SOURCE: Kreyling, Michael. “Construing Brown's Wieland: Ambiguity and Derridean ‘Freeplay.’” Studies in the Novel 14, no. 1 (spring 1982): 43-54.

[In the following essay, Kreyling explores Wieland's decentered universe by means of the Derridean theory of endless freeplay.]

Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.

Emerson wrote in the hortative mode. This passage from “Self-Reliance” must be read as a wish in the blank face of fact: would that the voluntary acts of the mind and one's involuntary perceptions were as surely distinguishable as night and day; would that a perfect faith in either one, or in the distinction between the two, were possible. Thus would ambiguity be banished. Good and evil, truth and fiction, reality and appearance would appear without disguises. Language in this Emersonian wish-world would also be perfect, for our voluntary mental acts (words) would never fail to find the link with our involuntary perceptions.

The wish erects a wall around language and is expressive of the great fear that language reveal itself as the master of man and not his tool. Language, as an act subject to the human will, is quarantined in the conscious Emersonian mind, restricted from any residence whatever in the unconscious. In his wish to keep language in the realm of the conscious, Emerson places himself at odds with the romantic mode. As Northrop Frye has observed, the romantic mode liberates language to play in the realms of the pre- and un-conscious.¹ That Emerson, as spokesman for an American tradition of optimistic idealism, is an authoritarian realist where language is concerned, seems to be an assertion that cuts against the grain. But Emerson is a brilliant spot in a long American tradition supporting the authority and objective reality of the Ideal, for underlying that tradition is the religious belief in the Word as God. Take away Emerson's distinction (that is, consider the word as unrestricted in its movement through consciousness, fix no residence for the word on a level of the human psyche) and the Word is demoted to a word. The center of the universe vanishes.

The darker works of Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne risk such a decentered universe. But the process of its creation—or decreation—can first be seen years earlier in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation.² For the significance of the subtitle let me suggest the transformation (or decreation) of a centered universe to a decentered one. And let me use some recent and still largely controversial critical methodology to make my point.

II

Wieland, published in 1798, has fascinated critics of American fiction. It is, as Donald Ringe has written, a “remarkable achievement” in spite of frequent lapses in craft and “ludicrous” convolutions in diction.³Wieland challenges the critic to make coherent sense of a narrative that often dramatizes the failure of sense-making by “rational” characters who are confused and ultimately mentally “blasted” by their failure.

The consensus of criticism of Wieland calls this theme in the novel ambiguity, and indicates by the choice of that term that there is a legitimate meaning or truth available to the characters if they can only discern it. The critical approach is usually to discern couplings of concepts, forces, or values which become one concept, force, or value through the unmasking of the other as untrue or evil. In this approach most critics have shown their staunch support of the Emersonian distinction. They set limits to the term “ambiguity” by analyzing it as the issue of a defect in “involuntary perception.” Once that defect is repaired, the interpretations hold, the real good, or the desirable alternative, is instantly perceived and chosen. The center is thereby restored, and the world spins on smoothly once again.

Ringe, one of the first critics to follow the literary historians who had placed Wieland in the tradition of the English sentimental novel, finds that the characters of Wieland confuse appearance and reality (p. 27). Larzer Ziff sees Calvinist depravity struggling with the eighteenth-century's optimistic rationalistic psychology.⁴ William Manly sees “objective logic and subjective terror” locked in a battle which the former happily wins.⁵ Michael Davitt Bell sees a division between sincerity and duplicity, respectively buttressed by “Lockean rationalism and the power of the irrational.”⁶ Michael Butler reads Wieland as an investigation of the competing claims of social and private man, with a resolution favorable to “some ultimately optimistic ideas about social man's limitation and capabilities.”⁷ John Cleman and Mark Seltzer adopt a more skeptical view of the novel; they doubt that Wieland is a text susceptible of conclusive interpretation.⁸

This digest of critical interpretations of Wieland is impressive in at least two ways. It testifies to ongoing critical concern in Brown's novel, and it illustrates how devoted is the act of interpretation to the stability of meaning. This essay, coming after much discussion, aims at a redefinition of our critical bases in ambiguity of theme and structure. My viewpoint, or beginning, is all-important, for I will try to avoid the presumption of knowable meaning in describing the nature of ambiguity in Wieland. The work of one critic who has had much to say about the nature of ambiguity in language and literature—Jacques Derrida—is central to the reading and interpretation I wish to offer. The implications of Derrida's critiques of philosophical and literary discourse are now being felt. In altering our thinking on the theme of ambiguity in literary texts, he can be of much help.

In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” Derrida attempts to define “freeplay.”⁹ His definition proceeds from another concept, that of the centered structure. The center of any structure is that part of the structure which is not subject to the substitutions of elements or terms—the structurality of structure. A centered structure, then, is one in which substitution of elements (change) is limited by the presence of the center. The notion of presence—which holds with Emersonian assurance that mind can and does act voluntarily in the control of language and knowledge—is the notion that Derrida subjects to “deconstruction.” “Freeplay” is the free substitution that, by a convention of philosophy, occurs everywhere except in the center of the structure. Derrida elaborates:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.

(p. 248)

This very anxiety, I think, is what Emerson-as-realist wishes so ardently to deny. With the perverseness of romance, however, Brown's text sets forth the very thing that the conscious mind fears: the erasure of presence-at-the-center which it has claimed for itself.

Ambiguity, it seems to me, is too often thought of as a “centered structure,” for we preserve the “reassuring certitude” that some significance will emerge. Derridean freeplay, in the present context, seems to be more radical than ambiguity. Elsewhere in his essay Derrida says:

Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence or absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around.

(pp. 263-64)

The shifting of the mind from residence in a centered structure to a decentered structure, in which freeplay describes the continuous movement or disappearance of meaning, involves a seismic upheaval. Wieland, with its variety of such shocks, is well-suited as a test of the applicability of the Derridean theory to literature.

III

The significance of the family history of the Wielands has been explored by nearly every critic who addresses the novel. It is no less crucial to the following presentation. Clara's father, desiring refuge from an amorphous gloom and a life that seems mired in meaningless routine, fatefully embraces a text attributed to the Camissards. The Camissards, Huguenot zealots who rebelled against the Catholic King of France, Louis XIV, were motivated by the visions of a few leaders to believe in personal revelation and the imminence of apocalypse. They had succumbed, in the terms of Frank Kermode's Sense of an Ending, to the consolations of apocalyptic time: the elimination of the uncertain by a divine conflation of chronos and kairos.¹⁰ There was no nonmeaning for the Camissard, no ambiguity. All occurrences testified to the imminent parousia; all signs dwelled in the glow of the transcendental signified.

The elder Wieland absorbed this apocalyptic fervor along with the certitude it imparted. He emigrated to America where he intended to convert the savages. That, he was convinced, was to be his unambiguous mission from God. But, as Larzer Ziff points out, America foiled him by making him rich instead of holy, and he lived in a prosperous gloom the rest of his life waiting for the unambiguous penalty that a thwarted God was sure to visit upon him.¹¹ He had gone into the wilderness only to be dragged back into the world's time, ordinary chronos. Vengeance came in the certain form of spontaneous combustion in his Tuscan temple overlooking the sublime Schuylkill.

The Wielands' uncle, the same admirable and rational man who picks up the pieces and fits them into a jerrybuilt explanation for Clara at the close of the novel, suspects that the fatally injured Wieland is withholding a key clue, for the story of the luminous cloud that incinerates him is, to the uncle, “an imperfect tale” (p. 20). Like Emerson, the uncle believes that whatever mysteries arise in the order of things, the order of things will solve. For Wieland père, however, the end of his life is no mystery: his sin of failure brought the Deity's inevitable retribution. Uncle Thomas Cambridge, whose surname suggests English commonsense and whose first name echoes the most famous case of doubt of parousia in the Christian Bible, is ensconced in history, the centered universe. To the Wieland children he becomes an alternative father centered in rationality.

Thus is the Wieland family determined from the outset of the novel. Signifiers and signified do not coincide, are not coeval; there are some facts for which there are no signs, and some signs which might attach to several facts. The uncle's centered universe flows over past events assuaging the anxiety of the Wieland orphans. They grow to maturity clinging to rationality and to language as a centered discourse. A center of their universe ensures order.

Theodore marries Catharine Pleyel, a girl virtually the image of his sister Clara (p. 23). Clara professes love for her sister-in-law and gradually reveals her attraction for her brother-in-law, Henry. Two pairs of brothers and sisters living in close proximity imply a premium on familiarity and order. Indeed the elder Wieland's temple, stark and empty in his day, is refurnished with a bust of Cicero and a harpsichord. Critics have placed various constructions on these two items, but that they reinforce the thrust for order and away from a previous generation's unhealthy fancy (p. 97) is not disputed.

There is, however, a decentering disaster percolating beneath the confident surface of Mettingen, and Pleyel's decomposition from “gay young rationalist”¹² to confused inquisitor is the least complicated of the several instances of its impact. A mysterious voice, first heard by Wieland alone, brings tidings to Pleyel that his beloved has died in Germany. Pleyel, who had scoffed at Wieland's faith in the voice, now fails to reject its news for him, and he withdraws into a Wielandesque moody solitude where fancy can begin the erosion of his vaunted logic. Clara, narrating these events, also jumps instantaneously to the conclusion that the voice issues from a “superhuman” source: “That there are conscious beings, besides ourselves, in existence, whose modes of activity and information surpass our own, can scarcely be denied” (p. 51). This assumption could be denied rather easily. Pleyel had done so once; he is powerless to do so again, however, when the information imparted has meaning for himself.

From this point forward Pleyel becomes a woodenheaded and woodenhearted cad. Ziff's estimation of him as Brown's sample of the sentimental hero in all of his limitations is valid.¹³ The disintegration of Pleyel also dramatizes the swiftness with which decentering can demolish “logic.”

Pleyel hears what he takes to be “evidence” that his ideal woman, Clara, has been conducting a secret and lascivious commerce with the interloper, Carwin. Placing an Emersonian “perfect faith” in these “involuntary perceptions,” he accuses Clara of lust. Clara can and does dismantle the certitude in Pleyel's interpretation by pointing out how he has permitted the involuntary and voluntary to mix. Her defense is to resort to her “character,” her good name. By all of her past life, Clara pleads (p. 138), she has composed a character which shall be signified by her name. Her argument implies a kind of social language in which all agree to collaborate the better to know one another and thereby to preserve the community in and through which each has his or her existence. By accepting contrary evidence—Clara later calls the evidence “signals”—Pleyel commits an elementary act of treason. He abets deconstruction in the “language” of character by allowing freeplay to infiltrate the “fundamental ground” which had hitherto been sacrosanct. With the substitution of each new piece of “evidence” Pleyel surrenders more of the center.

Pleyel's defection, however, is the least of Clara's worries. Wieland's utter destruction, likened by one critic to the noble fall of Icarus,¹⁴ presents Clara with a more immediate shock. She had venerated her brother's intellect, had worshipped him as the first among men. To see him driven mad by doubt and brutalized by solitary confinement in prison breaks Clara's tough and admirable mind.

Theodore Wieland has obviously been deeply affected by the mysterious voice that disrupts the Mettingen idyll. His symptoms have been present from the early pages. He had inherited his sire's gloom and, with his name, the father's preference for a theo-centered universe. Hearing the disembodied voice before any of the others gives Wieland fils a head start toward decentering. He maintains, in the face of Pleyel's mild derision, that he did hear the voice of his wife, although he knows she did not and could not have uttered the sounds that he heard. Wieland subsequently tells his sister that “‘the understanding has other avenues’” besides the five senses. He will, he pledges, find the cause of the voice—for he still believes in causes and effects—by eliminating all false explanations (p. 41). But the pressure of living with a multiplicity of changing truths—freeplay—destroys him.

In the transcript of his address to the court that sentences him for the murder of his wife and children, Wieland displays the agents of his decentering. It has been more violent than Pleyel's. First he marvels to the court at the freeplay in his own name. All present have known “Wieland,” he claims, as a certain bundle of characteristics (p. 184). All that is honorable is included; all baseness is excluded. Now that sign (“Wieland”) must also admit murder and madness in the freeplay of substitutions.

He had clung to his name as an unambiguous sign, but it proved false. The center of his universe, his own consciousness, has dropped out of sight. Praying to the Word for coherence, Wieland exclaims: “‘Would that a momentary emanation from thy glory would visit me! that some unambiguous token of thy presence would salute my senses!’” (p. 187). But God, Wieland's namesake, does not speak the Word. Wieland has instead taken the antics of Carwin as a sign from the unambiguous, and the result is tragic error. When Carwin confesses that he was in fact not the speaker of the words that sent Wieland to murder his family, the decentered Theodore turns his knife upon himself as the only way to end endless freeplay.

Carwin, himself uncentered, is the presumptive center of the ordered but stricken universe of which Mettingen with its close-knit inhabitants is the emblem. His intrusion seems to cause the decomposition of this Eden; in fact, the flaws that bring it down have always been present in the fictions of its perfection.

Carwin is the antithesis of Mettingen and of all that the retreat stands for—the familiar, reliable correspondence between characteristic and character, signifier and signified. Pleyel relates Carwin's chameleonlike transformation into a Spaniard and seems astonished that Carwin could so successfully change his appearance and his identity as to fool Pleyel himself. In the light of Pleyel's own shortcomings, his acumen in assessing character must not be overvalued.

Carwin's most crucial relationship—more crucial than the murky, one-sided relationship he strikes with Wieland—is the one with Clara. The importance of their initial meeting is central to the issues of ambiguity and language. Clara is the third to hear the mysterious voice. Her brother's report of his encounter with a mysterious voice thrills her. And Pleyel's testimony leads her to believe that the voice not only possesses infallible information, but is perhaps using this information to direct fate by removing her rival for Pleyel's attention. Thus is she prepared for a more crushing fall when Carwin enters, for she has begun to permit “voluntary” and “involuntary” to fraternize.

Clara, returning to her house, sees an ill-dressed vagabond in the neighborhood but thinks little more about him. Outsiders are rare in Mettingen, but not totally unknown. She sits out of sight of her front door when a man knocks and requests of her maid, Judith, a drink of water. The voice is so hypnotically attractive that Clara's awareness is completely drawn to it. She does not hear flirtatious badinage; she hears the voice of a romantic Heathcliffean figure. She constructs a character to be consistent with the voice: “My fancy had conjured up a very different image. A form, and attitude, and garb, were instantly created worthy to accompany such elocution; but this person was, in all visible respects, the reverse of this phantom. Strange as it may seem, I could not speedily reconcile myself to this disappointment” (p. 60). The sight of the actual speaker, the neighborhood vagabond, plunges Clara into a sudden anxiety, “a fit of musing” (p. 60).

Clara had construed a character from the evidence of one sense on the premise that characteristics—tone of voice, vocabulary, rank, class—are consistent with other characteristics under the rubric of the unity of character. Wieland and Pleyel operate under the premise of the stability of the character, the word, as well. Clara implies that this is a natural or “involuntary” law for the discovery of significance, for she uses the passive verb: “were instantly created.” When the actual, Carwin, fails to coincide with the character Clara had construed, the ground beneath her construction vanishes, and she is left so “disappointed” that she is physically weakened. She finds herself caught in the game, as Derrida would say, not the toy of suppressed fantasies or “depraved” senses, but of the very language by which she is to know the difference between corrupted senses and truth. Clara experiences in this moment the “freeplay” in language and its precedence over meaning.

The imperative to interpret still holds, however. After Clara hears the mysterious voice, she presents us with a sample of her reasoning. At first she reasons that the evidence of her ear—a voice so close that it seems to originate from beside her on her pillow—is a mere figment, “some casual noise transformed into the voice of a human nature” (p. 65). This is recognizable as Pleyel's logical tack. With the second occurrence, however, Clara is not so steadfast. Threats of death and worse unseat her composure and she flees to her brother's house, fainting at his door. A voice rouses the men, Wieland and Pleyel, who find nothing in Clara's dwelling to explain the situation. Pleyel then consents to lodge there, but he is little comfort, for he ridicules Clara's fears.

Carwin's presence in the midst of the inward-facing Mettingen community illustrates its unnaturalness. The community tries to interpret him, to give him a character, unsuccessfully. Clara confesses that the more the community knows of Carwin, the less its members can say exactly who he is: “He afforded us no ground on which to build even a plausible conjecture” (p. 81). He is and remains a bundle of characteristics without a center.

Carwin explains that the voices heard by Wieland and Pleyel are probably imitations of Catharine's voice perpetrated by an unknown person (p. 85). The cry of help that brought Wieland and Pleyel to Clara's aid was uttered, Carwin says, by someone on the spot (p. 86). To each phenomenon Carwin gives an explanation which is not only plausible but, since he himself performs the actions, also “true.” But his “mode of explaining” does not satisfy the Mettingen group, for whom (Clara explains) “it is such, perhaps as would commend itself as most plausible to the most sagacious minds, but it was insufficient to impart conviction to us” (p. 86).

Brown, by the simple series of incidents—the hearing and interpretation of a mysterious voice—maneuvers his innocents into the position of rejecting the plausible as “insufficient.” They, unlike the putative villain, Carwin, have entered a state in which characteristics, sensory evidence, and “reality” itself are no longer significant, i.e., generative of meaning. They are now truly lost in a game of freeplay in which any sign may be substituted for any other, where the rigors of objective existence no longer exert any centering control. No resolution, no return to a steady state in which the true can be winnowed from the false, reality from appearance can be attained. Centeredness (certitude) is permanently subordinated to freeplay. Order is a fiction.

The climatic murders of the novel are presaged by an abortive attempt by the innocents to reimpose the lost order on their crumbling lives by rehearsing a play. The play would have furnished them with knowable characters, dialogue, a plot; there would have been few if any options to transform the play into something other than the text of it. Where there is text, there is order. But the rehearsal never occurs. Instead, events accelerate toward the decentering of Clara's consciousness when her brother appears and tries to attack her.

When Pleyel does not appear for the rehearsal, Clara breaks the cardinal rule of logical interpretation, (the maintenance of checks on freeplay) by speculating in advance of the facts. Impatient with the slow arrival of explanation, she rushes ahead with her own fancy. Pleyel, she imagines, has drowned. Although she is aware of the fanciful nature of her reverie, Clara nevertheless indulges in it. The “economist of pleasure” goes on something of an imaginative binge, casting rationality to the winds. She soon recognizes that her mind is operating beyond her willed control. But she surrenders all desire to regain control and follows the “train of reflections,” or associations, which carries her out of the safe world in which freeplay is limited.

First she thinks of her father, whose memory she venerates, whose possessions are protected by her as “reliques” (p. 94). One of these mementoes is a narrative which Clara now desires to read for its ordered arrangement of a life. Once again a text is sought when order is failing. The manuscript is kept in her closet, but when she approaches this room the voice frightens her away. In a chaotic state Clara recalls the fitful dream in which she had perceived her brother on the opposite side of an abyss beckoning her to cross to his side. Why would she consider her brother, whom she worships as she does her father, as a threat to her safety? Fear of the anarchy of incest or the psychomoral transgression of narcissism have been offered as explanations.¹⁵ But the arbitrary barrier erected by Emerson seems to offer a less controversial explanation. Father and brother have become conflated in Clara's mind; both have crossed the barrier into the realm of “involuntary perceptions.” Clara still prefers the barrier, although she is swayed by the argument that involuntary acts of the mind might be as reliable as voluntary, and that seemingly involuntary perceptions (her dream) might in fact be voluntary on a level unknown to her. She hazards the generalization: “Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted for by no established laws. Why did I dream that my brother was my foe?” (p. 99).

Morning brings some relief from the tangled and troubling “logic” of Clara's night. She hopes that a calmer explanation will be forthcoming from Pleyel. He, however, shocks her with accusations, based on his “evidence” of the previous night, of her assignation with Carwin. Clara's analysis of Pleyel's logic brings her close to “biloquism”: she speculates that Carwin has trained another woman to imitate her voice (p. 126). She hazards a visit with Pleyel in order to reinstate logic, but the effort, as we have seen, miscarries because of his obtuseness.

Pleyel indicts Carwin as an “imp of mischief” (p. 140), a demonic and cunning improvisor whose “character,” that sign by which he is to be known, is not a stable entity but a shifting bundle of appearances that he can and does alter at will. That Carwin alone, in carrying this improvisational “reality” to Mettingen, infects the unnatural paradise with the ordinary world, is the strong implication of Pleyel's news. It would be simple and even desirable to restore Mettingen by loading the blame for chaos on Carwin and thus brand the world as unnatural.

Clara, however, cannot completely resolve the story in this way. She begins to ponder a possible answer that is far more troubling since it admits of no resolution at all. Thinking of Pleyel's story, Clara, her sense of being wronged now becalmed, sees the situation from his point of view. “In what other way was it possible for him to construe these signals?” (p. 158) she asks herself, thus allowing the principle of multiple, but not complementary, explanations or interpretations of the same signals. The “perfect faith” that Emerson desired is thus thrown out of balance.

In the climactic scene of the novel Wieland threatens Clara. That Carwin rescues her underlines “freeplay” as a dominant issue and Carwin as its agent. Wieland tries to pile the guilt upon the intruder's shoulders, just as Pleyel had, calling Carwin a devil dispatched from hell to wreck the Arcadia of Mettingen. But the load topples with a fine ironic twist. Just after Wieland dismisses Carwin as an “incarnation of a demon” (p. 253), the demon returns in answer to Clara's prayer for rescue from her homicidal brother (p. 254). This “form,” Carwin, exercising its power of improvisation, of freeplay, is both demon and angel, destroyer and rescuer.

IV

Three years later, purged by fire and harrowed by illness, Clara writes from Montpellier, France. She is regaining her health. Pleyel's intended, who was not dead, has since married him and then, incontrovertibly, died. The widower surfaces as Clara's suitor. Carwin, like Dick Diver, is out there in the expanse of the American hinterland, an inextinguishable spark of romance. Narrative loose ends are perfunctorily tied up.

There is, however, no resolution except on this level of the makeshift. Carwin's confession is not sufficient when it belatedly comes from him. He weakly says: “‘I have acted, but my actions have possibly affected more than I designed’” (p. 220). There is no catharsis in this.¹⁶ The presence of Clara's uncle, Thomas Cambridge, who supplies the Maxwell story, is also a makeshift device that only calls attention to its lameness. By the end of the novel we are persuaded that rational explanation is a necessary fiction, not a necessary reality, to which the straying Clara happily retreats for psychic survival.

The spreading freeplay and decentering of Wieland present “reality” as a fiction, the play of points of view, contending constructions, the inertia of the mind to stay in one groove of assumptions regardless of the “facts” (p. 61). Wieland's mind is tortured and eventually blasted by the great void where reality ought to have been in a centered universe and by his fatal impatience with freeplay. Clara is brought to the precipice, then retreats to tell her tale. The tale concerns the play of signals, the problematic nature of perception, the unstable character conventionally ignored by the use of proper names, the absence of the Word or cause as center of a knowable and structured universe. Without causes, adequate or not, the human consciousness is decentered and alienated, thrown into a game in which it is at stake.

The game of which Derrida speaks, so different from what we have been used to call ambiguity, never ends. Ends themselves, Kermode has suggested, are fictions, respites, in the game.¹⁷ Thus “ending” is one of our most desired yet impossible achievements. In such a playful condition is Clara Wieland when her narrative (she thinks) ends. She is back in Montpellier, France, in the Cevennes, the territory of the Camissards, whose text her father had “construed” in the beginning.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1968), pp. 304-5.

2. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or The Transformation, ed. Fred Lewis Pattee (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1926). All references to Wieland are taken from this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text.

3. Donald Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne, 1966), pp. 48, 44.

4. Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA, 77 (March 1962), 51-57.

5. William Manly, “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland,” American Literature, 35 (Nov. 1963), 312.

6. Michael Davitt Bell, “‘The Double-Tongued Deceiver’: Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown,” Early American Literature, 9 (Fall 1974), 144.

7. Michael Butler, “Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland: Method and Meaning,” Studies in American Fiction, 4 (Autumn 1976), 127.

8. John Cleman, “Ambiguous Evil: A Study of Villains and Heroes in Charles Brockden Brown's Major Novels,” Early American Literature, 10 (Fall 1975), 190-219; Mark Seltzer, “Saying Makes It So: Language and Event in Brown's Wieland,” Early American Literature, 13 (Spring 1978), 81-91.

9. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Macksey and Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 247-73.

10. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 47, 50.

11. Ziff, p. 54.

12. Ringe, p. 28.

13. Ziff, p. 52.

14. Joseph A. Soldati, “The Americanization of Faust: A Study of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland,” ESQ, 20 (First Quarter 1974), 13.

15. Ziff, p. 54, suggests incest. Joseph A. Soldati, throughout his essay, argues for combined Narcissistic and Icarian complexes.

16. William Manly, p. 321, asserts that catharsis does accompany Carwin's confession.

17. Kermode, p. 144.