SOURCE: Samuels, Shirley. “Wieland: Alien and Infidel.” Early American Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 46-66.

[In the following essay, Samuels explores the connections between family and nation and the threat to both from outsiders as a prominent theme of Wieland.]

An eighteenth-century New England minister who wrote a history of the American Revolution once described the need to “dress” his history modestly: “laboured elegance and extravagant colouring only brings her into suspicion, hides her beauty, and makes the cautious reader afraid lest he is in company with a painted harlot” (Gordon 393). While it seems understandable that a minister would not want his reader to keep “company with a painted harlot,” the conjunction of history and harlotry here appears rather striking. Such nervousness about licentious sexuality in language—specifically language that depicted the still-volatile topic of the American Revolution—extended to other writers, ministers, orators, and politicians in the young republic. They protected themselves by claiming to use a conservative rhetoric in their efforts to extradite the “alien” dangers of both deism and radical democracy. They proceeded, however, by emphasizing the dangers of the loose woman and, in attempting to educate the American people about the contagion of her infidelity, paradoxically enhancing the sexual associations they claimed to be protecting themselves against.¹

One of the most famous of these educators, known today for his aggrandizing Life of Washington, was “Parson” Weems, who spent thirty years peddling books and tracts with titles like The Bad Wife's Looking Glass and God's Revenge Against Adultery. Presented as moral lessons, rooted in an idealized concept of sexuality and the family, these tracts also discussed political issues, a mixture common in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writings to the point that the rhetoric of sexuality and the family became nearly interchangeable with that of religion and politics. Such interchangeability is a direct concern of the early American novel. While concentrating on gothic sensationalism and sentimental seduction,² the novel in the early republic displays contemporary social and political anxiety about the stability of the family and its freedom from unfaithfulness, often figured as the contamination of the outside world.

I

In God's Revenge Against Adultery (1815), Weems presents two exemplary cases of the dangers of infidelity: the “accomplished Dr. Theodore Wilson, (Delaware) who for seducing Mrs. Nancy Wiley, had his brains blown out by her husband,” and the “elegant Mr. James O'Neale, Esq. (North Carolina) who for seducing the beautiful Miss Matilda d'Estrange, was killed by her brother” (143). At first glance, the moral for adulterers seems to be to stay clear of family members; at second, to beware of women with disturbing names. But, as Weems unfolds them, the crucial problem with these scenes is that neither seducer has been educated to control his excessive desires. One professes himself a deist, and the other joins in religious revivals; both transgress the controlled confines of religious thought while violating the confines of the family. And despite the specifics of geography in Weems's account, it also becomes clear that the problem of uncontrolled desire is a national one, and that this pamphlet is finally as much about political and religious education in the new republic as about adultery.

Dr. Theodore Wilson deceives his wife because “he was infected with that most shameful and uneasy of all diseases, an incurable lust or itching after strange women.” His “disease” is not from natural causes, however: “this elegant young man owed his early downfal to reading ‘Paine's Age of Reason’” (146). This “libertine publication” sets loose Wilson's “boundless ardour for animal pleasures” and encourages him with “bold slanders of the bible” so that Wilson “threw aside his father's good old family bible, and for a surer guide to pleasure took up the AGE OF REASON!” (147). Paine's incitement to deism has not been uniformly treated as a “guide to pleasure,” but religious infidelity becomes more than metaphorical as Wilson's disease spreads.

Wilson begins a liaison with the wife of a tavern keeper. Nancy Wiley has been poorly educated; she overvalues her own beauty and “neglect[s] those immortal beauties of the mind WISDOM and PIETY” (150). They seem well matched, until her husband finds them together and kills Wilson, whereupon Wilson's wife dies of grief. The only beneficiary in Weems's account is Wilson's younger brother, who forsakes the “strenuous idleness” of a study of the law to study divinity “and is now the pastor of the first Presbyterian church in Philadelphia” (166).

The moral here appears to be that religion provides surety against Paine's dangerous excesses, but “Case the Second” provides a countering example. Here, a “rich old gentleman, whose name was L'Estrange” has found wealth but not happiness: “In spite of my money, I find I am growing old and crazy … I'll go to the Bible and see if I can find happiness there.” He learns, curiously enough, that “religion, properly defined, is only the art of happiness,” and therefore opens his home to religious revivalists, especially embracing young Mr. O'Neale, who “professed himself a convert!” (169). Unfortunately, young O'Neale's education, like that of Nancy Wiley, has been “worldly minded” and he has sought “his happiness in the concupiscences of the FLESH, the chief among which is the appetite for SEX” (170).

Looking for this happiness, in spite of his “conversion,” O'Neale attempts to seduce Miss Matilda L'Estrange, “but her sense of natural modesty, strengthened by education,” (171) helps her resist him until she too experiences a religious conversion. She reaches a “transport” of “convulsive joy; her breasts heaving and panting—her color alternately coming and going, now crimsoned with joy and delight, and now pale and exhausted as if near overcome with fatigue” (172). In this sexual “holy extacy,” Matilda seeks out O'Neale and throws “her arms around his neck,” “fondly pressing him to her swelling breasts.” These “virgin caresses” “served to kindle higher the fever of brutal passion”; O'Neale takes advantage of the moment, and “Miss L'Estrange was ruined … by a villain under the sacred garb of religion” (173-4). Inevitably she becomes pregnant and her family casts her out. Her brother shoots O'Neale, whose dying lament is, “Oh had I but been early brought up to religion and some good trade, I had never come to this miserable end!” (187).

O'Neale's lame regrets, and these case histories generally, emphasize the importance of a careful upbringing, safe from the introduction of false texts and desires that exceed the bounds of marriage and the family. Purportedly a pamphlet about the dangers of adulterous sex, this turns out to be a tract that insists on a concept of education conservatively cordoned off from either deism or revivalism. Why are both of these extremes of religious discourse linked with illicit sexual desire? Put another way, why did post-Revolutionary writers see both religious and political excesses as threats to the family?

The most notorious deist was Thomas Paine, whose Age of Reason was vilified for making religious infidelity accessible to the masses. In other words, the language was straightforward and any one could afford to buy it, since Paine subsidized its publication.³ Thirty-five replies to Paine's Age of Reason were published within a decade of its appearance (1794-1796), suggesting the alarm with which it was received.⁴ Far more than the document itself, these replies link an “infidelity” of religious thought with infidelity within the family and, by implication, the state. Timothy Dwight, the conservative New England minister and Yale president, mounted several prominent attacks on Paine and other deists with his satirical “The Triumph of Infidelity” and sermons like “A Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century” (1801). In the latter, Dwight attacks infidelity as a composite of “opposition to Christianity, devotion to sin and lust, and a pompous profession of love to Liberty” (265). Deism as a threat to institutionalized Christianity here becomes inseparable from a sexuality that erodes the boundaries of the family and a version of democracy that endangers the state.

If the exponents of deism had presented a “candid and logical opposition to Christianity,” Dwight claims, “no reasonable objection [could] be made.” But they insist on insidious rhetoric: the “infidels have neither labored, nor wished, to convince the understanding, but have bent all their efforts to engross the heart.” The reader, “engaged by the ingenuity of the writer, is lost in a mist of doubtful expressions and unsettled sentiments. His faith is constantly solicited to gravely described dreams; and his eye is required to fix on the form of a cloud.” Like Weems, Dwight appears to be describing a process of seduction. The “ingenuity of the writer” is focused on the method rather than the matter of persuasion, so that “from the highway of common sense [the reader] is invited into bypaths” (265-67). Implicitly, Dwight suggests that if Paine had stuck with “Common Sense,” he would find no fault with his “ingenuity.” But Paine, and other deists, have strayed “into bypaths,” and the former efficacy of attempts to “convince the understanding” is now channeled into “engrossing the heart.”

The dangerous character of infidels manifests itself in their talents and the diversity of their application: “Their writings have assumed every form, and treated every subject of thought.” From “lofty philosophical discourse,” they have “descended … to the newspaper paragraph; … from regular history to the anecdote; from the epic poem to the song.” The influence of deism is everywhere: “in a note subjoined to a paper on criticism or politics; in a hint in a book of travels.” What is most insidious about deism, then, is its omnipresence and the hapless plight of the reader who must assent despite himself, “to yield his judgment before he was aware that he was called to judge” (268). Since infidelity may be at work in the most innocuous writing, all forms of writing become suspect.

The nervousness that Dwight displays about the omnipresence and diversity of deistic writings may help explain why he finds infidelity a political as well as a sexual and religious threat. The notion of infidelity penetrated political disputes in several ways. Religious boundaries were patrolled by the politically and professionally dominant Federalists who claimed to hold a monopoly on religion and who opposed what they saw as Democratic deism. Subsequently, as the historian Clifford Griffin has shown, many of the so-called benevolent associations that appeared during the early nineteenth century—the Bible Society, for example, or the American Tract Society, which distributed almost two million pamphlets in the first half of the century—were Federalist-inspired attempts to maintain social order. These associations saw the Bible as a “moral police” that kept “guard over property and life” and was “better than every measure of secret espionage to which a Napoleon or a Nicholas might resort.” Finally, claimed the Home Missionary Society, “The Gospel is the most economical police on earth.”⁵ The Bible was unabashedly the most visible symbol of a conservative political order.

The kind of policing that was carried out in the name of the Bible extended from the benevolent societies to other institutions such as schools, and particularly to the relatively new American institution of literature. At the heart of these gestures of containment was a model of social control that took the form of a clearly defined family order. Since the French Revolution had introduced a model of revolution that seemed to undermine this order, writers of the period frequently worked to keep the notion of revolution contained politically and metaphorically as a “family affair,” a process that became linked with the desire to confine and institutionalize the family.⁶

Even such apparently innocuous terms as the “sacred honor” of the nation point to the conjunction of religious and sexual beliefs at the heart of national and familial identity. They may also shed a new light on the literature of the early Republic. Novels like Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland in many ways because of their gothic concern with incest, repressed desires, and lurid crimes, successfully “make the picture of a single family a model from which to sketch the condition of a nation” (33-34). That is, by so luridly depicting the threat posed to the family by the outside world, these novels encouraged and promoted a conservative, closed model of the family, though at the same time, in the closed circle of incestuous violence of Wieland, we can see that concentration on the family produces its own threats. The representative family-as-nation that was portrayed in numerous political pamphlets of the Revolutionary War found a fictional form in novels of the early Republic. National concerns were portrayed as domestic dilemmas, since in order to preserve the nation, it was conceived necessary to preserve the family as a carefully constituted supporting unit. Therefore, the sexual infidelity that represented the greatest threat to the family was presented as a national threat, especially after the French Revolution when women were popularly understood to be the instigators of the dread mob that came to stand for democratic rule, and Liberty came to be depicted as a whore.

As Timothy Dwight, among others, saw it, the French Revolution had unleashed Infidelity as the loose woman of the barricades:

Emboldened beyond every fear by this astonishing event, Infidelity … walked forth in open day, and displayed her genuine features to the sun. Without a blush she now denied the existence of moral obligation, annihilated the distinction between virtue and vice, challenged and authorized the indulgence of every lust, trod down the barriers of truth [and] lifted up her front in the face of heaven.

(269)

In other words, Democracy appears as a bold prostitute. Dwight again conflates the abhorrent possibilities of allowing infidelity to have a recognized place in religious discourse, allowing “democracy” to control the affairs of state, and allowing the “genuine features” of prostitutes to be exposed “to the sun.” Each act again involves the others; and each spells out destruction to church, state, and family. What Dwight seemed to fear most was that the loose morals introduced by this loose woman might be accompanied by a dread contagion, perhaps venereal, and he preached against whatever would “spread the disease,” suggesting that Jacobin democracy was a form of the yellow fever plague that had so terrorized Americans at the time of the Terror in France.

II

The fear of contamination by the French in general, though perhaps one might argue by French women in particular, led Federalists to propose the Alien and Sedition Acts as a means of “quarantining” America from the “vile and loathsome embrace” of the French (Miller 43). Shortly before Congress was to vote on the measures, Senator Humphrey Marshall, who supported the Alien Act, turned to poetry to explain its necessity. Marshall begins “The Aliens, A Patriotic Poem,” by praising the qualities of the United States that attract aliens. But the wrong aliens are being attracted. A troop of “venal wretches,” the French, have come to the United States because they were “At home involv'd in horrid war, / And all the vices, that curse the mind.” The proper recourse:

For Aliens, who've crossed the seas,
In language strong, and firm accost them;
The innocent—be they at ease,
The guilty—make haste and arrest them.

Not surprisingly, the poem tries to cordon off the “safe” alien from the potentially contagious one, but the paradox of America, epitomized by Philadelphia as the center of both government and aliens, is that its very order, especially its “laws, like those divine, / Calleth the Alien, from afar.” Attracting those “Aliens” it wishes to repel, America must act to contain the threat of the Alien, who is perversely attracted by the order that his coming threatens to disrupt.

Invoking the same model of attracting and even promoting disorder while producing a desire for familial and social order, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or The Transformation, published the year the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed, might be read as their novelistic response, but also counterpart. Like the qualities of America that attract the “alien,” the very charm of the Wieland's idyllic community has attracted Carwin, the alien called from afar. In each case, the attractiveness of order invites the intrusion of disorder. However, the novel does not unilaterally assign guilt to Carwin as the alien intruder, and indeed often questions whether we should instead blame, as the narrator, Clara, sometimes believes we should, the interior of the home itself, or, more particularly, “the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline” (5). Wieland presents alternative versions of educational and religious beliefs but frames the presentation with this announcement of a moral to be derived from the effects of such an “imperfect discipline”: these very “freedoms” of thought and belief may have caused the destruction of the Wieland family. Despite its gothic sensationalism, the novel, like Weems's pamphlet, often appears more significant as an educational tract, one which contains lessons about the contemporary disputes over religious infidelity, a strictly circumscribed education, the chastity of women, and the status of institutions, preeminently the institution of the family.

After the death of their parents, Clara and Wieland have a premature and, in Federalist terms, unnatural independence. They are “subjected to no unreasonable restraints,” indeed are virtually free from any external restraints at all, and are “saved from the corruption and tyranny of colleges and boarding schools,” becoming “superintendants of [their own] education” (20, 21). Clara's terms for her upbringing could have been taken from colonial pamphlets about the benefits of independence from Britain.⁷ The dangers of infidelity, however, would have been apparent to anxious contemporaries: “Our education had been modelled by no religious standard. We were left to the guidance of our own understanding and the casual impressions which society might make upon us. … We sought not a basis for our faith” (22). In other words, the Wieland children are educated in the style of the Enlightenment, a style derived in the eighteenth century from the formulations of Locke and Rousseau. One function of the novel might be to question how successfully this style functions on American soil.

Clara's utopian upbringing has created a hazardous situation both because it has attracted Carwin and because it has not been supplemented by the kind of institutions that were increasingly perceived as necessary in the young republic. Indeed, Clara judges that she has had a “perverse and vicious education,” especially because she has not been “qualified by education or experience to encounter perils” (80, 140). In The Discovery of the Asylum, David Rothman asserts that the late eighteenth-century American fear of contamination by France was in the process of becoming a fear of contamination by anything in the “world”; to counter this fear, the family had to be protected and protective and to “inoculate” the child against society. As we have seen, the rise of institutions of social control in this period, like the orphan asylum and even the school, is modeled on and supported by such an insular notion of the family. The institution compensated for the failure of the family, supplemented and even instructed the family, from which it was presumed to have derived (85, 121, 234, 152-53). One of Wieland's functions as a tutelary tract might be to prepare the way for the notion that institutions are a necessary supplement to the family. Without the formal institutions of education, religion, “benevolent societies,” orphanages, or prisons, the new republic would be susceptible to the chaos unleashed within the Wieland family.⁸

In Wieland, that chaos is blamed on Carwin, whose intrusion has excited sexual tensions in Clara and Pleyel and an insane and murderous religious enthusiasm in Wieland. Published while the fear of contagion by the alien was at its height, the novel foments and yet tries to explain away the threat by both blaming Carwin for introducing sexuality, disorder, and violence into the Wieland family, and explaining that introduction as nothing more than an enhancement of sexual and familial tensions already present.⁹ Carwin is an intruder, an alien called “from afar” by what he perceives as the almost “divine” qualities of Clara and her brother. But he also embodies an instability already present within the Wieland family. Introduced as an external threat, the alien, Carwin, instead stands (in) for an internal one, the infidelity of religious and institutional beliefs that the novel at first appeared to celebrate.¹⁰ If the family had been properly inoculated against him, he could have had no effect on them.

The extent to which the family can be seen as a haven from the outside world is made problematic on the historical front as well. Although Wieland's action takes place “between the conclusion of the French and the beginning of the revolutionary war,” Clara finds that “revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those who occupied the scene, contributed in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity, and furnishing causes of patriotic exultation. Four children … exercised my brother's tenderness” (3, 26). The unabashed segue between the “scene” of war and the family scene does not disturb Clara and would pass by the reader were it not that what seems continuous to her appears discontinuous to us. While Clara apparently intends that the violence outside should emphasize the harmony within the family, the introduction of the children is instead the introduction of violence: they are to be the object not of Wieland's “tenderness,” but of violence “calamitous to those who occupied the scene.” Both the absent battles and the present children mysteriously “contributed in some sort to our happiness,” while both agitate minds with curiosity about violence. If Clara conflates the revolutions of nations and the transformations of families, this conflation of national and familial violence further confirms the extent to which the novel registers contemporary national concerns in its depiction of familial turmoil. The novel emphasizes the violence within the family while ascribing that violence to the intrusion of a violent force, but that very force seems immanent rather than intrusive, and the efforts to name it as “alien” only emphasize its immanence.

The clearest instances of the intrusion of the alien into the family may be the explicit “otherworldly” experiences of the novel, the spontaneous combustion of the elder Wieland and the “inspiration” of the younger. While the younger Wieland begins by seeking a “ground of his belief” in the “history of religious opinions,” Clara finds in the Calvinist “ground” her brother stands on nothing but “props” that can be only a temporary support: “Moral necessity, and calvinistic inspiration, were the props on which my brother thought proper to repose” (23, 25). Unfortunately for Wieland, the shakiness of his “ground” points to an “obvious resemblance between him and my father” (23). In other words, we are warned that his attempt to reason toward faith by combining “calvinistic inspiration” with the “history of religious opinion” will produce infidelity and madness. The conflation of Wieland's attempt to reason toward faith (apparently an oblique reference to Paine) and the horrific effects of his sudden access to God (reminiscent of some of the excesses of the Great Awakening) appears as a reference to the conflict earlier described between Timothy Dwight, the grandson of that arch-Calvinist Jonathan Edwards, and Thomas Paine, the archdeist. Paralleling the twin downfalls of the Weems pamphlet, the novel shows the pitfalls of either position. Neither the inspired Wieland nor the rationalist Pleyel represents a form of belief that can effectively function against the hazards of the early Republic. By demonstrating the weakness of either extreme, the novel enacts a desire for the norm. And the champion or hero of this enactment may finally be not the reasonable Pleyel, or even Clara, but Carwin. His voice forces a questioning of perceived realities and underscores the abnormalities already present within the Wieland family. Carwin can be seen as an “alien” who introduces himself surreptitiously into households and exposes abnormalities as part of a regularizing or normalizing strategy.

III

Before examining further the effects of Carwin's presence in Wieland, I want to examine the context of this presence by returning to the terms of the pairing established in Weems's pamphlet, where deism and revivalism were both excesses that led to disaster. Specifically, I want to trace the religious, legal, and sexual implications of Wieland's destruction of his family by looking at the crime both in the novel and in two possible sources for the novel. The novel's presentation of Wieland's brutal murders brings together, in the arena of the family, anxieties about law and religion. Set in a period when the nation was haunted alike by fears of the removal of an institutionalized God perceived in deism and of the direct access to Him promised in the revivalism of the Great Awakening, the novel also works effectively to collapse the difference between these categories and to relocate the threat as an intrusive violation into the family.

When Clara reads Wieland's confession, which she transcribes as evidence within her own first-person narrative, she discovers his belief that in murdering his family he has obeyed a personal call to faith. Like the court he appears in, Wieland once wanted to “settle the relation between motive and actions, the criterion of merit, and the kinds and properties of evidence” (23). Now he professes to be thankful for the chance “to testify my submission to thy will” (165). Incongruously presenting a personal narrative of conversion in the world of the court, Wieland represents himself and his motives for the murder of his family in the terms of the conversion narrative that was required for admittance into the Puritan congregation.¹¹ But his story of conversion, instead of gaining him admittance into the “congregation,” causes him to be cast out, and in a way that emphasizes the conflict between “legal” and “religious” explanations that the novel examines.

Wieland's appeal to a transcendent deity was soon to become, in the eyes of the law, an insanity defense. Even in the 1790s, as the novel presents the case, Wieland's perceived madness saves him from the gallows, although not from institutionalization. David Brion Davis has discussed the change in the early republic from the Calvinist concentration on sin or sinful thought as worthy of punishment to the focus on actual crime and its origin in “parental neglect and faulty emotional growth [rather than] inherent depravity or a conscious choice of evil.” According to this view, the early republic witnessed a basic shift in notions of responsibility and communal legitimations and also a shift in notions of character. The structure of social institutions, modeled on the family, becomes the locus of the moral and emotional “nurture” and formation of the subject: “there was a growing conviction that crime was a disease … to be prevented by improved education and social reform” (Homicide 9, 22). Adapting to this shift to the jurisdiction of the family, Timothy Dwight preached that “murder in the proper sense is begun in … the early and unrestrained indulgence of human passions. This indulgence, therefore, Parents, and all other Guardians of children, are bound faithfully to restrain” (Theology 3:356). The conversion narrative has given way to the legal confession, innate character to education and growth, and penitence to the penitentiary. In one respect this transformation was itself dramatically ratified in the separation of church and state represented by the ratification of the Constitution and the dispersal of the authority of the church into the related institutions of education, law, and the family. The novel plays out the anxieties that this change in jurisdiction has produced.

More particularly, the novel dramatizes the change from judging Wieland's crime according to his faith (Wieland castigates his judges for their failure to recognize divine rather than legal jurisdiction: “Impious and rash! thus to usurp the prerogatives of your Maker!”) to judging it according to a legal conception of sanity. Still the novel betrays a rather uncertain jurisdiction over the topic of madness. In part this is due to the uncertainty of causal relations in a novel that foregrounds the problem of cause and effect.¹² The notion that madness is both motive and cause for Wieland's crime poses rather than solves the problem of motive, complicating what it means to have motives. Clara's uncle reassures her that “there could be no doubt as to the cause of these excesses. They originated in sudden madness, but that madness continues, and he is condemned to perpetual imprisonment” (177). Rather than solving the crux of Wieland's motives, the weak causal links of this statement beg the question. What is the connection between the continuation of Wieland's madness (“but”) and his imprisonment (“and”)? If the “cause” or origin of Wieland's “excesses” is “madness,” does his imprisonment represent an attempt to cure him or to contain the effects of his delusions? The notion that character can change is exhibited most problematically here: if Wieland's madness no longer continued, would he be freed?

An excess of belief has led to Wieland's crimes, but what may appear as a simple conflict between religious and legal explanations is further complicated by references to the family. Curiously, in addition to his marked submission to a divine vision, Wieland appeals to the community, and he makes that appeal in terms that suggest he recognizes yet another version of the constituted self. Turning to the audience at his trial, he asks, “Who is there present a stranger to the character of Wieland? Who knows him not as an husband—as a father—as a friend?” (164). His appeal to the community's “knowledge” of him in familial terms is at once an escape from the confines of legal and religious definitions of the citizen or congregant and a move to the heart of those definitions. If Wieland is “known” as a member of his family, he is placed safely within both legal and religious discourses. His actions in murdering his family have been as much a confirmation of his belief in the value of family as a denial.

IV

Wieland contains a family destroyed from within, though agency is ascribed to outside forces. A similar displacement occurs in one of the presumed sources for Wieland. James Yates was sitting in front of his fire in 1781 reading the Bible when he suddenly heard a voice commanding him to destroy his idols. He threw his Bible into the fire; then, upon further admonition from the voice, he killed his wife and four children. His next thought was to set the house on fire so that it would appear that the Indians had done the deed (“I shall be called a murderer for destroying my idols—for obeying the mandate of my father—no, I will put all the dead in the house together, run to my sister's and say the Indians have done it!”),¹³ but he was thoroughly convinced that his actions were justified since they had been dictated by a divine voice and decided that it was better to have the deed known as a confirmation of his devoutness. Axelrod has argued that by taking “‘communion’ with the wilderness” Yates internalizes the threat of the Indians and acts as they would presumably have acted (59).¹⁴ But if Yates, as a sort of afterthought, displaces his violence onto the Indians, his justifications for his actions, and indeed the acts themselves, explicitly invoke a rather different perspective. Yates's justifications, and his presentation of himself as wavering between a family of “idols” and “divine” injunctions to destroy them (reminiscent of Puritan iconoclasm), suggest that he has not so much incorporated the threat of the Indians as violently externalized the closely linked internal problems of belief and the family.

Another analogue for Wieland may be the Narrative for William Beadle (reprinted several times in the 1790s), which gives an account of a murder-suicide that took place in the last year of the American Revolution. This analogue has not been heretofore noted and is worth looking at in some detail for the clues it may provide about Wieland. Beadle was a retailer ruined because of the failure of continental species toward the end of the war. One morning in 1782, he killed his wife and four children and then himself. Beadle left letters in which “he professes himself a deist” and claimed that “the deity would not willingly punish one who was impatient to visit his God and learn his will from his own mouth face to face”: “That it is God himself who prompts and directs me … I really believe” (20, 21, 31). Conflating the concepts of deism and revivalism, Beadle apparently meant that the promise of direct access to God enabled him to perceive his premeditated murders as righteous acts, and hence his mind, like Wieland's “was contemplative” before the murders (15).¹⁵

The narrative of Beadle's life was presented by its editor as a testament to the “shocking effects of pride and false notions about religion,” but it also and perhaps more strikingly shows the power of the unstable tension between family and world in the early Republic (10). When Beadle originally began to fail, “he adopted a plan of the most rigid family economy, but still kept up the outward appearance of his former affluence” (6). More than an understandable attempt to retain status, Beadle's version of “family economy” is transformed into the necessity of family sacrifice. Beadle's family went hungry because “he was determined not to bear the mortification of being thought poor and dependent,” but his considerateness did not stop there: “since it is a father's duty to prepare for his flock, he thought it better to consign them over to better hands” (21, 24). His wife had been having premonitory dreams of the murders, perhaps because Beadle had been in the habit of bringing a butcher knife and an axe to bed with him every night. Beadle wrote of her premonitions, but claimed that “heaven” thought “his purpose was right”: God “now directs me and supports me” (18). He wondered whether he could justify killing his wife; finally he decided that it “would be unmerciful to leave her behind to linger out a life in misery and wretchedness which must be the consequence of the surprising death of the rest of the family, and that since they had shared the smiles and frowns of fortunes together, it would be cruelty to her, to be divided from them in death” (15).

Beadle's fear of being alienated from the community, through poverty, or the family, through death, was dramatically realized when the community had to dispose of his body. No one wanted to be responsible: “at last it was performed by some Negroes, who threw him out of the window, with the bloody knife tied on his breast” (20). Having found suitably marginal characters as undertakers and a thoroughly marginal means of egress, the community became perturbed about interring the body: “After some consultation, it was thought best to place it on the banks of the river between the high and low water mark; the body was … bound with cords upon a sled, with the clothes on it as it was found, and the bloody knife tied on his breast, without coffin or box, and the horse he usually rode was made fast to the sled.” After a gruesome funeral procession, “the body was tumbled into a hole dug for the purpose like the carcase of a beast” (12). Despite the communal attempts to eliminate Beadle and even to eradicate his identity as a human being, the multiply outcast Beadle returned yet again: some children discovered his body washed up by the river, and it was finally reburied by a crossroads.

Finally, then, the difference that Beadle enforces between outward appearance and an inner “rigid family economy” sets up an unbearable distinction between the family and the world. Although Beadle's explanation of his actions invokes a peculiar form of deism, in fact the confusion between revivalism and deism he exhibits appears equivalently in the Weems pamphlet and in other discussions of the early republic that create a striking correspondence between the effects of these religious excesses. The editor of Beadle's account, Stephen Mix Mitchell, asks, in terms reminiscent of Wieland, if it is possible that “a man could be transformed from an affectionate husband and an indulgent parent to a secret murderer, without some previous alteration, which must have been noticed by the family or acquaintance?” (16). The “previous alteration” that effected a transformation in Beadle seems again, as with Yates and Wieland, to have been caused by exposure to religious excess. What appears in these accounts to be on the one side an affirmation of devout Calvinist orthodoxy and on the other an affirmation of deistic reasoning that curiously allows for direct access to God turns out to be much the same thing when put into practice: deism and Calvinist revivalism are represented as significant, and significantly similar, threats to the family. What may be most disturbing, however, about these “alterations” is that they cannot finally be blamed on an alien intrusion; instead, the family-republic, like the Wieland family that serves as its “model,” is caught in the grip of transformations in which it discovers that the alien is already within.

V

In Wieland, the direct result of excessive styles of belief is not only the violence we have been discussing, but also, and perhaps more importantly in terms of the scene of the family, irregular sexual desires. Specifically, as several critics have noted, incest appears as an almost unmistakable element of both Wieland's actions and Clara's responses. In this final and most disturbing version of naming inner desires as alien in order to expel them, Clara performs a double action, at once projecting the violence of her brother's actions onto Carwin, and discovering Carwin in threatening scenes (with sexual overtones) where she has anticipated her brother.

Wieland and Carwin are repeatedly linked by Clara. Even the possibility of a connection between the antinomian beliefs that Wieland appeals to when he explains the murder of his family (by which one may be freed from moral law by virtue of grace) and the Albigensian beliefs for which her father apparently died (in which God and Satan are manifestations of the same force) provides a link between what Clara perceives as godlike qualities in Wieland and the apparently satanic qualities of Carwin. Both Carwin and Wieland undergo “transformations,” though their characters remain ambiguous and even interchangeable.¹⁶ When Clara opens closets expecting to find her brother, or steps back from pits her brother has beckoned her toward, she finds Carwin. When she discovers the murders her brother has committed, she blames Carwin. Although she explains them as antipodes, the “virtues” of her brother may not finally be distinguishable from those of Carwin: the alien and the infidel are the same.

Further, Clara's obsessive concern with the placing of responsibility, the assumption of guilt, and the assignation of blame, her attempts to discover who is guilty and how that guilt shall be determined and judged, appear connected to her own displacement of a sense of guilt. Near the end of her narrative, Clara “acknowledge[s] that my guilt surpasses that of all mankind” (223). One critic asserts plausibly that Clara's “repressed guilt and incestuous desires provide her with motivation” for the crimes that Wieland commits, and argues that she “writes our story with a pen sharpened by a knife steeped in her brother's blood” (Hesford 239). Clara's fascination with Carwin as he interferes with her fantasy life, mingled with her immediate assumption of his agency in the destruction of her family, points to her desire to have a scapegoat for her own desires. She identifies with Wieland's “transformation” to the extent that she asks, “Was I not likewise transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes? Was I not transported to the brink of the same abyss? Ere a new day should come, my hands might be embrued in blood” (179-80). In spite of her attempt to maintain Carwin as a supernaturally gifted “double-tongued deceiver,” Clara manages to castigate herself. Though she calls Carwin the “phantom that pursued my dreams,” she suspects that he might be one of the “phantoms of my own creation” (159, 83).

Clara responds immediately to Carwin's voice: her eyes fill with “unbidden tears” and are later “rivetted” upon the portrait she makes of him (52, 53). Though his features are “wide of beauty,” it seems curiously their very characteristic of being “outside” beauty and the inversion of usual standards in the “inverted cone” of his face that attracts her, so that she “consumed the day in alternately looking out upon the storm and gazing at the picture” (53, 54). She cannot “account for [her] devotion to this image”—though she allows the reader to suppose it a sign of the “first inroads of a passion incident to every female heart”—and similarly cannot explain why, although the outside storm passes, “thoughts ominous and dreary” overwhelm her as she continues to look at the picture (54). Rather than pointing to a romantic infatuation, these signs point to her participation in or even invocation of Carwin's existence at the same time as the associations she makes with him seem importantly connected to her own desires. Looking at Carwin's portrait, she thinks of death, specifically dwelling upon the foreshadowed deaths of her brother and his children. This oscillation between the portrait and the storm is reiterated when, in her retrospective tracing of the events that led to the deaths of her brother's children, she remembers Carwin as “the intelligence that operated in this storm” (190). The storm that raged outside has been internalized. Still, she does not finally know whether Carwin is “an object to be dreaded or adored” and moves to blame him with a tentative assertion: “Some relief is afforded in the midst of suffering, when its author is discovered or imagined” (71, 190).

Indeed, Clara's attempts to “discover” or “imagine” (activities that she appears to confuse in the novel) the “author” of the deeds she has been so appalled by seem finally rather disingenuous. Like Beadle, she has tried to separate the “inviolate asylum” of the home from the dangers of the world, and, like Beadle, she finds that the scene of the home is already the scene of destruction. (It seems quite telling that Clara hears murderers in her closet.) While she claims that “that dwelling, which had hitherto been an inviolate asylum, was now beset with danger to my life,” her mistake is to think that it has ever been an “inviolate asylum” (60).¹⁷

Clara's efforts to fix blame and determine judgments are part and parcel of the attempts to maintain familial and social boundaries that may be seen to structure the action of Wieland. Although Clara and Wieland turn their father's restrictive and rigidly regulated retreat (the temple where he meets his demise) into a haven for free discourse (a new infidelity), it quickly becomes a place where transgressions are foregrounded. Carwin turns the temple into a zone of terror by his voice projections, but his intrusion should have been expected. Clara speaks of the meetings that take place there as free from societal interference and of Carwin as the destroyer of their peace, but rather than being simply the double-tongued deceiver that she calls him, rather than being simply an intruder or foreign violator of the pastoral American scene, Carwin's very abnormalities expose the shaky underpinnings of the family “asylum.” By his intrusion into what Clara has presented as normal domestic scenes, he emphasizes or highlights underlying incongruities and potent desires. Although he systematically invades all Clara's retreats, including her body (albeit through the surrogate servant Judith, and through the ventriloquized sexual conversation that Pleyel “overhears”), Carwin might be seen as exposing Clara's general policy of concealment. In her shaded retreat by the river, Clara dreams of terrifying incest; Carwin wakes her. Clara's bower already resembles a sexual recess; Carwin forces her to confront the mingled invitation and threat of her brother's and her own sexuality.

In Wieland, then, the family is initially presented as a retreat, or “sweet and tranquil asylum” (193), from the intrusions of the outside world, but the distinction between home and world, radically personified by the figure of the intruding Carwin, gets blurred as the destruction seen to lurk without gets discovered within. Clara concludes her account of her family with a typically mixed acknowledgment of the flaw that lay within: “the evils of which Carwin [was] the author, owed their existence to the errors of the sufferers.” No violence could have been introduced into the family “if their own frailty had not seconded these efforts” (244). What Clara still manages to assume in this statement is Carwin's “authorship” of an account which she herself has written. Even as Clara cannot fully recognize the implications of her involvement as the author of the account of her family or see the family as the source of its own destruction, the novel presents her failed perceptions as part of a prevailing faulty perception in the early republic. For the family to keep its identity as an “asylum,” the outside world must be posited as a threat. At the same time, the imitation of the family in social institutions designed to assume or supplement its functions provides a way out of the unbearable tension created between inside and outside by such an insular view of the family. Wieland's message may finally be that for the family to be a haven from the excesses of radical democracy, deism, and revivalism, it must be inoculated, by way of these social institutions, at once with and against the “outside” world. Following the lead of Charles Brockden Brown, the American novel continued to explore the boundaries of the family and to suggest styles of education that would be appropriate for maintaining the family as the support for such an “outside” world, a world represented as all that is alien to the tranquil space, the “inviolate asylum,” of the family.

Notes

1. A version of the first part of this essay appeared previously in Early American Literature 22 (1987), in a special issue devoted to talks from the Early American Literature Division meeting at the 1986 Modern Language Association convention.

2. Davidson asserts that the “Gothic exhibited a particular genius” for exploring the “transitional culture” of the early republic (218).

3. Paine's work cost threepence, while Godwin's Political Justice was prohibitively expensive at three guineas, as reported in Grylls (16).

4. Mason Weems even peddled a version of Paine's Complete Works that contained a reply instead of the Age of Reason; reported in Skeel (296).

5. The first phrases are from a speech by Emory Washburn on the Bible Society in 1847, the last from the publications of the Home Missionary Society in 1837; cited by Griffin (95, 91, 94).

6. For an excellent discussion of the relation between the family and the institution in the period, see Rothman. Fliegelman provides a useful and intriguing account of attitudes toward the family in the literature of the late eighteenth century. See also Grossberg's discussion of the “republican family.” The two Samuels essays discuss the connections of family and state in the fiction of the early republic. For the classical background of family and nation imagery in Wieland, see Weldon.

7. Cf. Fliegelman's discussion of the relation of novels and political programs in the eighteenth century.

8. While Tompkins finds a “plea for the restoration of civic authority” in Wieland (61), I do not find the novel quite so programmatic; still, I concur with her emphasis on political and historical context.

9. There has been much critical attention to the sexual attraction Clara feels for Carwin and for her brother. Davis, for example, claims that “Carwin had saved Clara from an incestuous relation with her brother” (Homicide, 90). What has not been focused on is the parallel between that sexual tension and the representations of deism and revolution in sexual terms during this period. Instead, many critics read the novel as psychological or moral commentary. Cowie, for example, asserts that “at times Wieland seems more like an exposure of the author's unconscious than a reasoned attempt to communicate with the reader logically” (327). For other standard critical treatments of the novel, see Bell, Gilmore, or Ziff. For a suggestive reading of incest in other novels of the period, see Dalke.

10. Suggesting the unlocatable threat of the Bavarian Illuminati (with which secret organization he is often linked, especially because of his apprenticeship under Ludloe in Carwin the Biloquist), it is Carwin's mysterious appropriation of voices, voices that are “inexplicably and unwarrantedly assumed,” and, even more importantly, his assumption of the desires that go along with those voices, that makes Clara fear him most. Pleyel has already accused Clara of being in love with Carwin when he hears the conversation between them that Carwin projects. Wieland has already prepared himself to hear the voices that he hears. For the history of the threat of the Illuminati in America, see Stauffer.

11. The language of Wieland's account of his journey to God also incongruously echoes several passages in Jonathan Edwards's “Personal Narrative.” In this conversion narrative, Edwards reports that as he “walked abroad alone … for contemplation … God's excellency appeared in every thing” (60). Wieland too reports walking outside alone: “My mind was contemplative. … The author of my being was likewise the dispenser of every gift with which that being was embellished” (166).

12. For interesting discussions of the frailty of cause and effect relations in the novel see Scheick and also Seltzer. For a history of nineteenth-century American treatments of insanity, see Caplan.

13. New York Weekly Magazine, July 1796, vol. 2, no. 55, p. 20. Blaming the Indians has a long history in the United States. In a perhaps similar way, William Bradford blamed internal problems in the Plymouth colony on the external threat of the Indians, who usefully alleviated the psychological threats of faith by posing a physical one. As long as he could blame the Indians for tensions within the colony, he could ignore the divisive internal battles over commerce, settlement, and religion. See also Slotkin: “The crowning irony of the witchcraft delusion is that the Puritans' hysterical fear of the Indian devils led them to behave precisely like the Indians” (142).

14. This source was recognized as early as 1801 by an anonymous reviewer in the American Review and Literary Journal. Axelrod comments further that “the blackest irony of James Yates's actions is that in performing what he sees as God's will he commits an atrocity worthy of the stereotyped godless American Indian” (58).

15. Another parallel to Wieland occurs with a servant girl who survives the massacre of the family: Beadle sends her on an errand during his murderous activities at home; in Wieland, she hides in the closet.

16. Pleyel mentions Carwin's “transformation into a Spaniard” (68).

17. These reactions again seem directly connected to the contemporary American fears of Revolution. For an interesting treatment of the novel in this historical context, see Fussell.

Works Cited

“An Account of a Murder Committed by Mr. J———Y———, upon His Family, in December, A. D. 1781.” Reprinted in Philadelphia Minerva 2.81, 82 (August 20 and 27, 1796).

Axelrod, Alan. Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1983.

Bell, Michael Davitt. “‘The Double-Tongued Deceiver’: Sincerity and Duplicity in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown.” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 143-63.

Bradford, William. Of Plimoth Plantation, 1620-47. Ed. Samuel Morison. New York: Modern Library, 1981.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland, or The Transformation; an American Tale. Bicentennial ed. Ed. Sydney Krause, S. W. Reid, and Alexander Cowie. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1977.

Caplan, Ruth. Psychiatry and the Community in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Cowie, Alexander. “Historical Essay.” In Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland. Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1977.

Dalke, Anne. “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel.” Early American Liberature 23 (1988): 188-201.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the World: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986.

Davis, David Brion. Ante-Bellum Reform. New York: Harper and Row, 1967.

———. Homicide in American Fiction, 1798-1860. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1957.

Dwight, Timothy. “A Discourse on Some Events of the Last Century.” New Haven, 1801. Rpt. in American Thought and Writing. Ed. Russel Nye and Norman Grabo. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. 262-72.

———. Theology Explained and Defended, in a Series of Sermons. New York, 1846. Cited by Davis (Homicide 8).

Edwards, Jonathan. “Personal Narrative.” Representative Selections. Ed. Clarence Faust and Thomas Johnson. New York: Hill and Wang, 1965. 57-72.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982.

Fussell, Edwin. “Wieland: A Literary and Historical Reading.” Early American Literature 18 (1983): 171-86.

Gilmore, Michael. “Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown's Wieland.” Studies in the Novel 9 (1977): 107-18.

Gordon, William. The Letters of William Gordon. Rpt. in Massachusetts Historical Society, Proceedings 62 (1929-30): 393.

Griffin, Clifford. “Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815-1860.” Rpt. in David Brion Davis, Ante-Bellum Reform. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. 81-96.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Health. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Grylls, Rosalie. William Godwin and His World. London: Odham's, 1953.

Hesford, Walter. “‘Do You Know the Author?’: The Question of Authorship in Wieland.” Early American Literature 17 (1982/83): 239-48.

Marshall, Humphrey. “The Aliens: A Patriotic Poem.” Philadelphia: May 15, 1798.

Miller, John. Crisis in Freedom: The Alien and Sedition Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, 1952.

Mitchell, Stephen Mix. Narrative of the Life of William Beadle. Windsor, Vt.: Spooner, 1795.

Paine, Thomas. The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine. Ed. Philip Foner. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1974.

Rothman, David. The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Samuels, Shirley. “Plague and Politics in 1793: Arthur Mervyn.” Criticism 27 (1985): 225-46.

———. “The Family, the State, and the Novel in the Early Republic.” American Quarterly 1986: 381-95.

Scheick, William. “The Problem of Origination in Brown's Ormond.” Critical Essays on Charles Brockden Brown. Ed. Bernard Rosenthal. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. 126-41.

Seltzer, Mark. “Saying Makes it So: Language and Event in Brown's Wieland.” Early American Literature 13 (1978): 81-91.

Skeel, E. E., ed. Mason Locke Weems, His Works and Ways. New York: privately printed, 1929.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973.

Stauffer, Vernon. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1918.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1780-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Weems, Mason. “God's Revenge Against Adultery.” (1815) Rpt. in Three Discourses. New York: Random House, 1929.

Weldon, Roberta. “Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland: A Family Tragedy.” Studies in American Fiction 12.1 (1989): 1-11.

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