[In the following essay, Fussell suggests that Clara Wieland's struggle to produce the narrative of her family story parallels Brown's struggle to produce a new American literature.]

I entreated him to tell me … what progress had been made in detecting or punishing the author of this unheard-of devastation.

“The author!” said he; “Do you know the author?”

“Alas!” I answered, “I am too well acquainted with him. The story of the grounds of my suspicions would be painful and too long.”¹

DARK TRANSITIONS

Born January 17, 1771, in the proprietary colony of Pennsylvania, a presumably loyal subject of the crown; five years old when the American Revolution broke out; twelve years old when the Treaty of Paris was signed; eighteen years old when the Constitution was ratified: if not in 1776 or 1783 then certainly in 1789, Charles Brockden Brown underwent a change of political allegiance and was henceforth a citizen of the United States of America. Although his opinion or preference was never consulted in these matters, it is likely he thought about them, thought about them to most purpose when he was writing and publishing Wieland; or The Transformation. An American Tale in 1798. At some point during those twenty-seven nationally turbulent yet spectacularly developmental years he strangely had become a different person, as his patria ceased to be one comparatively clear thing and became quite another thing, not clear at all. Indubitably, there had been a transformation. He took the word for his first subtitle and his theme.

His second subtitle was also his theme, for of course he was engaged in the creation of an American literature—his need to define and embody the typifying communal experience of that new polity, to write the nation into an existence more deeply and genuinely constitutional than the merely assertive and legalistic, to give it a character, a personality, and a soul. What if on reflection it appeared as if an earlier generation of writers, the polemical patriots, as one might call them, had in very fact or inflamed fancy written a predecessor patria out of existence and what if it were the very patria Brown had been born to? Then the creation of the new literature must somehow depend on the destruction of the old patria, it must admit and assess the extent and the cost of that disallegiance, only then to incorporate that destructive knowledge and, with it, to move on. The new American writer must by birth and profession inhabit the old world and the new. To be an American he must have been transformed. Born into the Society of Friends, it must also have been second nature for Brown to ask how it was that the most glorious nation God ever shone his face at happened to commence in widespread hatred, mass murder, willful blindness, possible psychosis.

His ambivalences were many and in themselves doubtful, including a bit of the hysterical and paranoid bewilderment of those polemical patriots, with their mixed motives of ad fontes and stand-pat; his own mixed attitudes toward that precedent generation, which had altered his nationality for him and landed him in his present plight (whether they were to be thanked or cursed, they could hardly be ignored); was it by their doing that he now found himself in the odd position of asking for, and answering the call for, an American literature, when indeed there was no such thing, nor easy prospect of it, the best available models (the English) being anathema? It was a most quixotic undertaking.² The revolution was itself so literary in a sort—not his sort—that literature encapsulated the other dilemmas and might justly have been seen as the direct or indirect cause of them. The national agony in letters, and thus in national identity, was owing to writers, and Brown's particular agony was both the fault of the tribe and a unique problem of his own. Writing was the imaginable source of woe, yet still more writing was the only exit from woe. And so he wrote a diatribe against writing but within that context he split the indictment in order to show an irresponsible writer wreaking havoc and wretchedness on a hapless populace while quite another kind of writer—his kind—was quietly restoring a semblance of reason and peace to such of those people as chanced to survive. Wieland is a furious contest between villainous confused Carwin and our doughty daughter of the American Revolution, Clara Wieland, Brown's narrator. Clara wins, but the price of her victory is exile. Having finished her novel, she removes to Europe, never more to confront the monstrosity of these States.

An author so circumstanced as Brown could hardly avoid thinking of himself as tantamount to the historical process yet by no means in control of it. Especially in her guise as Columbian Fair, sufferer and inditer of the new American literature, Clara Wieland in her fictive torments is Charles Brockden Brown in his, and the language she lavishes on her situation can easily be applied to the author of her being:

My ideas are vivid, but my language is faint; now know I what it is to entertain incommunicable sentiments. … Yet I will persist to the end. My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion; but if I live no longer, I will, at least, live to complete it. What but ambiguities, abruptnesses, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?

(P. 147)

Clara Wieland tells us that when her father died she was “a child of six years of age. The impressions that were then made upon me, can never be effaced” (p. 19). Clara's course runs nicely parallel with her creator's and they both run parallel with their broader constituency. Clara's lover, Pleyel, “urged, that to rely on the exaggerations of an advocate, or to make the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation, was absurd” (p. 30), but it is just this exaggeration and absurdity upon which Wieland is constructed and from which it derives its wild yet public power. As Clara says, “How will your wonder, and that of your companions, be excited by my story! Every sentiment will yield to your amazement. If my testimony were without corroborations, you would reject it as incredible. The experience of no human being can furnish a parallel” (p. 6). The experience of Charles Brockden Brown can, and the experience of the youthful United States can. They are all three the same.

DEVILS AND DUPES

“Ventriloquism” is an old world but Brown had “biloquist” a decade before the OED.³ “One who can speak with two different voices” naturally suggests moral obliquity, all the more as it is only one person who speaks, and it may also suggest a literary situation in which a newly nationalized writer must talk both English and American, using the same lexicon and syntax for roughly opposite, and even inimical, ends. The latter duality dates as far back as the revolutionary slang-whangers (Irving's and Paulding's term, in Salmagundi), especially those poetical satirists who concocted anti-British invectives in the metrical modes of Dryden and Pope. “‘Yes, said I, this, it is plain, is no fiction of the fancy’” (p. 44). Indeed, it is not. It is literary history. “I have not formed this design upon slight grounds, and … I will not be finally diverted from it” (p. 49). Pleyel says the first and Clara the second. Wieland is full of helpful hints. After all, ventriloquism comes in two stages, the imitation of the voice and the physical (geographical) displacement of it, both stages making apt analogies with literary creation in the art of the novel. They are two stages of mimesis.⁴ In addition to “ventriloquism” and “biloquism,” these also are loaded words in Wieland: “narrative,” “narrator,” “tale,” “plot,” “writing,” “audience,” “war,” and “author.” (In the present essay, hardly a quotation but contains one or more of them.) Whether viva voce or by the pen, each of the following is an “author”: the grandfather Wieland, the Wieland father, the Wieland of the title, Pleyel, Carwin, and, encompassing all these as well as herself, Clara Wieland. Except for the first named, in Brown's novel each of them is reversibly an audience. Finally, in Wieland the vox humana and the scribal habit are perpetually being confounded. “‘You saw me in the very act of utterance’” (p. 214), Carwin says to Clara, with more pertinence to theme than to any ordinary view of things.

Talkers and listeners, writers and readers, not only reverse but concatenate. “Such was my brother's narrative. It was heard by us with different emotions. Pleyel did not scruple to regard the whole as a deception of the senses” (p. 34).⁵ On this occasion Carwin was first the narrator and Wieland was his audience but then Wieland becomes the narrator and Clara and Pleyel are his audience. Pleyel is also a narrator in his own right, in addition to being a secret audience (reader) of Clara's secret journal (about him). Perhaps for better reasons than we have supposed, the writer of the day is by the nature of his calling reclusive, or as the wife remarks in Crèvecoeur's Letters From An American Farmer (1782), “Let it be as great a secret as if it was some heinous crime. … I would not have thee, James, pass for what the world calleth a writer; no, not for a peck of gold, as the saying is.”

Crèvecoeur's Letters and Brown's Wieland resemble each other in thematic progression from idyl through regrettable action to paradise lost—one view of the American Revolution, not necessarily Loyalist. “The storm that tore up our happiness, and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence, is lulled into grim repose,” as Crèvecoeur has it. “How had my ancient security vanished!” (p. 60) is perhaps the briefest of Brown's many perorations on the modalities of pathos, and a good question. According to Huckleberry Finn, “That's the peculiarity of a revolution—there ain't anybody intending to do anything when they start in.”⁶ (Who is “anybody” and who are “they”?) It is plain enough what kind of view Wieland takes of incontinent authors and their instigations—a dim one. Clara expostulates to and about Carwin: “And thou, O most fatal and potent of mankind, in what terms shall I describe thee? What words are adequate to the just delineation of thy character? How shall I detail the means which rendered the secrecy of thy purposes unfathomable? … Let me tear myself from contemplation of the evils of which it is but too certain that thou was the author” (pp. 49-50). This is not the view of the author commonly found in English literature nor is it yet that fearful conservative distaste for the imagination (Scotch Common Sense philosophy) supposedly universal in American colleges and universities—Brown attended none of them—which is considered responsible for the dearth of imagination in our early national literature. Brown's view of literature in this novel is far worse than that, more inclusive, more realistic, purely American, distinctly a product of postrevolutionary backlash, composed in about equal parts of horror and contempt. By unholy cross with such attributes of omniscience as “the author of creation” and “the author of our being,” the concept of author is raised to almost infinite powers but with no commensurate responsibility or benevolence. He is, in a word, the devil.

WRITERS AS THE BANE OF OUR EXISTENCE

According to Wieland, writers do not merely reflect and record the disasters of social disruption; they are positively the prime cause of it. No matter that he peddles his wickedness by voice rather than by pen, Carwin clearly stands in for the American writer in times not so very long ago when he was busy producing his diabolical revolution. Brown's attitude toward him is as threatened and disdainful as that of the farmer's wife in Crèvecoeur toward the whole lot of them. As Clara frames the charge with her customary vehemence: “His tale is a lie, and his nature devilish. As he deceived me, he likewise deceived my brother, and now do I behold the author of all our calamities!” (p. 216). The tone is biblical, prophetic, and angry; the word “author” recurs like clockwork.

Nor are disclaimers by way of intention of any use. The personages of Brown's fiction are strictly accountable for the results of their behavior, let their intentions be what they might, and this simplistic moral asperity is applied with special rigor to anyone engaged in the act of writing, or indeed of communicating by whatsoever means with other persons, the latter being held defenseless in a degree.⁷ Carwin's extenuations are feeble bleats and are as quickly dismissed. “Had I not rashly set in motion a machine, over whose progress I had no controul, and which experience had shewn me was infinite in power? … This is the extent of my offenses’” (pp. 215-16). It is too much to be borne, the extent is so boundless. Men are supposed to be responsible for what they set in motion, all the more so as the machine—speech, writing, publication in any form—is indirect in operation. “‘Carwin may have plotted,’” Clara's uncle tries to interpose, insouciant and reasonable, “‘but the execution was another's’” (p. 161). Clara, herself a writer, will never be brought to agree. What she knows is that the writer will be held responsible for whatever the audience takes it into its sweet head to do. She will herself so hold, in continuous outrage. It avails Carwin no whit to mumble, “‘I meditated nothing’” (p. 201). He is simply damned by virtue of damage irretrievably done. Few will fully share Brown's judgments of these matters but none will deny their necessitarian clarity and sweep.

It is all Clara can do to write about it. “Yet have I not projected a task beyond my power to execute? If thus, on the very threshold of the scene, my knees faulter and I sink, how shall I support myself, when I rush into the midst of horrors such as no heart has hitherto conceived, nor tongue related? I sicken and recoil at the prospect” (p. 49). Nearly all such remarks in Wieland may be understood, really must be understood, in various applications extending from the most limited to the most inclusive. The horrors from which Clara sickens and recoils are the family murders, or they are Carwin, the cause of them, or they are the American writer in his capacity as inflammatory revolutionist, or they are the problems of American literature tout ensemble. (Such readers as wish may still have Carwin as a ventriloquistical clown.)

Yet we must be equally mindful that Clara never ascribes to her own writing any such baleful effect on a potential audience as she so stridently ascribes to Carwin. And in his “Advertisement,” or preface, Brown strikes a perfectly normal tone of self-confidence and self-esteem, touched with becoming modesty. “The following Work is delivered to the world as the first of a series of performances, which the favorable reception of this will induce the Writer to publish. His purpose is neither selfish nor temporary. … The incidents related are extraordinary and rare.” Notably Brown capitalized “Work” and “Writer,” asserted the purity and permanence of his achievement, and for good measure sent a copy crosstown to Thomas Jefferson, the vice president, with a long letter, which Jefferson answered briefly but politely.⁸ As for the ambiguity of reference, there is something curiously reciprocal, maybe perverse, in the American writer answering his own demand for an American literature with an American Work or Works, and it may be the perversity of the situation that partly accounts for the unceasing animosity against Carwin. It is, as almost always, Clara crying out: “‘O wretch! once more hast thou come? Let it be to abjure thy malice; to counterwork this hellish stratagem. … Testify thy innocence or thy remorse: exert the powers which pertain to thee, whatever they be, to turn aside this ruin. Thou art the author of these horrors! … I adjure thee, by that God whose voice thou hast dared to counterfeit’” (p. 227). It is not in the long run Carwin, however, but Clara who turns aside this ruin, she who exorcises the horrors of him by writing about them—by writing about his writing, as one might say. It is plain enough that Clara exists for us, as does Brown, only as she writes. “A few words more and I lay aside the pen for ever. … I have justly calculated upon my remnant of strength. When I lay down the pen the taper of life will expire: my existence will terminate with my tale” (p. 221). In that termination American literature is born. These are the birth pangs.

EXCHANGES OF WRITERS AND READERS, WITH SOME CULPABILITY OF THE AUDIENCE

Two generations earlier the grandfather, an unmoved mover, began it all. He was a composer, and he was a writer—gifted with a famous writer's name—and even yet Clara can hardly confront one of his ballads without its suggesting “a new topic in the horrors of war” (p. 55). “War” is one of those black-magic words of Wieland but it is not the French and Indian War that is in question but a worse one, closer to home.⁹ The father emigrates to the American plantations and devotes his religious fanaticism to converting the Indians through Scripture, i.e., the written word: “[T]o disseminate the truths of the gospel among the unbelieving nations” (p. 10), which sounds innocuous until we remember how gullible some people are and wonder how it will be when Thomas Paine is scattering his atheistical firebrands among our amber fields of grain. As father Wieland is also a writer, he constitutes one more splendid reason for disbelief in the whole train of unreliable narrators, especially as the American writer might be conceived—it must have been tempting in 1798—as having imported dangerous doctrine from Europe only in his mad success to export it back again. Wieland is a tissue of dubieties concerning causation: “There was somewhat in his manner that indicated an imperfect tale. My uncle was inclined to believe that half the truth had been suppressed” (p. 18). This is the father Wieland. He has written an autobiography that sounds like an early American masterpiece, idealized; in Clara's language, “the narrative was by no means recommended by its eloquence; but neither did all its value flow from my relationship to the author. Its stile had an unaffected and picturesque simplicity. The great variety and circumstantial display of the incidents, together with their intrinsic importance, as descriptive of human manners and passions, made it the most useful book in my collection” (p. 83).

That author's son, titular hero of Wieland, brother to Clara, is a chip off the old block, the new or proto-American through and through, madness multiplied. “His brain seemed to swell beyond its continent. … His words and motions were without meaning. … I beheld the extinction of a mind the most luminous and penetrating that ever dignified the human form. … I had not time to reflect in what way my own safety would be affected by this revolution, or what I had to dread from the wild conceptions of a mad-man. … Confused clamours …” (pp. 153-54). The diction is suggestive: “continent” and “without meaning” and “extinction” and “revolution.” Out of these clamors the younger Wieland writes literally a criminal confession. Upon reading it, Clara (now audience, now speaker) tells us: “The images impressed upon my mind by this fatal paper were somewhat effaced by my malady. They were obscure and disjointed like the parts of a dream. I was desirous of freeing my imagination from this chaos” (p. 175). This document, which she does and does not wish to read, she calls a “tale” and a “narrative” (pp. 175, 176). Even its author admits that it will hardly be believed. This is the same he who at the beginning of Wieland was so “diligent in settling and restoring the purity of the text” (p. 24), the text being Cicero. Of him, Clara's uncle says to her, she for a while supposing him to mean Carwin, “‘Thou art anxious to know the destroyer of thy family, his actions, and his motives. Shall I call him to thy presence, and permit him to confess before thee? Shall I make him the narrator of his own tale?’” (p. 162). Hearing Carwin's voice, and acting on it, Wieland was audience; now he is author to the shattered Clara, who doubles as audience and writer both.

The parade of narrators and auditors continues unabated. Pleyel, the lover she will lose and regain, literally takes notes on Clara his inamorata, even she so novelistically inclined, she so nationally representative: “‘I was desirous that others should profit by an example so rare. I therefore noted down, in writing, every particular of your conduct. … Here there was no other task incumbent on me but to copy; there was no need to exaggerate or overlook, in order to produce a more unexceptionable pattern. … I found no end and no bounds to my task. No display of a scene like this could be chargeable with redundancy or superfluity’” (p. 122). Perhaps one reason he notes her down in writing is that she so often appears to partake not only of the American literary enterprise but of the republic itself. In that last passage she is referred to as a “scene.” “‘Here, said I, is a being, after whom sages may model their transcendent intelligence, and painters, their ideal beauty. Here is exemplified, that union between intellect and form, which has hitherto existed only in the conceptions of the poet’” (p. 121). Comparable remarks were frequently made about the Constitution, with its new institutions; like them, Clara was worth writing down; Pleyel sounds like an infatuated version of The Federalist Papers. “‘I have marked the transitions of your discourse, the felicities of your expression, your refined argumentation, and glowing imagery; and been forced to acknowledge, that all delights were meagre and contemptible, compared with the audience and sight of you.’” Listening and looking are again conflated. “‘I have contemplated your principles, and been astonished at the solidity of their foundation, and the perfection of their structure’” (pp. 121-22), and now she is just like a poem of some length. All this was written in the administration of John Adams.

Clara points out that Pleyel's narrative is in turn dependent on an antecedent telling, which in turn depends on the rather mindless susceptibilities of a previous audience. “Here Pleyel paused in his narrative, and fixed his eyes upon me. Situated as I was, my horror and astonishment at this tale gave way to compassion for the anguish which the countenance of my friend betrayed. I reflected on his force of understanding. … Carwin had constructed his plot in a manner suited to the characters of those whom he had selected for his victims” (p. 133). Pleyel persists in being an arrant gull: “‘I can find no apology for this tale. Yet I am irresistibly impelled to relate it. … Why then should I persist! yet persist I must’” (p. 134). He must, they all must, because of Charles Brockden Brown's unrelenting purposes. His is that kind of a world.

Clara not only composes the entire novel in a series of letters (chapters) lacking salutation or signature, but in it she tells of composing still another document, the secret tale of her abortive passion for Pleyel. “I was tempted to relinquish my design”—of returning to her house—“when it occurred to me that I had left among my papers a journal of transactions in short-hand. I was employed in this manuscript on that night when Pleyel's incautious curiosity tempted him to look over my shoulder. … I had regulated the disposition of all my property. This manuscript, however, which contained the most secret transactions of my life, I was desirous of destroying” (pp. 190-91). Not only does Pleyel look over her shoulder, but Carwin takes the key to her chamber, lets himself in, and reads the whole thing. Like Pleyel, he is a great admirer of the native American character, or muse, so bountifully burgeoning in young Clara: “‘Your character exhibited a specimen of human powers that was wholly new to me. … I perused this volume with eagerness. The intellect which it unveiled, was brighter than my limited and feeble organs could bear. … You know what you have written. You know that in this volume the key to your inmost soul was contained. If I had been a profound and malignant imposter, what plenteous materials were thus furnished me of stratagems and plots!’” (pp. 205-06) Who but Charles Brockden Brown could conceive an imposter who was “profound”? Like nearly every other character in the novel, Carwin is an audience as well as an author, but he is a very immoral audience, specifically a peeping Tom and an eavesdropper. He is also a plagiarist, once removed: “‘I exerted all my powers to imitate your voice, your general sentiments, and your language. Being master, by means of your journal, of your personal history and most secret thoughts, my efforts were the more successful’” (p. 210). If in the early years of the republic, writing was a most dangerous business, and reprehensible as well, reading was about as bad. They went together and were together suspect. The story of suspicions was painful and long.

CARWIN AS AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY AND POST REVOLUTIONARY WRITER

As given to us in Clara's narration, Carwin is first and foremost a voice, a sweet talker, and mighty irresistible. She reports his verbal advent in language suggesting the advent of the new American literature as well: “The words uttered by the person without, affected me as somewhat singular, but what chiefly rendered them remarkable, was the tone that accompanied them. It was wholly new.” It will never be easy to say in an old language (English) what the new tone is, but Clara patriotically plows ahead: “I cannot pretend to communicate the impression that was made upon me by these 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.” If Clara's description owes something—not much—to the traditions of sensibility, we will value its transcendence the more, here put to new uses, public, literary, historical. Clara goes on. “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. When he uttered the words ‘for charity's sweet sake,’ I dropped the cloth that I held in my hand, my heart overflowed with sympathy, and my eyes with unbidden tears” (pp. 51-52). Clara's reaction is vastly in excess of its cause, and once more it would seem that the Work or Works of literature are likely to be dangerous, lies and deception, wonderfully sweet, reducing the audience to abject debaucheries of pleasing emotion, with loss of reason, loss of will.

At first, Carwin seems the nearly ideal audience for “the tale” of “the inexplicable events that had lately happened” (p. 73), i.e., the death of the elder Wieland, but soon we find roles reversed, and the others are captive audience to his “disquisition,” to his “narratives” (“all the effects of a dramatic exhibition”), and in general to “the exquisite art of this rhetorician.” Yet even Clara in her admiration observes that “his narratives, however complex or marvellous, contained no instance sufficiently parallel to those that had befallen ourselves, and in which the solution was applicable to our own case” (pp. 74-75), as was so regularly complained of English fiction of the times by American literary patriots, especially such as were out of patience with republican women who swooned over dukes. Brown's fable manages to glance at nearly all the literary hopes and fears of that brusque but unconfident epoch. If Wieland were an allegory, it would be nonsense for Carwin to represent the American writer, in his worst badness, while at the same time bringing to mind the preposterous irrelevance of English literature. But in Brown's loose fable he can suggest all manner of thing, perhaps most how transitional the literary situation was, with the muse forever migrating to these shores, or about to, momentarily delayed, weary of wing, inevitable, and even so late as Whitman's “Song of the Exposition” (1871). Let Carwin be vague, multiple, forward looking. As Pleyel says to Clara: “‘It would be vain to call upon Carwin for an avowal of his deeds. It was better to know nothing, than to be deceived by an artful tale’” (p. 127). Pleyel is promptly deceived by an artful tale. As a general rule, Carwin's victims are remarkably complicit in their own duping, and even Providence—novelistic Providence—is made to conspire: “Carwin's plot owed its success to a coincidence of events scarcely credible. The balance was swayed from its equipoise by a hair” (p. 139).

Through the melodramatic rhetoric, Carwin enacts what seems to be Brown's conception of the revolutionary and even the post-revolutionary American writer, he who wrought great evil—but maybe in the fullness of time he will wreak some good—without quite willing it, by possessing powers whose extent neither he nor his audience might have understood in advance. Perhaps it was part of Brown's purpose to persuade a later audience, with these analogues of military and political events only a little while back, of the awesomeness of literary power in a society where the written word was so boundlessly on the march; perhaps he meant also to suggest a heightened moral responsibility on the part of himself and his fellows, whence benefit might yet evolve from sin, as in Paradise Lost. Culpable Carwin is a veritable model of literary laceration, a classic case against the dire effects of literature out of control, an exemplary enactment of late eighteenth-century American political and literary hysteria, culminating in the American Revolution, now slowly receding in the popular mind. “‘I will fly. I am become a fiend, the sight of whom destroys. Yet tell me my offense! You have linked curses with my name; you ascribe to me a malice monstrous and infernal. I look around; all is loneliness and desert! … My fear whispers that some deed of horror has been perpetrated; that I am the undesigning cause. … My actions have possibly effected more than I designed. … I come to repair the evil of which my rashness was the cause, and to prevent more evil. I come to confess my errors’” (pp. 195-96). To whom Clara cries: “Wretch!” Continuing on, ever loquacious, righteously wronged, at the top of her bent: “Who was it that blasted the intellects of Wieland? Who was it that urged him to fury, and guided him to murder? Who, but thou and the devil, with whom thou art confederated?” (p. 196). She continues to vilify “the author of these dismal outrages” and he poorly replies: “‘Wretch as I am, am I unworthy to repair the evils that I have committed? … I have deceived you: I have sported with your terrors: I have plotted to destroy your reputation. I come now to remove your errors; to set you beyond the reach of similar fears; to rebuild your fame as far as I am able.’” His best line is: “‘All I ask is a patient audience’” (p. 197).

Whether or not Clara is in some of her permutations the young nation herself, it is surely that young nation, more or less represented by the Wieland family and what happens to them, that is most damaged by Carwin's acts of imitation. As in Crèvecoeur, it is not so much an individual who is outraged and devastated as it is an entire family, with suggestions of the countryside around. Carwin's is the true voice of the American bard imposing his own exile for monstrous unspeakable crimes against the people, and it sounds as if he is talking about the American Revolution: “‘I had acted with a frenzy that surpassed belief. I had warred against my peace and my fame: I had banished myself from the fellowship of vigorous and pure minds: I was self-expelled from a scene which the munificence of nature had adorned with unrivalled beauties, and from haunts in which all the muses and humanities had taken refuge’” (p. 211). He even seems to blend with the audience of the bard and is not only he who incites to violence but those incited. It is impossible to imagine Brown in 1798 or any other time an unreconstructed Loyalist, but it is easy to imagine him a good enough Quaker to wonder if that transformation from colonial to national condition might have been accomplished with less violence.

WRITING AND ACTION AND WRITING

For history, the inclusive point is that writing is both the cause and the effect of action; in this instance, the American Revolution was at least partly caused by writers, then that revolution, now won, necessitates an American literature to justify it and to ensure its fruits to posterity. There is plainly in Wieland just such a cause-effect-cause triad where Charles Brockden Brown in the process of helping create a national literature records in analogue how the opportunity and obligation of doing so arose from a war of rebellion induced by his literary precursors. It is rather a matter for definition, as there can hardly be an American literature, in the full sense of the term, until there is a United States of America. Historians of ideas notwithstanding, colonial American history is colonial American history.

With respect to the polemics of political uprisings, Wieland surely takes cognizance of the well-known fact that literary produce as a cause of war increases with the increase in the reading public—at least the violence is sooner likely to come to a boil. But as the audience is also more widely spread, so the more various and complex is likely to be the interplay between expression and physical action and the more various and complex the timing of these interactions, so that our awareness of the relations of history and literature (neither of them a simple cause of the other, nor a simple effect of some third cause, seldom specified, but locked in their reciprocities) must also be correspondingly more various and complex. In the new, comparatively democratic society, more and more persons were not only readers but writers, and literature was no longer the preserve or responsibility of a ruling class; then if guilt should come into question, as it certainly does in Wieland the guilt can be generously shared, which is maybe a comfort. With public rhetoric abounding, it must have been evident that the line between speaking and writing was increasingly blurred, the line between the political speech delivered orally to a small crowd and that same speech set in print and delivered up at large. Would that wider readership be more or less inflamed? Who could know ahead of time? Historians might be able to tell us later. Who would then be responsible? Everybody, if they wanted to live.

Fortunate as we are to have so revealing a document as Wieland, it seems the rankest folly to read it mainly as a Gothic novel or other divertissement in the annals of literary types. Spontaneous combustion, religious mania in a homicidal degree, ventriloquism—the topics are not especially American, they are not even topics of adult interest. It seems a terrible confession of weakness in historical reasoning to define the field of American literature in political terms, precisely in terms of the break with the parent country, followed by the desire to create an independent culture, primarily in literature, the most accessible of the arts for a new nation, and then go looking for the evidence in the junkyards of universal infantilism, psychologically or existentially construed. Wieland is more important to us than that. It is conceivably the major literary landmark between the Declaration of Independence and the appearance of The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper in 1823, and the reasons for its importance must be of the same order as the claim. What is hardest to grasp, yet at the heart of the rest, is that in Wieland Charles Brockden Brown was writing about writing, including his own, i.e., about that American literature not yet in existence but coming into existence as he confronted and incorporated the stiffest resistance imaginable, his own impossibility. It sounds more Alexandrine than it is, human achievements, both individual and collective, so conspicuously effectuating themselves in present actions that look to the future at the same time as they ride the waves of the past, and all in one unitary mode.

Notes

1. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, ed. S. W. Reid, Sydney J. Krause, and Alexander Cowie, Bicentennial Edition (Kent, Ohio, 1977), p. 160; quotations will hereafter be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. It may be further quixotism to attribute the shortcomings of early American literature to subservience to such imports as sentimentality, Gothicism, or Scotch Common Sense philosophy. Early American literature is its own sufficient cause.

3. Ventriloquism further appears in the fragmentary “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” (1803-05) (Wieland, pp. 252-53, 259). Also of special interest are Brown's variations in formula, as “my biloquial faculty” (p. 259), “my bivocal projects” (p. 276), “my bivocal faculty” (p. 284), and “some bivocal agency” (p. 308). Ventriloquism, but without the American literary theme, is in Arthur Mervyn; or Memoirs of the Year 1793, ed. Sydney J. Krause, S. W. Reid, Norman S. Grabo, and Marvin L. Williams, Jr., Bicentennial Edition (Kent, Ohio, 1980), p. 194, and in Ormond; or the Secret Witness, ed. Ernest Marchand (New York, 1937), pp. 95-96. These two novels were published in 1799 and 1799-1800, respectively.

4. Ventriloquism as a mode of imitation is strenuously discussed in a chapter called “Animal Magnetism” by James Fenimore Cooper in Gleanings in Europe; France, ed. Robert E. Spiller (New York, 1928).

5. “This scene of havock was produced by an illusion of the senses. Be it so: I care not from what source these disasters have flowed; it suffices that they have swallowed up our hopes and our existence” (p. 233). But no more than Scotch Common Sense philosophy is Lockean psychology the subject of Wieland. It is a condition of the subject.

6. “Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy,” in Hannibal, Huck & Tom, ed. Walter Blair (Berkeley, Calif., 1969), p. 168.

7. It is not only in sentimental novels of seduction that the nubile young are led astray; our highly rationalistic Clara also succumbs. “The impulses of love are so subtile,” she reasons, “and the influence of false reasoning, when enforced by eloquence and passion, so unbounded, that no human virtue is secure from degeneracy” (p. 241). Neither is all degeneracy sexual, any more than all eloquence and passion are spent in the pursuit of erotic happiness. Thus Carwin is “the grand deceiver” but he is also “the author of my peril … the author of this black conspiracy; the intelligence that governed in this storm. Some relief is afforded in the midst of suffering, when its author is discovered or imagined; and an object found on which we may pour out our indignation and our vengeance” (pp. 189-90). Author, author, author—it is all his fault, and always.

8. Both letters are in David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, N.C., 1952), pp. 163-64.

9. “These events took place between the conclusion of the French and the beginning of the revolutionary war” (“Advertisement”). The statement is plausible only if taken to mean that one war leads to another, with private disasters in between. In the text proper, there are echoes of a war actually going on, and the only question is, which one? “The Indians were repulsed on the one side, and Canada was conquered on the other” (p. 26) is diversionary or maladroit, for it is hard to know how “furnishing causes of patriotic exultation” to the British Empire fits “An American Tale.” In the same passage, Brown refers to “revolutions and battles.” There were no revolutions in the French war but in 1798 the American Revolution was still active—violently so—in Brown's imagination.