SOURCE: Gilmore, Michael T. “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown's Wieland.” Studies in the Novel 9, no. 2 (summer 1977): 107-18.

[In the following essay, Gilmore claims that Milton's Paradise Lost provided the inspiration for Brown's Wieland.]

Charles Brockden Brown's “Gothic” novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) was long read as an expression of Enlightenment rationality. The author's purpose, according to this view, was to caution readers “against credulity and religious fanaticism.”¹ But the rationalist interpretation has come under spirited attack in recent years, partly as a result of a reassessment of le genre noir in general, and the Calvinist underpinning of Brown's tale has begun to gain the recognition it deserves.² Nevertheless, the misreadings persist in one form or another, and even Larzer Ziff, who properly insists that “Brown ends his journey through the mind by approaching the outskirts of Edwards' camp,” misconstrues the novel's denouement as a conventional happy ending. Further, Ziff's analysis of the sentimental seduction theme is a source of confusion, the effect of which is to trivialize Brown's principal concern.³ For the Carwin-Clara-Pleyel triangle has little to do with sentimental love: rather it is Brown's version of the temptation in the garden, and Wieland itself is his retelling of the biblical fable of the Fall of Man.

It is well known that William Godwin's Caleb Williams had a major impact on Brown and that its publication in 1794 prompted the American to turn to the writing of fiction. Much stressed by critics, the Godwinian influence is usually cited as proof of Brown's radicalism and hostility to religion. As Joel Porte has recently shown, however, Caleb Williams possesses an “exacerbated Calvinist framework” and breathes the spirit of Paradise Lost. With Falkland in the role of the harsh Divinity and Caleb as the sinful Adam, it charts a course of guilt, suffering, and relentless persecution, ending with a reversal in which the eponymous hero, having succeeded in vindicating himself in a court of law, is overcome by remorse and acknowledges that “he is precisely the ‘monster of depravity’ whom he had been represented as being all along.” In the ruined Gothic world of Caleb Williams, argues Porte, there is no hope, no prospect of grace or redemption.⁴

And yet the conclusion of Godwin's novel would seem to suggest that the author did in fact have a scheme of salvation, a scheme which is unmistakably Calvinist and may even have derived from his reading of Jonathan Edwards.⁵Caleb Williams, which Godwin wrote, as he claimed in the preface, in order to expose “Things as They Are,” is profoundly antilaw in outlook and expounds the view that the English legal system is a tool of class oppression. On a different or deeper level, however, the book is addressed to the issue of salvation by works or faith. Mr. Raymond, captain of a band of thieves patterned after Robin Hood's mythical crew, declares to Caleb that “either … we all of us deserve the vengeance of the law, or law is not the proper instrument of correcting the misdeeds of mankind.” As Old Testament God, Falkland uses the “remorseless fangs of the law” to hound Caleb with the threat of extinction; but once the wretched victim is imprisoned and arraigned for judgment, the pursuer declines to appear to press charges. Jehovah becomes Christ in an unexpected volte-face; and Caleb, who has doggedly protested his innocence, thereby denying his need for grace, is transformed into Cain or the Wandering Jew. In the novel's postscript, he goes to a magistrate and turns the law against Falkland himself, who is convicted and dies after three days. He will not rise again for Caleb Williams. For the latter, having figuratively slain Christ—“A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men,” he now says of Falkland—awakens too late to his corrupt nature and participation in the primal crime. He might have secured himself from damnation, he realizes, if “I had opened my heart to Mr. Falkland, if I had told to him privately the tale I have now been telling …”—if, in short, he had thrown himself upon the mercy of the Redeemer and made a confession of sin.⁶ What Godwin's residual Calvinism reduces down to is the conviction that only through Christ and the covenant of grace can mankind be saved; given human depravity, there is no salvation through law or good works.

Crane Brinton, in his work on the French Revolution, has commented on the resemblance between Protestant and Robespierrean theology, arguing that “the men who made the Terror were compeers of the first Crusaders, of Savonarola, of Calvin.”⁷ Brinton's thesis is perfectly illustrated by Godwin, whose radicalism bears the indelible stamp of his orthodox upbringing. In the case of Brown, who was raised as a Quaker, the Calvinist mood informing both Wieland and the fragment Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist probably stems as much from the eighteenth-century American background as from his immersion in Enlightenment literature. The Memoirs of Carwin, which was composed at roughly the same time as Wieland but not published until 1803, strongly evinces the traces of both Godwin and native religious thought. Brown's closest friend, Elihu Hubbard Smith, was a graduate of Yale who introduced the novelist to Timothy Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards; and it is not impossible that Brown was familiar with the great theologian's writings. But Brown himself hinted at another source of influence, a source conned by Edwards and Godwin alike: John Milton. While Carwin perfects his ventriloquism, for example, he peruses Milton's Comus (p. 281);⁸ and although Paradise Lost is not actually mentioned by name in the fragment, its theme is crucial and pervasive. Carwin is consumed by a perverse lust for knowledge which his father denounces as “incorrigible depravity” (pp. 275-76). After an almost supernatural fire that burns down his father's barn—a reminder, perhaps, of the fiery sword that the Angel Michael waved behind Adam and Eve as he drove them from Paradise—Carwin leaves the pastoral setting where he was born, wanders to the city, and catches the eye of the mysterious Ludloe, who proposes to finance him on a voyage to Europe. A Utopian schemer and apparent Illuminatus, Ludloe plays Falkland to Carwin's Caleb Williams. He seems to possess preternatural powers of which his protégé stands in awe. Like Milton's God, he projects a new Eden, and like Edwards's Christ, he demands a full and sincere confession from those seeking membership in the exalted order to which he belongs. “Perdition or felicity will hang upon that moment” (p. 344), says Ludloe in reference to the confession, adding that “concealment is impossible” and that every secret must be divulged (p. 350). Carwin, however, resolves to withhold the knowledge of his biloquism from his confessor; and shortly thereafter Brown abandoned the manuscript, leaving unanswered the question of his protagonist's fate.

It is in Wieland, of course, that he furnishes the answer, an answer that has been foreshadowed by Carwin's insatiable curiosity, his unwillingness to confess all, and his transformation into a Spanish Catholic: This last detail is especially significant in light of the conventional Gothic technique of displacing the action to a Catholic setting, with its ubiquitous decaying abbeys, monasteries, and catacombs. To embrace Catholicism, as Protestant authors indoctrinated with the theology of John Calvin knew in their bones, was to ensure perdition, since Catholics clung to the misguided belief that salvation could be won by spurning the world or performing good works within it. This was to deny the need for divine election and to gloss over the universal depravity of mankind, which rendered truly virtuous actions impossible without an infusion of the Holy Spirit. On the issue of salvation by works Catholics and Protestant Armenians locked arms, and what has passed as the anticlericalism of the Gothic school might more properly be viewed as a veiled protest against the waning of Calvinist dogma around the turn of the eighteenth century. That the Gothicists themselves frequently shared in the general disquietude of the age is true, but at the same time they were too thoroughly steeped in Puritanism to find the Catholic or Armenian alternative a meaningful one. William Godwin, after all, went from Calvinism to atheism but was never tempted by the Church of England, and his hunger for inner-worldly sainthood surely accounts at least in part for his attraction to the French Revolution. Carwin's adoption of Catholicism, to which Brown alluded again in Wieland, is not, therefore, simply a convenient device for endowing the villain with an aura of exoticism. Instead it is an outgrowth of the explicitly Calvinistic bias of the Gothic school and stamps Carwin as one of the damned, an unrepentant sinner who counts upon the false security of the legal covenant to preserve him from the vengeance of a righteous God. It is altogether consistent with his repudiation of Christ-Ludloe and his subsequent protests of innocence throughout the novel. Despite having set in motion the train of events that culminates in the younger Wieland's suicide, he will defend himself against Clara's accusations of depravity, allowing that his morals are “far from rigid” but insisting that he is not the “desperate or sordid criminal” that she charges him with being (p. 230).

And yet the almost oppressive theological temper of Brown's tale is barely sensed at the outset, the participants themselves confidently consigning it to the past. Although Clara concedes that the history of her father's strange death, which she recounts in the introductory chapters, has left an impression on her that “can never be effaced” (p. 21), the idyllic middle-class landscape inhabited by herself, her brother, Catherine, and Pleyel retains few traces of the morbid spirituality to which the elder Wieland fell prey. Brown's subtitle “An American Tale” suggests that he saw in his central foursome a microcosm of the bourgeois American society that by 1798 stood in defiant opposition to the Puritan past. Surely it is no coincidence that at one point in the narrative Pleyel refers to a Ciceronian oration that makes “the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (p. 34). Unruffled rationality, moderation, and middle-class ease are the distinguishing marks of the Mettingen setting; the temple that the senior Wieland kept bare—“without seat, table, or ornament of any kind” (p. 12)—and consecrated to the worship of the Deity has been cluttered with a harpsichord, pedestal, and bust of Cicero, Enlightenment trappings that symbolize a rejection of the austere Protestantism of an earlier day. The God-charged universe of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards has narrowed to a common sense world that would have gladdened the heart of Benjamin Franklin. Even the childhood environment of the younger Wielands has been scrupulously based on enlightened principles, with special emphasis on the golden mean: “our education,” comments Clara, “had been modeled by no religious standard” (p. 24), the aunt who raised her and her brother seldom deviating “into either extreme of rigor or lenity” (p. 22). Once a guide for personal conduct, religion has become merely a subject for casual debate, and assembled at their “fane” on the Schuylkill, the circle of intimates whiles away the hours in aimless cultural pursuits.

If the Wielands have renounced the past, however, Theodore has not succeeded in exorcising the ghost of his father, which continues to haunt him in the form of an inchoate longing for what the Puritans would have called a conversion experience. “Moral necessity, and calvinistic inspiration,” according to Clara, “were the props on which my brother thought proper to repose” (p. 28). She further describes him as grave, thoughtful, and given to melancholy. But Brown has taken pains to distinguish Wieland from authentic Calvinists and to spell out the dangers inherent in his background and sensibility. While apprenticed to a merchant in England, the senior Wieland had come into contact with the doctrines of the Camissards, a Huguenot sect notorious for its antinomian excesses. Having emigrated to America with the intention of preaching to the Indians, he had connected himself to no established church and abjured all forms of social worship. A separatist and enthusiast, he had lived in daily expectation of a direct message from the Almighty. Even the mother of Clara and Theodore, although not a fanatic like their father, did not belong to any congregation and was a devout disciple of the mystical Count von Zinzendorf, whose separatist impulses were a thorn in the side of Gilbert Tennent. The aunt who reared the younger Wielands was a separatist of a different order, but a separatist nonetheless. She preserved her charges, in Clara's words, “from the corruption and tyranny of colleges and boarding-schools” (p. 22); and Theodore and his sister have carried on the family tradition in their own enlightened fashion. Fortunate enough to find their temperaments duplicated in Catherine and Pleyel, they have gradually withdrawn from “the society of others, and found every moment irksome that was not devoted to each other” (p. 23).

Thus Brown has carefully sketched in the flaws of upbringing and character that will eventually issue in Wieland's antinomian mania and Clara's fits of madness. Whereupon he introduces into the narrative the figure of Carwin, and his implicit criticism of American life begins to move in the direction of epic, as it becomes increasingly clear that the fable underlying his novel is Milton's Paradise Lost. Clara is utterly captivated by the appearance of Carwin, who begs at her door for water dressed in virtual rags. That a stranger who reminds her of a rustic clown should exert so powerful a hold on her imagination would seem absurd were it not for the fact that her portrait of him so strikingly resembles the fallen Angel Lucifer or the Wandering Jew Ahasuerus:

yet his forehead, so far as shaggy locks would allow it to be seen, his eyes lustrously black, and possessing, in the midst of haggardness, a radiance inexpressibly serene and potent, and something in the rest of his features, which it would be vain to describe, but which betoken a mind of the highest order, were essential ingredients in the portrait.

(p. 61)

The faded grandeur that Clara detects in Carwin's countenance plunges her into a maze of mournful associations which call into question the Edenic bliss of her present life, and for the first time since the tragedy of her father she is troubled by intimations of mortality: “Death must happen to all” (pp. 62-63). Although she argues that her infatuation with the mysterious wanderer should not be mistaken for love, there is good reason to believe that Clara is sexually drawn to him, and that the storm which rages outside her window while she studies his picture is both an omen of future disaster and an emblem of the tumultuous passions aroused by his presence. Indeed, it is a Miltonic storm such as accompanied the transgression in Eden, a circumstance which is entirely appropriate in view of the fact that Carwin will bring death and sin into the garden of Wieland. For he is Brown's Gothic tempter, and Clara has become the novelist's American Eve.

It is worth noting, for example, that the biloquist has but a single name. The absence of a surname or Christian name—for the reader never knows which one it is that Carwin lacks—implies an estrangement from society that brands him as an outcast and misfit. In spite of the apparent ease with which he insinuates himself into the Mettingen setting, Carwin's ultimate failure to shed his solitude places him in the company of archetypes such as Lucifer, Cain, and Ahasuerus. Bumbler that he proves to be, the biloquist is nevertheless modeled on Milton's conception of Satan. So extensive, in fact, are the parallels between Wieland and Paradise Lost that it is hard to imagine how they have been overlooked. Carwin's eloquence is an obvious case in point. Overhearing him converse with her servant, Clara is forcibly struck by the sweetness of his voice; and his uncanny powers of speech occasion the numerous misunderstandings that shatter the novel's surface tranquillity. Repeatedly Clara is under the misapprehension that he is speaking directly into her ear; in Milton's classic, Satan is discovered squatting like a toad, “close at the ear of Eve” (4.800). Envious of Eve's love for Adam, the Arch-Fiend is filled with wonder when he first beholds the primal parents, and the sight of their beauty, refulgent with the image of God, almost swerves him from his sinister purpose. Similarly, Carwin is jealous of Clara's passion for Pleyel, although he also expresses admiration for the latter's “exquisite sagacity” (p. 236), and he hesitates to employ his verbal skills against them. Clara in particular captures his fancy, Judith having told him that her mistress's “perfections were little less than divine” (p. 227). In Paradise Lost, Satan addresses Eve as scarcely inferior to the angels, and entering the sleeping form of the serpent, he literally licks the ground on which she treads (9.526).

There are, moreover, striking affinities between the dream in which Lucifer appears to Eve and entices her to the tree of knowledge, and that in which Wieland beckons Clara to the edge of an abyss. Clara's dream has generated a host of conflicting interpretations. To critics who favor the sentimental seduction reading, for example, the chasm evokes a latent fear of incest; to William H. Manly, it stands for the insanity that runs in the Wieland family.⁹ Another interpretation, one based on Brown's indebtedness to Milton, seems more probable, however. In both the novel and the epic, the dreams eventually come true; beguiled by Satan, Eve eats of the forbidden fruit, and Clara is physically menaced by Theodore, who believes himself under a divine injunction to slay her. But the physical threat is less important, ultimately, than the fact that her brother compels Clara to confront the evil within herself. We will return later to this decisive turning point in her narrative; for the present, it is enough to suggest that the pit toward which she hastens is hell—the hell that awaits those who taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. There are several hints to this effect. Clara is stopped short in her progress by a voice crying “Hold,” by which Brown may have wished to recall the heavenly prohibition imposed on Adam and Eve. Further, the mysterious voice summons Clara to “Remember your father, and be faithful”; and she shudders with fright, as if she beheld “suspended over me, the exterminating sword” (pp. 72-73).

But the portent of the dream is temporarily lost sight of, even by Clara herself, after the scene in which she approaches the closet door and is again arrested by the command to “Hold!” Imagining because of her dream that Theodore is her enemy, she leaps to the conclusion that he is the person hiding within the closet and calls to him to come out, exclaiming “I know you well.” But the person who steals forth is Carwin, not Theodore, and the focus of danger is thus shifted to the biloquist (pp. 96-102). The brother becomes the other in a dramatic turnabout which has the effect of seeming to isolate evil in an external agent. The importance of this scene for Clara's development cannot be overstressed, since she will continue almost to the end of her narrative to regard the intruder as the sole cause of the sufferings that destroy her family's happiness. As Milton's God was careful to explain to the angels, however, He created man able to withstand temptation, thereby rendering him inexcusable for having sinned. Clara will only grasp this truth at the last.

This is not to say, of course, that Carwin is guiltless. Although her brother will eventually undermine Clara's conviction of her own innocence, it is the “double-tongued” wanderer who brings about her fall in the eyes of Pleyel. This is what the controversial seduction episode is really about: deceived by Carwin's ventriloquism, and convinced that Clara has succumbed to the villain's wiles, Pleyel charges her—in accents unmistakably Miltonic—with having committed the primal sin: “O wretch!—thus exquisitely fashioned—on whom nature seemed to have exhausted all her graces; with charms so awful and pure! how art thou fallen! From what height fallen! A ruin so complete—so unheard of!” (p. 117). Pleyel goes on to accuse Clara of consummate depravity, despairing that “In thy ruin, how will the felicity and honor of multitudes be involved” (pp. 117-18). He describes Carwin as the blackest of criminals, a Satanic schemer whose devices “no human intelligence is able to unravel” and who has leagued with infernal spirits in order to wage “a perpetual war against the happiness of mankind” (pp. 148-49). Clara herself now says of the biloquist that “this a foe from whose grasp no power of divinity can save me” (p. 126). As her words indicate, Carwin has completely replaced her brother as the source of her fears. And indeed Pleyel pictures Clara, in what appears to be a deliberate allusion to her dream, as “rushing to the verge of a dizzy precipice,” led on by the cunning seducer (p. 147). The denunciations that he hurls at her, and her indignant protests of purity, recall the bickering between Adam and Eve after the Fall:

Thus they in mutual accusation spent
The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,
And of their vain contest appeared no end.

[9. 1187-89]

“Neither self-condemning”—Milton's words go to the core of the novel's concern, and underline the mutual failure of Clara and Pleyel to assume responsibility for their transgressions. What is more, as the confrontation at Pleyel's house demonstrates, both are unwilling to go beyond reliance on the legal covenant. Pleyel takes upon himself the office of unforgiving judge—Clara calls him “inexorable” (p. 129)—and he denies her the Christian charity that might have repaired the misunderstandings engendered by Carwin's duplicity. He holds her to the relentless letter of the law:

An inscrutable providence has fashioned thee for some end. Thou wilt live, no doubt, to fulfil the purposes of thy maker, if he repent not of his workmanship, and send not his vengeance to exterminate thee, ere the measure of thy days be full. Surely nothing in the shape of man can vie with thee!.

(p. 135).

Clara likewise spurns the message of Christ and demands justice instead of mercy. “I come hither not to confess,” she informs her accuser, “but to vindicate” (p. 133). Here the Godwinian aspect of Brown's tale comes to the fore, and here too the true meaning of the secrecy theme is cast into bold relief. The issue for Brown is manifestly the reluctance of sinful man to lay bare his heart—an ordeal that Poe, for one, considered impossible, and that Edwards regarded as essential for salvation. Although Clara hears out Pleyel in silence and persists in believing herself blameless, she has been guilty of concealing her true feelings from him, and her concealment has contributed to their estrangement as much as Carwin's officiousness. She has also kept secret the interview with the would-be murderer whose summons interrupted her dream at the summerhouse—an interview, as Pleyel rightly surmises, that took place with the Satanic biloquist, albeit that Clara was then ignorant of his identity. The reader knows, however, from Clara's own words, words written after the fact but inserted into her narrative prior to the climactic scene with Pleyel, that her “scruples were preposterous and criminal. … My errors have taught me thus much wisdom; that those sentiments which we ought not to disclose, it is criminal to harbour” (p. 90).

Clara's fall, like that of the primal couple, ushers sin and death into the Edenic world of Wieland. Having left Pleyel's house—significantly, he has announced his intention of setting out on a long journey—she returns to a Mettingen despoiled by her brother's murderous rampage. Overcome by what she sees, she casts the entire burden of guilt on Carwin. She assumes that he is the murderer of her brother's family; and even Theodore's confession does not shake her belief that the author of woe is the biloquist, to whom she attributes supernatural powers. This is to deny man's complicity in the Fall and to reject—in Edwards's words—“The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin.” To Clara's disordered mind, evil is extrinsic, not integral to human nature:

O brother! spare me, spare thyself: There is thy betrayer. He counterfeited the voice and face of an angel, for the purpose of destroying thee and me. He has this moment confessed it. He is able to speak where he is not. He is leagued with hell, but will not avow it; yet he confesses that the agency was his.

(p. 245)

In this speech, Clara is implicitly proclaiming her own innocence as well as Theodore's and taking refuge in the legal covenant—the covenant predicated on the mistaken notion that fallen man is essentially unfallen, and that Lucifer alone is responsible for sin. Moments later, however, she is brought up sharply by the discovery that she is prepared to defend herself against Wieland's attack by plunging her penknife into his heart, a weapon that she has all along insisted that she will use only against herself. This realization sets off a reversal of sentiment that recalls Caleb Williams's despair after the trial of Falkland:

I estimate my own deserving; a hatred, immortal and inexorable, is my due, I listen to my own pleas, and find them empty and false: yes, I acknowledge that my guilt surpasses that of all mankind: I confess that the curses of a world, and the frowns of a deity, are inadequate to my demerits. Is there a thing in the world worthy of infinite abhorrence? It is I

(pp. 249-50)

Admittedly, the act that Clara contemplates is one of self-defense—but that is precisely Brown's point. For although any court of law would deliver a verdict of justifiable homicide (just as Caleb Williams is vindicated in a court of law), Clara—finding herself capable of slaying her own brother—has ceased to think in terms of the law. She has finally accepted the fact of human corruption: the “adders” of sin are now lodged in her own breast (p. 256).

Clara is prostrated with grief and self-loathing after the death of her brother. Much like Milton's Eve, she craves “quick deliverance from life and all the ills that attend it” (p. 261), and she revolts against the inevitable decree that she must quit the scene of her former bliss:

O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death!
Must I thus leave thee, Paradise: thus leave
Thee, native soil, these happy walks and shades,
Fit haunt of gods?

[9.268-71]

Clara has accepted her culpability, but she still shrinks from its consequences. It is not until her home is consumed by flames—as in the Memoirs of Carwin, the conflagration recalls Michael's fiery sword—that she resigns herself to banishment from the garden and agrees to accompany her uncle on a voyage to Europe. The last chapter of the novel is therefore dated at Montpellier in France, and is written, significantly enough, three years after the narrative proper. It finds Clara chastened but “not destitute of happiness” (p. 262), for her sanity has been restored and she has been reunited with her American Adam. She now admits that “no human virtue is secure from degeneracy” (p. 270), and she has made a full confession of her former sentiments to Pleyel. Inevitably one is reminded of Eve's moving speech to Adam in Paradise Lost: “Living or dying, from thee I will not hide / What thoughts in my unquiet breast are risen …” (9.974-75). In Calvinist terms, Clara has been reborn through the agency of Christ: she has bared her soul and given her assent to the doctrine of original sin. “It will not escape your notice,” she writes, “that the evils of which Carwin and Maxwell were the authors, owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers” (p. 273). Man is partner with Satan in the Fall.

In the last book of Paradise Lost, Adam almost rejoices over his sin because of Michael's prophecy of the coming of Christ; by the concluding pages of Brown's novel, Clara has grown to a measure of self-awareness that was beyond her when she dwelt in the Mettingen Eden. The transformation of Brown's title refers, then, both to the Fall and the promise of redemption; and it is altogether fitting that Hawthorne's Marble Faun (1860) was published in England under the title Transformation, its subject being the Fortunate Fall. As for Carwin, the ventriloquist acknowledges his misconduct, but, as he correctly insists, he has committed no crime punishable by human law. “I cannot justify my conduct,” he tells Clara, “yet my only crime was curiosity” (p. 231). Caleb Williams's crime was no different: curiosity, after all, is the primal sin. Escaping the clutches of Ludloe, Carwin makes his way into a remote district of Pennsylvania, where he engages “in the harmless pursuits of agriculture” (p. 268). Blind to his own depravity, ignorant of his need for grace, the villain returns to the garden from which Clara and Pleyel have been expelled and becomes an “innocent” American yeoman. This is Brown's devastating judgment on Franklin's America: it no longer has any place for those who penetrate to the truth of the human heart. Clara is doomed to permanent exile from a land which has lost the sense of sin.

The apologetic tone of Brown's “advertisement,” and his apprehensions concerning his tale's reception, are reminiscent of the somewhat defensive posture adopted by Edwards in the preface to The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1757). Barely forty years separate the publication of the two works, both of which deal, as Brown announced in his “advertisement,” with “the moral constitution of man” (p. 3). Edwards, writing in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, still retained some hope of restoring his countrymen to “the principles and scheme of religion maintained by our pious and excellent forefathers.”¹⁰ No such hope animates Brown's “veiled sermon,” as Fred Lewis Pattee once called it.¹¹ And so it is fitting that Wieland is built on the fable of Paradise Lost. For in going back to Milton for his inspiration, Brown was doing more than paying tribute to the greatest of Puritan authors. He was also addressing a theme that was to engage a host of later American novelists: the promise of America, he strongly suggests, is the “paradise lost” in Wieland.

Notes

1. David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 168-69. See also Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville, Fla.: Univ. of Florida Press, 1949), pp. 104-5.

2. For important reassessments of the Gothic novel, see Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” The Yale Review, 52 (Winter 1963), 236-57; Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90; and the essays in G. R. Thompson, ed., The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism (Pullman, Wash.: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974), particularly Joel Porte's “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction,” pp. 42-64. The religious theme in Brown has been noted by Larzer Ziff, “A Reading of Wieland,” PMLA, 67 (1962), 51-57; and Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966), pp. 25-48.

3. See Ziff, pp. 51-57.

4. Porte, pp. 52-55.

5. On Edwards's influence on Godwin, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, “Jonathan Edwards and William Godwin on Virtue,” American Literature, 18 (1947), 308-18.

6. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 233, 273, 278-79, 296, 323, 325-26.

7. Crane Brinton, A Decade of Revolution: 1789-1799 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 158-61. The similarity between the Puritan and French Revolutions has been examined in detail by Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965).

8. I will be referring to Fred Lewis Pattee's edition of Wieland; or The Transformation, which includes the fragment Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1926). Page references will appear in the text.

9. Ziff, p. 54; also see Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 74-104, 126-61; and William M. Manly, “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland,” American Literature, 35 (1963), 317-18.

10. Jonathan Edwards, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, ed. Clyde C. Holbrook (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), p. 102.

11. Introduction to Wieland, p. xxviii.