland” appears twice in the list. “Weiland” occurs in a shorter list near the end of the outline, and “Wieland” appears twice in a list of book titles. The columns are a quarry sufficient to supply a dozen novels with character names. We know from Elihu Hubbard Smith's diary that Brown was fond of drawing up plans and programs for literary projects, and perhaps the name lists were part of such a plan. Indeed, following the names in the outline is a list of titles, quite possibly drawn up as a prospectus for a literary career:

• Sky-walk, or the man unknown to himself
• Wieland, or, the Transformation
• Carwin. [crossed out] or [subtitle obliterated]
• Bedloe. or the self devoted
• Gower, or The dead recalled

More remarkable is this catalog of themes found at the end of the outline:

Tales. passions poutrayed.
Hallucination
ulation
Somnamb.	Mimicry
person. Simil	personal Similitude [crossed out]
Melanaema∗
Hallucinat.	Ventriloquizm
Love of Country	Dissimulation
∗Melanaema: “A condition of suffocation in which the blood throughout the body assumes a dark or black color” (OED).

Although a penchant for drawing up lists and literary programs tends to contradict the impression of spontaneous composition Brown conveyed to Bernard, the lists themselves exhibit a kind of “automatic” writing. They are neither systematic nor wholly random. Such alliterative clusters as “Barwell / Bertrand / Carew / Caster” occur frequently and even suggestions of imperfect rhyme, as in “Heene / Mayne.” “Welbeck” follows “Beckworth,” and the sound of “Car” seems particularly to have appealed to Brown:

Carrington		Caring
Carling, —		Carey.
Charlton,		Carton.
Carlingford.		Carford.
Carlington.		—Carfield
Carbourg.
		Carobury
Carsey
		Carlosteen
Carlette.	Carney
Carwin.	Carhill
Carrell.	Carlhurst
Cardale.
Carville.
Carhuyson.
Carry.
Carborough.

One of the names Brown recorded struck in him a conscious intellectual chord. The “Weyland” of the name list is transformed into the title list's “Wieland,” a name familiar to Brown (and to most of literary America and Europe) as that of an enormously popular and influential German pre-Romantic poet.⁸ Early in his novel (7), Brown has Clara Wieland acknowledge her family's literal kinship with Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813). Best known to Brown and his contemporaries as the author of the epic poetic fantasy Oberon and several novels, Wieland appealed to Brown (and to many another nascent Romantic) for both aesthetic and political reasons. Attuned to the ideas of Rousseau and Godwin, C. M. Wieland was also an intellectual idealist whose Platonism was filtered through Shaftesbury. One student of the poet's work sees his career as a “continual struggle for certitude, for the right answers,” suggesting further that “epistemology is the key to a deeper understanding of Wieland's personality and accomplishments.”⁹ Given what we have already determined about Brown's place in the intellectual tradition of the American novel, it is little wonder that the novelist's freely flowing thoughts should have paused at Wieland's name. For Brown, like Christoph Martin Wieland—and Theodore Wieland, like his German namesake—was engaged in continual struggle for certitude.

At least two other German sources—Friedrich Schiller's Der Geisterseher and an imitation of it by Cajetan Tschink, bearing the same title—also probably figured in the composition of Wieland;¹⁰ but an early effort of Christoph Martin Wieland seems to have exerted the greatest influence. Der Gepryfte Abraham, a minor verse epic retelling the Abraham and Isaac story, appeared in 1754 and was translated into an English prose version, The Trial of Abraham, issued by the Norwich, Connecticut, press of John Trumbull in 1778. Like Wieland, The Trial of Abraham is to a large extent an intellectual elaboration upon Genesis, chapter 22, probing the psychological and moral consequences of absolute obedience born of absolute faith. Like Theodore Wieland and James Yates, C. M. Wieland's Abraham consciously subdues “natural affection” to the command of divine will. Natural affection is real, but revealed truth transcends it. While C. M. Wieland's Abraham pondered God's awful command, “his musing soul in a scale of speculation ascended from truth to truth, till it brightened up, that every painful sentiment dissolved in the radience [sic] of inspired wisdom.”¹¹ Still, like Yates and Theodore, Abraham consciously has to suppress the immediate promptings of nature. In order to achieve certitude a man must attain the realm of pure thought, which (in C. M. Wieland's Platonic cosmogony) is the realm of God. “Silence, Nature,” bids the loving father of Isaac. “My will is dedicated to God” (35).

There is a striking psychological and intellectual similarity not only among The Trial of Abraham, Wieland, and the Yates atrocity but also among the physical phenomena associated with the moment of “divine” revelation in each case. James Yates reported the presence of “a new light” as the two “Spirits” appeared before him. The display to which C. M. Wieland treats his Abraham is more spectacular:

And now a sudden effulgence diffuses itself over the hill, and with increasing radiancy, like a cloud of light, moved through the azure sky: Abraham lifted up his eyes, felt the presence of the Deity; an angel, by God's intuitive [?] command, descended invisible, to strengthen the patriarch's eyes: At one look, for only of one is the human soul capable, he saw the divine glory through inconceivable ranks of adoring angels, between them Jehovah inthroned on cherubs; celestial scene, which verbal description would obscure!

(3)

None of this is present in the austere description of the scene in Genesis, chapter 22; however, most of the elements C. M. Wieland includes are also to be found in Theodore Wieland's confession. He tells the court how he entered his sister's house, its total darkness requiring caution in descending the stairs. As Theodore reached for the balustrade—

How shall I describe the lustre, which, at that moment, burst upon my vision!

I was dazzled. My organs were bereaved of their activity. My eye-lids were half-closed, and my hands withdrawn from the balustrade. A nameless fear chilled my veins, and I stood motionless. This irradiation did not retire or lessen. It seemed as if some powerful effulgence covered me like a mantle.

As with Abraham's vision, the revelation is too intense to be borne by mortal senses.

I opened my eyes and found all about me luminous and glowing. It was the element of heaven that flowed around. Nothing but a fiery stream was at first visible but, anon, a shrill voice from behind called upon me to attend.

I turned: It is forbidden to describe what I saw: Words, indeed, would be wanting to the task. The lineaments of that being, whose veil was now lifted, and whose visage beamed upon my sight, no hues of pencil or of language can pourtray.

(167-8)

For Theodore Wieland, as for the German poet's Abraham, the experience of the absolute is beyond words.

Whatever the order in which Brown read The Trial of Abraham and read about Yates, it is the American situation—and Brown's own deepest ambivalent response to it—that drew Abraham and Isaac, Christoph Martin Wieland, Theodore Wieland, and James Yates together. Indeed, despite its remote origins in the German poet's fatherland and in the biblical land of Moriah, The Trial of Abraham employs the very epistemological metaphor most immediately available to the American writer. On the eve of the day appointed for his sacrifice, Isaac relates to Abraham and Sarah an adventure that befell him and his friend Abiasaph in the wilderness of Haran. The youths, wandering along the frontier, spy a beautiful bird, its song the sweetest music, its wings a rainbow. Isaac would capture it as a present for Ribkah (Rebecca, his future wife), and with Abiasaph he follows the bird into the forest. Oblivious to all but the gorgeous bird, they are soon lost. Worse, they wander into the domain of Tidal and Gog, grandsons of Nimrod, who plan to sacrifice the youths to their god Adramelech. There is little hope, until Elhanan, Isaac's guardian angel, intervenes, rescuing both young men.

Isaac and Abiasaph's adventure in the wilderness, far more a product of C. M. Wieland's imagination than of the Old Testament, is crucial to the poet's intellectual reinterpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story. The bird that the boys blindly follow is a metaphor of sublunary sensual reality. Lured by “too much love to God's creatures” (in both his attraction to the bird and to Ribkah, for whom the bird is intended), Isaac forgets himself and is lost in the creature's realm, a chaos of sensuality ruled by a deity who, appropriately, demands actual, physical sacrifice, rather than the ideal, symbolic sacrifice finally enjoined by Abraham's God. The moral of the parable is found in Abraham's words to Sarah as he and Isaac embark for Moriah: “Yet, oh guard thine heart, lest too much love to God's creatures insensibly stifle the thoughts of God” (30). Intellectually considered, the wilderness of The Trial of Abraham is a version of Plato's cave. By no means is Brown's American wilderness so one-dimensional as the German poet's, but something like it does figure in the precarious balance of Brockden Brown's ambivalence toward civilization and the wild.

The Yates murders served as the American nexus upon which other “sources” converged. Yates became an Abraham, flourishing tragically in the isolation and violence of a New World frontier town. And Abraham, through Christoph Martin Wieland, became an actor in a drama of epistemology. In Brown's work, the Old World is repeatedly tested by the New World as, compulsively, certitude falls before skepticism, doubt, error, and the frailty of human perception. Recall that Brown, in his outline for Wieland, identified himself with two seekers of certitude: he named his first Wieland “Charles,” having drawn “Wieland” from his list of names likely because it resonated so tellingly with the surname of a German poet engrossed in themes of knowledge and knowing. The American nexus of the Yates tragedy, then, became for Brown the correlative of an intensely felt intellectual conflict.

What Wieland wonderfully illustrates is how Brown's American subjects serve to focus and concentrate his “wildering” thoughts into an artifact of culture burst through the mere peculiarities of an environment. The essence of Brown's “Americanism,” of his relation to his time and place, consists precisely in his uneasy command of both Old and New World sources. Wieland suggests that, for Brown, to be an American, especially an American author, meant a life lived in emotional conflict born of restless skepticism about the truth of thought and perception. The novelist found that what had been a comfortable confidence in one's “eastern” mind could become an agonizing doubt as one forced consciousness to a “western” frontier. Brown carried a great deal of the Old World into his New World fictions, using the Bible and Der Gepryfte Abraham to translate the Yates murders into the tale of Theodore Wieland.

The creation of Theodore's father required even more of the Old World.

The man who would become the father of Clara and Theodore Wieland, smothered by seven years of spiritual aridity as apprentice to a London trader and charged with a zeal born of radical religious reading, was overwhelmed one day by an awakening of the religious affections, which prompted him to leave England for the banks of the Schuylkill outside Philadelphia. His intention (for so he believed God had commanded) was to preach to and convert the Indians; but fear of the Indians, which had tormented him even before he left Europe, was “revived [upon reaching America], and a nearer survey of savage manners once more shook his resolution” (10). Cheap land and black slaves “gave him who was poor in Europe all the advantages of wealth,” so that for fourteen years, setting aside the zeal of youth, he prospered as a farmer. Having earned a degree of leisure, he took up Scripture and theology once again until “his ancient belief relative to the conversion of the savage tribes, was revived with uncommon energy” (10). Missionary labors, undertaken at last, “were attended with no permanent success.” A minor spiritual victory here and there was poor compensation for the derision and insults to which Wieland was subject. The extremities of wilderness life, fatigue, hunger, sickness, and solitude also took their toll. “The license of savage passion, and the artifices of his depraved countrymen, all opposed themselves to his progress” (11).

Discouraged, essentially broken by his wilderness missionary sojourn, Wieland came back to his family. Eschewing conventional and social religion, he worshiped in complete solitude daily at noon and midnight, building for this purpose “what to a common eye would have seemed a summer house” (11). Slight and airy, it “was no more than a circular area, twelve feet in diameter, whose flooring was the rock, cleared of moss and shrubs, and exactly levelled, edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome” (11). We shall see in a later chapter that this “temple” is of a piece with Palladian designs Brown sketched in fragmentary manuscripts that are probably parts of a youthful and abortive utopian project. This does not explain, however, the incongruity of having the senior Wieland conduct his “gothic” religious exercises in a monument to the neoclassical sensibility.

The picture Clara Wieland paints of her father's religious beliefs is grimly fanatical. It was the chance reading of “a book written by one of the teachers of the Albigenses, or French Protestants” that sent the senior Wieland on his ill-fated mission to America. A consideration of this religious background figured in the earliest stages of the composition of the novel. Wieland “contracted a gloomy & religious sprirt [sic],” Brown noted in his outline, “from the perusal of the works of the first reformers. He built up a system of his own. The Savoyard protestant faith was his. See Chambers Cyclopaedia” (427).

Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia does not have an article on “Savoyard protestants,” nor are they mentioned under the main “Protestant” entry. Perhaps Brown intended a reference to the entry under “Waldenses” in Chambers, since these Protestants were “Savoyards,” residents of the Savoy Piedmont. The religious persecution they perpetually suffered culminated in the “massacre” of April 24, 1655, that is the subject of John Milton's Sonnet 18. But this resolutely independent yet simple and mild sect hardly seems a likely source for a “gloomy,” let alone fanatical, religious spirit. The Waldenses were, however, often confused with their neighbors to the east, the Albigenses, with whom, theologically, they had very little in common. Chambers's Cyclopaedia, in its article on the Albigenses, stresses the sect's Manicheanism. Their belief was in “two Gods, the one infinitely good, the other infinitely evil … the good God made the invisible world, and the evil one that which we live in.” Some later commentators have observed that the Albigenses were actually a direct outgrowth of the Persian Manichees. Chambers enumerates additional Albigensian heresies, including a belief in two Christs (one good, the other evil), no resurrection of the body, the uselessness of baptism and other holy rites and sacraments, the absence of confession and penance, and the belief that marriage is both unholy and unlawful. Later writers mention the Albigenses' fanatical asceticism, which may culminate in suicide among the sect's “perfected” as a means of evading mortal sin. For once an Albigensian has been initiated through a laying on of hands known as the “consolumentum,” a single sin of the flesh forfeits eternal salvation. Suicide was generally by starvation.¹²

Melancholy, foreboding, fanaticism, self-loathing, deprecation of the physical and elevation of the spiritual: Brown could have found enough of these in the Albigensian doctrine to supply two generations of Wielands. Why, then, attenuate the gothic effect of such a religion by having its American disciple worship in the bright product of the age of reason? The incongruity is made the more striking by the sedate temple's location “on the top of a rock whose sides were steep, rugged, and encumbered with dwarf cedars and stony asperities” (11), a “sublime” landscape that anticipates Edgar Huntly. If the admixture of classical restraint with fanaticism and the sublime is a product of Brown's incongruous nature, it was an incongruity he shared with his culture. As conspicuously out of place in the American landscape as the “dungeon” Edgar Huntly projects into it, Wieland's temple has its source in a similar reaction to the extremity of wilderness experience. Wieland, all but destroyed by his missionary endeavors, erects a symbol of classical order at the edge of the wilderness that had debilitated him. Upon the Albigensian passion that sent him into the wilderness in the first place, he imposes a symbol of passionless order; and where once he had worshiped in limitless American wilds, he now confines religious meditation daily behind twelve Tuscan columns at noon and at midnight exactly. The rage for order Edgar Huntly and the senior Wieland manifest is part of the impulse that led the “gothic novelist” himself to sketch drawings of Palladian buildings. And these designs, like the “dungeon” and “temple” Huntly and Wieland respectively project into the wilderness, may be located along the same cultural continuum that moved a Thomas Jefferson to build Monticello.

If the senior Wieland's architectural reaction to the wilderness can be accounted typically American, his religion, despite its familiar missionary element, seems quite alien. It is initially puzzling that Brown failed, say, to tap the rich vein of Puritanism Hawthorne would later discover. After all, as Larzer Ziff has suggested, in Wieland, “Brown … penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character. … Beginning consciously in the camp of the benevolent Philadelphians of the American Philosophical Society … Brown ends his journey through the mind by approaching [Jonathan] Edwards' camp.” Brown “was the first [American novelist] to face the confusion of sentiment and optimistic psychology, both of which flowed through the chink in the Puritan dike, and to represent American progress away from a doctrine of depravity as a very mixed blessing indeed.”¹³

While Ziff is correct in remarking the similarity of intellectual tone between Wieland and Puritan theology, it is an oversimplification to declare that Brown sided with the Puritans in order to attack facile optimism. It is true that the novel explores the horrors of an irrationality against which reason proves powerless; and it is also true that in the blind fate of Wieland, father and son, and in the motiveless malignity of the “biloquist” Carwin, we do see a species of “depravity.” However, if Brown can be said to attack anything, it is fanaticism; and the novelist must have seen that neither of the Wieland men could be literally Puritans. Required were solitary figures whose religion, like that of James Yates, had developed in isolation. Puritanism, for all its potential extremity (especially as it might have been popularly perceived), was simply too social an institution, providing too many of the checks and balances of rational civilization to serve the novelist's purpose.

While Albigensianism, a long-dead schism originating in medieval Toulouse, may at first seem a gratuitously exotic choice for the Wieland religious background, the sect can be seen as a caricature of the more sulfurous aspects of Calvinist doctrine. The Albigensian's Manichean cosmogony of absolute good and evil and its rigorous doctrine of natural depravity resonate powerfully with the kind of religion that would appeal to the literary sensibilities of Hawthorne and Melville. Much as Edgar Huntly translates European gothicism into terms of the American wilderness, Wieland uses an exotic Old World religion to help define in the New World wilderness the intellectual themes that, we have already suggested, mark Brown as an American author. The shadowy Albigensian background of the senior Wieland—which manifests itself in the next generation as the “calvinistic inspiration” (25) of Theodore—is meant to expose and explain the tragic errors to which a blind leap of faith may lead. Resonant with, perhaps even inspired by, the particular situation of the American Puritans, Wieland was written neither to approve of nor to condemn them.

Whatever their “calvinistic inspiration,” the two Wielands are what the eighteenth century called “enthusiasts,” a kind of fanatic the Reverend Charles Chauncy described and cautioned against in a sermon written during that violent spasm of revivalist emotion in America known as “The Great Awakening”: “He mistakes the working of his own passions for divine communications, and fancies himself immediately inspired by the SPIRIT of GOD, when all the while, he is under no other influence than that of an over-heated imagination.”¹⁴ Men like Chauncy feared that error lay behind the upheaval of religious affections, egocentric error that could lead to such disasters as the Yates murders, which, like the Awakening, were in part fostered by the conditions of wilderness life. What might begin as belief in a divine commission to “deliver [God's] message to the world” (6), Chauncy observes, may evolve into unmitigated horror:

Sometimes [enthusiasm] appears in their imaginary peculiar intimacy with heaven. They are, in their own opinion, the special favourites of God … and receive immediate, extraordinary communications from him. The tho'ts, which suddenly rise up in their minds, they take for suggestions of the SPIRIT; their very fancies are divine illuminations; nor are they strongly inclin'd to any thing, but 'tis an impulse from GOD, a plain revelation of his will.

And what extravagances, in this temper of mind, are they not capable of, and under specious pretext too of paying obediences to the authority of GOD? Many have fancied themselves acting by immediate warrant from heaven, while they have been committing the most undoubted wickedness.

(4)

In just this manner did the seeds of the senior Wieland's enthusiasm bear deadly fruit in the son.

As thoroughly as Chauncy's description anticipates the Wielands, it is of course impossible simply to infer that Brown had read the sermon, which, after all, had appeared more than a half-century before Wieland, and in Boston, a city Brown may never even have visited. More important is what “Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against” suggests about the nature of faith in America. It shows us how the religious theme in Wieland reaches beyond Calvinism as such and toward broader questions about the assumptions on which men habitually construct “truth.” While this is not so peculiarly American a theme as Puritan Calvinism, such phenomena as the Yates atrocity show that it is no less a function of culture and physical environment.

Chauncy's sermon is related thematically to a document we do know that Brown used in the composition of Wieland. Chauncy recommends Scripture and reason as antidotes to the egocentricism of enthusiasm, yet he observes that “in nothing does the enthusiasm of these persons discover itself more, than in the disregard they express to the Dictates of reason.” Both James Yates and Theodore Wieland are contemptuous of the reasonings of their captors. In Chauncy's terms, “They are above the force of argument” (5). Enthusiasm is actually beyond the power of reason, for “'tis properly a disease, a sort of madness,” the result of “bad temperament of the blood and spirits” (3). Here the minister anticipates a treatise to which Brown refers in a footnote to Wieland (179). Erasmus Darwin, Brown points out, described Theodore Wieland's disorder in his Zoönomia; or The Laws of Organic Life, which was published in a complete American edition the year before Brown wrote his novel. Darwin defines “Mania mutabilis” as a state of delusion wrought by some “physical defect”—thought to be hereditary—in the nervous system or sensory organs. Instances of the mania Darwin recounts include a woman who hallucinates the presence of an angel, another who hears a voice commanding “Repent, or you will be damned,” and others of like nature.¹⁵ Somewhat ironically, perhaps, Darwin illustrates his “scientific” description of Mania mutabilis with a number of religious examples, whereas the clergyman Charles Chauncy defines this malady of the religious affections scientifically. Larzer Ziff was right to note elements of something like the Calvinist notion of innate depravity in Wieland, but Chauncy's “medical” definition of enthusiasm comes even closer to precisely what we find in the novel. The roots of enthusiasm are not to be explained theologically, but physiologically, as a “disease, a sort of madness: And there are few; perhaps none at all, but are subject to it” (Chauncy, 3).

In a similar vein, at the conclusion of the misadventures of Edgar Huntly, Brown has Huntly's friend Sarsefield declare: “Consciousness itself is the malady, the pest, of which he only is cured who ceases to think.” In this strictly intellectual sense, depravity is a fact of human existence. In the world of Brown's novels, to think is to invite error, and to act upon thought is to invite calamity. As Edgar Huntly himself concludes: “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. … How little cognizance have men over the actions and motives of each other! How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances!” (267). And Clara Wieland cries out from the pages that recount her brother's life of holy error: “What is man, that knowledge is so sparingly conferred upon him!” (102).

While Brown's absorption in intellectual themes suggests that he was no simple product of a Calvinist heritage, the fact remains that his themes do at least smack of such a background. Ziff suggests, in effect, that Brown's use of depravity, predestination, even the hellfire spontaneous combustion attending the senior Wieland's demise, is reason enough to enroll the novelist with such Calvinist-influenced writers as Hawthorne and Melville in an important tradition of the national literature. But William L. Hedges, in a 1974 article, raises a well-founded objection to this view. He concedes that “concepts such as innocence, puritanism and the Protestant ethic might be adequate to discussions of Brown if liberally enough construed,” but when “the construction is too strict … we risk forgetting that Charles Brockden Brown the Quaker and Young Goodman Brown the New England puritan are not identical.” When we stop to consider that Brown grew up not in Puritan Boston but Quaker Philadelphia, that his parents were indeed Quakers, and that his only formal education was the six years he spent at the Friends' Latin School, we are inclined to second Hedges's objection that Larzer Ziff “approaches … an … untenable extreme in arguing that in [Wieland] Brown reverts to something like a Calvinist doctrine of ‘inherited depravity’ and a ‘confused acceptance of supernatural causation.’”¹⁶ But, turning back to the novel itself, we do see in Theodore Wieland something very like inherited depravity. And rather than a display of William Penn's gentle doctrine of the Inner Light we are treated to the Day-of-Doom spontaneous combustion of Theodore's zealot father.

How do we reconcile the biographical fact of Brown's Quaker background with the aesthetic fact of his most famous novel, the darkness of whose themes suggests the Calvinist heritage of a Hawthorne or Melville? To begin with, we can no more call Brown simply a Quaker than we can call him simply a Calvinist. True, his parents were Quakers; but of their six children, four, including Charles, married non-Quakers (Warfel, 19-20). Moreover, an exchange between Brown's closest friends, Smith and Dunlap, reveals that the novelist's marriage to Elizabeth Linn, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was not his first romance “outside the Meeting.” On March 29, 1798, Elihu Hubbard Smith showed William Dunlap a letter in which Brown described himself “as assiduously writing Novels & in love” (Dunlap, Diary, 236). By April 24 Smith was calling a Miss Susan A. Potts Brown's “Mistress” (Smith, 439-40), while Dunlap, a few days later, was content to identify her as “CBB's wished for” (Dunlap, Diary, 252). But at the end of September Dunlap tersely recorded that Brown had related to him “the manner in which his mother breaks off his connection with Miss Potts” (Dunlap, Diary, 343). It is most likely that Mrs. Brown's objection was made on religious grounds: Susan Potts was not a Quaker (Clark, 195).

No hard evidence exists that Brown harbored ill will toward either his mother or Quakerism; however, interestingly enough, in Arthur Mervyn (Part 1, published the year after l'affaire Potts) Brown puts the young title character through a romantic experience analogous to his own. Arthur, who is not a Quaker, falls in love with a Quaker farmer's daughter but dejectedly puts off proposing to her because he knows her father will object to the marriage on religious grounds. Brown, conveniently, kills off the father and has Arthur acknowledge that the old man's death has removed the only obstacle to marriage. Even if we take the episode from Arthur Mervyn as evidence of Brown's covert rebellion against the religion that may have cost him his Miss Potts, we must still conclude that his attitude toward Quakerism was ambivalent rather than wholly antagonistic. For he is careful to paint the old Quaker of the novel as a kindly, mild, and generous man. Perhaps the extent and longevity of such ambivalence toward the religion of his parents is most fully suggested by a document he wrote the year before his death. In An Address to the Congress of the United States, on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce, an 1809 pamphlet directed against Jefferson's embargo, Brown counseled that the President's action was not only ineffectual, but immoral, an act of war, greed, and vengeance. “There are [some] who will pass me by as a visionary,” Brown wrote:

And some, observing the city where I thus make my appearance [Philadelphia], may think my pacific doctrine, my system of rational forbearance and forgiveness carried to a pitch of Quaker extravagance. The truth is, I am no better than an outcast of that unwarlike sect, but cannot rid myself of reverence for most of its practical and political maxims.¹⁷

Cast out from the Meeting—perhaps, indeed, because of his marriage—Brown yet retains a reverence for the Friends, or, at least for their “practical and political maxims.”

The novelist's religious ambivalence suggests that, while Charles Brockden Brown indeed was not Young Goodman Brown the Puritan, neither was he, say, John Woolman or William Penn the Quaker. We should, in any case, avoid stereotyping Quakerism as the mild religion of Woolman and Penn; it could, of course, take other forms as well. Though Brown found his bride outside the Meeting, he would not have had to venture that far in order to find a germ he might nurture into the full-blown fanaticism of both the senior and junior Wieland. Available to the novelist in the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia was William Smith's History of New-York (London: 1757; reissued in Philadelphia: 1792), in which Brown would have come across the story of Lewis Morris. Appointed Chief Justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1692 and governor of New Jersey in 1702, Morris nevertheless had been “a little whimsical” in his youth. Bridling under the zealous Quaker tutelage of a certain Hugh Coppathwait, young Morris played a practical joke on him one day: “The pupil taking advantage of [Coppathwait's] enthusiasm, hid himself in a tree, and calling to him, ordered him to preach the gospel among the Mohawks. The credulous quaker took it for a miraculous call, and was upon the point of setting out when the cheat was discovered.”¹⁸

We can do little more, really, than wonder if Brown actually had this comical episode in mind when he wrote of the senior Wieland's call to preach to the Indians or when he had son Theodore heed the “divine” command—which may well have issued from the ventriloquist Carwin—to sacrifice his family. But, considered with the evidence of Brown's ambivalence toward the religion of his parents, the case of Hugh Coppathwait does tell us at least one thing definitely: it is a mistake to label Brockden Brown's religious influences with the stereotyped tags that commentaries have furnished to date.

We turn now to a particular influence upon Brown, about which there has so far been no hard speculation: Robert Proud, author of the first history of Pennsylvania and the schoolmaster of the future novelist. Proud, as master of the Friends' Latin School, was certainly a professed Quaker. Harry R. Warfel describes him as “tall as a tower and commanding in presence, with a prominent Roman nose and bushy brows arching over a large face”—a symbol of “the old patriarchal order.” Warfel drew this description from Charles West Thomson's “Notices of the Life and Character of Robert Proud, Author of ‘The History of Pennsylvania’” (1826) either directly or through the redaction of it in The Dictionary of American Biography (DAB). But Warfel added on his own a judgment for which neither Thomson nor the DAB gives unambiguous warrant. “Wise, calm, mild, energetic, resourceful, affectionate,” Warfel declares, Proud “was the living embodiment of the Quaker philosophy” (Warfel, 22-3).

Charles West Thomson did meet a former student of Proud's who described the schoolmaster as “mild, commanding, and affectionate”; but when Thomson himself, as a boy, caught a glimpse of Proud it was his stern bearing that made the greatest impression.¹⁹ “I well remember the imposing effect, which the curled, gray wig, the half-cocked, patriarchal-looking hat and the long, ivory-headed cane, had on my boyish imagination.” Likely that effect was terrifying, especially on a “boyish imagination,” which would undoubtedly as well as painfully connect the ivory-headed cane with the profession of schoolmaster. In fact, Proud, “obscure and retiring,” emerges from the traces that remain of his life—including the 1797 History of Pennsylvania—as a malcontent and misanthrope, desperately forlorn among a nation and people he did not cherish. Thomson wished to record Proud's life precisely because, by 1826, memory of the man had all but vanished.

Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1728, Robert Proud showed such early genius that his parents precipitously steered him into a medical career. But, much as the youthful Brown would himself become disgusted with the profession of law for which he had been trained, so Proud bolted from medicine. This or financial troubles (which were something of a plague upon Proud) may have caused his abrupt departure from England for America in 1759. There were rumors circulating that Proud had actually fled England because of an unhappy love affair—financial embarrassment barred marriage—but Thomson gives these stories no credit; though, it is true, Proud did remain a bachelor lifelong. Whatever his reasons for emigrating, two years after his arrival in Philadelphia he was engaged as a master of the Friends' Latin School, where he presented a figure so stern that he quickly became known as “Dominie Proud.” There is no evidence that he discouraged this appellation, though it better suits a Scots Calvinist than an English Quaker.

If the epithet suggests Presbyterian sternness, this bearing actually masked a melancholy as morbid as any found in the diaries of Cotton Mather or Michael Wigglesworth, or, for that matter, in the youthful letters of Brockden Brown himself. Among some verses Proud left in manuscript at his death is “A Plaintive Essay, attempted by R. P. in 6 mo., 1781, after several years of great distress, dejection, and trouble of mind,” which Thomson included in an appendix to his biographical sketch of Proud. The schoolmaster addresses God, who, unaccountably, has of late seen fit to forsake his faithful servant:

But oh! why now this grievous fall,
                    Why am I left forlorn?
Why am I thus deprived of all,
                    Why was I ever born?

In 1770 Proud had resigned as master at the Latin School to embark upon a financially ruinous decade of foreign trade. The “Plaintive Essay” was written the year after he returned to the school, quite broke, and just a year before Brockden Brown enrolled.

Oh! why in my declining years,
                    Hast Thou forsaken me!

A commercial failure, Robert Proud never felt at home in America. Furthermore, politically and philosophically conservative, he was a Loyalist Tory during the Revolution, and felt himself doomed to perish:

Far distant, in a foreign land …
Where death and darkness, understood,
                    Possess the human mind,
Rebellion, wrath, revenge, and blood,
                    The actions of mankind!

The “Plaintive Essay” concludes with a quatrain “Motto”:

Our early days are best but quickly gone,
Disease with pain and sorrow soon come on,
Labor and care soon introduce decay,
And death resistless hastens all away.

Such effusions are hardly the work of a “living embodiment of the Quaker philosophy.”

At the very least, Proud may well have nurtured in Brown the melancholy that would become a characteristic of the vision embodied in his fiction. Moreover, and more importantly, the schoolmaster may have shaded his somber-hued lessons with tones specifically religious and thereby may have influenced not only the emotional tenor of his pupil's future work but also its themes. The single sentence devoted to Robert Proud in The Literary History of the United States mentions the “almost medieval spirit” in which the pedagogue argued “that men were born to obey.”²⁰ Better to have called this spirit Calvinist; for Proud's Toryism was as much the result of religious as of political conviction. These lines from “Vox Naturae, An Elegy,” another of the poems printed by Thomson, depict Proud as an exile among a people doomed by their rebellion to everlasting damnation:

Hence eternal reason's voice
I will follow in my choice;
For, as happiness alone
By obedience first was known,
                    But was lost
By rebellion, so no more
Shall be known, upon this shore,
That true glory, peace, and joy,
Which did former days employ,
                    On this coast.(21)

In a letter to his brother William dated “12 mo. 1st '77,” Proud cranks his rhetoric to a pitch just flat of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Prophesying that America shall surely suffer for its “unnatural Rebellion,” he summons up an image of the “over-ruling Hand of Divine Providence, which disposes the Events of Things, and inflicts the Scourge of his wrath on Man-kind, for their Depravity and Revolt from the true Means of their real Interest and Felicity.” Revolution is itself the punishment for unnatural rebellion, “the grand Punishment assigned by the Almighty for the wickedness of the human Race, while in the State of Existence.”²²

In the June 1799 issue of his Monthly Magazine Brown published a review of Proud's single claim upon posterity, his History of Pennsylvania (1797). Judging the author no artist, and the work an exhaustive collection of material rather than a genuine history, Brown nevertheless praised the “humble, honest, and industrious compiler. If his merit were measured by the labour which so large a compilation cost him, it would not be accounted inconsiderable.”²³ Nor is it an inconsiderable labor to read the History, whose choked syntax recalls the densest passages of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana.

More significant are the Matherian sentiments Proud entertains in his “Preface Dedicatory,” where he conceives history as an interaction of Providence and the perpetual legacy of original sin. Divine Providence ordains government, Proud maintains, but “a constant decay [operates] in human affairs” to undermine it.²⁴ Through “folly or depravity” men rebel against the felicity of providentially ordained governments. “For the history of all nations abounds with instances of the same nature, operating in all descendants of Adam and Eve, which we are told, prevailed in these first parents, as representatives, of mankind” (6). Despite the lessons of history, “the interdicted tree, with its forbidden fruit, is still as tempting as ever it was” (7). “Ambition is rooted in human nature”—a human nature forever depraved when Adam and Eve first foolishly sought change—and ambition

demands restraint; it assumes all manner of appearances whatsoever, and is now working wonders, in the world, under the name of equality and the rights of man;—Hence to mistake innovation for renovation, and a love of change for melioration, connected with such an idea of self-dependency, as is inconsistent with the enlargement of civilization, or of the social happiness of mankind, in any great or extensive degree, …

(14)

So Proud's “sentence” itself decays, syntactically, in the course of another quarter-page.

As we cannot declare with certainty that Proud's evident melancholy fostered Brown's own, so we cannot say for sure that the novelist's “Quakerism” was that of his schoolmaster. We do know some things for certain: Brown's formal education was the work of Robert Proud; Brown respected the schoolmaster's History; and the novelist apparently maintained contact with Proud, at least through September 1, 1800, when he addressed a melancholy letter to “R. P.” reporting his convalescence from some unspecified emotional wound, possibly the broken engagement with Miss Potts (Dunlap, Life, 2: 101). And we know, too, that the ostensibly Quaker novelist produced in Wieland a drama of depravity and fatality in which “Inner Light” seems but the product of hallucination and spontaneous combustion.

Without doubt, the best-known episode of Wieland or any other Brown novel is that in which the father of Clara and Theodore unaccountably bursts into flame while making his midnight obeisances in his “temple.” This instance of “spontaneous combustion” is also the novel's most sensationally “Calvinist” incident—as far as a narrowly popular view of Calvinism is concerned—redolent of the sensibility behind revival sermons, Wigglesworth's Day of Doom, and even calling to the mind of the modern reader a famous scene in Melville's Redburn.²⁵

In addition to considering a scientific explanation for her father's death, Clara Wieland does speculate that his horrible end might have been “the penalty of disobedience”—punishment, apparently, for his vacillation and failure in missionary life—“the stroke of a vindictive and invisible hand.” If so, it is the hand of an Angry God, and the senior Wieland's death is “fresh proof that the Divine Ruler interferes in human affairs, meditates an end, selects and commissions his agents, and enforces by unequivocal sanctions, submission to his will” (19). Once again, though, we must avoid narrow interpretations; while popular Calvinist lore may have influenced the origin of the spontaneous combustion scene, it is as a metaphor informing the book's intellectual themes that the episode is more important. As usual, Brown abstracts the literal particulars of his material and raises them to the level of contemplation.

A light emanates from the temple, followed by an explosion. Clara Wieland's uncle runs to his brother's aid and sees “a blazing light … between the columns of the temple.”

Within the columns he beheld what he could no better describe, than by saying it resembled a cloud impregnated with light. It had the brightness of flame, but was without upward motion. It did not occupy the whole area, and rose but a few feet above the floor. No part of the building was on fire.

As soon as the uncle enters the temple, the light vanishes, plunging all into darkness (17). The scene is an early climax in the crescendo of the Wieland gloom. Yet, in this visually gloomy novel, the scene is also one of only two instances of bright light. The combustion of father Wieland, and son Theodore's description of the “divine” illumination that inspires him to “sacrifice,” luridly punctuate the otherwise visually austere novel's pattern of images.

Brown admits light but grudgingly into most of Wieland. When seen, it is fleeting, vanishing upon approach, as the temple's illumination dies the instant Clara's uncle passes between the columns. Most often, images of flitting light are associated with the character in whom Brown distills the essence of deception, the enigmatic Francis Carwin, who insinuates himself into the world of the Wielands with little purpose beyond confounding them with his “biloquistic” talents. Years after his father's death, Theodore, on his way to the temple to fetch a letter he has left there, sees “a glimmering between the columns.” Naturally, this recalls to him his father's combustion years earlier, but he continues toward the temple until arrested by what is later revealed as Carwin imitating the voice of Theodore's wife Catharine.

Another instance: one night, while Clara sleeps and dreams—like Edgar Huntly—in the wilderness environs of her home, she hears the biloquist's voice. What she dreams is Theodore beckoning her toward a pit into which she surely would have fallen had not “some one” caught her arm, exclaiming “in a voice of eagerness and terror, ‘Hold! Hold!’” At this she wakes—like Huntly, into the very wilderness of her dream—and hears the warning again. This time she recognizes the voice as one she had heard earlier, in the closet of her own bedroom, a voice that had threatened to murder her. It warns her of danger now, tells her to flee. Convinced that her life is in peril, Clara is also aware of the hazards of flight through a woods that is as dangerous and dark as any dream-image of it, a place where one “could not take a step without hazard of falling to the bottom of the precipice.” The darkness is unrelieved until, pondering whether to stay or leave,

I perceived a ray flit across the gloom and disappear. Another succeeded, which was stronger, and remained for a passing moment. It glittered on the shrubs that were scattered at the entrance, and gleam continued to succeed gleam for a few seconds, till they, finally, gave place to unintermitted darkness.

As it had for her brother, such a flitting gleam recalls the horror of her father's death. The girl is paralyzed by fear until she beholds the “new and stronger illumination” of a “lanthorn” carried by Henry Pleyel, the most rational (and pedestrian) figure in Brown's novel (62-4).

And, a final example. Chapter 15 closes with Clara entering the deathly silent parlor of her brother's house, “in which a light was just expiring in the socket” (142). Leaving the apparently deserted house, she walks toward her own, and, at the beginning of Chapter 16, is startled to see a light in her chamber window. “As I eyed it, it suddenly became mutable, and after flitting to and fro, for a short time, it vanished” (145). The next sound she hears is, again, Carwin's piercing “hold! hold!” She gets a glimpse of his face—its eyes emitting sparks—finds a fragment of his writing, and, lastly, discovers the corpse of Catharine Wieland (142-51).

The association of Carwin with these images is not casual. His function in the novel is to counterfeit knowledge; the “illuminations” Carwin furnishes are as evanescent as lights that appear one moment, only to vanish the next. Since images of illumination are common in everyday speech as metaphors for discovery, revelation, and knowledge (“I see the light,” for example), it is easy to overlook their apparently casual occurrence throughout Wieland. We might not think much about Clara's observation that, although Carwin quickly became an intimate of her tight little family and social circle, he “left us wholly in the dark, concerning that about which we were most inquisitive” (71-2). Nor would we be particularly apt to remark Clara's desire to reflect “some light … on the actual situation of” Carwin (127). Common as such figures of speech are, Brown takes pains to make his reader conscious of the link between the physical darkness of his story and the figuratively dark state of human knowledge. One evening, shortly after Carwin's biloquism first manifests itself as Catharine Wieland's warning voice, Clara remarks to her brother: “‘How almost palpable is this dark; yet a ray from above would dispel it.’ ‘Ay,’ said Wieland, with fervor, ‘not only the physical, but moral night would be dispelled’” (36).

Would that all humankind enjoyed the privilege of Abraham: a ray from above, a revelation of absolute truth. “‘But why,’” Clara asks Theodore, “‘must the Divine Will address its precepts to the eye?’ He smiled significantly. ‘True,’ said he, ‘the understanding has other avenues’” (36). Perhaps, then, we should say that the evanescence of light in Wieland figures as something even more than metaphor. For, as this conversation suggests, light is literally the means of “seeing,” of acquiring knowledge: the chief means by which “the Divine Will addresses its precepts” to humankind. Locke, as Brown well knew, held that knowledge was the product of the senses. Yet, like Carwin's counterfeited voices of revelation, which address the understanding through another of its sensory “avenues,” the light of Wieland is deceptive, vanishing as quickly as it appears: “What is man, that knowledge is so sparingly conferred upon him!”

Ironically, the second explosion of light in the otherwise flickering visual scheme of Wieland, the “illumination” that bursts only upon the deranged mind of Theodore, is, of all the lights that flicker through the book, by far the steadiest and most certain. All of his life, Wieland tells judge and jury, has been spent “searching for the revelation of [God's] will.” Hitherto the search has failed: “I turned on every side where glimmerings of light could be discovered.” Although never “wholly uninformed,” his “knowledge has always stopped short of certainty.” But that night of the murders, entering the dark house of Clara, revelation was total and blindingly brilliant. “I had no light. … The darkness required some caution in descending the stair. I stretched my hand to seize the balustrade by which I might regulate my steps. How shall I describe the lustre, which, at that moment, burst upon my vision!” Dazzled, blinded, chilled by a nameless fear, Theodore closes his eyes; but still this “irradiation did not retire or lessen. It seemed as if some powerful effulgence covered me like a mantle.”

Opening his eyes, he finds all about him “luminous and glowing. It was the element of heaven that flowed around. Nothing but a fiery stream was at first visible; but, anon, a shrill voice from behind called upon me to attend,” and the sacrifice was demanded (165-8). This most intense “illumination,” a product of Mania mutabilis, lacks the physical substance of the father's spectacular combustion—or, for that matter, lacks the substance of any of Wieland's other and dimmer lights. Its unflickering brilliance fueled exclusively by Theodore's imagination, the truth of its revelation is but the certainty of solipsism.

As the senior Wieland's spontaneous combustion is significant on the level of image and beyond its more specific resemblance to Calvinist pyrotechnics, so the drama of light and dark, of which the combustion is a spectacular part, extends beyond the immediate story of Wieland. By linking the two literally brightest moments of his novel to the darkness of error rather than to the illumination of truth, Brown inverts the very metaphor that informed an “Age of Enlightenment.”²⁶

It was an age for which Joel Barlow spoke in 1787, when he brought before the public his Vision of Columbus. Barlow depicted America as the political, moral, and religious utopia for which Christ himself had died. In images of light and flame Barlow welds reason to religious revelation on the free soil of the United States:

In no blest land has fair Religion shone,
And fix'd so firm her everlasting throne.
Where, o'er the realms those spacious temples shine,
Frequent and full the throng'd assemblies join;
There fired with virtue's animating flame,
The sacred task unumber'd sages claim;
The task, for angels great; in early youth,
To lead whole nations in the walks of truth,
Shed the bright beams of knowledge on the mind,
For social compact harmonize mankind,
To life, to happiness, to joys above,
The soften'd soul with ardent zeal move;
For this the voice of Heaven in early years,
Tuned the glad songs of the life-inspiring seers,
For this consenting seraphs leave the skies,
The God compassionates, the Saviour dies.(27)

In Wieland, Barlow's shining religion and shining temples, worshippers fired with virtue's flame, become the fuel for spontaneous combustion; and the voice of heaven becomes that of Francis Carwin, biloquist. Not that Brown necessarily had Barlow in mind when he wrote his dark book, but he knew the poem, praised it in a review, and had been, in his youth, almost certainly influenced by it. But the popular Vision of Columbus, like its later reworking as the Columbiad (1807), and like Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Poem, on the Rising Glory of America (1772), did draw upon conventional images emblematic of a national optimism.²⁸ We shall, in the next chapter, examine in some detail Brown's relation to Barlow's Vision and the vision it embodied. For the present, though, we might observe that the novelist's praise for the poem suggests an impulse to share in its optimism; but, speaking in the voice most his own—the voice of fiction—Brown intoned Barlow's pious images reversed, as it were, in a kind of Black Mass.

Barlow's vision is of a rational America, and his images of illumination reflect the dominance of reason. In Wieland, light suggests revelation rather than reason, and, at that, false revelation. Nevertheless, the temple, in which the first spectacular “illumination” takes place, is an architectural hommage to an age of reason. As such, it might be seen as a simple moral icon, caging behind its neoclassical columns the flames of enthusiasm. Furthermore, as if to suggest that reason endures while passion burns itself to ash, the temple survives the conflagration to be appropriated by Wieland's children and their friend Henry Pleyel for classical study and harpsichord music, rational amusements that seem better suited than religious worship to the structure's twelve Tuscan columns and undulating dome.

Converted by Theodore and the others of his circle ostensibly to serve the cause of Enlightenment reason, the structure actually continues—even under Pleyel and the Wieland progeny—as a temple. It is sacred to Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose bust, commissioned by Theodore from an “Italian adventurer,” presides on a pedestal opposite the harpsichord (23-4). For the “chief object of [Theodore's] veneration was Cicero.”

He was never tired of conning and rehearsing his productions. To understand them was not sufficient. He was anxious to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought to be delivered. He was very scrupulous in selecting a true scheme of pronunciation for the Latin tongue, and in adapting it to the words of his darling writer. His favorite occupation consisted in embellishing his rhetoric with all the properties of gesticulation and utterance.

Theodore worships Cicero almost as his father had worshipped his dark Albigensian God. Theodore collected all the editions and commentaries he could find, employing “months of severe study in exploring and comparing them” in order to settle and restore “the purity of the text” (24).

The rationality suggested by the architecture of the temple notwithstanding, Theodore's veneration is not for Cicero the archapostle of Roman reason, but for Cicero the orator, persuader of men and instigator of their actions. If Theodore's enthusiasm betrays an excess of zeal, it is not without some basis in the conventional critical opinion of Brown's day. The Scots rhetorician Hugh Blair, whose Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres was almost a household book in America, expressed great admiration for Cicero, pointing out, however, that his chief and almost too artful appeal is to the emotions, and that in purely intellectual argument he is inferior to the Greek Demosthenes.²⁹

Theodore's weakness for the Roman orator both foreshadows and reveals his susceptibility to the voices of Carwin. Clara herself attests to Carwin's powers as an orator. When she first saw Carwin he appeared to her rustic, ungainly, malproportioned, unprepossessing, and unremarkable. Then he spoke—asked for a simple cup of water. Clara instantly became obsessed with his image and voice. Theodore's voice and Pleyel's “were musical and energetic,” but Carwin's surpassed even theirs. “It was wholly new.”

I cannot pretend to communicate the impression that was made upon me by [Carwin's] accents, or to depict the degree in which force and sweetness were blended in them. They were articulated with a distinctness that was unexampled in my experience. But this was not all. The voice was not only mellifluent and clear, but the emphasis was so just, and the modulation so impassioned, that it seemed as if an heart of stone could not fail of being moved by it. It imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and incontroulable [sic].

(52)

In moving “especially the softer passions,” Hugh Blair observed, Cicero “is very successful. No man knew the power and force of words better than Cicero.” As Carwin's verbal emphasis was always just, so the structure of Cicero's sentences “is curious and exact to the highest degree.” Full, flowing, never abrupt, “Ciceronian eloquence”—whether that of Cicero or Carwin—is almost too “dazzling by its beauties,” its rhetoric at times “showy rather than solid” (2: 204-6).

One day, while “bandying quotations and syllogisms,” Theodore and Pleyel fall to friendly argument over the merits of Cicero's oration for Cluentius. Pleyel, genial contestor of Cicero's divinity, holds that the orator had embraced a bad or doubtful cause, and criticizes the logic of his argument. Although there is nothing in the Defense of Aulus Cluentius Habitus that bears directly upon Wieland, Brown's citation of this oration is not without significance. Among the more dramatic of Cicero's speeches, its narrative and “plot” are surely the most complex, involving charges and countercharges, and the guilty accusers' baroque obfuscations of the truth. The novelist who would soon prove himself capable of the gnarled second part of Arthur Mervyn, and who was already manifesting a fondness for sub-subplot in the relatively direct Wieland (follow, for example, the alive-dead-alive-dead fate of Pleyel's shadowy European fiancée, Theresa de Stolberg), was understandably attracted by Cicero's command of a complex narrative. Hugh Blair himself had singled out the Pro Cluentio for careful analysis and praised Cicero (though he cited another speech) for his “very remarkable” talent of narration (2: 281-98, 394-6). Clara Wieland's appraisal of Carwin's early discourses on mysterious voices from invisible sources might well have expressed her brother's (or even Blair's) admiration for the Cicero of the Pro Cluentio:

[Carwin's] narratives were constructed with so much skill, and rehearsed with so much energy, that all the effects of a dramatic exhibition were frequently produced by them. Those that were most coherent and most minute, and, of consequence, least entitled to credit [!?], were yet rendered probable by the exquisite art of this rhetorician. For every difficulty that was suggested, a ready and plausible solution was furnished.

(74)

Thus Carwin is curiously identified with Cicero—and (we may reasonably infer) like the Cicero of Pro Cluentio, he is also identified with the novelist, whose business it is to furnish plausible solutions for every difficulty suggested.

Brown, who at an early stage of composition bestowed upon Wieland his own first name, also shared something of Theodore's regard for Cicero. While the orator was Theodore's “darling author,” Brown's own favorites were Shakespeare and Milton, as well as Cicero, whose Latin Robert Proud had taught the boy, sometime between his tenth and sixteenth years, “to cherish” (Warfel, 9 and 225). Much later the novelist would make Cicero the hero of a forty-eight-page tale incongruously bound in the third slim volume, second edition, of Edgar Huntly. “The Death of Cicero, a Fragment” tells the story of the orator's last days as he is pursued by agents of the Triumvirate, which, declaring him an enemy of Rome, have ordered his execution. At first glance the “fragment” appears to be a straight-forward celebration of Cicero's stoic valor. The orator, weary of the ignominy of flight, resigns himself to death despite the expostulations of his companion Tiro, who argues that to die at the hands of the Triumvirate is more ignominious. Over Tiro's objections, confronted at last by his enemies, Cicero orders his retainers to put up their swords. One Papilius Laenas, whom Cicero had once defended in court, executes the sentence of the Triumvirate.

Though it picks up the story of Cicero's flight in medias res, “The Death of Cicero” is essentially a complete tale; so we might question why Brown chose to call it “A Fragment.” Perhaps it was intended as part of a projected fictional treatment of Cicero's life. More likely, Brown was acknowledging the emotionally unsettling and dramatically unsatisfying ambivalence of the piece's denouement, which leaves the tale at loose ends. Tiro, telling the story of Cicero's death in a letter addressed to Atticus, concludes his narration entirely of two minds about the orator's “heroic” resignation. He should have seen escape as his duty, Tiro asserts, only to end by suggesting that perhaps Cicero had been right to choose a dignified death after all. The pattern of ambivalence in “The Death of Cicero” is a familiar one in Brown's writing. Brown would announce to his brother the aim of creating in Arthur Mervyn a model of moral rectitude; the result was a figure as ambiguous as Melville's Pierre. Brown set out to celebrate the heroic moral conviction of his favorite Roman author, only in the end to question the basis of Cicero's heroism. We are left with the unspoken possibility that Cicero's stoicism is akin to the Wieland fanaticism.

It is therefore no surprise that Brown implies an identification of Carwin with Cicero. To be sure, Brown nowhere equates the two, but the identification, pivoting on Theodore Wieland's weakness for rhetoric, suggests that Cicero's powers make him a potential Carwin—and, for that matter, Carwin's powers (had he developed commensurate moral principles) make him a potential Cicero. Further to compound an already complex system of identification, Brown, as a creator of narrative, implicitly associates himself with Carwin/Cicero, and, as a seeker of certitude, with Theodore (“Charles”) Wieland. Nothing in Brockden Brown's writings illustrates more strikingly the “double mental existence” the novelist explained to John Bernard. Brown projects himself into Wieland as both the deceiver and the deceived. What is more, the “deceiver” in him is the novelist, a Carwin/Cicero, yes, but also the Christoph Martin Wieland/Theodore Wieland seeker of certitude. The novel, for Brown a means of discovering truth, is also a rhetorical exercise in which the novelist, like the Cicero of Pro Cluentio—and like Carwin—is obliged merely to furnish a “ready and plausible solution” for every difficulty suggested. Perhaps it was a growing awareness of an irreconcilable tension between “seeker” and “deceiver” that led Brown to abandon fiction, to relinquish “romance” in favor of “history.” For history (he explained in his 1800 Monthly Magazine article, “The Difference between History and Romance”) catalogs surfaces only, while romance is always speculative.³⁰ And in speculation Brown always found space for the disturbing doubleness of his mental existence.

In Wieland he was unwilling to relinquish either half of the doubleness, though both must have distressed him. He passes no absolute judgment against Carwin, except obliquely in the epigraph to the novel:

From Virtue's blissful paths away
The double-tongued are sure to stray;
Good is a forth-right journey still,
And mazy paths but lead to ill.

But even this apparently “forth-right” condemnation of doubleness and duplicity has its twists. Those “mazy paths” recall the “pleasant paths” in the “metaphysic wilderness” of “Devotion: An Epistle.” While the young poet of 1794 had recognized a duty to “beat with indefatigable heels, / Th' highway” of reason, the mazy paths of darker speculation simultaneously attracted and disturbed him.

There are some more obvious means by which Brockden Brown seeks to extenuate the guilt of Carwin. The biloquist is himself pictured as a victim. The fragmentary Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, begun immediately after the completion of Wieland,³¹ detail the protagonist's naïve association with the sinister and powerful Ludloe. Carwin is pictured also as the victim of an ignorant and brutal father. Finally, Brown leaves the extent of Carwin's involvement in the Wieland murders so much in doubt that the subject has become a matter of critical controversy.³²

The potential Carwin in Cicero, the classical orator whose greatest appeal is ultimately to the passions, recalls the flames at the heart of the temple. It is not enough merely to oppose enthusiasm with reason: the always speculative, ever ambivalent Brown shows himself wary of an enthusiasm to be found at the heart of reason itself. It is likely, as Larzer Ziff argues, that Brown is critical of the early Republic's facile rationality, but not only because it was impotent to deal with an irrational element at the core of human nature. The young Republic of the United States was, to use Howard Mumford Jones's phrase, founded on “Roman virtue,” which permeates architecture no less than government.³³ Cicero, the embodiment of Roman virtue, emerges ambiguously, as Brown depicts him, both through his identification with Carwin and through his actions in “The Death of Cicero” fragment. Like Hawthorne after him, Brown was critical of those who serve a principle of “reason” reared irrationally as a homemade god. Both male Wielands, like Roger Chillingworth, or Rappaccini, or Aylmer, or Ethan Brand, serve gods they themselves have created and to whom they sacrifice their love and heart's desire, relinquishing at last nature itself.

Brown's uneasy examination of the classical background behind his nation's culture does not stop with his ambivalent criticism of Cicero. “My brother's skill,” Clara observes, “in Greek and Roman learning was exceeded by that of few.” Where he had earlier concerned himself with the textual problems of Cicero's works, after the first two manifestations of Carwin's voice Theodore begins “collecting and investigating the facts which relate to that mysterious personage, the Daemon of Socrates” (48).

Socrates, as Plato represents him to us, refers to his Daemon a number of times, describing it most succinctly in the “Apology”:

You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in his indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything.³⁴

Little wonder that Theodore had taken sudden interest in the subject. When Carwin's mysterious voice made its debut it was to warn Wieland, who was walking to the temple, to stop: “There is danger in your path” (33). The second manifestation of the voice, heard by Wieland and Pleyel, interrupted their debate about the merits of Pleyel's plan to visit his betrothed in Europe. Pleyel, endeavoring to convince Wieland to accompany him abroad, was just suggesting that Catharine, as a good wife, would abide by Theodore's decision, when “a negative was clearly and distinctly uttered from another quarter” before Wieland could answer. This voice goes on to “warn” against making a useless journey: for Pleyel's fiancée (it says) is dead (44).

The resemblance to the Daemon of Socrates, which warns rather than commands, is unmistakable. As Edgar Huntly reacts to the horrifying newness of the pit by making of it a horrible but more familiar dungeon, or as Theodore's father recoiled from the wilderness by building the Palladian temple, so Wieland launches upon a study of a classical parallel for the mysterious voice, as if to bring it within the range of what is not only familiar, but venerable. The Daemon of Socrates, one modern writer reports, has been the subject of numerous commentaries and has given rise to any number of interpretations, both ancient and modern.

Apuleis treated it as a private god. The Fathers of the Church were completely divided about it. Some, like Tertullian, St. Cyprian and Lactantius held it came from Satan; others, like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius and St. Augustine thought of it as some kind of angel. Today certain people think it may have been a type of hallucination that occurs in epilepsy. Still others have seen nothing more in it than Socrates recognizing the voice of conscience.³⁵

Brown's linking Carwin with the Daemon, a figure subject to ambiguous interpretation, reflects the complexity of the novelist's own identification with the biloquist. Indeed, in at least one way, Carwin seems to be associated with the clearly benevolent voice of warning. Seven of the nine confirmed instances of biloquism in the novel are warnings: to Theodore, not to approach the temple (32ff.); to Theodore and Pleyel, not to go to Europe (41ff.); again to Theodore and Pleyel, to aid Clara, who had fainted after hearing “murderers” in her closet (59); to Clara, preventing her dream-fall into a dream-pit, and warning her to avoid a certain secluded wilderness nook (63ff.); and again to Clara, forestalling her discovery of Carwin behind her closet door (85). Lastly, Carwin saves Clara from death by uttering his favorite monosyllabic injunction—“Hold! Hold!”—as her brother is about to execute upon her, as he had upon wife, children, and ward, the sentence of God (299).

But neither does Brown let us see Carwin as a genius of pure benevolence. The first two instances of biloquism proceed not so much from malice, as from Carwin's perverse and diabolically unconscious curiosity. The third is the product of this same curiosity, Carwin having created the closet dialogue between two “murderers” (he says) simply to test Clara's courage. When Clara panics, running out of her house, collapsing in a dead faint at her brother's threshold, Carwin, alarmed himself at the effect of little more than a deadpan practical joke, cries: “Awake! arise! hasten to succour one that is dying at your door!” (59). A more deliberate motive is behind Carwin's wilderness warning to Clara: he wishes to secure the privacy of an amorous retreat—he is intimately occupied with Judith, Clara's chambermaid. Also self-serving is his warning Clara not to open her closet door; he is inside, reading a personal memoir left Clara by her father.

The motive for his final biloquistic performance would seem the least suspect. That he exhibits enough presence of mind to exercise his powers to prevent Clara's murder redeems Carwin from, at least, absolute villainy. Yet this instance of Carwin's benevolence is supremely ironic, since it was necessitated by his previous mischief. Even if Carwin is not directly guilty of the Wieland atrocities, his biloquistic stunts in large measure set the stage for Theodore's madness. Carwin's last injunction—his final “Hold! Hold!”—merely denies madness its consummation. To compound the irony, in a gesture typical of Brown's “do-gooders,” Carwin is not content to stop with the utterance of his “favorite monosyllable,” but continues, addressing Theodore: “Man of errors! cease to cherish thy delusion: not heaven or hell, but thy senses have misled thee to commit these acts. Shake off thy phrenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be lunatic no longer” (230). Where the “delusion,” called the “delicious idea” by Erasmus Darwin in Zoönomia, “produces pleasurable sensations, as in personal vanity or religious enthusiasm[,] it is almost a pity to snatch [the maniac] from [his] fool's paradise, and reduce [him] again to the common lot of humanity.”³⁶ So reduced, “transformed at once in the man of sorrows” by Carwin's final “benevolence,” Theodore plunges Clara's penknife into his own neck (230-1).

Isaiah prophesied that, despised and rejected, the Messiah would be “a man of sorrows” (53:3). This is the ironic measure of divinity Brown at last allows Wieland: identification with Christ as the man of sorrows, but incarnated in the “Man of errors.” And though we would despise and reject that man, he, surely, bears “our griefs and carrie[s] our sorrows” (Isaiah, 53:3-4); for, as Christ was sent among us as our sorrowful advocate, so Wieland, the man of errors, is even more our representative. Charles Chauncy defined enthusiasm as a “disease” endemic perhaps to all men. “Consciousness itself,” Sarsefield declares in Edgar Huntly, “is the malady.” And so Clara's lament—“What is man, that knowledge is so sparingly conferred upon him!”—sadly inverts the Paul of Hebrews 2:6-7. “What is man,” the Apostle rejoices, “that thou art mindful of him?” Man—“a little lower than the angels” and crowned with glory and honor!

Carwin is not evil, but the moral basis for his motives is in no way commensurate with his powers. His talents enable him to approach Cicero in forensic skill and the Daemon of Socrates in authority, but Carwin lacks the moral principles by which he might regulate his powers. The association of Carwin with Cicero and the Daemon ameliorates his character at the same time as it underscores its weaknesses, answering to the needs of Brown's ambivalent identification with the biloquist. The association seems also a response to the broader ambivalence of Brown's relation to some of his nation's adopted cultural values. Not only does the identification of Carwin with Cicero and the Daemon fail to vindicate Carwin unequivocally, it also fails to elevate the classical figures by contrast. Their association with the biloquist diminishes their status as cultural models.

In modern English the distinction between daemon and demon is not always clear. Defining demon, the Oxford English Dictionary shows how daemon, for Socrates a “divinum quiddam … a certain divine principle or agency, an inward monitor or oracle,” evolved pejoratively through the interpretations of Socrates' accusers and the Christian Fathers into what we understand by the modern English word demon. The blurred distinction between daemon and demon suggests the ambivalence with which the idea of any inspirational voice or spirit has traditionally been regarded. In the case of Wieland, Brown frequently associates Carwin with demons in the sense of the word given by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary, as a “spirit; generally an evil spirit; a devil.”

But, curiously, whereas Johnson spells the word demon, Brown persists in daemon, as if to preserve through orthography the idea of a divinum quiddam even as he calls Carwin a devil. Pleyel, Clara, Theodore, and even the elusive Ludloe identify the biloquist as—to use Brown's spelling—a daemon. Ludloe (who has tenaciously as any “demon” fastened himself upon Carwin) says that the biloquist is “in league with some infernal spirit” (130). The reasonable Pleyel sees the “daemons” with whom Carwin is leagued as nothing more substantial than metaphors of man's darker side. “As to an alliance with evil geniuses,” he explains to Clara, “the power and the malice of daemons have been a thousand times exemplified in human beings. There are no devils but those which are begotten upon selfishness, and reared by cunning” (132). But Clara, despite her rational education, entertains more literal notions of Carwin's daemons: “Where is the proof, said I, that daemons may not be subjected to the controul of men?” (180). Brought before the bar of justice, Theodore denies that he acted under the “influence of daemons” (176), meaning, presumably, evil spirits or devils.

Yet it is Theodore who finally and positively defines Carwin as a “daemon,” not a “demon,” but something of a divinum quiddam. Theodore had made good a third escape from his dungeon for the purpose of “sacrificing” Clara. But Carwin's stammering and ambiguous confession forestalls him. Enraged beyond revenge after Carwin's “incoherent confessions,” Wieland contemptuously orders the biloquist from the room. Apparently disabused of his errors now, Theodore is about to spare Clara—but, suddenly: “A new soul appeared to actuate his frame, and his eyes to beam with preternatural lustre.”

Clara! [he exclaims] I must not leave thee in doubt. I know not what brought about thy interview with the being whom thou callest Carwin. For a time, I was guilty of thy error, and deduced from his incoherent confessions that I had been made the victim of human malice. He left us at my bidding [actually, Wieland had threatened him], and I put up a prayer that my doubts should be removed. Thy eyes were shut, and thy ears sealed to the vision that answered my prayer.

I was indeed deceived. The form thou hast seen was the incarnation of a daemon. The visage and voice which urged me to the sacrifice of my family, were his. Now he personates a human form: then he was invironed with the lustre of heaven.

“Clara,” Wieland concludes, “thy death must come” (225).

Theodore claims to have seen and heard a “daemon” when he murdered his family, not a devil or an evil spirit, but a being “invironed with the lustre of heaven.” Now the hapless Wieland recognizes Carwin as the “incarnation” of that “daemon,” personating “a human form”; for Carwin's “visage and voice” (Wieland says) urged the sacrifice of his family. In this, his penultimate moment upon earth, Theodore comes to regard Carwin much as Socrates had regarded his own Daemon. Of course, Brown does not mean to call Socrates and the classical tradition of rational inquiry evil; but the novelist's spirit could not rest in a Socratic symposium anymore than it could in a Ciceronian temple. Some imp of the perverse seems always to knock down whatever figure Brown's imagination suggests, no matter how exemplary. Abraham, Cicero, Socrates—in Wieland all wobble on their pedestals.

The philosopher whose rational method triumphed over the mysticism of Anaximides, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, also allowed for the influence of the irrational. One modern student of Socrates finds the source of the philosopher's originality in the remarkable union of “a critical mind, a gift for analysis, a taste for free investigation and doubt, and a wonderful practical sense, with a sincere religious faith, deep burning enthusiasm and a tendency to ecstacy, or at least toward the possibility of it.”³⁷ For Brown such a happy synthesis was not possible. Carwin, as Brown's version of the Socratic Daemon, does indeed have an affinity for the rational mind—but as a cat for the mouse. Carwin's stunts can operate successfully only upon the rational individual who has quite reasonably come to depend upon the truth of what his senses tell him.

Conceived in the American halcyon of John Locke's epistemology, Brown's Carwin must have appeared as an extraordinarily dangerous figure. Though the biloquist deals in illusion, the voices are real enough in their appeal to the senses; and in an epistemology where ideas are ultimately the products of sensation, Carwin is able to create and interpose his private universe of mysterious voices between mind and nature itself. Pleyel, the reasonable Lockean, is merely duped by Carwin's counterfeit of Clara's seduction. Although the result is upsetting, even emotionally painful, for both Clara and Pleyel, it is hardly tragic. But when Carwin works his tricks upon an individual in whom both the rationalist and the enthusiast contend, then the biloquist finds he has “rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no controul, and which experience [shows as] infinite in power” (215-6). The tragedy, however, does not proceed from any grand malice. Why, for example, did Carwin counterfeit a terrifying dialogue between “two” murderers in Clara's closet? Because “some daemon of mischief seized me” (201).

As a youth, doubtless prompted by the same “daemon,” Carwin delighted in making people think his spaniel talked. The dog “asserted the dignity of his species and capacity of intellectual improvement. The company [that had gathered in amazement to hear the animal] separated lost in wonder, but perfectly convinced by the evidence that had been produced” (Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, 260). This harmlessly impish parlor trick is actually of a piece both with the “murderous dialogue” counterfeited for Clara and with a divine command to murder that Carwin may have counterfeited for Wieland. Ludloe, the youthful biloquist's mysterious mentor, explains how men

believed in the existence and energy of invisible powers, and in the duty of discovering and conforming to their will. This will was supposed to be sometimes made known to them through the medium of their senses. A voice coming from a quarter where no attendant form could be seen would, in most cases, be ascribed to supernal agency, and a command imposed on them, in this manner, would be obeyed with religious scrupulousness. Thus men might be imperiously directed in the disposal of their industry, their property, and even of their lives. Men, actuated by a mistaken sense of duty, might, under his influence, be led to the commission of the most flagitious, as well as the most heroic acts.

(Carwin, 263-4)

The spaniel's name was “Daemon.”

Ludloe, a hyperambitious member of the Illuminati, insinuates a motive for the exercise of talents such as Carwin's: “If it were [a man's] desire to accumulate wealth, or institute a new sect, he should need no other instrument” (264). Such motives are not always admirable, but they are reasonable, and are therefore by no means Carwin's. Spurred only by a “daemon of mischief,” Carwin's primum mobile is, in fact, a mobile without motive, to use Edgar Allan Poe's definition of his own version of the daemon of mischief, “a motive not motivirt”:

Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistable.

Poe called this the “Imp of the Perverse.” “Beyond or behind this, there is no intelligible principle” (Poe, 6:150).

“It is a radical, a primitive impulse,” Poe's narrator says of the Perverse, “—elementary” (6:147). Certainly, Carwin obsessed Brown's imagination as thoroughly as Wieland, but while Theodore's motives are as clear as Abraham's, Carwin's are so elementary as to defy analysis. Just the same, Brown, having divided his identity between Wieland and Carwin, was at pains to explain the biloquist. His name had figured in the list of titles Brown included with his outline of Wieland, clearly legible though canceled by a stroke of the pen (a subtitle following it is more thoroughly obliterated and illegible: possibly it reads “the road of crime”). Hard upon the completion of Wieland, the novelist began The Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, breaking it off after he had written enough to fill some sixty printed pages.

Both before and after the composition of the novel, then, Carwin had enjoyed a shaky existence independent of Wieland. This is as it should have been, for Carwin's fictional origin is significantly different from that of the Wieland children. Clara and Theodore were first-generation Americans, highly conscious of their European ancestry and steeped in the neoclassical culture of eighteenth-century Europe. Carwin is more truly a native American. Unlike the Wielands, whose rural home in southeastern Pennsylvania lay but a few miles from what was America's most cosmopolitan metropolis, Carwin was raised on a farm in a “western district of Pennsylvania.” His father was a hostile stranger to knowledge outside the farm, his ideas never ranging “beyond the sphere of his vision,” and young Carwin's insatiable—even Faustian—“thirst of knowledge” was met by the stern farmer with scorn and “stripes” (247).

One evening, in his fourteenth year, the boy was sent to bring his father's cows in from a distant meadow. He had been “menaced with severe chastisement” if, as was the youth's inquisitive custom, he lingered beyond a strict time limit. He reached the meadow only to discover that the cows had broken the fence and run off. “It was my first duty to carry home the earliest tidings of this accident, but the first suggestion [of an unappeasable curiosity] was to examine the cause and manner of this escape.” Soon absorbed in speculative reverie, young Carwin grows heedless of the passing time until “some accident” calls to mind the painful consequences of delay. He resolves not to return home by the “beaten path,” but by a wilderness shortcut that would take him through a landscape anticipating Edgar Huntly, a “sublime” scene of precipitous cliffs and swirling water. Presently “entangled in a maze” of “abrupt points” and “gloomy hollows”—thoroughly “bewildered,” as Edgar Huntly was to say of himself—Carwin discovers a glen through which passage would be shorter and safer than the path he had first proposed to follow. But even this is steep and narrow, so overshadowed by a great cliff that all is plunged into midnight, though the sun has just set. Fearful of “goblins and spectres,” Carwin tries to distract himself “by hallowing as loud as organs of unusual compass and vigour would enable me.” He calls to the errant cows “in the shrill tones of a Mohock savage”—perhaps he had heard such cries in western Pennsylvania—and the rocks of the wilderness landscape reverberate, though their echo is at first indistinct.

But at one particularly treacherous turn, after a short pause, he calls out again. “In a few seconds a voice, as I then imagined, uttered the same cry from the point of a rock some hundred feet behind me.” Carwin casts “a fearful glance behind … The speaker, however, was concealed from my view.” Again giving voice to the “Mohock” cry, the boy is treated to a “new occasion for wonder.” His “ditty” is repeated, a perfect imitation, after a few seconds, but from “a different corner”—the imitator, as before, invisible.

When the quick-witted boy realizes that he has discovered “an echo of an extraordinary kind” he is delighted and, forgetting the prospect of his father's punishment, amuses himself for an hour in talking to the cliffs. He returns frequently to what he now calls his “vocal glen” until he hits upon the idea of producing the echo without aid of the cliffs. “From speculation I proceeded to experiment.” And in the wilderness of America, Carwin's biloquism—a talent (he admits) “too liable to perversion for a good man to desire to possess”—is in the most literal sense born (248-53).

Like Edgar Huntly, then, Carwin discovers in the wilderness a hitherto unknown elementary—radical and primitive—aspect of himself. The conditions of the wilderness, of the New World, provoke such discoveries, and the story of Wieland, however fleshed out by German, Roman, Greek, and biblical sources, is, as John Neal said of Brown himself, American to the backbone.

Born in and of the wilderness, Carwin's biloquism is the child of confusion's own landscape. As usual, the landscape of the novel is abstract; but if Brown intellectualized the details of the scene into mere emblems, he could not dismiss the intellectual and emotional fact embodied in those emblems. Clara repeatedly presents her situation through metaphors drawn from the landscape. At the beginning of her narrative she pictures herself placed upon a “dreadful eminence” (6) by a train of events unparalleled in the experience of any other human being. Later she sees herself set upon the “brink of danger” (189) and upon the “brink of fate” (22). The revelation of her brother's atrocity threatens to push Clara to the “brink of the same abyss” into which Theodore has already fallen (180). Pleyel, fearful and jealous of what he takes to be her clandestine affair with Carwin, tells Clara how he felt compelled to interfere: “Should I see you rushing to the verge of a dizzy precipice, and not stretch forth a hand to pull you back?” (129). But it is just such a verge that invites Clara as she is about to write of her brother's suicide. Why recall such a horrible scene? Why even continue to live? “Why not terminate at once this series of horrors?—hurry to the verge of the precipice, and cast myself for ever beyond remembrance and beyond hope?” (228). Despite a paucity of picturesque landscape, the wilderness, of which Carwin is product and personification, permeates Wieland.

Such figures of speech as those in Wieland would be melodramatically banal in the civil scenes of Europe's great cities. Uttered in the American wilderness, they take on crucial significance as evidence of an interpenetration of mind and landscape, an absorption in the spirit of the place. The wilderness was for Brown the territory of the mind's most obscure recesses. Huntly sleepwalks and dreams there, fully awakening into what seems yet another dream. Clara falls asleep in a remote wilderness spot only to dream of the wilderness, a dream within a seeming dream. Given the almost casual equation Brown formulated between mind and landscape, it is not surprising that, along with images of light and dark, the wilderness provides a source of figures through which Brown defines his novel's moral and epistemological themes.

The very epigraph resolves the moral content of Wieland into the opposing figures of “Virtue's blissful paths” and the “mazy paths” of deceit. This figure is repeated throughout the novel, from its opening page—where Clara disdains “supplication to the Deity,” declaring that the “power that governs the course of human affairs has chosen his path”—through a description of the “austerer and more arduous path” of study Wieland pursued (23). It is continued through Carwin's assurance to Clara that she is under the protection of a divine power so that her “path will be without pits to swallow, or snares to entangle” her (92); and through Pleyel's assertion that Carwin has chosen to conduct his life along an “obscure path” (126). Numerous additional examples might be cited, and frequently these figures of speech are counterpointed to the occasional glimpses Brown affords of the actual paths, narrow and obscure, that run through a sketchily rendered Pennsylvania wilderness. On several occasions the figurative and the physical are not merely counterpointed, but actually dissolve into one another. “There is danger in your path,” Carwin warns Theodore, who is at that moment walking the literal, physical path to the temple (33, 46). Although Theodore does turn from the temple and walk back down the path, he of course continues along a metaphorical path to the catastrophe that his father's temple represents.

Long “has been the march,” young Brown wrote in his 1794 “Devotion: An Epistle,” “And weary, through the thorny tracts that lead / To nothing in the metaphysic wilderness.” This might well serve to describe the intellectual journey the novelist took in Wieland four years after writing the poem. In a sense, Wieland, a book of the metaphysic wilderness, does lead to “nothing”—at least to the frustration of knowledge and revelation. Like the story of Abraham and Isaac, Wieland is an epistemological fable; but the biblical episode affirms man's capacity for attaining absolute truth, whereas Brown's novel denies the human capacity for attaining any truth absolutely. In Edgar Huntly the wilderness functions both as metaphor and as place, while in Wieland—as in Poe's “The Pit and the Pendulum”—the wilderness is realized almost exclusively as metaphor. Because the physical facts of Edgar Huntly's wilderness force the sleepwalker to call upon “natural” instincts beyond (or beneath) his civilized reason, Huntly finds within himself an untapped reserve of strength and cunning. Although the wilderness defines the limit of knowledge born in the lightsome chamber of civilized existence, it also reveals a truth outside that chamber. In Wieland, however, the wilderness is not present as a place of revelation, but only as a metaphor of limitation. Essentially, the novel's characters remain lost along figurative paths, tottering on the emotional verge of this or that intellectual abyss.

The discovery of limits, of the “nothing” at the end of thorny tracts, is itself a crucial truth, though. The abrupt and anticlimactic ending of Wieland—in which Pleyel, time, and Europe have quite healed Clara's emotional wounds—precludes any divine revelation of the sort Theodore craved. Ironic revelation there is, however, couched in figures of paths, abysses, precipices, darkness, and light. It is the novel's unremitting and unresolved ambiguity, a paradoxical revelation of the absolute limit of revelation.

One of the topics we shall take up in the next chapter is Brown's failure to realize his youthful plan of writing an epic on Christopher Columbus. We may anticipate that discussion here by observing that, in one important sense, Brown did not completely fail. In his four major novels he continued the Navigator's exploration of America, not as a geographical entity, but as a phenomenon of mind. By adding a New World to the geographical and intellectual cosmogony of Europe, Columbus forced the Old World to define its limits. J. H. Elliott, in The Old World and the New, quotes Etienne Pasquier, a Parisian lawyer of the early 1560s:

“It is a striking fact that our classical authors had no knowledge of all this America, which we call New Lands.” With these words [Pasquier] caught something of the importance of America for the Europe of his day. Here was a totally new phenomenon, quite outside the range of Europe's accumulated experience and of its normal expectation.³⁸

The writings of Columbus himself reveal both the newness of the “New Lands” and the inadequacy of Europe's limited experience fully to comprehend it. Howard Mumford Jones criticizes the letter Columbus wrote to describe the New World as “vague,” nonspecific, with little “beyond the repetition of a few simple formulas” common to conventional Renaissance evocations of nature. Later writers and compilers of voyages, particularly Peter Martyr in the early sixteenth century, “translated reports of Columbus, Vespucci, and others” even more deliberately into Renaissance terms, drawing desperately upon classical authors for inadequate formulaic imagery. To be sure, the United States of Brown's century was not Columbus's Europe. But the wilderness, upon whose frontier Brown and his countrymen lived, was yet New Land, and Brown, like Columbus three hundred years before him, struggled to comprehend it, to encompass it within the narrow bounds of his experience. Howard Mumford Jones said, “The nightingale, by the by, which does not exist in the New World, haunted Columbus: twice on his outward voyage, when the weather was especially fine, he noted in his journal that nothing was wanting for perfection but the song of the nightingale.”³⁹

Nor do European dungeons exist in America, until Edgar Huntly projects one into the Pennsylvania landscape. Or if the wilderness lacks the temples of ancient Rome, men like Thomas Jefferson and the senior Wieland readily supply Palladian equivalents. As late as 1835 Washington Irving would suggest that the American prairies “only want here and there a village spire, the battlements of a castle, or the turrets of an old family mansion”—as foreign to the New World as a nightingale—“rising from among the trees, to rival the most ornamented scenery of Europe.”⁴⁰ Brown, like Columbus and like Irving, participates in Europe's dialogue with America, the dialogue that is (according to J. H. Elliott) the history of the Old World and the New. On the one hand, there is “the attempt of Europe to impose its own image, its own aspirations, and its own values on a newly discovered world”; but on the other hand, “a growing awareness of the character, the opportunities and the challenges represented by the New World of America helped to shape and transform an Old World which was itself striving to shape and transform the New” (Elliott, 7).

In the case of a writer like Thoreau, who tells us that the “frontier” exists wherever a man “fronts” a “fact,” we can be certain of a conscious awareness of America as an epistemological metaphor. It would be asking too much to expect that degree of self-consciousness from Brown. Although it is difficult to believe him unaware of his own obsession with epistemological themes, it is just as difficult to believe that Brown was fully cognizant of the role America played in working them out. The epistemological metaphors of Wieland seem more the inevitable emanations of the spirit of the American place than the carefully wrought products of conscious design. Just the same, at least one of Brown's fellow Americans exhibited an acute awareness of his country as a phenomenon crucial in the world's intellectual cosmogony. Jeremy Belknap, biographer, historian, and novelist, was also a minister. Called upon by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1792 to deliver a commemorative discourse upon Columbus's discovery of America, Belknap began with a text from Scriptures: “Many shall run to and fro and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4).

For, Belknap said, Columbus's voyages “opened to the Europeans a new world; which gave a new turn to their thoughts.” The Navigator's heroism consisted in his fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy. Columbus was a divinely inspired but thoroughly empirical scientist: “not a closet projector, but an enterprising adventurer [who,] having established his theory on principles … was determined to exert himself to the utmost to demonstrate its truth by experiment.” America was the place of empirical truth; Europe, the closed land of abstract dogmatic belief. “Ignorance and error were canonized” by Europeans, such as St. Augustine, who “doubted the diurnal motion of the earth, or the existence of antipodes.” The philosophers of the Old World judged—prejudged—the “torrid and frigid zones” uninhabitable: “It is now known by experience, that the human constitution is capable, by proper management, of enduring all the vicissitudes of heat and cold, of moisture and dryness, to which any accessible part of the earth is subject; and that its health may be preserved in all climates and situations.”⁴¹ With dead aim, a battered and exhausted Edgar Huntly hurled an Indian tomahawk between the eyes of a panther. Huntly observed: “No one knows the powers that are latent in his constitution”—until they are discovered “by experience.”

How commonplace Belknap's notions of America and Columbus were is impossible to determine exactly. Certainly, American audiences were capable of enjoying the likes of the British playwright Thomas Morton's Columbus, little more than the thinnest of excuses to find an exotic setting for the thinnest of love stories, and without the slightest intellectual pretensions.⁴² But Belknap's more thoughtful interpretation did circulate well beyond the Massachusetts Historical Society when, two years after the commemorative address was delivered, he included an altered version of the piece in his encyclopedic American Biography, a work reviewed in Brown's Monthly Magazine.⁴³ A more significant indication of the currency of Belknap's views is their affinity with Joel Barlow's genial and popular vision of America. At bottom, Barlow's utopian vision rests upon the New World's epistemological status. Both Belknap and Barlow argue that the American “experiment,” in revealing a new world of God's creation, brought man to a greater knowledge of God himself, so that America serves the Old World as, in effect, the book of the Lord. The ramifications of this revelation are, of course, not only intellectual but social and political.⁴⁴

For Barlow, America was the land of light; but through the dark pages of Wieland light is a fugitive thing. The brightest and steadiest, which bursts only upon the mind of Theodore, is the least real. As the novel perverts the idea of Abrahamic revelation, so it inverts the values represented in Barlow's metaphors of enlightenment. The enduring revelation of the New World is not of light, but of darkness, the limit of knowledge. Joel Barlow summons up Hesper, the genius of the Western world, to guide Columbus through his vision. Brown substitutes a flesh-and-blood native of western Pennsylvania. Carwin's double tongue proclaims the relativity of man's knowledge, even as the discovery of a New World some three hundred years before Brown wrote Wieland revealed the relative nature of truths long held sacred by the Old. At the end of Wieland, Brown's “genius” returns to his place of origin, retiring to a farmer's life in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania in order to elude Ludloe.

Clara Wieland, however, abandons America for Europe. We leave her in the penultimate chapter longing for death; her entire family, after all, has died, and died horribly. But, summarily, in the final chapter—“written three years after the foregoing and dated at Montpellier”—she flatly declares: “Such is man. Time will obliterate the deepest impressions” (234). Clara confesses that, three years earlier, with the catastrophe fresh in her mind, she was “enamoured of death.” Indeed, she fully expected to die, “yet here am I, a thousand leagues from my native soil, in full possession of life and of health, and not destitute of happiness” (234). What is more, she has married that avatar of neoclassical enlightenment, Henry Pleyel! A conventional comic token of the restoration of cosmic order, the marriage ends the tragedy on a note of comedy.⁴⁵

Clara's removal to Europe is not merely a “happy ending” thrown as a sop to a smiling American public. It is a purgation, and more for Brockden Brown than Clara Wieland. After she finished her narrative of the Wieland family tragedy Clara betook herself to bed, “in the full belief that my career in this world was on the point of finishing.” She apparently languished for several days until, one night, “after some hours of restlessness and pain, I sunk into deep sleep.” She dreamed:

My fancy became suddenly distempered, and my brain was turned into a theatre of uproar and confusion. It would not be easy to describe the wild and phantastical incongruities that pestered me. My uncle, Wieland, Pleyel and Carwin were successively and momently discerned amidst the storm. Sometimes I was swallowed up by whirlpools, or caught up in the air by half-seen and gigantic forms, and thrown upon pointed rocks, or cast among the billows. Sometimes gleams of light were shot into a dark abyss, on the verge of which I was standing, and enabled me to discover, for a moment, its enormous depth and hideous precipices. Anon, I was transported to some ridge of Aetna, and made a terrified spectator of its fiery torrents and its pillars of smoke.

(236)

At first this seems another of Brown's wilderness dreams, replete with images of abyss, verge, and precipice. There is even the dissolution of the boundary between dream and waking reality that is also a feature of Huntly's wilderness experience and Clara's earlier dream in the woods: “I was conscious,” Clara reports, “even during my dream of my real situation” (236). However, here the wilderness images have undergone a subtle but crucial transformation. There are not only abysses and precipices in this dream, but the whirlpool, rocks, and billows of an ocean and, more significantly, a smoke-belching Mount Aetna. The wilderness has become European, a Dantesque landscape with the addition of classical overtones in Aetna and its pillars of smoke. Just as Edgar Huntly preferred the more familiar horror of a European dungeon to the entirely new terror of an American wilderness, so Clara's dreaming mind molds the images of the American wilderness into European, even classical, shape. The horror is vivid; but it has been fashioned into a form familiar to the experience of the Old World.

The dream that purges Clara's mind, and Brown's book, of New World images is a dream of combustion. And for good reason: due to a servant's carelessness in disposing of some live embers, Clara's bedroom is actually aflame as she dreams, and she narrowly escapes a fate that recalls her father's. But escape she does, and more: “This incident, disastrous as it may first seem, had, in reality, a beneficial effect on my feelings. I was, in some degree, roused from the stupor which had seized my faculties. The monotonous and gloomy series of my thoughts was broken.” Not only does the fire cauterize Clara's emotional wounds, it sends her packing off to Europe: “My habitation was levelled with the ground, and I was obliged to seek a new one” (237). The “new” habitation, however, is “the shore of the ancient world,” where, although the memory of catastrophe does not leave her, “the melancholy which it generated, and the tears with which it filled my eyes, were not unprofitable.” This catharsis, an affective forgetfulness, is due largely to the influence of the European “spectacle of living manners and the monuments of past ages” which Clara contemplates “with ardour.” The “ancient world” reinstates in Clara's heart “its ancient tranquillity” (237).

The empiricism of John Locke took especial root in America most likely because the demands of New World experience were themselves so eminently empirical. The further revelation of Wieland, itself rooted in the Lockean soil of America, is the inadequacy of human perception and understanding to interpret the reality the New World so immediately represents. Clara's removal to an ancient world of ancient tranquillity was doubtless an emotional and intellectual necessity for Brown. Reversing the utopian stereotype, he pictures a Europe in which forgetfulness approaches innocence, and an America made guilty by its discovery of the frontier of knowledge itself. The novelist allowed his unconscious and speculative “literary” self full expression in Wieland, pushing his characters through a territory of paradoxical revelation. But Charles Brockden Brown could not live wholly in the revealed gloom of this American “literary mood.” Having used her to probe the New World's primeval darkness, he returns Clara to the civilized sunshine of Europe. Her name, after all, means “light.”

Notes

1. “An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J———Y———, upon this Family in December, A.D. 1781,” in New York Weekly Magazine 2, nos. 55 and 56 (July 20 and 27, 1796), pp. 20 and 28; rptd., Philadelphia Minerva 2, nos. 81 and 82 (August 20 and 27, 1796), n. pag. An anonymous reviewer of Wieland recognized the Tomhannock murder as a source for the novel in the American Review and Literary Journal 1 (January, 1801), pp. 333-9. J. C. Hendrickson, in “A Note on Wieland,” American Literature 8 (November, 1936), pp. 305-6, identifies J———Y——— as James Yates.

2. Carl Van Doren, “Early American Realism,” Nation 99 (November 12, 1914), pp. 577-8.

3. A facsimile of the outline is reproduced together with a transcription in the Kent State Wieland [edited with an introduction by Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978)]. Page references hereafter will be cited in the text.

4. Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; rptd., New York: Dutton, 1957), p. 35.

5. In Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1793). The History of Maria Kittle was also published in a separate edition in 1797 by Elisha Babcock, Hartford. All references are to the 1793 edition and will be cited in the text.

6. Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 10.

7. See Kendall B. Taft, ed., Minor Knickerbockers (New York: American Book, 1947), p. 378, n. 3.

8. “Though it has been virtually ignored by literary historians, the amazing influence that [C. M. Wieland's] Oberon evidently exerted would seem to make this pioneer metrical romance easily the most influential foreign literary work of the time. … In a steady stream [Wieland's] writings … appeared in countless editions and well over 375 translations into no less than 14 other languages!” (Werner W. Beyer, The Enchanted Forest [New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963], pp. ix and 2). See also Harry R. Warfel, “Charles Brockden Brown's German Sources,” Modern Language Quarterly 1, no. 2 (September, 1940), pp. 357-65.

9. John McCarthy, Fantasy and Reality: An Epistemological Approach to Wieland (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1974), pp. 9 and 12.

10. See the Warfel article cited in note 8. For more on Brown's use of C. M. Wieland, see John G. Frank, “The Wieland Family in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland,” Monatshefte 42, no. 7 (November, 1950), pp. 347-53.

11. Christoph Martin Wieland, The Trial of Abraham. In Four Cantos. Translated from the German (Norwich, Conn.: John Trumbull, 1778), p. 28. Page references hereafter will be cited in the text.

12. See the entries under “Albigenses” and “Waldenses” in Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia; or, An Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences, 5th ed. (London: D. Midwinter, 1741-3), and in the second volume of the 1753 Supplement (London: Printed for W. Innys, 1753). Accounts by later authorities are found in Samuel Macaulay Jackson et al., eds., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910); James Hastings et al., eds., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (New York: Scribner's, 1958); and Edwin H. Palmer et al., eds., The Encyclopedia of Christianity (Wilmington: National Foundation for Christian Education, 1964), vol. 1.

13. Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA, 77 (March, 1962), pp. 51-7; see pp. 51 and 54.

14. Charles Chauncy, “Enthusiasm Described and Cautioned Against: A Sermon Preach'd at the Old Brick Meeting House in Boston, the Lord's Day after the Commencement, 1742” (Boston: J. Draper and S. Eliot, 1742), p. 3. Page references hereafter will be cited in the text.

15. Erasmus Darwin, Zoönomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1797), pt. 2, vol. 1, p. 444.

16. William L. Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature 9 (Fall, 1974), pp. 107-42 (see pp. 110 and 112).

17. [Charles Brockden Brown,] An Address to the Congress of the United States, on the Utility and Justice of Restrictions upon Foreign Commerce (Philadelphia: C. and A. Conrad, 1809), p. vi.

18. William Smith, History of New-York, from the First Discovery to the Year 1732 (1757; rptd., Albany: Ryer Schermerhorn, 1814), pp. 201-3 and 202n. A second edition was issued by Mathew Carey in Philadelphia, 1792.

19. Except where noted otherwise, the information that follows is drawn from Charles West Thomson, “Notices of the Life and Character of Robert Proud, Author of ‘The History of Pennsylvania,’” in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: McCarty and Davis, 1826; rptd., Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1864), vol. 1, pp. 417-35.

20. Robert Spiller et al., The Literary History of the United States, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 137.

21. Although Proud affixed the date of the “Plaintive Essay” in good Quaker fashion, substituting the simple “6 mo.” for the pagan June, he dated the “Vox Naturae” from “Philadelphia, Christmas Day, 1782.” Quaker practice, as set out in Rules of Discipline, and Christian Advices of the Yearly Meeting of Friends for Pennsylvania and New Jersey (Philadelphia: Samuel Sansom, Jr., 1797), enjoins against distinguishing days and months by pagan names and condemns “Fasts and Feast Days and Times, and other human Injunctions and Institutions relative to the Worship of God.” From all appearances temperamentally unsuited to the spirit of Woolman and Penn, Proud, in the privacy of manuscript, was also capable of heterodoxy in a significant detail of Quaker practice.

22. “Letters of Robert Proud,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 34 (January, 1910), p. 62-73; see p. 63.

23. [Charles Brockden Brown], review of Proud's History of Pennsylvania, Monthly Magazine 1 (June, 1799), pp. 216-7. For authorship see Bennett, p. 129.

24. Robert Proud, History of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Zachariah Poulson, Jr., 1797), vol. 1, pp. 7-8. Page references hereafter will be cited in the text.

25. See Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849; rptd., New York: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 236-7. For a discussion of Melville's possible borrowing from the spontaneous combustion scene in Wieland, see note 17, Introduction.

26. So the Reverend Charles Chauncy questioned the metaphor of illumination employed by proponents of The Great Awakening. He doubted the validity of any “joy” or “assurance” vouchsafed by “a direct Light shining in” the mind of an enthusiast rather than by “Evidence … from the Word of GOD.” Chauncy warned that “the Joy of these Times [the decade of the Awakening] is too generally the Effect of this sudden Light, and not of a strict and thorow Examination.” It is “infinitely dangerous for Men to trust to this light, and depend upon the Joy arising from it, without the concurring Testimony of their own Consciences, upon clear and full evidence.” (Charles Chauncy, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion [Boston: Printed by Rogers and Fowle for Samuel Eliot, 1743], p. 123.)

27. Joel Barlow, The Vision of Columbus: A Poem in Nine Books (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1787), bk. 7, p. 204

28. See Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976), passim and p. 232, for a discussion of the “rising glory” motif. Brown wrote his own “Rising Glory of America” (1787), a poem transcribed in his father Elijah's manuscript journal (Historical Society of Pennsylvania: AM03399, item 4).

29. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 2d ed., corrected (London: W. Straham, T. Cadell, and W. Creech, 1785), vol. 2, pp. 204-13. Page references hereafter will be cited in the text. On the great popularity of Blair in America, see William Charvat, The Origins of American Critical Thought, 1810-1835 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936), pp. 29-31.

30. [Charles Brockden Brown,] “The Difference between History and Romance,” Monthly Magazine 2 (April, 1800), pp. 250-3.

31. “Read Brown's ‘Carwin,’ as far as he has written it” (Smith, August 8, 1798, p. 460).

32. Two articles summarize the controversy: Robert Hobson, “Voices of Carwin and Other Mysteries in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland,” Early American Literature 10 (Winter, 1975-76), pp. 307-9; and David Lyttle, “The Case against Carwin,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26 (December, 1971), pp. 257-69.

33. Howard Mumford Jones, O Strange New World (New York: Viking, 1967), pp. 227-72.

34. Plato, “Apology,” in Benjamin Jowett, trans., The Dialogues of Plato (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), pp. 66-7.

35. Jean Brun, Socrates, trans. Douglas Scott (New York: Walker and Co., 1962), pp. 66-7

36. Darwin, Zoönomia, pt. 2, vol. 1, p. 444.

37. Anthelme Chaignet quoted in Brun (see note 35, above).

38. J. H. Eliott, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1972), p. 8.

39. Jones, New World, p. 14; cf. Anne Bradstreet's “sweet-tongu'd Philomel” in stanza 26 of the Contemplations.

40. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (1835; rptd., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), p. 108.

41. Jeremy Belknap, A Discourse Intended to Commemorate the Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus … (Boston: Apollo Press, 1792), p. 34.

42. Thomas Morton, Columbus; or, The Discovery of America. An Historical Play. As Performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden, London (Boston: William Spotswood, 1794). The play had its American premiere in New York, September 16, 1797. William Dunlap praised the production. See George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), vol. 1, p. 463; and William Dunlap History of the American Theatre and Anecdotes of the Principal Actors (1832; rptd., New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), vol. 1, p. 372.

43. [Charles Brockden Brown?], review of Jeremy Belknap, American Biography … (Boston: Isiah Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1794), Monthly Magazine 1 (July, 1799), pp. 282-7. See note on authorship, Chapter 1, note 1.

44. Alexander Martin wrote an addendum to Morton's Columbus entitled “A New Scene Interesting to the Citizens of the United States of America, Additional to the Historical Play of Columbus, by a Senator of the United States.” Published in 1798 by Benjamin Franklin Bache at Philadelphia, the fragment sounds a utopian theme closely resembling Barlow's; Martin even borrows Barlow's Hesper—albeit adorned in “Roman cap”—to guide Columbus through a vision of the United States. See Richard Walser, “Alexander Martin, Poet,” Early American Literature 6 (Spring, 1971), pp. 55-61.

45. Wayne Franklin, in “Desperate Imagination: Tragedy and Comedy in Brown's Wieland,” Novel 9 (Winter, 1975), pp. 147-63, shows how Brown was influenced by Shakespeare in the mixture of tragic and comic modes in Wieland.