SOURCE: Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Wieland: Accounting for the Past.” In Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown's Gendered Economics of Virtue, pp. 99-131. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Hinds discusses issues of class and inheritance in Wieland.]

Within the unfolding drama of international capitalism, Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale appears less than interested in a growing market economy or in any private world modeled on the contingencies of exchange in the public sphere, in part because Wieland, Brown's first novel, is set in the country, far away from the immediate pressures of such a market. Yet I will argue that Brown establishes in this novel a context for the interchange of market and private values, for in its idyllic setting, Wieland's cast of characters enacts a drama of “upper-class” suffering brought on by the isolation and insularity their inherited luxury has enabled. Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Constantia Dudley, actors on an urban stage, are called to action by the peculiar demands of a city in time of crisis: in order to survive, these two must interact to varying degrees with a public world of labor and exchange, and as a result their private values, not to mention private virtues, reflect in social terms what Habermas calls “exchange relations.”¹ For Arthur and Constantia, virtue merits success and security insofar as virtue is gained by participation in a world outside their houses.

By contrast, Brown's Wieland family, out on its country estate, has turned in on itself as it has turned its back on a public world of exchange. By virtue of their inheritance, the Wielands are excused from the necessity of work, and thus their private values are a little too private, establishing them in a leisure class, since they take no part in the principles of reciprocity involved in the virtues of the marketplace. Incestuous in its behavior, this family is poised from the beginning to take a great fall—to suffer from a disease of isolation embodied in a species of Calvinist neurosis seemingly inherited along with its property. For the third time in as many generations, the male of the Wieland household has fallen victim to sensory delusions. Acting on command from a mysterious voice, Theodore Wieland murders his wife and children, sets out to complete his “duty” by killing his sister Clara, and finally commits suicide in a moment of clarity and remorse. Sister Clara, no less susceptible to intimations of the supernatural than Theodore in spite of her claims to rationality, suffers from a tormented apprehension of threat to both body and spirit, eventually succumbing to a nervous breakdown from which she recovers only minimally when forced to abandon her home.

The suffering visited on the house of Wieland grows directly out of its isolated social class, for the Wielands are defined equally by their inheritance of superstition and their inheritance of property, both of which ground them in a world of materiality, of biological determinism, and of a land-based economy that reaches far beyond the physical setting of its houses. In short, the house of Wieland is haunted by its past, and in this third generation of self-destruction, that inheritance comes close to annihilating the family for good. The only remaining Wieland is the one telling the tale, and in her story, Clara evidences both the close bond with her past and the double-bind of her class and gender: as an “aristocratic” woman, Clara is placed beyond the possibility of virtue in its late-eighteenth-century gendered social definition. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse define the virtues of “domestic” womanhood in the late eighteenth century as combining “psychological depth” and “femaleness”—“the qualities that differentiate her from the male rather than [as previously and as would be the case for leisure-class women] in terms of her father's wealth and title.”² In other words, as domesticity came to define women during this period, the “virtuous” woman was something of a Constantia Dudley—a hard-working, saving, and essentially conservative personality.

Clara Wieland, on the other hand, partakes too much of the aristocratic. “As femaleness was successfully redefined in [domestic] terms,” Armstrong and Tennenhouse argue, “the woman exalted by an aristocratic tradition of letters ceased to appear so desirable. In becoming the other side of a new sexual coin, the aristocratic woman in turn represented surface instead of depth, embodied material rather than moral values, and displayed idle sensuality where there should be constant vigilance and tireless concern for the well-being of others.”³ Clearly, a good deal of Clara's definition as a character results from a poisonous combination of class and gender. Brown's virtuous Constantia occupies something of a “middle-class,” though, as Stuart M. Blumin reminds us, “the middle class had not already emerged by the end of the eighteenth century.”⁴ Still, Blumin writes, there did exist something like a class system with a “recognizable ‘middling rank,’” even in Brown's 1790s Philadelphia.

“Class,” including variants of “middle class,” was by then appearing with somewhat greater frequency, especially in the pages of the more radical newspapers, but even at the end of the century it was still far more common to express social levels in terms of ranks, sorts, stations, conditions, orders, or even estates. … Terms such as “the better sort” and “people of middling rank,” according to this argument, reveal the imprint of aristocratic Europe, despite the absence or attenuation in America of clearly bounded “interests.”⁵

Indeed, Brown's sensitivity to “class” or “rank” is apparent in his careful handling of the hard-working Constantia Dudley and Arthur Mervyn, characters whose virtue is inseparable from “labor” values as opposed to inherited wealth, and whose plots are essentially comic. With Wieland, Brown offers the other side of this class-virtue matrix: the leisured Wieland family, tethered to the past by way of inheritance, participates in an existence too materially grounded for virtuous behavior, resulting in a plot more tragic than comic. If Ormond and Arthur Mervyn suggest an affinity on Brown's part for the “middling orders,” even with some evident doubts about the mercurial nature of the entrepreneur, Wieland provides a resounding critique of an aristocratic class enabled by an overtly material and private set of values.

At bottom, this most classically gothic of Brown's tales is haunted by inheritance, and a good portion of Clara's haunting is just this: as a woman she is defined by her house and body, but as inheritor of gentried values she cannot perform the labor necessary to fulfill the role of domestic womanhood. Clara's position, then, realizes in little what the house of Wieland suffers at large. Doomed to fulfill the inherited role of her class, her insulated, materially determined virtues cannot enter into the values defined by the publicity of market exchange in the 1790s.

INHERITANCE AND INCEST, REPETITION AND CLASS

Wieland is still Brown's most popular novel, to judge from the array of critical assessments given to social, psychological, and historical readings.⁶ Whatever their differences, on one score most twentieth-century readers of Brown seem to be in agreement: Wieland seems to foreground a barely suppressed impulse to incest, dramatized most fully in Clara's dream of her brother beckoning to her across an abyss, surrounded with an atmosphere of foreboding running to terror. In his Historical Essay for the Kent State edition of Wieland, Alexander Cowie takes the position that Clara's “abnormal” psychological state points to “latent incestuous longings for” Theodore—that her overactive sexual state at the moment has brought on such a lust-filled dream.⁷ Norman Grabo would agree, arguing that as characters in this novel substitute for one another in the most coincidental of patterns—as Pleyel shows up when Carwin is expected, Catharine is murdered in Clara's bed, Carwin's thrown voice appears with all the authority of Deity—so too does Theodore Wieland substitute in both dream and night terrors for the lusted-after Carwin and Pleyel.⁸ Or is it the other way around? Clara's dream, this line of argument suggests, may embody the “true” lust—the lust for brother Theodore—that has been disguised in the light of day by ostensible desire for the more appropriate Pleyel and at least marginally acceptable, because unrelated, Carwin. Most recently, Christophersen writes of an incestuous substitution of brother for lover; looking into Clara's fear of someone hiding in her bedroom closet, Christophersen notes that “She both loves [Theodore] and fears him sexually.”⁹

Nearly a century of critics probably can't be altogether wrong—indeed there is something vaguely incestuous about the family situation of this novel, what with its conjunction of closer-than-usual kinship ties and overheated desire on the part of more than one character. However, I'd like to study three scenes closely one more time, the scenes of so-named incestuous longing, before deciding the limit of what they offer. In the midst of a satisfying and innocent existence, to hear Clara tell it, comes first a “signal of the ruin which impended over” her in the form of voices in her closet in the middle of the night, two voices in hot argument over the better method of killing “her” (54), a “her” Clara assumes to be herself. She's been prepared, as it happens, for this upsetting happenstance by spending the preceding evening in fantastic imaginings ranging from sexual desire to death to war. This very day, in fact, Clara has encountered the mysterious Carwin, he of the mellifluent voice, whose simple phrase “for charity's sweet sake” (51), modulated with passion, has reduced Clara to trembling: “It imparted to me an emotion altogether involuntary and uncontroulable. … I dropped the cloth that I held in my hand, my heart overflowed with sympathy, and my eyes with unbidden tears” (52). “Sympathy” indeed. Clara thus begins a long ride on the pheremone train, a state of mind and body throwing her into a disequilibrium quite intense for the rest of the evening. She sits up late, drawing portraits of Carwin and studying them, only to venture later into morbid death fantasies, as though her sexual desire has simmered down into a corrupted sludge.

After such preparation, no wonder the mysterious closet voices send her running in panic to brother Theodore's house for protection. But later, a second visitation of voices in the closet sets up an oddly inverted chain of interpretations for Clara, as she this time in fancy makes her brother the threatening rather than protecting figure. Again Clara has spent an agitated evening, the object of her love, Pleyel, having missed an appointed time to join the Wieland clan for a bit of play-acting. And again, Clara's love-thoughts have turned to death-fantasies: believing now that Pleyel is indifferent to her, she imagines him dead, lost to an angry river he must have crossed. Worked up to this frenzy, Clara takes to reading her dead father's memoirs and is, around the midnight hour, seized with an overwhelming fear of her closet, only to be struck by a terrible shriek and a cry of “Hold! Hold!” (85) as she touches its lock. This time, her imagination leads her to her brother as the culprit. “Who was it whose suffocating grasp I was to feel, should I dare to enter it? What monstrous conception is this? my brother!” (87). The associations on this occasion have begun, of course, with a memory of the dream she's had between the first and second visitations of the voice, a dream most commonly read as symbolically incestuous. Nodding off to sleep at the summerhouse, a “slight,” open, and airy spot Clara usually enjoys in solitude, she “imagines” herself drawn by Theodore's voice and gestures to cross an open pit on her way to his house; “He stood on the opposite edge of the gulph. I mended my pace, and one step more would have plunged me into this abyss, had not some one from behind caught suddenly my arm, and exclaimed, in a voice of eagerness and terror, ‘Hold! hold!’”¹⁰

This memory in place, Clara then fears her brother in her closet at the second visitation of voices here, and to the degree that the novel's climax reveals Theodore as a vicious killer, her fears do make sense: on all three occasions of early terror and foreboding, Clara is afraid someone will kill her. Given her sexually charged state during the two closet scenes, it seems legitimate, on the one hand, to read Clara's anxieties as sexually motivated, as indeed incestuous longings for and/or fears of brother Theodore. On the other hand, nothing particularly sexual takes place in either dream- or closet-scene. On the face of it, Clara is threatened with death, precisely the subject of her recurrent fantasies once they have refocused away from the nebulously sexual.

In fact, Clara interprets her dream much later as a premonition of the death her brother does eventually bring to their household. After she learns that the murders of his wife, children, and servant were not enough to complete Theodore's imagined duty to his God, that he has been repeatedly breaking out of prison to try and kill her, too, she glosses the dream and closet-experience thus: “I recollected the omens of this destiny; I remembered the gulf to which my brother's invitation had conducted me; I remembered that, when on the brink of danger, the author of my peril was depicted by my fears in his form: Thus realized, were the creatures of prophetic sleep, and of wakeful terror!” (189-90). For Clara, the meaning of her dream and her upsetting fear of Theodore lies in threat of personal injury, not specifically in incestuous entanglement.

Naturally, Brown's readers aren't obligated to read as Clara does, and one can't help but recall the symbolic imagery of the penknife with which Clara threatens herself and Theodore kills himself, the heightened sexual charge Clara sustains through much of the novel, and the “passion more than fraternal” (185) Theodore bears for his sister. On a broader scale, however, I would argue that the recurrent interpretation of incestuous relations in Wieland, while not beknighted misreadings of a pure sister-brother relationship, may be prompted not so much by these threats to Clara's person so much as by the familial and economic matrix established by the position of the Wieland household within a growing market economy surrounding the Wieland's author, an economy in many ways still rooted in property-ownership run by a somewhat aristocratic class on the European model but also with a young, internationally directed capitalism getting a firm foothold in Brown's Philadelphia.

The Wielands live in an insulated setting, both economically and familially: their inherited estate supports Clara and Theodore, and their daily associates likewise comprise a small family—wife Catharine, brother-in-law Pleyel, and Louisa Conway, a servant raised from a young girl with the Wieland family. Absent the need to go beyond their own estate for either financial support or company, the Wieland clan does not give and take in exchange of any sort. Indeed, their economic class is as “incestuous” as the family situation appears to be; that is, as one brother and sister attach themselves to another brother and sister (Theodore marrying Catharine Pleyel and Clara eventually marrying brother Pleyel), keeping the “stock” of marriage exchange as narrow as possible without literal incestuous marriage, so too does the stock of property come from and remain within the family. At least for this generation of Wielands, the family tree barely forks: any threat of an attraction or marriage outside the close circle that might come to fruition is stifled, seeing that Pleyel's baroness is handily killed off, and Carwin—the outsider to whom Clara is powerfully attracted—is rejected, not later when he proves to be a villain, but much sooner, as soon as Clara finds herself attracted to him. This scenario of locked-in familial closeness, I maintain, Brown stages in a play of the insular property-sustained ease and security of the Wielands' inheritance, a legacy literally embodied in the various houses at Mettingen. Within these structures, the Wielands come into their inheritance; sustained by the wealth of previous generations, they are secured from any risky, free-market exchange beyond the estate, exchanges of either kinship or finance; and finally, locked behind the doors of such sustaining, inherited wealth, the Wielands suffer retribution poetically appropriate for the insular, nonvirtuous leisure class—their inheritance, indeed their own property, comes to haunt and destroy them.

Taking Wieland's cue and studying whether Brown might “make the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (33-34), Shirley Samuels asserts that the novel poses a “conservative, closed model of the family” in secure opposition to a “luridly” depicted “outside world.”¹¹ Yet, the incest Samuels herself discovers haunting the novel suggests just the opposite, I believe, since the “lurid” world of incestuous relations takes place within the home, within the very “closed model of the family” supposedly designed to protect and support. In avoiding exchange of both familial and economic sorts, the Wielands, like their famous descendants the Ushers, are terrorized by their own past, materially destroyed by a type of biologically determined neurosis coupled with the physical spaces of their own homes. The nearly complete destruction of the family dramatizes a warning against these several insularities of an aristocratic class.

Such insularities Claude Lévi-Strauss has defined as having both economic and kinship bases to the extent that a system of “reciprocity” within many cultures “is not merely nor essentially of an economic nature,” but instead more generally constitutes an impulse to exchange embracing both the economic and the familial; breaking this “rule” of reciprocity, then, constitutes “incest” of types going beyond the kinship taboo.¹² One might note that however broadly “reciprocity” applies to cultures, the ethos of the late-eighteenth-century United States, with its fast-growing economy newly invested in international markets, would necessarily support a social and economic principle of reciprocity indispensable to market interests; Habermas would suggest a similar ethos on the social level, given that the “public” sphere of growing exchange systems, in his analysis, was generating a kind of “publicity” within the “private” domain of the household: in effect, the market concept of reciprocity would, then, mirror and support a system of kinship exchange.

Thus, Lévi-Strauss is able to discuss a general system of exchange supporting the incest taboo in specifically economic terms: “Generalized exchange establishes a system of operations conducted on credit. … The belief” that one family's investment of a marriage partner will be “returned” not by the family invested in but by a third, unrelated family, “is the basis of trust, and confidence opens up credit. In the final analysis, the whole system exists only because the group adopting it is prepared, in the broadest meaning of the term, to speculate. But the broad sense also implies the narrow sense: the speculation brings in a profit, in the sense that with generalized exchange the group can live as richly and as complexly as its size, structure and density allow, whereas with restricted exchange … it can never function as a whole both in time and in space.”¹³ To define exchange and its taboo, incest, in both economic and kinship terms highlights the problem of the Wieland family, for its class—a sociocultural position affecting both economic and familial behavior—sets it apart from the give-and-take of public exchange embodied, for instance in Arthur Mervyn's commitment to speculation, in the end predetermining, so to speak, the Wieland family's demise.

Within his four major novels, the house of Wieland represents Brown's only experiment with a gentrified class of characters. Compared to the pestilential poverty surrounding Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, the Wielands have it easy; compared to the disinherited Edgar Huntly, doomed to look upon wealth but never to touch it, Clara, Theodore, and the family surrounding them are economically secure for life. The entire cast of Wieland rests easy in their inherited country estate, far from the demands of the city and the class of characters Brown negotiates in his “city” novels. Unlike Constantia Dudley and Arthur Mervyn, the Wielands do not have to labor for their hasty pudding. Indeed, when Theodore is approached with the prospect of going to Germany with Pleyel to take possession of land he can now claim as his own. Theodore demurs, and in terms that bespeak an aristocratic birthright. He might lay claim to these ancestral lands, now that the Prussian wars have returned them to the ancient race of “noble Saxons.”

Theodore, however, declines to exercise his privilege—an aristocratic gesture in the very refusal—even though Pleyel touts a favorite scheme, evidently, of Theodore's, claiming “the privileges of wealth and rank” may be exercised in “benevolence” (37-38) towards the poor. Young Mr. Wieland's reasoning upon wealth, here, is interesting for its consciousness of rank: “was it laudable to grasp at wealth and power even when they were within our reach?” Further, one has no reason to “grasp” so. Secure in his inherited plenitude, Theodore refuses to risk his present happiness for uncertain, “distant and contingent” (38) possibilities. In short, he refuses the speculative behavior of an Arthur Mervyn, even with much more secure outcomes than any offer Arthur ever enjoys. His sister and wife, too, will concur with this conservative reading of the situation, preferring present security to the risk of losing their friend.

The Wieland household is moneyed, then—more than moneyed. They have property, and it appears to be all they need or want. Living on their gentrified country estate, keeping company with a tight-knit family clan, Theodore edits his Cicero and engages in sprightly disagreement over matters philosophical with Pleyel while the ladies attend their needlework; all engage in the decidedly aristocratic activities of play-acting, reading, and conversation (not to mention Clara's journal-keeping), a scene of leisure far removed from the merchant-class Philadelphia of Ormond and Arthur Mervyn. Theirs is not the country as rural setting, however, but instead, to use Raymond Williams' words, “a rural landscape emptied of rural labor and of labourers,” in which “the facts of production” are removed to the degree that even the servant girl, Louisa, is embedded in the family narrative as a friend warranting her own story.¹⁴

Idyll that it is, the Wieland household does suffer more than its share of hardship, and its particular genre of suffering embeds the twin modalities of property and kinship converging in a doomed suggestion of incest pervading the novel. Here on the Wieland estate—the combined houses of Mettingen, including the main house Theodore resides in with wife, children, and Louisa, Clara's home, her “summerhouse” and the Temple built by father Wieland for worship but now the scene of leisured family activity—on this estate the family plays out its seemingly inherited proclivity to self-destruct, and to self-destruct in fiery responses to real or imagined calls from the supernatural world intruding into its private and insular world.

The fate of the Wielands bespeaks a powerful critique of an aristocratic class set off from the exploding free market, complete with all the risks of exchange, surrounding Brown at the end of the 1790s. In a novel that Carroll Smith-Rosenberg might classify as a discourse of the “emergent middle class,” Brown's Wieland family and the fate reserved for it highlights the growing class-consciousness of the decade consequent on the “ideological battle between classical republicanism [with its power-base in property] and the rhetoric of economic and political laissez-faire.”¹⁵ Brown's 1790s had not reached a full embrace of market capitalism, as Smith-Rosenberg suggests in describing a still-hot ideological struggle between market and political ideals. Gordon Wood likewise relates that “The ties that bound people together in this society were still explained and given meaning by terms that looked to the past more than the future, to the personal world of the family as much as the impersonal world of commerce,” a statement highlighting the fluctuating nature of a social practice not yet attuned to a market economy not yet fully in place.¹⁶ In spite of Brown's ambiguous treatment of the capitalist par excellence, Arthur Mervyn, his treatment of the Wielands' aristocratic tendencies, their insularity bordering on incest, works to disparage an inherited economy of landed gentry much more critically characterized than any suspicions he may have had regarding the coming capitalist class. Such a terrible fate created for the Wielands—the multiple murders, the suicide, Clara Wieland's degeneration as she is physically and psychically persecuted—especially given the repetition through generations of spiritual neuroses linked to grisly deaths (it isn't Carwin, after all, who destroys the family, but its own patriarch) speaks to a sense of the “vicious, nonproductive elegance of the aristocracy” Brown invented for the Wielands, what J. V. Ridgely has noted as a murderous detachment of family members in Wieland from larger social bodies.¹⁷

The family's insularity provides impetus for both the novel's incestuous undertones and for the characters' destiny, for the incest implied in their way of living comes about primarily from their inheritance—an inheritance of secured property with the isolation it encourages. This patrimony comes in the form of what we might call a neurosis of spirituality in addition to property inherited: both Wieland “children,” that is, the present generation of Clara and Theodore, replicate their ancestors' belief in a spirit world and to some degree act out in damaging behavior such belief. Engaging in few exchanges beyond the confines of their property, the Wieland family is thus unprepared for Carwin's descent upon them: he takes up an extraordinary amount of their mental energy, as the whole group tries to fathom the mysteries of this late addition to their group (“These incidents, for a time, occupied all our thoughts,” Clara writes [48]). Likewise, without their knowledge of Carwin as the culprit, the mysterious voices introduced into their insular idyll so much upset the family's stability that the entire group begins to disintegrate. Clara lives alternately in fear for her life and in awe of what she determines to be a “protecting” benefactor who warns her away from danger; Theodore sinks into himself, withdrawing from the family as his predisposition to melancholy is encouraged by the voices; and Pleyel undergoes the torments of hell as the voices first tell him his fiancée is dead and then enact a false performance of his friend and idol, Clara Wieland's, supposed sexual interlude with Carwin.

This interloper—a mysterious stranger if there ever was one—in effect shifts the careful balance of the Wielands' self-enclosed, private world. Clearly an emissary from the public world beyond the Wieland estate, Carwin's mystery in part stems from his involvement in the public arena; Pleyel has known him from an earlier time in Spain, and one of Carwin's mysteries is his ability to appear as Englishman, Spaniard, or American rustic as the situation may demand. Chameleonlike, he intrigues by virtue of his contact with these other cultures, a contact so complete as to change him, literally, into his surroundings, creating a more malicious but parallel character to Arthur Mervyn, the Protean man. There seems to be, as the Wielands see it, no there there: as they don't know Carwin, he appears as only his public personae, and his appearance on the scene of familial, private closeness begins the family's decline.

One has to wonder why the Wielands overlook Carwin as a possible source of the voices, since he is the only new element introduced into their otherwise unchanging lives and since they find him such a mystery. Though surprised by this figure from the outside world, the family isn't entirely unprepared for the upcoming events, however, for both Clara and Theodore seem to have inherited a predilection for the mysterious along with their property. With a grandfather who without warning jumped off a cliff to his death and with a father whose concentration on his duty to God led to a seeming spontaneous combustion in the Temple devoted to his God, the present generation of Wielands, however different from each other in temperament, dwell on the possibility of a Divine Hand directing their behavior and their duty. Clara and Theodore essentially agree that the voices they've begun to hear must have a supernatural origin, and though Clara more than once accuses her brother of having an overly mystical sensibility, what with his insistence that their father's death derived “from a direct and supernatural decree,” with his being something of an “enthusiast,” a believer in “the system of divine government” (35), she herself frequently displays all the signs of this rather Calvinistic inclination. Clara unfailingly sees “a shadowy resemblance” (34) between the mysterious voices she and her brother hear and her father's death. More than that, Clara finds a kind of sublime pleasure in contemplating a supernatural world perhaps interfering in her own: “It begat in me a thrilling, and not unpleasing solemnity” (35).

Neither Clara nor Theodore is able to conceive of a human explanation for the voices, and Carwin's plan merely to test this little group—to have some fun at their expense and nothing more—falls on a very willing audience. Carwin, as Norman Grabo suggests, is in fact a rather “shabby” villain, one whose actual interference is mild compared to the havoc it generates.¹⁸ For the destruction of this family results not so much from Carwin—as he says at the scene of Theodore's return in search of another sacrifice in sister Clara, he has merely set the action in motion (“my only crime was curiosity. … The perpretrator of Catharine's death was unknown to me” [205-6, 216])—but rather from the Wielands' own predisposition to believe in the reality of a spirit who demands obeisance in return for favor. It is this sense of duty toward the divine, of course, that undoes the Wieland family, not merely a belief in divinity, since the call to duty prescribes action, in Theodore's case the action of sacrificing his family in a repeat performance of the Abraham and Isaac story but without the happy ending. Clara, too, sees herself as directed from above by a “hand invisible and of preternatural strength … selecting my life for its aims” (84-85). When a voice warns her away from the summerhouse, Clara reveals her belief in a spirit as exacting as Theodore's and her father's “daemon,” one who may “award” (66) her with death if she fail to keep quiet, as ordered, about the incident there.

Duty owed to such a demanding God has ruined both father and (possibly) grandfather Wieland; now in this third generation, both son and daughter imagine an equally deterministic universe, or as Theodore expresses it, “We seem to be led hither by a kind of fatality” (43). The necessity claimed by such imagined duty calls up, too, a material determinism infused into what seems like every space of Wieland's framework. One of the novel's most discussed emphases, for instance, is the Lockean notion of sense data as the primary source of knowledge.¹⁹ A premise, in fact, of the Wielands' situation as it develops is the unreliability of the senses, their sensory “depravity,” so to speak, which allows false information to appear as truth when the “evidence” of a supernatural being may well turn out to be only human machinations.²⁰ For Clara and Theodore, however, “proof” lies in the “material” world of sense data, a belief that disallows any radical distinction between physical and spiritual worlds—the spirit, here, takes some kind of “form” in the material world humans inhabit.

More consequentially, a materialism underpins the Wieland universe in the biological determinism operating upon the family. Brother and sister have both inherited all their father's spiritualism, including his deadly sense of duty and sacrifice—this, in spite of the fact that their father didn't raise or educate them. Clara mentions, for one thing, that she and her brother have been raised without religion, and yet both have a deep belief in a God as exacting as any institution might have taught them. Further, the family seems doomed not only to believe but to perish in the ecstacy of belief, a very specific set of familial traits traceable only to congenital predisposition Brown may have considered as inherited “blood.” Of course, Clara's belief in a “genius of [her] birth” (95) and Theodore's acting out his depraved delusions guarantee nothing; readers have often disagreed as to the import of Wieland's seeming determinism. Larzer Ziff, for example, writes that Brown had both an attraction to and repulsion from such a notion; others argue that the Calvinism lies only in the characters' fancies and that the novel dramatizes the evil consequences of the delusions—not real depravity.²¹ We may not get to the bottom of Brown's own persuasion about this issue, but the novel does bear out, whether Calvinistic or not, a biological determinism and materiality behind its actions in the generational repetition of events. Whether the Wielands' depraved senses are real or imagined, whether their belief in a Divine Hand is warranted or not, the novel makes clear that these beliefs, at least, crop up in each generation, destroying physically those who believe imaginatively.

With this material basis of judgment and action, with the prompting to delusion or duty to God growing out of a familial connection to past generations, the Wieland saga describes a parabola of inherited, material consequences no less than it dramatizes an inheritance of property and a suggestion of incestuous, gentried isolation. John Irwin's study of doubling and incest provides insight into the Wieland family's apparently predetermined fate and its isolationist economics of property, for the repetition through time enacted at least by the male Wielands (remember that father and son even share the same given name) with their melancholy spiritualism, Irwin might argue, illustrates an “incestous” family situation wherein the isolation supporting repeated generations of behavior likewise encourages incest.²² Specifically, “doubling and incest are both images of the self-enclosed—the inability of the ego to break out of the circle of the self and of the individual to break out of the ring of the family.”²³ In the Wieland case, I would add that self-enclosure is enabled by the family's economic and social class, literally embodied in the property it inherits along with its blood.

The houses in Wieland in effect double the family to the degree that, to invoke the later “Fall of the House of Usher” and its incestuous brother and sister, the “house of Wieland” calls up “both the family and the family mansion.”²⁴ The fate of the Wielands is inextricably bound together with their various properties, as Clara herself seems to indicate: “All happiness and dignity must henceforth be banished from the house and name of Wieland” (151). The elder Wieland's death is unthinkable without its setting in the Temple, for instance, given all the attention paid to this structure built for worship but repeatedly the theater of death and mystery. Though the structure itself changes very little, it represents quite various activities remarkably well. First designed as a spartan dwelling to house lonely worship, the Temple shows amazing transformative power when the younger generation adds its musical instruments, sofas, and bust of Cicero to create an appropriate scene for its activities. For all of its changes, the Temple acts as a lightning rod for each generation's demise. Likewise, scenes of terror seem to attach to particular dwellings in Wieland: Clara's dream and one altercation with the voices take place at the summerhouse, Clara overhears voices plotting her death in her private closet, she discovers sister-in-law Catharine dead in Clara's own bed, and the climactic scene of Theodore's return to kill his sister takes place in Clara's bedroom.

More than mere setting, the Wieland houses are haunted. In one sense, the novel is a ghost story, complete with inherited depravity, incestuous shadowings, and houses that hide mysterious persons and voices. And like other ghost stories (one recalls The Turn of the Screw), the action of terror centers on the house as the seat of private and domestic activity. The terror of these stories threatens the home, not just the house, in that the values of domesticity—privacy, chastity, family—are challenged by an outsider. While Theodore's wife and children are murdered by their own patriarch, destroying the family and its supposed mutual protectiveness, Clara is threatened in the most private of spaces with loss of life and virtue; discovering Carwin in her closet at one point, she believes he has come to rape her, and earlier, when she imagines Theodore in the closet, it's not clear just what she fears from him. In Wieland, the privacy of domesticity comes to be attacked by the elements of the domiciles themselves, which have taken on attributes of the public world in that they provide a theater for the shape-shifting, mercantile type—Carwin—and since the structures can themselves accommodate changes in their appearance and function so readily. Like the public spaces of mercantile exchange described by Agnew as theatrically mercurial, the Wielands' properties allow for an interpenetration of the public world into supposedly private space.

Tricia Lootens's study of The Haunting of Hill House may gloss the Wieland haunted house as well, for Lootens describes a matrix of the familial and sexual, or private and “public” modes of exchange, wherein terror is “simultaneously familial and erotic,” where nuclear families “kill where they are supposed to nurture.”²⁵ What makes Wieland a story of terror as well as a story of psychological disintegration is that the danger comes from inside the house, that the characters do not lose a struggle “with the forces of the next world” but instead lose to their own intimate associates, though, importantly, those familial associates have been affected by the outsider—the “public” man—Carwin.²⁶ That the home should be a place of security goes without saying, but the home, especially as embodied in fiction, is more often than not an icon of absolute protection from the outside world and all its “public” values. As Marilyn Chandler writes, “the biblical notion of the ‘world’ as the devil's domain reinforced the idea that the home was a place of protection where one could be ‘in the world but not of it.’”²⁷

Ironically, the worldly domain outside the home calls to mind not only the demonic associations of much gothic fiction, but just as importantly suggests a market configuration of “dangerously” public values—a public “psychology” associated with the spectral consciousness of Adam Smithian exchange values. The “ghost” in Arthur Mervyn's public, spectacular frame of reference, what I have earlier called an indwelling “specter,” is shadowed forth here in Wieland as a trace of the past, coupled with the intrusion of Carwin-the-public-man, to make of the novel something of a traditional ghost story at the same time the specter of public values likewise haunts the premises in a specifically market-oriented fashion. In other words, while the literal threat in Wieland does indeed come from inside the house, that private space has already been infused with the taint of publicity in the form of Carwin, bearing with him the spectral values of a world outside. It seems the Wieland family is “of the world” as well as “in” it. The Wielands' insularity, their refusal of reciprocity with a world beyond the home, even when (perhaps because?) that involvement might prove profitable, does not in the end insulate them from the ghosts of a public world.

As with the more standard-variety ghost story; Wieland portrays houses as “value-laden, animated agents of fate looming in the foreground, not the background, of human action.”²⁸ Clara maintains an intimate connection with her “places,” noting the summerhouse has been her private retreat and declaring sometimes that she has no need to fear her own closet. Yet her house she describes in frightening terms fairly often: during the second voices-from-the-closet scene, Clara notes the moonlight showing on the walls with “chequered” and “shadowy forms” (86). Returning to her house after the murders to collect her journal, soon to be threatened by brother Theodore, Clara experiences in slow motion her approach to the closet: “I passed the entry, mounted the stair, and unlocked the door of my chamber. It was with difficulty that I curbed my fancy and smothered my fears. Slight movements were transformed into beckoning shadows and calling shapes” (193). Servants on the property—“inhabitants of the Hut”—don't hesitate to say Clara's house is “haunted by a thousand ghastly apparitions” (192).

This haunting takes on a typical character of fear, with the shadows and the vaguely animate settings. More than that, the various dwellings, not content to be part of the “foreground” of the novel, take on an agency of their own, at least in Clara's gothic imagination. At the summerhouse, it is the “lulling sounds of the waterfall, the fragrance and the dusk” that “sink [her] into sleep” (62). The dwellings in general work upon her, the voices giving both cottage and summerhouse a “spirit,” one she persists in claiming is personally interested and protective. Within this ghost story, Clara doesn't differ much from other heroines who, according to Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, can view the supernatural activity of their houses as friendly. Women writers especially, they contend, “seem more likely to portray natural and supernatural experience along a continuum. Boundaries between the two are not absolute but fluid, so that the supernatural can be accepted, connected with, reclaimed, and can often possess a quality of familiarity.”²⁹ Carpenter and Kolmar suggest that Wieland stands as legitimate forebear to later women writers, since the narrative is Clara's—“its heroine embattled and terrorized in her own home”—but one should also note that Theodore feels a similar familiarity with “spirits” in the temple.³⁰ In spite of her comfort with the supernatural, however, it is clear that Clara is released from the terrors resident in her house only when it burns: so fully invested in her home and its history is she, even after that home has ceased to enjoy only a system of private values after the intrusion of Carwin with his contagion of publicity, that she can only begin a recovery and go far away to Europe when the house is gone.

So mutually sustaining is Clara and her property that she has suffered, like the characters at Hill House, “a literal kinship with the house.”³¹ As long as her house is safe, impenetrable from the outside, so is Clara, such that the intact house replicates her intact body; once the house is invaded, Clara goes into a psychological decline from which she escapes only with many scars. The house, in its gothic, private, and insular configuration, “inhabits” Clara through the mechanism of her inherited past, but the ghosts of this house operate doubly, representing the public specter after Carwin's intrusion as well as a private past; Clara maintains her “kinship” with her property in both of its ghostly manifestations. If the house in this novel is a trope of the body, so too is the body a trope of the house. Wieland is filled with reminders of materiality at its gothic core: its houses, therefore, move beyond figuring the Wielands' fates—fates undeniably detrimental to body and spirit. The impenetrable link between body and property describes a fictional calculus wherein inherited houses perform the same haunting function toward the Wieland family as does their inherited, punishing “religion.” The bodies of the family, then, come to be a locus of retribution, like their houses carrying the germ of their own destruction.

Inheriting property and mystical-neurotic “blood” equally, the Wieland family enacts a drama of class prerogatives as each member bears the fruit of previous generations behind the screen of the insular country estate. The material base of this haunting—its location in the body and the property—calls up an “incestuous” form of behavior for brother and sister Wieland, whose fast bond with past family members persists into closeness with each other so tight it includes them in shared biological inheritance, shared nightmares, and what appears to be shared bodies. If James Wilson is correct in assessing fictional brother-sister incest as symbolic of solipsism, Wieland carries solipsism to an extreme, working into the family's past and present both a self-enclosed economy of upper-class seclusion and a physicality of inheritance purveying bodies, spirits, and houses.³²

The destruction of Theodore's family and near-destruction of Clara indicates more than a little criticism on Brown's part of a class of characters whose insularity and naiveté has so little protected them from themselves that any visit from the world outside upsets their fragile equilibrium explosively. Privacy itself appears to come under fire, therefore—a privacy so absolute as to be incestuous, since it's in the most intimate of ways that the family is threatened. What the world of Wieland lacks is a regulating contact with the public world, a publicity coming fully into being alongside an international market economy at the eighteenth century's end. In “proportion to the increasing prevalence of the capitalist mode of production, social relationships assumed the form of exchange relationships” at this time, Habermas writes, a mode of association having ambiguous consequences socially and psychically, to be sure, as Brown was to explore shortly in his Arthur Mervyn, but also functioning as a spectral, social eye to assure reciprocal exchange economically and familially.³³ Such exchange-based relations would reinforce an incest taboo as well, encouraging exchange of family along with capital and underscoring a sense of the Wieland family as incestuous simply by virtue of its seclusion from public oversight.

In Wieland, inheritance destroys, perhaps because in this scene of leisure-class suffering, what is lacking is publicity, and thus the virtues of a Constantia Dudley or an Arthur Mervyn are likewise missing. And given the brutal treatment of Clara by her author—given that Brown has her suffer the fires of lust, the spontaneous combustion of her father, the murder of nearly everyone close to her, and finally the burning of her own house without any consequential growth—Brown evidently took a low view of the upper crust, having them hoist on their own petard as the houses they inhabit and the blood they inherit turn on them to all but obliterate their kind. Compared to his successful and virtuous Constantia and Arthur, the Wielands' insularity might establish a pattern of virtue across Brown's novels wherein the striving-capitalist sort—the poor, needy, but ambitious youth—grows into virtue by way of labor, not unlike the author himself, furiously laboring with his pen to establish a name for himself in an era in which, as Blumin reminds us, a “middle class,” not to mention an “authorial class,” was not quite yet a viable category.³⁴ Yet Brown's view of the striving lower class, at the production of Wieland and its unfinished sequel Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, at any rate, is equally acidic. And surprisingly so, given his more measured treatment in Arthur Mervyn of what Theodore Wieland might call the “grasping” class, which appeared in two volumes in the two years following Wieland. In 1798, however, in Carwin, Brown generated a view of the merchant-class Carwin no less hateful than the insular and aristocratic Wielands.

In the juxtaposed narratives of Wieland and Carwin the Biloquist, an opposition of two styles of economies and the class structures they support evidence an at least semiconscious awareness, on Brown's part, of the class structures he embodied in his familiar narratives. Carwin, an early incarnation of the successful Arthur Mervyn, comes from ignorance and poverty: his father, a farmer like Arthur's, abuses Carwin for his ambitions, continually pressing his notion that the only education needed for farm work is reading enough to understand the Bible and math enough to calculate earnings. Carwin wants more, though, and is eventually sent to live with his aunt in the city and taught to expect an inheritance from her. When this scheme fails, Carwin is taken in by the shady Ludloe, a distinct parallel to Arthur's surrogate father, Welbeck, who promises Carwin all the wealth and comfort he could want if he would study to join a mysterious secret society, a little-disguised Illuminati.

Carwin bears an uncanny likeness to Arthur Mervyn, and in light of the later-created Arthur's success and relatively gentle handling on the part of his creator, this early incarnation of the poor, ambitious youth is instructive. Like Arthur, Carwin detests labor and studies to generate a living otherwise. Yet, though Carwin worries over his ability to keep the secrets of the Illuminati as demanded by Ludloe, it isn't a worry grown of virtue; he states clearly, in fact, that his “moral principles had hithero been vague and unsettled”; his later career as we see him in Wieland proves him more immoral than unsettled as he takes the lives of perfect strangers in his hands and destroys them for a lark.³⁵ Brown took great pains to develop Carwin as a lower-class youth striving beyond his class, and his villainy cannot be dissociated from his class in this fragment, just as Arthur Mervyn's virtue is a direct outgrowth of his own striving class. Judith, the treacherous servant who “acts” the part of Clara in Carwin's scene of lovemaking manufactured to ruin Clara's reputation is likewise a representative of the truly lower classes in this novel. By comparison to Louisa Conway, a nominal servant-become-family-member, Judith is not a credit to her rank; coupled as she is with Carwin, Judith reinforces a portrait of a most unvirtuous lower order.

At the time of Wieland's creation, then, Brown's critical examination seems to have cut both ways, since Carwin falls prey to the lowest sort of immorality as a result of his protectorless poverty at the same time his Wieland family is victimized by the inherited securities of its class. In theory “against kings and privilege and in favor of equality,” Cowie remarks of Brown's attitude toward the upper class, he likewise harbored “an instinctive patrician scorn for the uncouth, unwashed mob.”³⁶

It comes as no surprise that Brown would have mixed reactions to what might have appeared the only two class options at large: one with the incestuous tendencies of the aristocracy and the other a groveling crowd dependent for favors upon its betters. As he again and again pointed out, the United States had not yet developed a literature nor had it provided a “place” for literary types, writers who fell into neither class. As Gordon Wood argues, the era of the 1790s offered more economic and social risk than security, what with a prevailing view that an economy based entirely in credit capital would cast its lot with the merely imaginary. As a result, according to Smith-Rosenberg, even basic definitions of class categories were in flux, allowing simultaneously a held-over conservative, classical republican ideal of the propertied upper class as “virtuous” at the same time that a newer, “commercial-republican” ideal of virtue as “frugality” and “application” was coming along to replace the previous era's idea of virtue.³⁷ Brown bore two distinct responses to his contemporary class options: as Watts explains, while Brown saw democracy as allowing more wealth to more people, wealth in a democracy is spread out thin, leaving little excess to patronize arts and letters, though the other option—a European-style aristocratic system—provides for cultural support only through excess money gained in abuse of the lower orders.³⁸ Suspicions about both extremes seem to prevail in Brown's Wieland and Carwin, though Arthur Mervyn would soon evidence an order of virtue aligned with the public world of commercial enterprise.

The private world of Wieland, then, a world aristocratically insular, familially enclosed, and psychologically damaging, comes under fire for its very privacy, for as Habermas explains of the growing “publicity” of the late eighteenth century, the “Law of Opinion judged virtues and vices; virtue, indeed, was measured precisely in terms of public esteem” to a degree that “secularized morality” was taking the place of “privatized religious faith.”³⁹ If Brown was even semiconsciously describing an economy of property ownership in Wieland by comparison with a cash- and credit-economy in Carwin the Biloquist, with perhaps a growing notion of the Arthur Mervyn who would make morality conversant with a market economy, I would argue that he likewise defined Clara Wieland in gendered terms of property and virtue by comparison with a standard of moral activity embodied in the “Republican wife.”⁴⁰ While Brown's Constantia Dudley may be virtuous only by careful dissociation from the marketplace, such dissociation is not enough for Brown's fictional females: Clara Wieland, refusing the role of domestic womanhood, falls prey to every species of terrorism. As a woman whose home is unsuitably removed from the publicity that regulates, a woman inappropriately following the male habits of intellect rather than the domestic calling of virtuous, laboring womanhood, Clara's virtue is constantly questioned. For Clara, the economic class that sets her apart from the world of work likewise defines her as less than virtuous.

VIRTUE AND VOICE: AN ECONOMICS OF GENDER

If the Wieland family is torn asunder at least in part because its insular class structure implodes the family in on itself, it is also the case that Wieland brother and sister encourage one another's inward-looking delusions and protect one another from the public world. Indeed, Theodore and Clara double one another's personality in a resemblance uncanny except for the legitimating cause of their patrimony, an inheritance equally controlling of and damaging to both. That brother and sister behave similarly is one thing; that they so consistently replicate one another's thoughts is quite another. Clara enters so much into Theodore's state of mind that at the crisis of her story, even though she has herself pled with Carwin to simulate a divine voice to stay Theodore's hand against her, she shares Theodore's experience of the voice exactly: “I partook of Wieland's credulity, shook with his amazement, and panted with his awe” (230). That “the arm lifted against [her] was Wieland's” (230), then, adds another turn of the screw to this domestic drama of doubling and incest; that Theodore the double would also be Theodore the sister's murderer is more than Clara can bear. From this point, Clara gives up all claim to rationality, takes to her house and her bed to be moved only by the fire that consumes the old life with the property that staged it.

Of this kind of doubled experience Irwin explains that the “double evokes the ego's love because it is a copy of the ego, but it evokes the ego's fear and hatred as well because it is a copy with a difference.”⁴¹ If Clara Wieland is more than a copy of Theodore, and vice versa, what is Clara's difference, then? The two carry the same biological inheritance and appear to own the same property; to some degree they share the same tastes and activities. Yet their fates are decidedly different: Theodore dies by his own hand, ending his alternating misery and ecstasy, while Clara is doomed to live with the memory of her family's demise, to take a long, slow cure (if indeed it is a cure), and doomed to relive the horror story by writing it down. While Theodore acts, and acts according to the “commands” of a voice with specific instructions, Clara is acted upon—by her brother, by her house, by Carwin, and even by her husband-to-be, Pleyel, who scorns and abuses her for what he believes to be promiscuity.

Clara's passivity, represented in narrative voice and action, serves a larger class of passivity she enacts through the novel with respect to her house. As a woman with a home, Clara's behavior differs widely from that of the virtuous Constantia Dudley, who gains independence and friendship by way of labor in and for the home; Clara's fate is just the opposite, for in the end she has lost her home and family, has spent time in Europe dependent on an uncle and ends a dependent of husband Pleyel. Within the prevailing ideal of woman as domestic by “nature,” Clara comes up short. Owner of a home, she doesn't labor in the home. Instead, Clara takes part in the more “masculine” activities enabled by her class—she reads, play-acts, and spends her days in conversation, a profile of behavior quite unlike what Nancy Cott has described as the ideal of womanly virtue in the late eighteenth century, a style of virtue concurrent with the beginnings of a middle-class work ethic in the United States. As Cott argues, the “cult of domesticity” encouraged by this new ethos represented a conservative definition of women's virtue, one bound to the home as “woman's place” but transformed by the new civic republicanism to require work in and for the home.⁴² Nancy Armstrong, in a study of women's conduct books in the eighteenth century, likewise comes to the conclusion that political and economic factors late in the century re-created women's roles to encompass the ideal of domestic labor: “the virtues of the ideal wife appeared to be active. … Once female virtue became so linked to work, conduct books banished from the ideal woman the features that had once seemed desirable because they enhanced the aristocratic woman.”⁴³

Clara Wieland, both woman and member of a self-enclosed, aristocratic class, is released from the labor so necessary to the domestic ideal of virtue, and while Clara isn't in theory bound to this definition of virtue, Brown's creation of Constantia Dudley, whose virtue so carefully fulfills the obligations of domestic womanhood, suggests that in practice Clara is. If Theodore is one counterpart to Clara, Constantia is another, and while the latter creation works as a domestic woman for the good of the home, Clara seems to work not at all, yet both are intimately connected with their homes, in Clara's case to the degree that her house and her body serve as mutually defining figures in a mutual definition of penetrability. For if the ruin of Clara's house is set into motion by penetration from the outside, Clara's body seems likewise to be constantly under siege, resulting in the ever-present hint that her “virtue” may be flawed. Thus, Clara's house stands for her virtue no less than Constantia Dudley's, with the difference that Constantia actively creates her house while Clara is created by hers. In both instances—in Brown's only two novels to feature women as centers of narrative attention—virtue is that which can be seen, can be regulated by the visibility of action in a “public” space, and as a result Clara's conservative definition of virtue as a pure body will not protect her against demands of a domestic, labor-generated ideal.

In an economy of gender, Ormond's Constantia has all the success: despite her hardships, indeed because of the hardships demanding her labor and ingenuity, Constantia prevails as a female version of Arthur Mervyn. She learns to make and save money, illustrating the values of industry and frugality; she chooses carefully among her suitors, rejecting the unfit (Balfour) and the unworthy (Ormond); and she meanwhile cares for her ailing father, exercising the womanly features of nurse and soothing mother. And Constantia gains a reward most appropriate to a domestic being: her home. For all but a few wrap-up pages of her story, Clara Wieland is likewise unmarried; however, her position within the story is not that of a child, either. A young woman, she does engage in adult activities, and her marriageability is consistently a matter of her own and others' attention. Carwin awakens her sexuality; her brother seems to threaten it; and Pleyel remains a perpetual object of desire. Woman that she is, Clara nevertheless is seldom seen engaged in domestic projects; only the occasional needlework (performed, we should remember, while talking with company) weighs in against her more “intellectual,” rather aristocratic pursuits.

In fact, the “aristocratic” in this novel works counter to the “female” virtues Clara might be expected to exercise as Constantia would. As Andrew Scheiber notes, there “is nowhere any hint that Clara's training” has been of the domestic kind: “Nor is there any evidence that Clara sees her education as having any reference to conjugal or maternal responsibilities; even her romantic inclinations toward Pleyel seem unconnected to any thoughts of their natural conclusion: marriage and motherhood. In short, she aspires toward full participation in the life of the intellect, and in the history of her culture and family, while circumventing that core of ‘womanly’ duties to which, for her, these interests are to be subordinated.”⁴⁴

Clara does not work; or if she does, her work consists in the “male” activity of the Wieland household: with her brother and Pleyel she argues, deliberates, and puts on plays. It is notable that Catharine, the other adult female character of the novel, often described as soft and womanly (and of course motherly), remains outside much of this activity. Catharine is mostly silent, tends her sewing and helps educate her children. Thus is Clara doubly masculinized, first by connection with the men around her and second by disassociation from Catharine's domesticity. As such, she stands as an aristocratic, educated intellectual, a type of woman untouched by the training in domesticity Armstrong describes as especially dominating the late eighteenth century.⁴⁵ Armstrong and Tennenhouse define a clear mutual exclusivity between the “aristocratic” and “domestic” women trained on conduct books, manuals reflecting a prevailing view of womanly virtue and training women to “constant vigilance and tireless concern for the well-being of others,” not an “aristocratic tradition of letters” that would relate them too closely to a material world of “surface” values.⁴⁶

In her aristocratic, rather masculine, and intellectual position, Clara is most specifically identified with “material rather than moral values,” and, as I have argued earlier, her “materiality” of character is bolstered by the novel's firm thematic identification of Clara with her house.⁴⁷ Indeed, Clara comes to be so strongly a part of her properties that she is nearly destroyed by and with her own cottage. Brother Theodore, to be sure, is similarly figured by the Mettingen properties just as he is “biologically” predisposed to be guided by his “inheritances.” Still, in taking action and removing himself from the scene by his own destruction, Theodore's relation to property is somewhat oblique by comparison to Clara's deep identification—Clara, who cannot take herself away by force of her own will but must be “ruled” by her house even in her removal from it. Further, that the crisis of the Wieland family is set in motion by an intruder from the outside world accentuates a relationship of Clara's person with her property more symbolic still: as her cottage and summerhouse—not to mention the Temple—are attacked, as Clara is warned particularly to stay away from the summerhouse and threatened physically by the voices in her closet, so too is Clara's virginity, her integrity of body, jeopardized.

Recall, for instance, Carwin's explanation when Clara finally discovers him hiding in the closet. Though the voices have spoken clear designs on her life, Carwin deflects the murder threat by “confessing” he had actually come to “ravish” Clara. Now that her so-called “protector” has warned him away (a voice Carwin claims has frightened him), Clara will be safe from these designs, he says, Neither confession nor promise is convincing, and Clara later returns to her house for a meeting with Carwin equipped with a penknife, not to defend by murder but to destroy herself if her “virtue” should be threatened. As though her body were constantly identified with sexual activity, Clara becomes an object of suspicion when Pleyel “overhears” the manufactured liaison between Clara and Carwin. Bearer of a virginal female body, Clara's “virtue” seems always in question—like her houses, her body is in constant danger of penetration and ruin.

This tenuous virginity that helps define Clara underscores a materiality of characterization, an objectification making of Clara a body more than soul or will at the same time their inherited properties and blood ground both Wieland brother and sister in the world of physicality. Clara, then, more fully objectified by her questionable purity of body, continues to suffer, and to suffer passively under the defining will of others—Pleyel who questions her purity, Carwin, who feints at raping her and Theodore, who threatens her life—as a female under the influence of men who themselves take action to promote or to end suffering. In Wieland's economy, therefore, the female version of virtue becomes one of physical integrity while Clara's male double, at least in Theodore's own construction, is bound to a virtue not physical but spiritual. For Theodore, virtue is duty to his God, a state of “morality” calling for specific action; for Clara, virtue comes from defensive protection of the body—from not acting. Compared to the busily responsible Constantia Dudley, Clara's virtue is the farthest thing from “Republican” womanhood.

Clara herself recognizes the gendered values attached to “virtue,” since she laments that her brother has come to murder her because he regards his “career of horror as the last refinement of virtue” (189) while of herself she consistently aligns virtue with her body. To Pleyel's accusation that she “coveted pollution” and “wedded infamy,” Clara responds “my heart was the shrine of all purity” (112), knowing well the physical basis of female virtue assumed here. “The gulf that separates man from insects is not wider than that which severs the polluted from the chaste among women” (113), she unhappily writes, and though she verbally defends herself against the accusation, never do we see her actually acquitted. Clara is aware that for a woman, as long as virtue remains in the domain of the physical, reputation is everything: “Yesterday and today I am the same. … yet, in the apprehension of another … I had ceased to be the same. My integrity was tarnished and withered in [Pleyel's] eyes” (113). By contrast, the criminal Theodore cares nothing for reputation insofar as it may define his virtue. His courtroom confession shows nothing but scorn for his accusers, for Theodore finds the human and social definition of virtue wanting, since it uses the wrong measure of a man: “Impious and rash! thus to usurp the prerogatives of your Maker! to set up your bounded views and halting reason, as the measure of truth! Thou, Omnipotent and Holy! Thou knowest that my actions were conformable to thy will. … The peace of virtue, and the glory of obedience, will be my portion hereafter” (176-77).

Neither Clara's nor Theodore's definitions of virtue are particularly comprehensive, yet Clara's bodily purity stands apart as a category of virtue subject to supervision because “visible” by others, unlike Theodore's, which operates outside the regulation of public scrutiny. The measure of Clara's virtue is reputation, or the “publicity” attending social visibility, since the female virtue Clara hopes to demonstrate takes physical form as the female body gains “value” by its virtue. Like Constantia Dudley, Clara's virtue is particularly female and particularly governed by social convention, the only difference being that Constantia's virtue is located in the actions of domestic labor while Clara's resides in the measurable space of her body. And given Clara's strong identification with her house, this female body serves as a trope of domesticity no less than Constantia's home.

However, in Clara's position as leisured intellectual, her lack of attention to domestic duties comes back to cast suspicion on the body that serves as the house's figure. Significantly, it is when Clara first learns her reputation has been slurred that she finds her “security” finally penetrated, in her language eliding the difference between house and body when she writes, “I had vainly thought that my safety could be sufficiently secured by doors and bars” (110); once the house is invaded—once Carwin's voice can carry into and out of the house with real consequences for Clara's reputation—the effect is the same as if she had in fact been promiscuous.

With no control over the security of body or house, Clara is caught in what Andrew Scheiber identifies as the “schizophrenic definitions of late eighteenth-century womanhood.” Scheiber identifies this “schizophrenia” as an ethos demanding of Clara Wieland both rationalism and dependency, “political self-determination” and capitulation to masculine authority.⁴⁸ I would add to this a schizophrenia doubled in force by the “catch” of “aristocratic womanhood” in an age of domestic, republican values. Clara remains identified with her body no less than the “woman exalted by an aristocratic tradition of letters” Armstrong and Tennenhouse describe as “embodied” in “material rather than moral values” when the values attending the new market economy demanded of woman a more active virtue of domestic labor. Clara's class does not protect her “reputation”; in fact, the habits of this leisure-class woman preclude domesticity, leaving no option for Clara as either virtuous woman or virtuous character, for at the same time Clara's attachment to property damns her for nonparticipation in labor, it also confirms her as a woman, as a locus of physical and reputational threat.

Clara Wieland cannot be active either in or for the home by virtue of her gender combined with her class, and her passivity in general is evidenced by her constant defensive posture. Clara is frequently in fear of rape, and after her story's midpoint, she constantly defends her reputation. In fact, the ostensible heroine of this novel is seldom seen acting at all, but is more often than not deliberating, worrying, or creating bizarre fantasies to explain events around her. Sitting with Catharine and waiting for Pleyel and Theodore to return from the Temple, the women compare “conjectures as to what might be the cause” (41) of their prolonged absence; alone in her room, she meditates on the voice heard at her summerhouse, imagining reasons the “spirit” (95) there has warned her away; when Pleyel fails to appear for the family's arranged play-acting, Clara launches into a highly detailed fantasy of Pleyel's death-by-water (82-83). Clara performs so few real actions the novel has driven Robert Micklus to write, “Clara sits around brooding to such a degree that her narrative becomes downright oppressive to read. We wish Brown would give her something to do, but because her affluence obviates the need for her to do anything, Clara performs the only function her sterile environment has prepared for her: she speculates.”⁴⁹

Her “speculative” forays may remind one of the young capitalist, Arthur Mervyn; in an odd sense, both Clara and Arthur do exercise an imaginative power crossing their differences of class and gender. But Arthur's fantasies are future-directed, “teaching” him, so to speak, what duties he must perform to make a success of himself in the public arena. Clara's imagination leads her in quite the opposite direction: she doesn't imagine the future and her fantasies strangely tend to exclude her from the picture. The prolonged morbid fantasy about Pleyel's death, for example, has little to do with Clara, instead dwelling on a past episode in Pleyel's life. Even the “spirit” at the summerhouse, though “directly” communicating with Clara, sets her to wondering whether “he” has been using the place for his own meditations, not so much what he wants from her. These imaginings go nowhere for Clara, they do not involve her, and most importantly, they are almost always wrong. There is no spirit; Pleyel is not dead. Clara's speculations don't constitute investments in possible futures as do Arthur Mervyn's, but instead only pass her many hours in misery, passively waiting out the time until actuality is revealed to her.

In only two respects do we see Clara as a “producer,” a character involved in active labor toward a goal: in drawing and in writing the story. In these labors, Clara replicates the “masculine” activities of the gentry class, and one might argue that Clara overcomes her own overwhelming passivity through these activities. However, in these “artistic” endeavors, Clara especially enacts the double-bind of her gender and her class, for while the work may be “masculine,” her role as artist is especially “feminine” in its submissive posture. To begin with, Clara responds peculiarly to her sketch of Carwin in a scene memorable for her prolonged withdrawal from the family circle. Carwin has so affected her at first meeting that Clara refuses to join the usual evening gathering; instead, “I could not resist the inclination of forming a sketch” (53) of him. As artist, Clara is evidently of the “inspired” school, since the idea of the drawing seems to come to her unbidden. One picture, and then “I placed it at all distances, and in all lights; my eyes were rivetted upon it. Half the night passed away in wakefulness and in contemplation of this picture” (53). Next morning, Clara takes up the same occupation, alternately watching a storm outside and looking at her sketch. With respect to this artistic outburst of labor, Clara has become paradoxically docile.

Her narrative, a much more prolonged artistic undertaking, similarly places her in a “masculine” role in that, as Cynthia Jordan has pointed out, Clara by writing attempts to “master” her situation to remain “relatively sane.”⁵⁰ More than just enacting a stereotypical “male” text, Clara writes in a “masculine” manner according to both Jordan and Scheiber, the former contending that Clara has learned the psychological technique of writing as therapy from her forefathers, the latter suggesting Clara, despite “her claim to be a modern, independent woman,” nevertheless “looks to masculine figures of authority” in her writing.⁵¹ While her socioeconomic class reinforces this view of Clara as a masculine figure in her writing activity, still I would argue that she subverts the role of writing to a degree that a passivity infused into the narrative voice cancels out the “masterful” control the act of writing should produce and positions Clara as simultaneously masculine and feminine.

In spinning out her tale to a group of unnamed friends, Clara slips now and then into the present, the time of writing rather than the time of the events, to try to harness her energies and proceed with the story.⁵² As though the story itself, the memory of events overwhelming her in the past has taken control of her narrative mastery, Clara hesitates at regular intervals, reminding her readers that she is still affected by these events: “It is with a shuddering reluctance that I enter on the province of describing [Carwin]. Now it is that I begin to perceive the difficulty of the task which I have undertaken” (49). She writes at the beginning of Chapter Six, “Alas! my heart droops, and my fingers are enervated. … now I know what it is to entertain incommunicable sentiments. The chain of subsequent incidents is drawn through my mind, and being linked with those which forewent, by turns rouse up agonies and sink me into hopelessness” (147). Thus Clara confesses the act of memory is nearly strong enough to destroy her narrative will when she begins to describe her discovery of the murdered Catharine.

These hesitations of voice embody in the discourse what her behavior often reveals in the story—that Clara is taken over by events rather than taking part in them. At her discovery of Catharine, she admits “I had no inclination nor power to move from this spot” (152). When invited to meet with Carwin late at night, she knows such a meeting would be fraught with danger to life, virginity and reputation, but Clara cannot help herself: “I felt myself divested of the power to will contrary to the motives that determined me to seek his presence” (140). And so on through her story, passively reliving a chain of events she experienced passively in the first place. She displays an amazing lack of will, unable to control events or narrative. As a result, when she opens her second conclusion, the much-maligned Maxwell-Stuart-Conway story, even her language at the sentence level suggests passive contrition in the face of lived experience: “Such is man. Time will obliterate the deepest impressions. Grief the most vehement and hopeless, will gradually decay and wear itself out. Arguments may be employed in vain: every moral prescription may be ineffectually tried: remonstrances, however cogent or pathetic, shall have no power over the attention, or shall be repelled with disdain; yet, as day follows day, the turbulence of our emotions shall subside, and our fluctuations be finally succeeded by a calm” (234). The “calm,” here, suggests more of exhaustion than of peace: “as day follows day,” she is eventually overcome by experience.

That Clara has recuperated by the end of her tale, as several readers have argued, seems a rather optimistic interpretation of her state.⁵³ By this time, she has discovered a corpse in her bed, lost her family, lost her home, and can barely stand to write the tale. Again, her language reveals mere toleration of her state: “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). Even though Clara has now married Pleyel, bringing to fruition her early wishes, she is “not destitute of happiness.” Nowhere does she say she is happy. Within this insistently passive position, a state remaining long past the novel's central events, Clara underscores the female role she is bound to at the same time she performs the “male” action of writing.

Her duality of gender is enacted likewise in the “confessional,” or “explanatory,” purpose of her narrative on the whole. As Clara writes to friends to explain her family's demise, she embeds two confessional tales within her own: the transcript of Theodore's courtroom confession and Carwin's “confession”—a mini-life story—told to Clara in explanation of his role in the murders. Carwin, to be sure, doesn't confess what Clara wants to hear—that he is responsible for all the voices. But his story is complete, it describes his motive (perverse curiosity) and intentions, and he clearly admits to producing some voices and clearly denies others. Theodore's confession is even more clear and complete: insane as it is, it follows a “rational” and masterful pattern, with more or less strictly novelistic guidelines and a closely unified plot that unfolds the motives of its main character, producing closure by way of justice served in a neat bundle. Theodore's narrative works toward an ending in Frank Kermode's sense: all actions and motives tend toward the final, italicized verdict “guilty.”⁵⁴ When the verdict comes, there is no surprise, and in fact, unity and logic hold sway when justice is served, all plot lines are closed, and all motives disclosed. Theodore's confession, with its revelation of a will in absolute accord with the will of God, displays a radical logic that appears as rationality.⁵⁵ Like a good sentimental romance, this confession serves to illustrate the motives behind his behavior in a complete, though short, Richardsonian-style romance that vindicates, if not the ways of God to man, at least the motives of a man possessed by God. As such, it is a “rational fiction” in manner if not in matter; as Christophersen has noted, this confession may remain “inscrutable,” but it is “lucid.”⁵⁶

By comparison, the narrative surrounding these two tightly organized confessions is oddly incomplete. Clara does state a series of facts, but final explanations are wanting. She never decides, for instance, whose voice prompted Theodore to murder (Carwin's or a real spirit) or if he simply imagined a divine call, each being possibilities she considers at one time and another. She never explains her curious passion for Carwin, nor is explanation of how Pleyel has learned of her innocence ever forthcoming. Instead, Clara ends with the peculiarly placed Maxwell-Stuart-Conway story, a narrative gaffe readers have squirmed over since the novel's appearance. A tale of seduction and intrigue, this add-on story has been explained as Clara's attempt to mold her own story into a standard sentimental form so as to provide a tolerable, because expected, ending.⁵⁷ Still, this second ending to Wieland doesn't offer answers to the questions the main narrative raises: why does Carwin continue to torment the Wieland family after his curiosity is satisfied? Why does Theodore murder his family? What does Clara's perpetually returning romantic imaginings have to do with the religious impulse driving Theodore to murder? Clara's “confession,” unlike the male-authored confessions of the novel, seems to lack the authority of a completed narrative, thus indicating a crucial, and perhaps female, difference in voice not unlike the passivity she exhibits in constructing the text.

On the other hand, perhaps the ill-placed Maxwell-Stuart-Conway tale does suggest some answers to the problem of gender and virtue in Wieland proper, for placed alongside the other “addendum” to the novel, the Memoirs of Carwin, this story of intrigue fills out a pattern established by the three “texts” together. If the Maxwell-Stuart-Conway ending is a story of seduction, with Mrs. Stuart being in effect “ruined” by the seducer, Maxwell, though actual consummation never takes place, so too is Carwin a seduction tale. As an unformed young man, Carwin confesses, he has been teased by the mystery of the Illuminati. But unwilling to reveal his ventriloquistic powers to complete an honest membership, Carwin like Louisa Conway has been in hiding ever since, changing his style of living and religious affiliation regularly to throw off any scent of who he really is—or so we may conclude from the unfinished manuscript that leaves Carwin cringing in terror from Ludloe's possible discovery of Carwin's talent, along with what we know of his chameleonlike existence from Wieland's main text. Two stories of seduction and hiding, and thus reading “backward” to the main story, one has to wonder if Clara's family saga is not also a seduction story, telling a tale not of actual rape or promiscuity, perhaps, but of a ruin brought about through awakened desire.

If Clara's story conceals a seduction as it reveals her family's demise, it comes as no surprise, then, that so much depends on her reputation, her public record of “virtue.” With virtue defined for her, Clara cannot escape the consequences of reputation; her “confession,” as a result, may serve to shore up her claim to purity no less than Arthur Mervyn's, yet her narrative voice, her generally passive interaction with events, and her identification with her house confirms her in the role of female.

In short, she defends her virtue in precisely the gendered terms that in the late eighteenth century demand a role of domesticity she could not possibly fulfill. Strongly associated with her house and her body, Clara continually deepens a portrait of her own materiality, while at the same time the “voice” of her narrative confirms a gendered passivity, an inability to master events or control the direction of her future. Yet, her “aristocratic” position, like that of her brother and their small family circle and equally confirming “material rather than moral values,” positions Clara outside the activities of domestic womanhood. The private kind of virtue established for Clara in Wieland, then, associating her with body and house is simply not consonant with a more public view of woman's virtue. Clara's is the voice of virtue denied, for the conditions Wieland establishes for womanly virtue are mutually exclusive. In her narrative voice, we see this duality at the base of her existence, for there she demonstrates simultaneous “masculine” and “feminine” traits as well. Indeed, Carwin is not the only “double-tongued” speaker in Wieland, for Clara's class, enforcing an insulated, incestuous form of social behavior, and her gender, binding her to public models of virtue, insist that her voice be likewise duplicitous.

Notes

1. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 74.

2. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, Ideology of Conduct, 11.

3. ibid., 11.

4. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13.

5. ibid., 18-19.

6. The novel's subtitle, “An American Tale,” is the source of several studies, including Edwin Fussell's reading of the novel as an allegory of patricide and authorship (Edwin Sill Fussell, “Wieland: A Literary and Historical Reading” Early American Literature 18 [1983-84]: 171-86); see also Christophersen, Apparition in the Glass, who reads the novel subtly in light of Jay Fliegelman's Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and Revolutionary paranoia; Robert Levine (“Villainy and the Fear of Conspiracy in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond,” Early American Literature 15 [1980]: 125-40) looks into the “American” theme in the most thoroughgoing study of the French Revolution and American conspiracy fears as backdrop to Brown's novels; and Shirley Samuels (“Plague and Politics”) takes up the symbolic connections between disease and Revolutionary fervor. Psychological studies tend to review Brown's interest in “natural depravity” as evidenced in Wieland and generally fall into two camps, those who argue that Brown's story warns of the dangers of superstition (e.g., Arthur Kimball, Rational Fictions) and those entertaining the possibility that Brown may have himself believed in an inherited depravity (e.g., Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA 77, no. 1 (March, 1962]: 51-57). Recently, more studies have turned to Clara Wieland's position as narrator and Brown's ideas about authorship; see Christophersen's Apparition in the Glass, Cynthia Jordan's Second Stories, and James Russo's “‘Chimeras of the Brain.’”

7. Alexander Cowie, “Historical Essay” in Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale, (1798), vol. 1 of The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977), 332.

8. Grabo, Coincidental Art, 3-29.

9. Christophersen, Apparition in the Glass, 29. See also Shirley Samuels, “Plague and Politics,” 225-46 and David Brion Davis (Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957).

10. Brown, Wieland, 62. William M. Manly is one of the few dissenters from this view, reading the pit dream as a temptation toward insanity, not incest (“The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland,” American Literature 35 [November 1963]: 311-21).

11. Shirley Samuels, “Infidelity and Contagion: The Rhetoric of Revolution,” Early American Literature 22 (1987): 187.

12. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed., trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

13. ibid., 265.

14. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 125.

15. Smith-Rosenberg, “Domesticating ‘Virtue,’” 160.

16. Wood, Radicalism, 57. Wood writes, as evidence of the changing economy that still to some degree held onto a system of properties and patronage, that “in the years after mid-century … New York landlords expected less and less filial affection from their tenants and more and more monetary payments. Fewer of the landlords were able or willing to ignore or burn their tenants' overdue debts. … More and more landlords wanted their rents, and those … who raised them at every opportunity were willing to evict tenants who could not pay” (Radicalism 114).

17. Smith-Rosenberg, “Domesticating ‘Virtue,’” 160; J. V. Ridgeley, “The Empty World of Wieland,” in Individual and Community: Variations on a Theme in American Literature, ed. Kenneth H. Baldwin and David K. Kirby (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1975), 3-16.

18. Grabo, Coincidental Art, 10.

19. See, for example, Kimball's Rational Fictions.

20. Christophersen points out that only eight out of the nine voices can be accounted for as Carwin's (Apparition in the Glass, 49).

21. Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,”; William Manly (“Importance of Point of View”) argues that any latent Calvinism belongs to Clara Wieland and would not be taken seriously by Brown. Michael T. Gilmore makes an even stronger suggestion that Brown may have borne Calvinistic views learned from his Quakerism (“Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown's Wieland,” Studies in the Novel 98 [Summer 1977]: 107-18).

22. Irwin doesn't discuss Brown in particular, but his analyses of Faulkner and Poe would gloss Wieland easily, given Irwin's scrutiny of the symbiotic relationships among family, inheritance, and incest; see John Irwin, Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

23. ibid., 59.

24. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in The Complete Tales and Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 232.

25. Tricia Lootens, “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’” 166-67.

26. ibid., 166.

27. Chandler, Dwelling in the Text, 8.

28. ibid., 4.

29. Lynnette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds., Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 12.

30. ibid., 4.

31. Lootens, “‘Whose Hand Was I Holding?’” 179.

32. James Wilson, “Incest and American Romantic Fiction,” Studies in Literature I 7 (Spring 1974): 31-50.

33. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 74.

34. Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class, 13.

35. Charles Brockden Brown, “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” (1798), in Wieland and “Memoirs of Carwin,” vol. 1 of The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977), 273. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically.

36. Cowie, “Historical Essay,” 312.

37. Wood, Radicalism, 163-64; Smith-Rosenberg, “Domesticating ‘Virtue.’”

38. Watts, Romance, 145-46.

39. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 91. Adam Smith's specular “man within” would be a synonym for this “secularized morality,” since both indicate a species of publicity internalized to regulate private behavior.

40. Jan Lewis, “Republican Wife.”

41. Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 33. Irwin writes that we often speak of a “first” and “second” self, perhaps following Otto Rank's study, The Literature of the Second Self, with one character serving as primary interest while the “double,” the “second” self does seem secondary. However, since Clara and Theodore are contemporaries and share the book's title, I would say there is no “first” or “second” self in the doubling of Wieland.

42. Cott, Bonds, 8.

43. Nancy Armstrong, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman,” in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Lit. and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 104-6.

44. Andrew Scheiber, “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me’: Love, Terror, and the Construction of Gender in Wieland,” Early American Literature 26 (1991): 177.

45. Armstrong, “Rise of the Domestic Woman.”

46. Armstrong and Tennenhouse, Ideology of Conduct, 11.

47. ibid., 11.

48. Scheiber, “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me,’” 174.

49. Robert Micklus, “Charles Brockden Brown's Curiosity Shop,” Early American Literature 15 (1980): 176.

50. Jordan, Second Stories, 235.

51. ibid., 235; Scheiber, “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me,’” 173.

52. Brown seems to have recognized the absence of any definite “frame” for Wieland when, in his Advertisement to the novel, he feels it “necessary to add, that this narrative is addressed, in an epistolary form, by the Lady whose story it contains, to a small number of friends, whose curiosity, with regard to it, had been greatly awakened” (3).

53. Ziff, for instance, takes as given that Clara has become healthy by the second conclusion of Wieland. He writes that Brown “at least sent his characters off to France before permitting them to enjoy their felicity. America was blighted for them” (“A Reading of Wieland,” 56). J. V. Ridgely likewise reads the move to Europe as curative in “The Empty World of Wieland” (12).

54. In The Sense of an Ending, Kermode defines a “coherent” narrative as one that drives toward an ending, whose plot lines are all developed and accumulate to ultimate explanation by the ending (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

55. In his Rational Fictions, Arthur Kimball argues that Brown's “Enlightenment” sensibility produced in his novels a “rational” basis for the narrative, an argument based on the characters' own claims for rational even-mindedness. Yet Clara's statements about her own rationality are undermined, I believe, by her “irrational” manner of narration.

56. Christophersen, Apparition in the Glass, 27-28.

57. Grabo, Coincidental Art, 4-29. Nina Baym defines not only the shift from Wieland's main story to the Stuart-Conway-Maxwell story but also several other discursive “reversals” in the novel as flaws. She writes that “there is a continuous sacrifice of story line and character—hence, long-term coherence—for the sake of immediate effect” largely brought about by haste in composition (“A Minority Reading of Wieland,” in Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Bernard Rosenthal, Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981), 88. William Hedges would agree: in “Culture of Contradictions,” he reads the shift near Wieland's end as Brown's failure to complete a story of religious mania and concludes that the story subsequently turns into a seduction novel. In the same vein, Ziff sees the ending as evidence of “poor planning” (“A Reading of Wieland”).

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. “The Rise of the Domestic Woman.” In The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Lit. and the History of Sexuality. Ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York and London: Methuen, 1987. 96-141.

Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds. The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Lit. and the History of Sexuality. New York and London: Methuen, 1987.

Baym, Nina. “A Minority Reading of Wieland.” In Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Ed. Bernard Rosenthal. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1981. 87-103.

Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale. 1798. In Wieland and “Carwin the Biloquist.” Vol. 1 of The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown. Ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977. 1-244.

Carpenter, Lynette and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

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———. “Plague and Politics in 1793: Arthur Mervyn.” Criticism 27, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 225-46.

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