SOURCE: Manly, William M. “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland.” American Literature 35, no. 3 (November 1963): 311-21.

[In the following essay, Manly suggests that Wieland has more in common with the darker works of Poe and Hawthorne than with the sentimental tradition with which it is often associated.]

Students of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland have often noted its relationship to the Richardsonian sentimental novel. Fred Lewis Pattee was the first to suggest similarities when he wrote in his early Introduction: “The book is to be classed with the seduction novels so popular at the close of the 18th Century—a book of the Clarissa Harlowe type.”¹ Leslie Fiedler later elaborated the sentimental seduction theme into the major experience of the novel,² and a more recent reading has found Wieland to be a sentimental novel with a reactionary middle.³

Surely there are sentimental-seduction materials in Wieland: Clara, the narrator, swoons at several critical moments; she is occasionally dithyrambic with emotion over her would-be lover Pleyel; Carwin, the villain of the piece, at one point confesses to a desire to ravish Clara; and in the denouement he confesses that he has seduced Clara's maid. Yet I would suggest that for all these incidental trappings, the emotional power of Wieland does not rely in any essential way on the traditional appeals of the sentimental novel. The felt literary experience which Brown's early novel provides is far closer to the dark ambiguities of reason and emotion in Poe, Hawthorne, and Henry James than to the palpitating excesses of Richardson. Sentiment is only one aspect of the narrator's sensibility, and not the dominant aspect; seduction is only one of a cluster of threats that assail her, and not the dominant threat. The astonishing intensity which Brown generates in such an unevenly written novel reflects his ability to convey through a first-person narrator the shifting instability of a mind swayed between objective logic and subjective terror, creating thereby a tension which is not resolved until the final pages. The controlling drama of this novel is suggested by another of Pattee's early insights: “The Wieland family is abnormal, but the reader holds the key to this abnormality. The novelist has skillfully furnished all the materials for a clinic. The book is a study in dementia: all four of the main characters are touched with it.”⁴

I

The sensibility of Clara Wieland filters two preoccupations which occur throughout Brown's writing: his avowed interest in rationalism, truth, and purpose; and his equal fascination with the disruption of these qualities in the bizarre, the Gothic, and the sentimental. Though critics have claimed Wieland for one or the other of these preoccupations,⁵ it seems clear that Brown constructed his tale not around one, but around both—the one leading dramatic force to the other—and that the dramatic tension so generated is the key to Wieland's central fascination despite its surface flaws. To be fully logical and guided by common sense is, in the mental world of this narrator, to be fully sane; to give reign to one's susceptibilities to supernatural and mystical speculation on mysterious events is to move toward madness. This unresolved dramatic tension begun in the early pages and continued until the final ones not only gives a heretofore slightly regarded unity to this early tale but is clearly its guiding genius.

Clara displays from the beginning a far more rational and controlled intelligence than that of the typical sentimental heroine. Even random samplings of her conversation have a philosophic rigor unknown to Clarissa: “We recalled and reviewed every particular that had fallen under our observation,” “he merely deduced from his own reasonings,” “I labored to discover the true inferences deducible from his deportment and words.” Her analysis of her brother's possible delusion seems to be taken from Locke or Hume entire: “The will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusions on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding” (p. 39). The highly rational Pleyel says of her: “I have contemplated your principles, and been astonished at the solidity of their foundation, and the perfection of their structure” (p. 138). This common sense side of Clara reveals the impact of Brown's reading in Locke and Hume, his early interest in Voltaire and the French Deists, and his association with Deistic thinkers in America like Benjamin Franklin. But beyond this, we see in Clara's rationalism Brown's own innate philosophic habit of mind which caused comment among friends and critics alike.

Yet Clara has a more dangerous aspect to her sensibility, a tendency to veer from objective common sense into a melodramatic world of haunting speculation. Working against her tendency to set forth her narrative logically and clearly are sudden shifts as her imagination becomes overwhelmed with horror. Before describing Carwin she writes “My blood is congealed: and my fingers are palsied when I call up this image. Shame on my cowardly and infirm heart!” (p. 56). Three times she pauses to recover herself from soaring sensations which threaten to overwhelm her senses, and toward the end of the tale she morbidly looks toward her own death: “Let my last energies support me in the finishing of this task. Then will I lay down my head in the lap of death. Hushed will be all my murmurs in the sleep of the grave” (p. 248). The indulgence of Clara's imagination sets up an emotional rhythm in the novel which is constantly tugging at the factual foundations on which the tale seems to be based, and injects a hint of instability into the whole.

This tension which Brown is at pains to create through Clara's conflicting predisposition is initiated in her early description of her father's strange death. On the one hand the event is informed with scientific objectivity. The description of her father's day and of the symptoms with which the fatal evening begins are almost clinical; significantly, a man of science, a doctor (Clara's uncle), related the facts to her because she was too young to have understood them at the time. This same rational and scientific uncle will enter the tale in the final scenes to start Clara back on the road to mental health. Clara says of him: “My uncle's testimony is peculiarly worthy of credit, because no man's temper is more skeptical, and his belief is unalterably attached to natural causes” (p. 21). Even the description of her father's body after the mysterious accident is unemotionally realistic: “My father, when he left the house, besides a loose upper vest and slippers, wore a shirt and drawers. Now he was naked, his skin throughout the greater part of his body was scorched and bruised. His right arm exhibited marks as of having been struck by some heavy body. His clothes had been removed, and it was not immediately perceived that they were reduced to ashes. His slippers and his hair were untouched” (pp. 19-20). It is not surprising that the precisely observed details of this description came from an actual journal report of a similar accident: Clara's tone of factual authenticity is unmistakable.

Yet though she is disposed to view her father's death with a certain objective reserve, another more “Gothic” appeal manifests itself. Throughout the episode Clara dwells intermittently on her father's feeling that he might be doomed by some supernatural agency, and on her mother's thoughts that fatal night. The episode when seen from the eyes of her mother is bathed in emotionalism: “What was it she feared? Some disaster impended over her husband or herself. He had predicted evils but professed himself ignorant of what nature they were. When were they to come? Was this night, or this hour to witness the accomplishment?” (pp. 17-18). This impressionistic speculation on her mother's thoughts long after the event is evidence at the outset of a tendency to color events subjectively, a tendency with which the reader sympathizes—the death is, after all, a mystery—but on which he can only reserve judgment. The peculiar irresolution of the elder Wieland's death is in part the irresolution of Clara's attitude toward it, an irresolution which the tale will demonstrate to have dangerous consequences.

Brown's dramatization of opposed tendencies in Clara's consciousness is structurally reinforced by the externally opposed personalities of the ultra-rational Pleyel and the ultra-religious Wieland. Their conflicting, and ultimately irreconcilable, attitudes toward experience are defined early: “Pleyel was not behind his friend in knowledge of the history and metaphysics of religion. Their creeds, however, were in many respects opposite. Where one discovered only confirmations of his faith, the other could find nothing but reasons for doubt. Moral necessity, and calvinistic inspiration, were the props on which my brother thought proper to repose. Pleyel was the champion of intellectual liberty, and rejected all guidance but that of his reason” (p. 28). Pleyel, being an outsider, is untouched by the morbid inheritance of a mysterious death which appears to haunt the Wielands; his perspective is like that of Clara's uncle whose nature was “unalterably attached to natural causes.” Pleyel is inclined to regard the mysterious voice which Wieland first hears with sociable good humor and skeptical reservation. Wieland, on the other hand, consistently exhibits a mind prone to supernatural brooding and tends to color events with his own interpretation of them. The mysterious voices cause Wieland to fall into a prolonged, introspective meditation which partially isolates him from his friends. Clara remarks of her brother that he always regarded his father's death as “flowing from a direct and supernatural decree,” and that he was in some respects an “enthusiast” in religious matters.

Clara is clearly the inheritor of her brother's introspective disposition, which she gradually comes to realize is leading to dangerous alienation from reality, but which she is powerless to control by the application of objective logic. Her emotional commitment to supernatural interference is deepened by her second encounter with the mysterious voice, this time heard not only by Wieland but by Pleyel. She cannot contain an upwelling of enthusiasm: “The tales of apparitions and enchantments did not possess that power over my belief which could even render them interesting. I saw nothing in them but ignorance and folly, and was a stranger even to that terror which is pleasing. But this incident was different from any that I had ever before known. Here were proofs of a sensible and intelligent existence, which could not be denied. Here was information obtained and imparted by means unquestionably super-human” (p. 51). Her use of “proofs” and “unquestionably” at this juncture, while Pleyel is bemused but uncommitted, is an ominous shifting of Clara's mental balance in the direction of Wieland's “enthusiasm”; her assured invocation of the supernatural to explain appearances runs against an underlying tenor of skeptical “scientism” and rationality which has vied for the reader's attention from the beginning.⁶ Through Clara's brooding and extravagance Brown begins subtly to establish that the mind which filters the experience of the tale is itself a biased glass which warps the proportions of the events seen; in this respect, the complex tension of the tale becomes focused not on typical sentimental or Gothic situations, but on the problem of separating appearances from realities, truths from fictions, in a manner which suggests Henry James's later technique in “The Turn of the Screw.” Clara's vacillation at this point is merely an early tremor in her mental stability but it is a tremor which subtly prepares the reader for those later oscillations between madness and sanity which dominate the tale's central scenes.

Clara grows more and more frenzied as frustration and isolation continue to exacerbate an already divided sensibility. Her tone takes on a desperate quality: “You will believe that calamity has subverted my reason, and that I am amusing you with the chimeras of my brain, instead of facts that really happened. I shall not be surprized or offended, if these be your suspicions” (p. 74). As her instability mounts, her naturally rationalistic, philosophic temper becomes steadily weakened: “I now speak as if no remnant of doubt existed in my mind as to the supernal origin of these sounds; but this is owing to the imperfection of my language, for I only mean that the belief was more permanent, and visited more frequently my sober meditations than its opposite. The immediate effects served only to undermine the foundations of my judgment and precipitate my resolutions” (p. 168).

II

The subtle dislocation of Clara's narrative is further emphasized by her inexplicable first-sight reaction to Carwin, the ventriloquist villain, a reaction which the reader can neither share nor understand. Having had only a glimpse of Carwin's face (he appears as a rustic stranger), and hearing only a snatch of his conversation to her maid, she is not only moved to tears, but his image continues to preoccupy her for days. The instability which she displays at this juncture is confusing even to herself: “The manner in which I was affected on this occasion, was, to my own apprehension, a subject of astonishment. The tones were indeed such as I never heard before; but that they should, in an instant, as it were, dissolve me in tears, will not easily be believed by others, and can be scarcely comprehended by myself” (p. 59). Clara's involuntary fantasies soon veer to a morbid preoccupation with her father's mysterious death and her own legacy of possible madness; Carwin the stranger is thus only the occasion for a fresh release of melancholy as his image provokes foreshadowings of doom.

This curious reaction, taken together with her response to the voices in the closet plotting her murder, and the warning in the recess—all the startling and inexplicable situations that make up the fabric of this tale—gradually isolate Clara from the free and healthy social intercourse of the novel's beginning, to press her toward the private hell of doubt and uncertainty which characterizes its climax. The progression appears as preordained as a Greek tragedy. We follow those early premonitions and warnings which have intruded into her consciousness and watch them become inexorably realized in the real and threatened mental disintegration of Wieland and Clara herself. One of Brown's major foreshadowing devices, which has heretofore received insufficient, if not irrelevant, treatment, is the dramatic impact and subsequent effect of Clara's dream of Wieland, a dream which not only subtly prepares the reader for Wieland's disastrous transformation in the climactic scenes of violence but gives Clara a dim insight into her own possible mental disintegration if she follows her brother's course. After falling asleep in an isolated summer bower, she dreams she is walking in the evening twilight to her brother's habitation: “A pit, methought, had been dug in the path I had taken, of which I was not aware. As I carelessly pursued my walk, I thought I saw my brother, standing at some distance before me, beckoning and calling me to make haste. He stood on the opposite edge of the gulph. I mended my pace, and one step more would have plunged me into this abyss, had not some one from behind caught suddenly my arm, and exclaimed, in a voice of eagerness and terror, ‘Hold! hold!’” (p. 71)

In a curious way, Clara both sees and does not see the pit toward which she is headed in her carelessness; it is a course which her conscious mind neglects but which her subconscious intuits as destructive. The dream is appropriately mysterious; it is an “abyss” toward which her brother beckons her, but with what intention? Recent criticism of Wieland has been inclined to interpret the abyss and Clara's fears of her brother as a latent horror of incest,⁷ despite the complete lack of objective evidence for such a view within the novel. Clara at no point fears seduction or rape by Wieland but at several points fears the homicidal possibilities of a latent, and perhaps inherited, insanity in her brother. The image of an “abyss” is present at two other crucial points in the narrative, where it is clearly used to mean the gulf of insanity.⁸ Furthermore, Clara herself interprets her own dream toward the end of the tale as a prophetic intuition of her brother's incipient transformation into a maniac,⁹ an intuition which is repeated in the following waking episode that takes place shortly after her dream.

Alone and in a disturbed state, Clara enters her bedroom prepared to peruse a manuscript, but at her closet door she hesitates, inexplicably overcome with terror: “A sort of belief darted into my mind, that some being was concealed within, whose purposes were evil” (p. 96). She is suddenly haunted by the vision of “An hand invisible and of preternatural strength, lifted by human passions, and selecting my life for its aim,” and in the instant the dream of Wieland's temptation to destruction is recalled. She is led to the irresistible conclusion that Wieland is within the closet—“What monstrous conclusion is this? my brother!” (p. 99) Once again the dream warns her subconscious of danger, but it is quite obviously not sexual assault which she fears but homicidal violence. The very ambiguity of her thoughts and actions in this scene indicates that it is not only Wieland's madness which is dimly presaged, but the scene itself dramatizes a threat to her own sanity that the reader cannot fail to remark. Her irrational compulsiveness here is a subtle prelude to that terrifying compulsive and fanatic behavior of the later Wieland. The disturbed mind faltering in darkness which so fascinates Brockden Brown in this and other novels could well stand as a metaphor for the entire action of this strange tale.¹⁰

It is not Wieland who emerges from the closet, but Carwin, and this brief direct encounter of Carwin and Clara has been a key scene for those critics who desire to view the tale as Richardsonian. Here, if nowhere else in the novel, sexual assault is presented as a momentary threat. But in the same breath that Carwin alludes to his opportunity to ravish Clara, he professes his inability to do so because she is protected by a “higher power.” The scene is short and fraught with mysterious, apologetic behavior on the part of Carwin, who does not appear either here, or anywhere else, as a lusty Lovelace. Even this scene of avowed momentary passion for Clara is later confessed to be a sham expedient, designed to make him seem more flamboyant. Carwin, in fact, is for the most part a shadowy background figure whose final confessions reveal him to be more of a pathetic bumbler than a figure of soaring sexual passion.¹¹ Though he is the mechanism behind mysterious events, the dramatic heart of the novel is not in the events themselves but in the reaction of Clara and Wieland to them. When the mysteries are brought to light they appear trivial and uninteresting; they have their meaning in the agonies they have produced. Which is only to say again that the central drama of the novel lies not in sex or sensationalism per se, but in Clara's consciousness as she copes with a growing isolation from the sane and normal preoccupations of daily life.

III

The mysterious alienation of Pleyel (later found to be the work of Carwin) is one more instance of this isolation. The sentimental attraction of Pleyel for Clara is precisely why her isolation from him is so dismaying, for once again the strange has intruded itself into the intimate and familiar to disturb the very foundations of Clara's sanity. To be sure, part of this alienation results from a too scrupulous conventionality which Clara regrets, but this is hardly the most important reason for the alienation, nor is it the point of the whole episode. The incident is organically integrated into Brown's carefully constructed chain of isolation and frustration which with fateful relentlessness is pressing Clara closer and closer to possible disaster, as her emotions and imagination gain control over her reason.¹²

At the climax of the tale those intimations and omens which have plagued Clara from the beginning come to fruition. Wieland's murdered wife and children are discovered, and Wieland himself takes over the narrative for a time (by means of a trial transcript) to portray the consequences of a morbidly hypersensitive sensibility when it is cut loose from any balancing skepticism. Wieland's transcript, which begins so rationally and ends in such horror, is a logical extension of the path on which Clara has been walking, and from which she is only fortuitously saved. In the culminating scenes of the tale, Clara is brought to the brink of complete disorientation: she falls into frenzies, she becomes delirious, and just before Carwin enters for the last time, she is on the point of suicide.

But with Carwin's confession comes catharsis: rationalism begins to be restored and the healthy perspective of fact begins to replace the instability of fancy. This resolution in explanation is actually begun slightly before the confession with the appearance of her uncle, whose rationality and scientific interests take the place of the missing Pleyel. Facts of family history are given, and a medical explanation of Wieland's condition is provided. Yet, as her uncle shows Wieland's madness to be inherited, Clara's dread of her own mental transformation is increased. Shortly after the climactic events she takes to her bed delirious; once again the ominous image of an abyss, the symbolic inheritance which has haunted her from the beginning, is recalled in a phantasmagoric dream: “Sometimes gleams of light were shot into a dark abyss, on the verge of which I was standing, and enabled me to discover for a moment, its enormous depth and hideous precipices” (p. 264). The ultimate purgation breaking the concatenation of terrors that has dominated her fancy is achieved through a fire from which she is physically and symbolically rescued, a fire which sweeps away the scenes of her past and jars her into a fresh start for the future. As it was fire which destroyed her father to begin the inexorable tragic chain of frustrations and fears that make up Wieland, so it is fire that at last breaks that chain to allow Clara to return to a normal life.

This fresh start is the true ending of the novel; from this point on Clara's few pages of “tying up loose ends” act simply to draw out the purgation that Carwin's confession inaugurated and bring the reader back into a world of cause-and-effect sanity. That Brown was careless with some of his details is undeniable, but such carelessness leaves the central experience of the novel untouched. This reading has tried to show that Brown's over-all achievement in Wieland is far more of a piece than most critics will acknowledge who approach this early work more as a mine of literary-cultural materials than as a powerful psychological experience. If one must find a tradition for Wieland, it must surely lie with those peculiarly American explorations of the tormented psyche which seem ambiguously and resonantly to hover between appearance and reality, fact and imagination, daylight and dream. Brockden Brown is clearly the first of those many in American letters who have grasped the dramatic importance of “point of view” in fiction.

Notes

1. Fred Lewis Pattee, Introduction to Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland or the Transformation, “Hafner Library of Classics” (New York, 1958), p. xxxvi. All page references (hereafter in text) are to this edition.

2. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York, 1960), Chap. ii.

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

4. Pattee, Introduction, p. xl.

5. Critics in recent years have swung to the rationalistic view of Brown's fiction. David Lee Clark began the trend in an early dissertation, Charles Brockden Brown, a Critical Biography, Columbia University, 1923. Brown's sentimental and Gothic side have been emphasized by Harry Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown, American Gothic Novelist (Gainesville, Fla., 1949).

6. In addition to Clara's rationalistic tone, and the emphasis on reason in the tale, Brown's preface serves further to bias the reader toward a realistic solution by promising that “appearances” will be solved in accordance with “known principles of human nature” (Wieland, p. 3). See also in this connection Brown's footnotes (pp. 21 and 202) where the naturalistic tendency of the tale is upheld by documentation outside it (unavailable, of course, to Clara).

7. Fiedler, op. cit., began the incest trend, along with a number of other distortions, such as, for example, his statement that “Brown does not dare openly imagine even murder between characters of one blood—only the approach to it” (p. 36), about a tale in which a man murders his wife and four children, and attempts to murder his sister. The incest idea has been revived more recently by Ziff, op. cit., who writes: “The horrors of incest and inherited depravity which Clara forces back from the threshold of her consciousness by turning to thinking about thinking are not to be explained away by the tabula rasa” (p. 54).

8. When the impact of Wieland's madness has dawned on her, Clara writes, “Now was I stupified with tenfold wonder in contemplating myself. 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?” (pp. 202-203). Again when in a delirious dream, the image of an abyss again haunts her imagination as the threat of insanity: “Sometimes I was swallowed up by whirlpools, or caught up in the air by half-seen and gigantic forms, and thrown upon pointed rocks, or cast among the billows. Sometimes gleams of light were shot into a dark abyss, on the verge of which I was standing, and enabled me to discover, for a moment, its enormous depth and hideous precipices” (p. 264).

9. “I recollected the omens of this destiny [she is in danger of “perishing under the grasp of a brother”]; I remembered the gulf to which my brother's invitation had conducted me; I remember that, when on the brink of danger, the author of my peril was depicted by my fears in his form: Thus realized, were the creatures of prophetic sleep, and of wakeful terror!” (p. 214). When we add to this Clara's early reservations about Wieland's excessive morbidity, which she claimed “argued a diseased condition of his frame which might show itself hereafter in more dangerous symptoms” (p. 39), Ziff's contention that Wieland's insanity is a “leap rather than a development” (op. cit., p. 56) is rather too simple and condescending—Brown is not interested in “developing” Wieland's madness but in developing Clara's—and to the extent that Clara intuits her brother's condition it is sufficiently prepared for.

10. Clara's crisis of consciousness before a door suggests later treatments of the idea in both Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” and Henry James's “Jolly Corner.” In these tales, as in Wieland, the protagonist has been driven to the edge of sanity before confronting the door, and in each case the door represents the barrier beyond which some terrifying conception lurks which threatens mental equilibrium.

11. Carwin is perhaps the most overrated villain in American fiction, and has been the subject of many distortions. Richard Chase, convinced of Carwin's central role, writes that he “has little difficulty” in convincing Clara at the end of his ventriloquistic endeavors that “if he is a criminal he is a high-minded one whose actual crimes are venial, being merely the result of a certain necessary unscrupulousness in the choice of means to ends” (The American Novel and its Tradition [New York, 1957], p. 33). This is clearly wrong. Leslie Fiedler, who misreads the Clara-Carwin relationship in a different way, wishes to make Carwin into a sex-crazed ravisher.

12. Ziff, op. cit., in attempting to prove that the focus of Wieland is a rather confused attack on sentimentalism which is not carried through, misses the larger and deeper unity of Brown's work. Leaving aside the assumption that Brown and his intellectual milieu were in a state of optimistic innocence as he started to write, a view which I find untenable, his view of Clara-Pleyel misunderstanding as simply anti-sentimental is superficial.