[In the following essay, Soldati discusses the blending of the Icarus and Narcissus myths achieved by Brown in the characterization of Theodore Wieland and his sister Clara.]

In Western literature, especially during the Romantic Period, man has often been represented by two heroic figures—Prometheus and Faust. Peter L. Thorslev has correctly claimed that since Prometheus “is the Romantic hero apotheosized, he is pure allegory; there is nothing in him of the Gothic, nothing of the dark mystery or taint of sin of the other Romantic heroes.”¹ Prometheus, therefore, represents the most benign aspects of man—his altruistic endeavors in the service of his fellowman.² Faust, however, is completely shrouded in “the dark mystery or taint of sin” of the Romantic hero, and his appeal for our culture has been as great as, if not greater than, the appeal of Prometheus. Indeed, Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation (1819), observed that Faust's anguished striving embodies not only the essence of man but also the essence of the cosmos. Even more emphatically, Oswald Spengler states in The Decline of the West that the “prime symbol” of the Faustian soul is “pure and limitless space,” calls Western civilization the Faustian culture, and designates Faust as the primary representative of Western Man.³ Faust, totally unlike the altruistic Prometheus who strives for the ultimate well-being of others, strives only for the ultimate satisfaction of himself. Faust, then, represents the more malign aspect of man—his selfishness and egocentrism—at the same time that he represents the ethereal glory of trying to soar with the gods.

Surrounded as Faust is in an aura of mystery—his dark liaisons with devils, spirits, and gods—it is not surprising that the dominant villain-heroes of the Gothic novel are Faustian men. It is not enough to claim, as Mario Praz does, that the Gothic hero-villain is a perverted, metamorphosed descendant of Satan in a black cape of Romantic erotic sensibility; for the Gothic hero-villain is also a Faustian man in the tradition of Marlowe's Faustus and Goethe's Faust.⁴ What has not been observed is that the Faustian man incorporates the myths of Icarus and Narcissus, and that the configurations of these myths reveal the psychological, metaphysical, and structural components of the Gothic novel. For the Faustian protagonist of the Gothic novel, the Narcissistic (internal) plunge into the Self and the Icarian (external) leap above human frailty are in constant, relentless tension. Utilizing this tension extant between its heroes' internal and external impulses, the Gothic novel—as a genre of the Faustian literary tradition—is thus a paradigm of man's dangerous egocentrism (Narcissism) and his soaring search for forbidden knowledge and subsequent fall (Icarianism). The Gothic novel is, then, a retelling of the myth of man's fall, the fall brought about by his attempts to gain the secrets of the universe—his attempts to be the equal of the gods.

To be the equal of the gods, however, man must disassociate himself from mortal existence. And principle of all the Faustian characteristics is the individual's drive to leave the earth of men. Such a drive has in fact been called by psychologists the Icarus complex,⁵ deriving from the myth of Icarus, the youth who, after escaping the earth, flew too close to the sun which melted the wax of his wings and caused him to plunge to his death in the sea. One can associate the Icarus complex with numerous American and European fictional characters, but nowhere is the complex more apparent than in the Gothic novel. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to observe that, in the Gothic novel, the Faustian prototype is characteristically possessed by an Icarus complex. It is as though he, like Icarus, leaves the earth to experience the ethereal and that this dizzying experience of dwelling in the stratosphere of the gods blurs his perception of his own mortal existence. Joseph L. Henderson has written that “Faust had failed to live out to the full an important part of his early life. He was, accordingly, an unreal or incomplete person who lost himself in a fruitless quest for metaphysical goals that failed to materialize. He was … unwilling to accept life's challenges to live both the good and the bad.”⁶ This refusal to face the earthly realities of life and the tendency to substitute instead a metaphysical quest may well be dominant characteristics of the Icarus complex.

The psychological concept of the Icarus complex, according to Ogilvie (p. 31), is a “compound of ascensionism (the wish to overcome gravity), narcissism (a craving for attention and admiration), and the anticipation of falling (unwanted or accidental descents).” In the Gothic novel ascensionism (the major feature of the Icarus myth because Icarus actually attempted to fly from the earth to the heavens) is, of course, not usually manifest in the protagonist's actual flight; rather he endeavors to raise himself above ordinary human existence and seeks godlike status. Ascensionism is revealed in the Faustian man through his “fantasies of rising, flying, and floating; in a fondness for height (tall people, trees, towers, mountains) and for flying objects … in bursts of enthusiasm, extravagant flights of fancy and rapid elevations of confidence; in wishes for a spectacular rise in social status or prestige; and so on” (Ogilvie, p. 31). Constantly believing in his own supremacy, the Faustian man refuses to surrender himself to the world of his fellowman, and, at least in his own mind, he pulls away from that world.

Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus obviously aspires to higher-than-human goals, and the first chorus of the drama links the doctor with Icarus:

So much he profits in divinity,
The fruitful plot of scholarism grac'd,
That shortly he was grac'd with Doctor's name,
Excelling all and sweetly can dispute
In the heavenly matters of Theology;
Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir'd his over-throw.(7)

Faustus' self-conceit is, of course, only his ego in triumph—in ascension—over all other concerns. Glutted with learning, he mixes idealism with over-confidence, over-estimates his abilities, and refuses to recognize his limitations as a man. This, then, is the meaning of the Icarus myth: “The human ego can be exalted to experience godlike attributes, but only at the cost of overreaching itself and falling to disaster” (Henderson, pp. 112-113).

It is, therefore, the dual nature—the soaring and the falling—of the Faustian hero that is most intriguing. Like Marlowe's Faustus, Goethe's Faust is also imbued with self-conceit:

Of course, I am smarter than all the shysters,
The doctors, and teachers, and Scribes, and Christers.(8)

And he early describes his own existence as apart from other men:

I, image of the godhead, that began
To dream eternal truth was within reach,
Exulting on the heavens' brilliant beach
As if I had stripped off the mortal man.

(Faust I, 614-617; p. 111)

This is the beginning of the Icarian leap, for Faust's stripping off the human veneer of mortality is tantamount to man's disastrous exaltation of his ego. In such a deluded state, Faust does not know that in his soaring is also his fall. Mephistopheles, however, does know this, and commands the spirits to “dazzle him with dream shapes, sweet and vast. / Plunge him into an ocean of untruth” (Faust I.1510-1511; p. 171, my italics). In his desire to soar, the Faustian-Icarian cannot check his inevitable fall.

It is Narcissism, however, that is the primary source of the Faustian hero's Icarianism. Implicit in the Gothic novel is, as Harold Bloom observes of many Romantic works, a complex exploration into “the Romantic mythology of self.”⁹ Thus the Faustian man is the embodiment of the Romantic writers' preoccupation with self-indulgence. This internal, Narcissistic allure of the Self seemingly conflicts with the hero's external, Icarian impulse to soar above mortals. Yet it is the psychological nature of the hero's Narcissism that generates his outward metaphysical quest. If one can imagine the hero's Narcissism as a metal spring being wound tighter and tighter and then suddenly releasing, one can understand the inward, psychological impulse of the hero's Narcissism and the outward, metaphysical release of his Icarianism. Both impulses are generated by the same spring, so to speak. Thus, the Faustian villain-hero of the Gothic novel is a Narcissist because his Icarian quests for forbidden knowledge and godlike status are really exercises in the idolatry of Self and are therefore dangerous. His ultimate spiritual, and in some cases physical, reflections invert the ancient, classical myth of Narcissus and are horrible instead of beautiful. Herbert Marcuse, in “The Images of Orpheus and Narcissus,” discusses the relationship of both Orpheus and Narcissus to Western culture with pertinence to the nature of the Faustian hero's Narcissism.¹⁰ These images, Marcuse writes, explode the reality of the world and “are committed to the underworld and to death. At best they are poetic, something for the soul and the heart. But they do not teach any ‘message’—except the negative one that one cannot defeat death or forget and reject the call of life in the admiration of beauty” (p. 165). Ultimately, like the mythological Narcissus, the Faustian hero is victim of his own self-enamoration.

Narcissism, the primary force in the Faustian hero's belief that he can overcome the horror of mortal existence, ensnares him with its dark allure. Enraptured with the reflection of his Self in the metaphysical pool of possibility, the hero recognizes perfection in his own ego. Then, unable to sustain this euphoric vision of his perfect being, he compensates for over-estimating his ego by what Erich Neumann characterizes as “a depressive self-destruction which, in the form of Weltschmerz and self-hatred, often culminates in suicide. …”¹¹ But it is the dark side of the Self that the Narcissistic reflection really projects. “The dark side of the Self is the most dangerous thing of all,” writes M.-L. von Franz, “precisely because the Self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to ‘spin’ megalomanic or other delusory fantasies that catch them up and ‘possess’ them. A person in this state thinks with mounting excitement that he has grasped and solved the great cosmic riddles; he therefore loses all touch with human reality. A reliable symptom of this condition is the loss of one's sense of humor and of human contact.”¹² At the height of the Faustian hero's megalomania, the dark side of his Self becomes the dominant, destructive side, and his reality is totally subjective. Any action he takes will usually be at the expense of others, often those closest to him. Hence Narcissism—the plunge into the Self—destroys not only the Faustian hero but also those around him.

There is, however, a distinction between the Faustian hero's Narcissistic plunge into the Self and his Icarian plunge, or fall, away from his ethereal goals—even though the two plunges are complementary. The Narcissistic plunge is the direct and psychological result of the Faustian hero's inward brooding and mesmerization with his Self. The Icarian plunge is the indirect and metaphysical result of the hero's attempt to soar above human frailty. For the Faustian hero it is the Icarian plunge that is his greatest fear—his anticipation of falling—the fear that he will lose favor with the gods he has sought to imitate and will be hurled back to the earth of mere men. When he is hurled back, he often falls into what is, metaphorically speaking, the underworld—that real or imaginary dark labyrinth of the human condition. But the Faustian hero of the Gothic novel, regardless of the motives or the stimuli that influence him to emulate Icarus, is not engaged in mere folly. Indeed, he seems to typify the man who desires to dwell apart in both degree and kind from his fellowman. But he is only the challenger, and seldom, if ever, the victor. The Faustian hero, then, is one who takes the fatal Narcissistic plunge into the Self and, simultaneously, the Icarian leap away from human frailty to challenge the gods.

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; Or, The Transformation (1798) is the American Romantic successor of the Faustian tradition. Innovatively employing the myths of Icarus and Narcissus in its exploration of the Faustian hero's dark psyche, Wieland is the precursor of the psychological tales of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and others.¹³ The two myths not only are subjacent to the Icarus complexes inherent in the elder Wieland and his son Theodore, but are also thematic and, to a lesser extent, structural entities as well. Brown's Wieland achieves an effective synthesis of the two myths so that they become psychological configurations which dominate and reflect both Wielands' Faustian endeavors. Wieland is more than a novel about the madness of two men; it is an artistic, literary structuring of that madness.¹⁴ To examine Wieland is to explore the Icarian-Narcissistic elements which pervade the novel and which expose the dark and terrible labyrinth of Faustian existence.

I

The first chapter of the novel reveals the beginning of the elder Wieland's Icarian nature. A brooding and remorseful man, he “spent all his time pent up in a gloomy apartment, or traversing narrow and crowded streets” until he discovered the book of the Comisards and the Bible.¹⁵ The knowledge he finds in these works lifts him to the apex of ecstasy as often as it drops him into the abyss of fear. Thus he experiences the ascensionism and the anticipation of falling which are symptomatic of the Icarus complex. As Brown writes: “He was alternately agitated by fear and ecstasy. He imagined himself beset by the snares of a spiritual foe, and that his security lay in ceaseless watchfulness and prayer” (p. 15). But the elder Wieland becomes possessed by this “spiritual foe,” which he calls his Deity, and after emigrating to America and settling on the Schuylkill River (near Philadelphia), he builds a temple for it. Set on a cliff above the river, the temple “was no more than a circular area, twelve feet in diameter, whose flooring was the rock, cleared of moss and shrubs, and exactly levelled, edged by twelve Tuscan columns, and covered by an undulating dome” (p. 18). By constructing the temple on the bluff above the river, the elder Wieland manifests not only his growing religious fanaticism but also an Icarian fondness for high places. The temple, then, becomes a monument to his religious ecstasy, to his Icarian soaring.

In spite of old Wieland's fantastical imagination and its accompanying religious fanaticism, he never insists that his wife, his two children—Clara and Theodore—or anyone else worship as he does. In fact:

His deportment to others was full of charity and mildness. A sadness perpetually overspread his features, but was unmingled with sternness or discontent. The tones of his voice, his gestures, his steps, were all in tranquil uniform. His conduct was characterized by a certain forebearance and humility, which secured the esteem of those to whom his tenets were most obnoxious. They might call him a fanatic and a dreamer, but they could not deny their veneration to his invincible candour and invariable integrity. His own belief of rectitude was the foundation of his happiness.

(p. 19)

The old man's appearance as a fair and charitable man is misleading, however. For as he substitutes his fanaticism for earthly reality, he becomes more and more alienated from his family: the world of his Deity is his primary concern, the world of men secondary. Yet one must not forget that he had knowledge of his Deity, and that, in spite of his overt fanaticism, he knew what other men did not know; he had gained access to an electrifying spiritual world. It is not important that he never reveals the mysteries of this other world. What is important is that knowledge of the Deity's world came only after he turned away from the human world.

But, as with all Icarians, his ecstasy, his happiness does not last. The anticipation of falling is always present:

Suddenly the sadness that constantly attended him was deepened. Sighs, and even tears, sometimes escaped him. To the expostulations of his wife he seldom answered anything. When he designed to be communicative, he hinted that his peace of mind was flown, in consequence of deviation from his duty. A command had been laid upon him, which he had delayed to perform. He felt as if a certain period of hesitation and reluctance had been allowed him, but that this period was passed. He was no longer permitted to obey. The duty assigned to him was transferred, in consequence to his disobedience, to another, and all that remained was to endure the penalty.

(p. 20)

The ultimate penalty is, of course, death; but for the elder Wieland, Icarian that he is, it is really the fall from his former ethereal fantasy that is most painful. Unable to sustain the ecstatic soaring quality between himself and his Deity, he believes he has lost the Deity's favor and has been cast down:

He did not describe the penalty. It appeared to be nothing more for some time than a sense of wrong. This was sufficiently acute, and was aggravated by the belief that his offence was incapable of expiation. No one could contemplate the agonies which he seemed to suffer without the deepest compassion. Time, instead of lightening the burden, appeared to add to it. At length he hinted to his wife that his end was near. His imagination did not prefigure the mode or the time of his decease, but was fraught with an incurable persuasion that his death was at hand. He was likewise haunted by the belief that the kind of death that awaited him was strange and terrible. His anticipations were thus far vague and indefinite: but they sufficed to poison every moment of his being and devote him to ceaseless anguish.

(p. 20)

But the old man's haunting premonitions of his “strange and terrible” death are only partly illustrative of his final suffering. The death itself is also symbolic of the terrible consequences of his dark knowledge. On a night when his inquietude is the greatest, he is mortally injured by a severe blow and vicious burns. Of the mysterious circumstances which occurred that night, only this is revealed:

It appeared, that while engaged in silent orisons, with thoughts full of confusion and anxiety, a faint gleam suddenly shot athwart the apartment. His fancy immediately pictured to itself a person bearing a lamp. It seemed to come from behind. He was in the act of turning to examine the visitant, when his right arm received a blow from a heavy club. At the same instant, a very bright spark was seen to light upon his clothes. In a moment, the whole was reduced to ashes.

(p. 26)

His is a lingering, stinking, horrible death of fever, delirium, and “insupportable exhalations and crawling putrefaction” (p. 26). As Icarus was destroyed by the heat of the sun, old Wieland dies from spontaneous combustion—explosion and fire—as if fulfilling his tormented apocalyptic vision.¹⁶

In the interval between old Wieland's death and young Theodore Wieland's own fanatical transformation, the elder Wieland's wife dies. Clara and Theodore are raised by a maiden aunt and remain at the family home where they are educated away from “the corruption and tyranny of colleges and boarding schools” (p. 28). The isolation of their youth continues into their adulthood despite the coming of Catharine [sic] Pleyel, who becomes Theodore's wife, and later of Henry, Catharine's brother. In the “six years of uninterrupted happiness” (p. 34) following their marriage, Theodore and Catharine have four children and become the guardians of fourteen-year-old Louisa Conway. Suddenly the isolated tranquility of their lives is broken by the mysterious Carwin who, unknown to the others, practices ventriloquism—a practice which helps precipitate Theodore Wieland's transformation from eccentric scholar to homicidal maniac and suicide.

Carwin, however, is only the catalyst: Theodore Wieland is his own executioner. To understand completely how and why Wieland operates, one must closely examine the major components of his Icarus complex—his Narcissism and Icarian ascensionism. For these, the inner workings of his psyche outwardly expressed, not only make him the extraordinary fictional character he is, but also set the Icarian rise-fall pattern that carries throughout the novel.

Wieland, like Narcissus, becomes the victim of his egocentrism and, like Icarus, attempts to soar above human frailty. Wieland's turn inward, as well as his desire to raise himself above all mortals, originates from two acceptable civilized endeavors—scholarship and religion. Although the younger Wieland's drive for knowledge exceeds his father's in its relentlessness, it parallels the traditional forms of which the reader is familiar in both Marlowe's and Goethe's Fausts: “My brother was an indefatigable student,” writes Clara, and adds that “the chief object of his veneration was Cicero” (p. 32). This mention of Wieland's scholarly character takes on a new importance when one remembers that Cicero was also an egoist who sought perfection in his arguments. And Wieland is not content just to understand the works of his Latin hero: “He was anxious to discover the gestures and cadences with which they ought to be delivered. He was very scrupulous in selecting a true scheme of pronunciation for the Latin tongue, and in adapting it to the words of his darling writer” (p. 32). One soon discovers to what depths Wieland immerses himself in his studies, and in what inane results he glorifies: “His favorite occupation consisted in embellishing his rhetoric with all the properties of gesticulation and utterance. Not contented with this, he was diligent in settling and restoring the purity of the text. For this end, he collected all the editions and commentaries that could be procured, and employed months of severe study in exploring and comparing them. He never betrayed more satisfaction than when he made a discovery of this kind” (p. 33). Totally committing himself to the rational mechanics of scholarship, Wieland is actually engaged in producing trivia. His study is merely for his own self-glorification.

But academic excellence is not enough to satisfy Wieland's ultimate metaphysical goals. He is like Goethe's Faust who realizes that

Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast,
And one is stiving to forsake its brother.
Unto the world in grossly loving zest,
With clinging tendrils, one adheres;
The other rises forcibly in quest
Of rarefied ancestral spheres.

(I, 1112-1117; p. 145; my italics)

In evidence here are the two souls, or Selves, of Faustian man. One Self recognizes the earthly concerns of human love and responsibility; the other, trapped in the dark web of the ego, advances toward the forbidden realms of the gods. Like Faust, Wieland wants absolute truth; unlike Faust, however, Wieland turns toward religion for ultimate knowledge and truth and becomes an adamant Calvinist.

Characteristic of Wieland's basic Calvinism is a marked distrust of society-at-large and a constant distrust of his own intelligence. He permits himself only the company of his family and a few select friends, and he is mistrustful of anything foreign—his inherited European estates, for example. His brooding over religious matters, however, destroys his intellectual awareness to the extent that he is in a constant quandary whether or not to trust even his senses when he hears the voice. While all of this is occurring, he remains, curiously enough, exhilarated—his enlarged Calvinism transforming into a soaring, destructive fanaticism as he slowly succumbs to the belief that he is in personal contact with God.

Wieland's religious fanaticism, then, is really his ruling passion. Infused as he is with the belief that his father's death was the result of a “direct and supernatural decree” (p. 45), Wieland can only believe that the voice he hears for the first time in the temple is God's. (It is really Carwin using ventriloquism to keep from being discovered.) This first voice incident catalyzes Wieland's religious fanaticism with his Narcissistic tendency and instigates his Icarian leap. In other words, Wieland's inward Narcissism is the nucleus of his outward Icarian release. Thus, the extent of Wieland's fanaticism must be understood in terms of his perception of the significance of the voice for him. Clara observes that “the will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusion on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved, it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding.”¹⁷ The reader along with Wieland discovers the presence of the young man's dark Self—one which writhes in Narcissistic-Icarian tension. And there is evidence that Wieland feels the influence of his dark Self, for shortly after the first voice incident, on a dark night, he wishes aloud that “not only the physical but moral night be dispelled” (p. 46).

Wieland's metamorphosis has now begun; the voice has inextricably enmeshed him in the entanglements of his fanatical religious uncertainty.¹⁸ When Clara asks him what he thinks of the incident, he exclaims: “There is no determinate way in which the subject can be viewed. Here is an effect; but the cause is utterly inscrutable. To suppose a deception will not do. Such is possible, but there are twenty other suppositions more probable. They must all be set aside before we reach that point” (p. 46). What is important about this first encounter with the voice is that it marks the beginning of Wieland's transformation from eccentric scholar to fanatical madman. It marks the cessation of his scholarly pursuits and the increase of his religious pursuits. It is the point from which he begins his long journey into his dark Self, the point at which he is so powerfully captivated by his ego that he cannot escape himself nor concern himself with others, the point from which he must begin his escape from the earth of men to fit the self-imposed majesty that will find favor in the eyes of his inscrutable God; it is the point from which his Narcissism and his Icarianism become more and more intense.

Because Wieland is unwilling to suspect he is being deceived by a human voice, his fantasy now governs his actions, and the voice of his imagination demands that he kill his wife. The murder obviously illustrates the extreme violence of Wieland's Faustianism. But such an act, he believes, will dramatize his religious faith and propel him into the ethereal realm of God. After strangling Catharine, Wieland is raised to heights of religious rapture, as if he truly had left the earth of frail men:

This was a moment of triumph. Thus had I successfully subdued the stubbornness of human passions; the victim which had been demanded was given; the deed was done past recall.

I lifted the corpse in my arms and laid it on the bed. I gazed upon it with delight. Such was the elation of my thoughts, that I even broke into laughter. I clapped my hands and exclaimed, “It is done! My sacred duty is fulfilled! To that I have sacrificed, O my God! thy last and best gift, my wife!”

For a while I thus soared above frailty.

(pp. 196-197; my italics)

But Wieland's rapture quickly subsides to sorrow—the expected human emotional reaction: “I imagined I had set myself forever beyond the reach of selfishness: but my imaginations were false. This rapture quickly subsided” (p. 197; my italics). This resulting premature descent from ecstasy is unexpected and almost unbearable: “I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and outrageous sorrow. The breath of heaven that sustained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into mere man” (p. 197). The ideal has not been reached; the sacrifice is not complete if he is to have perfect spiritual understanding, or so he believes; and he is given another chance at the total rapture he experienced earlier:

I thank my God that this degeneracy was transient,—that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, and was calm. My wife was dead; but I reflected that though this source of human consolation was closed, yet others were still open. If the transports of a husband were no more, the feelings of a father had still scope for exercise. When remembrance of their mother should excite too keen a pang, I would look upon them and be comforted.

While I revolved these ideas, new warmth flowed in upon my heart—I was wrong. These feelings were the growth of selfishness. Of this I was not aware, and, to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, a new effulgence and a new mandate were necessary.

From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray that was shot into the room. A voice spake like that which I had before heard:—“Thou has done well. But all is not done—the sacrifice is incomplete—thy children must be offered—they must perish with their mother!—.”

(pp. 197-198)

Although Doctor Faustus and Faust endeavored to reach their material-spiritual nirvanas at the expense of themselves and loved ones, Wieland is the first to brutally murder so many to escape his mortal boundaries. Marlowe's Faustus is damned; Goethe's Faust, although later reprieved, destroys Gretchen; but Wieland annihilates his whole family, his wife and all his blood heirs—Benjamin, William, Constantine, little Clara—and even his ward, Louisa Conway.

It is the savagery of Wieland's Faustianism—its utter violence and total destructiveness—that sets him apart from his European predecessors and reflects the New World's violent temper.¹⁹ Wieland's terrible crimes—the result of apocalyptic brooding coupled with fanatical pursuit of an ideal—point the way for protagonists of numerous later American novels. Some even surpass Wieland as does Ahab, who sacrifices his ship's company for Moby-Dick. But the Americanization of Faust is Brown's creation, and Wieland is the first Faust in our literature to use such totally destructive means to achieve his ends.

Like all Faustian men, however, and like his father before him, Wieland anticipates his fall. After murdering his wife, he admits that his aspirations to set himself “beyond the reach of selfishness” (p. 197) were false. His “breath of heaven” withdrawn, he falls only to rise again by murdering his children. His final anticipation of falling occurs during his last confrontation with Clara. In perhaps his most rational moments after the murders, he asks: “Sister, … I have acted poorly my part in this world. What thinkest thou? Shall I do better in the next?” (p. 253). Later he exclaims: “My wife and babes have gone before. Happy wretches! I have sent you to repose, and ought not to linger behind” (p. 253). He has become destructive to the point of self-destruction, and, perhaps consciously, he anticipates his own suicide.

Because he falls from his God's favor, Wieland, like all Faustian men, is finally “restored to the perception of truth”—the human truth of his delusion and depravity. It is not the fall but the abrupt realization of his own human truth that destroys him. For Wieland's fall and ultimate sorrow obliterate all his links with the human and spiritual world. When Wieland believes Carwin's admonishing words (“Man of errors …”) to be God's, both the human and the ethereal worlds are negated. Is he lunatic? Has he cherished merely a delusion? These questions seem to race through his astonished and perplexed mind. He mutters incomprehensibly an appeal to heaven which “implied doubt as to the nature of the impulse that hitherto had guided him, and questioned whether he had acted in consequence of insane perceptions” (p. 260).

But Wieland is unable to bear even these flickerings of doubt. Before Carwin had spoken Wieland had been ready to murder his sister. Now he stumbles randomly around the room; his face twitches, and his lips move but utter no sound. He is beyond help as a human being, beyond fitting himself into the human spectrum, and beyond bearing the excruciating abstractions of his mind:

For a time his movements seemed destitute of purpose. If he walked; if he turned; if his fingers were entwined with each other; if his hands were pressed against opposite sides of his head with a force sufficient to crush it into pieces; it was to tear his mind from self-contemplation; to waste his thoughts on external objects.

(p. 261)

Even Clara can see no purpose for him to go on living:

Oh that thy frenzy had never been cured! that thy madness, with its blissful visions, would return! or, if that must not be, that thy scene would hasten to a close!—that death would cover thee with its oblivion!

What can I wish for thee? Thou who hast vied with the great Preacher of thy faith in sanctity of motives, and in elevation above sensual and selfish! Thou whom the fate has changed into parricide and savage! Can I wish for the continuance of thy being? No.

(p. 261)

It is as if the word “No” now symbolizes for Wieland the complete loss of his Icarian gamble. Only his ego remains, and he presses his hands against his head as if to smother it within the fierce recesses of his mind. Then, his Faustian role complete, in a frenzied yet enlightened gesture, he grasps his knife and plunges it into his neck.

II

If Wieland is an exploration of the Faustian hero's dark psyche, it is Clara's point of view that reveals that darkness, for she not only narrates nearly all the novel, she is also her brother's Narcissistic image. It is by Clara that the reader comes to understand Wieland. And although there is hardly an implication of incest between Wieland and Clara, Brown's Wieland is the first American novel to disclose the Narcissism between brother and sister. Clara virtually mirrors herself in her brother's early happiness and final despair; the more his mind becomes distorted by his fanatical delusions, the more she reflects his grotesque agony: “My state was little different from that of my brother. I entered, as it were, into his thoughts. My heart was visited and rent by his pangs” (pp. 260-261). Even after Wieland kills himself, Clara seems mesmerized by his dead body—the Narcissistic reflection in utter refraction: “I was incapable of sparing a look or thought from the ruin that was spread at my feet” (p. 262).

This sibling Narcissism in American fiction is based on subtle psychological factors, rather than on physical attraction between brother and sister. Although William Hill Brown—no relation—introduced the incest motif in the American novel in The Power of Sympathy (1789), it is Brockden Brown's treatment of sibling Narcissism that is used later by Poe with Roderick and Madeline Usher (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) and, even more strangely and more dynamically, by Faulkner with Henry and Judith Sutpen (Absalom, Absalom!), Horace and Narcissa Benbow (Sanctuary and Sartoris), and Quentin and Caddy Compson (The Sound and the Fury). Each of these brothers finds an alter-ego in his sister; conversely, each sister sees in her brother a reflection of herself.

Wieland's own Narcissism is reflected not only by his sister, Clara, but by his wife, Catharine. Together they form a mutual admiration society, acting out their innate Narcissism. Clara herself attests to this fact: “Every day added strength to the triple bonds that united us. We gradually withdrew ourselves from the society of others, and found every moment irksome that was not devoted to each other” (pp. 28-29). Outwardly they seem representative of the highest ideals of civilized man. Yet the closed triangle of their exclusive man-sister-wife relationship actually represents a retreat from the reality of the outside world. At the same time, of course, it represents an advance toward the prison of the individual ego.

When Henry Pleyel joins their select group, he merely becomes another reflection in the mutual mirror. Clara tells of his place in the group: “This new friend, though before his arrival we were sensible to no vacuity, could not now be spared. His departure would occasion a void which nothing could fill, and which would produce insupportable regret” (p. 34). The little society now exhibits major characteristics of Narcissism—withdrawal from the outside world, submersion into the ego, and a complete selfishness. Like the mythic Narcissus, the group becomes infatuated with images and not with actualities. All four believe the illusion that they are somehow immune to the harsh realities of the outside world and that, because they put complete trust in their own rationality, they are somehow infallible as well. Furthermore, the group Narcissism is indicative of the tensions extant in Wieland between his Narcissistic plunge (inner egotism) and his Icarian rise-fall (outer egotism).

The group's central figure is always, of course, Wieland. Not only is he the primary figure which projects the Narcissistic image to and from Clara, Catharine, and Pleyel, but he is also the energizing force of those images. From him and through him the destructive elements of Narcissism emanate. Indeed, Wieland's Narcissism is so strong that he not only represents the tyranny of the harsh outside world the group had attempted to shut out, but he also, ironically, symbolizes the tyranny within the group and within the human mind. In other words, “Wieland … becomes a symbol for civilized man's savage potential” (Kimball, p. 215).

To understand the composition of Wieland's savagery, one must understand that, coming as it does from his ego, it is directed primarily against Catharine and Clara—his Narcissistic reflections—the two people who are most like himself, and whom he most loves. Narcissus loved his reflection and perished because he did. Wieland's own Narcissism parallels the myth, then exceeds it; and the results are even more disastrous. The reflection he sees of himself in his sister and wife is not enough to maintain the majesty of his ego. Because his Narcissism is compounded by religious fanaticism, he must seek his alter-ego not in human-kind but in his God. He therefore must destroy his earthly reflections. One view purports that Wieland's religious fanaticism is “a practical companion piece to Abraham's trial of which S. Kierkegaard brings so many versions in Fear and Trembling, seeing in it the highest expression of faith.”²⁰ But this view seems insupportable because, by sacrificing his family, Wieland seeks not so much to express his rigid faith as to rise above his human state. His actions are more to satisfy his self-love than his love of God. Although Abraham's love of his son and Wieland's love of his family are diametrically opposed to the love of God, Wieland's self-enamoration is even more opposed to God's love. Abraham is not a Narcissist, whereas Wieland's actions reveal that he has all the components of the Narcissist—“excessive egocentricity, self-complacency, and self-absorption.”²¹ Most obvious is that Wieland, like Narcissus “rejects love and then becomes fatally infatuated with his own reflection” (Neumann, p. 89). He finally turns away both from Catharine and Clara and from the importunate demands that must be met when one loves others rather than himself. Thus Wieland fully rejects the love of his wife and sister and sets out to destroy them.

While he succeeds in killing his wife, he does not succeed in murdering Clara who is the primary reflection of his Narcissism. Wieland's attempt to kill Clara can be read as an attempt to destroy this major image of himself; therefore, it is an attempt to strike out against his earthly self in order to attain demi-god status. His alter-ego (Clara) must be destroyed if his own ego is to triumph. Erich Neumann has written of the Narcissist's “preservation of a relation to himself in opposition to love of the environment and of an outside object.”²² Wieland, by killing his sister, will preserve his egocentric relation to himself, thereby cancelling out the love of his sister. Searching for the rationale to kill her, he exhorts: “Thou angel whom I was wont to worship! fearest thou, my sister, for thy life?” (p. 263; my italics). That he will sacrifice Clara, whom he worshipped as the other half of his Narcissistic reflection, illustrates how total his Narcissism has become: he no longer needs the outward, physical reflection of himself. And, interestingly enough, when Wieland cannot kill his sister—he is stopped by Carwin's voice—he kills himself. It cannot be otherwise. Under the tenets of his religious philosophy, Wieland's self-preservation depends on his murdering Clara. Without her sacrifice Wieland will be confronted with the reality of his actions, and that reality, for him, would be unendurable. If his ego in attempting to soar cannot have its sacrifice, it must, paradoxically, sacrifice itself. His suicide, then, is the ultimate plunge into Narcissism.

III

Along with the Narcissism theme, the Icarian rise-fall pattern functions throughout Wieland. Icarian soaring (ascensionism), manifested by Wieland's fanaticism and evident throughout as he experiences spasmodic bursts of enthusiasm and flights of fancy, is countered by Icarian falling (unwanted descents), manifested by the depressive “lows” Wieland experiences after each inordinate event. These unwanted descents are, of course, important to the novel's overall effect; but Brown continually keeps Wieland's ascensionism before the reader. This ascensionism is most obvious on the night he kills the members of his family, as he voices in confessing the murders before the court:

For a time my contemplations soared above earth and its inhabitants. I stretched forth my hands; I lifted my eyes, and exclaimed, “Oh, that I might be admitted to thy presence! that mine were the supreme delight of knowing thy will, and of performing it!—the blissful privilege of direct communication with thee, and of listening to the audible enunciation of thy pleasure!”

(p. 190; my italics)

Completely bewildered by his flight on the night of the murders, he confesses “that the relations of time and space were almost obliterated from my understanding” (p. 190). As time and space dissolve in the ether of his ego, Wieland believes he sees a spectre, which he describes as “a lustre,” an “irradiation,” “the element of heaven,” “a fiery stream”: “The lineaments of that being whose veil was now lifted and whose visage beamed upon my sight, no hues of pencil or of language can portray” (p. 191). It is this spectre—evidence of the hallucinatory effects Wieland's ascensionism has had upon him—that commands Wieland to slay his wife. If not totally separated from reality, Wieland experiences at least a terrible distortion of it.

After Wieland is captured and imprisoned, he relentlessly attempts to regain the ecstatic heights he achieved on the night of the murders. Indeed, Wieland's two escapes from prison are actually physical movements upward and are indicative of his obsessive ascensionism. It is as though to soar again he must first ascend from the dungeon. Furthermore, the escapes themselves are characteristically ascensionistic because of the fantastic aura about them—as if denizens of the supernatural world had helped Wieland to execute the escapes. His first escape is almost superhuman, occurring as if “by some miracle,” since “his chains, and the watchfulness of his guards, were redoubled” (p. 215). Then he is captured at his sister's house. But his second escape, no less difficult, is more successful, and he finds Clara (with Carwin) in her room. His two escapes have had but one objective—to slay his sister and experience again the ecstasy of acting out what he believes is his God's will: “Father! I thank thee. This is thy guidance. Hither thou hast led me, that I might perform thy will. Yet let me not err; let me hear again thy messenger! … Poor girl! a dismal fate has set its mark upon thee. Thy life is demanded as a sacrifice. Prepare thee to die” (p. 246). He has risen from the dungeon to attempt again to soar above human frailty.

Yet even when Carwin admits to Wieland that he, Carwin, was the source of the voices (though he was not the source of the voice which compelled Wieland to slay his family), Wieland's ascensionism remains. He is still caught in the majesty of his ego: “Thinkest thou [Clara] that thy death was sought to gratify malevolence? No. I am pure from all stain. I believed that my God was my mover!” (p. 253). Wieland is still driven to kill Clara, and he attempts to rationalize Carwin's participation in his own actions, thus exhibiting the inescapability of his Icarian torment: “Clara … thy death must come. This minister [Carwin] is evil, but he from whom his commission was received is God. Submit then with all thy wonted resignation to a decree that cannot be reversed or resisted. Mark the clock. Three minutes are allowed to thee, in which to call up thy fortitude and prepare thee for thy doom” (p. 255). But Wieland is deterred from murdering his sister by Carwin, who, during the three-minutes, had left the room. Ironically, Carwin uses his ventriloquism, which earlier had helped perpetrate Wieland's fantasy, to stop the murder: “A voice, louder than human organs could produce, shriller than language can depict, burst from the ceiling and commanded him—to hold!” (p. 259). All that is left is Carwin's final admonishment: ‘Shake off thy frenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be lunatic no longer” (p. 259; my italics).

The ascension into rationality and humanness is, for Wieland, a descent. And here, in the last climactic pages of the novel, the Icarian pattern of rise and fall fully asserts itself: “Fallen from his lofty and heroic station; now finally restored to the perception of truth; weighed to earth by the recollection of his own deeds; consoled no longer by a consciousness of rectitude for the loss of offspring and wife,—a loss for which he was indebted to his own misguided hand,—Wieland was transformed at once into the man of sorrows!” (p. 260; my italics).²³ Further ascension is no longer possible. Stripped of his delusions, Wieland is transfigured back to earthly man, one “weighed to earth by the recollection of his own deeds.” The voice only Wieland could hear had demanded he sacrifice his family; now, with the symbolic gesture of thrusting his knife into his throat, he silences the voice forever.²⁴ Wieland's ultimate Narcissistic plunge is therefore no less the inevitable Icarian fall—the fall from the soaring heights of ecstasy and the frenzied rejoicing in the total ego to the self-destruction of the complete “man of sorrows.”

Notes

1. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1962), p. 112.

2. I refer here solely to the Aeschylean Prometheus—the rebellious, suffering champion of man—rather than to the cunning, trickster Prometheus of Hesiod's Theogeny or to the Roman Prometheus plasticator who, as M. K. Joseph observes, in the “Introduction,” Mary W. Shelley, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), p. viii, “was said to have created or re-created mankind by animating a figure made of clay.”

3. The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1932), I, 183.

4. All students of the Gothic novel owe much to Mario Praz's invaluable study, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2nd ed. (New York: World, 1967). My study here of the Faustian nature of the Gothic villain is but a departure from, not a refutation of, Praz's general thesis.

5. See Daniel M. Ogilvie, “The Icarus Complex,” Psychology Today, 2 (1968), 31-34, 67; and Henry A. Murray, “American Icarus,” Clinical Studies of Personality, ed. A. Burton and R. F. Harris (New York: Harper, 1955), pp. 614-641. It seems extremely fortuitous that as the Romanticists seized upon the ancient myths, so too have twentieth-century psychologists seized upon them and applied them to the twentieth-century experience.

6. “Ancient Myths and Modern Man,” Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (New York: Dell, 1969), p. 112.

7. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, ed. Frederick S. Boas (London: Methuen, 1949), I,i,15-22; pp. 56-57.

8. Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), I, 366-367; p. 93. Hereafter, references to this edition will appear in the text.

9. Harold Bloom, in the “Afterword” to his edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: New American Library, 1965), p. 215. In determining that Narcissism is an active force working upon the Gothic protagonist, I am referring mainly to the most popular story of Narcissus—the story of the beautiful youth who, falling in love with his own reflection in a pool, becomes so enamored with himself that he rejects the love of everyone else. Pausanias' story of Narcissus—the story of the love between Narcissus and his twin sister—does, however, influence my discussion of sibling Narcissism later in the essay.

10. “The Images of Orpheus and Narcissus,” Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 159-171. I am using this essay only as it pertains to Narcissism; I am not here concerned with the connections of the Faustian hero of the Gothic novel with the Orpheus myth.

11. The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1954), p. 123.

12. “The Process of Individuation,” Man and His Symbols, ed. Carl G. Jung (New York: Dell, 1969), p. 234.

13. I am, of course, aware that Wieland has its English successors—among them Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brönte's Wuthering Heights (1847).

14. Much has been written about the madness in Wieland. Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: America's Gothic Novelist (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), p. 195, writes that Wieland is a terror story organized, “unlike most Gothic tales, around the theme of mental balance and the ease with which that balance is destroyed.” Fred Lewis Pattee, in his “Introduction” to Wieland; Or, The Transformation (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), p. xl, calls the novel “a study in dementia,” in which the reader holds the key to the Wieland family's abnormality. William M. Manley, “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland,” American Literature, 35 (1964), 319, suggests that “the disturbed mind faltering in darkness … could well stand as a metaphor for the entire action of this strange tale.” And Kenneth Bernard, “Charles Brockden Brown,” Minor American Novelists, ed. Charles Alva Hoyt (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1970), p. 5, has labeled Theodore Wieland as a creature springing “from the nonrational corners of the mind,” whose sustenance comes from “darkness and mystery.”

15. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; Or, The Transformation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 14. Hereafter, references to this edition will appear in the text.

16. Much of what Ann Y. Wilkinson, “Bleak House: From Faraday to Judgment Day,” ELH, 34 (1967), 225-247, says about Krook's spontaneous combustion and the apocalyptic vision of Bleak House can be applied to the elder Wieland. See also Elizabeth Wiley, “Four Strange Cases,” Dickensian, 58 (1962), 120-125, who discusses spontaneous combustion in Wieland, Bleak House, Marryat's Jacob Faithful, and Melville's Redburn.

17. P. 45. Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA, 77 (1962), 50-51, has correctly pointed out that Clara's observation here sums up the whole psychology of Wieland.

18. See Paul Levine, “The American Novel Begins,” American Scholar, 36 (1966), 134-148, who suggests that Wieland, in a sense, resembles Kafka's Metamorphosis.

19. Arthur Kimball, “Savages and Savagism: Brockden Brown's Dramatic Irony,” Studies in Romanticism, 6 (1967), 214, has pointed out Brown's skepticism of man's innate virtue and of the overly optimistic hopes for the new world: “that from the hidden corners of man's mind there is likely to issue as much darkness as light. That darkness, in the form of savage violence, is a central theme in Wieland. …” Ziff, p. 57, writes that in Wieland Brown “penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.”

20. John G. Frank, “The Wieland Family in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland,” Monatshefte, 42 (1950), 350-351.

21. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954,] p. 122.

22. Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1959), pp. 185-186.

23. Although Wieland's transformation into a “man of sorrows” seems to be a reference to Christ—the traditional “man of sorrows”—there is no other evidence in the novel that Brown is suggesting an analogue between Wieland and Christ.

24. Kimball, p. 216, suggests that Wieland's stabbing himself in the neck is an “attempt to kill the voice.”