THE EMPTY WORLD OF WIELAND

Wieland is a nocturnal tale, a nervous melodrama played out in the uncertain illumination of candle, lamp, fire, moon, stars. To a degree, of course, Brown's darkened stage set is a literary convention; in folk tale as well as in the contemporary Gothic novel of terror, night is the time when creatures of mystery and danger are expected to walk abroad. But Charles Brockden Brown was a self-proclaimed novelist of purpose, and the titillating shudder, though he employed it as a time-tested lure for readership, he condemned as an end in itself. In his preface he announced that he aimed at no less than the "illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man," and he attached a didactic tag to the end of the novel to assure that no one could underestimate his fundamental seriousness. Unfortunately, this conclusion can too lazily be taken as a sufficient summation of the tale's entire import. Certainly, as recent criticism has made us aware, Wieland is far more complex in structure and in meaning than its narrator, Clara Wieland, intimates by moralizing in her final sentences only on the "errors" of the Stuarts, of Wieland, and of herself. For, as Brown himself proclaims, Man is the protagonist; and the theme is conceived as universal: when the light of reason becomes dimmed or is extinguished by superstition, by trickery, or by unusual experience which is misconstrued as preternatural, horror is loosed in the world. This horror is that of man's darkened mind; and its state may be externalized, as here, by false appearance, by the urge to destroy reason in others, by murder, by self-destruction. Wieland is a warning to beware of the quality of sense perceptions, an appeal to cultivate and protect the light of reason; for, once benighted, some men may not find their way back out of the blackness.

This is Brown's manifest message; but, as several recent commentators have argued, Brown's apparent dedication to Lockean sensationalist psychology is compromised by other ramifications of the tale. Thus Larzer Ziff sees Brown as the first American novelist "to face the confusion of sentiment and an optimistic psychology, both of which flowed through the chink in the Puritan dike, and to represent American progress away from a doctrine of depravity as a very mixed blessing indeed." William M. Manley, disputing Ziff's focus on sentimental-seduction materials in the novel, still finds that the "astonishing intensity which Brown generates ... 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." And Donald A. Ringe summarizes: "To show that Brown made use of sensationalist psychology in his book does not necessarily mean that he accepted it uncritically, for the developing action of the novel calls its validity into serious question." Despite their different emphases, all three critics reach what is certainly a valid conclusion: the manifest and the latent content of Wieland appear to be at odds. Yet all, in arriving at this point, overlook an aspect that is an even more fundamental peculiarity of the tale. For the world of Wieland is not only nocturnal; it is also a remarkably empty one. Confined to a few characters and some set locales, it is curiously without a wider social reference: state, city, church—even other families—remain mere shadows lurking in the general gloom. It is this world devoid of those authoritative institutions by which sense impressions could be weighed and judged which I wish later to emphasize. But I would like, first, to demonstrate just how Brown brings each of his principal characters—Clara, Pleyel, and Wieland—to the ultimate state of dangerous illusion, to that "transformation" to which the subtitle refers.

I

As several critics have correctly emphasized, an early comment of Clara's furnishes the key to Brown's method of putting his leading players to the test. "The will," writes Clara, "is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusions on the notices of sense." And, she continues sententiously, "If the senses be depraved it is impossible to calculate the evils which may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding" (39). These maxim-like statements provide the philosophical basis for Brown's employment of light and dark patterns. For if "depravity" of the senses is crucial it is but a step to positing that the light of full day may be linked with the light of unclouded reason; or, to formulate the principle in the reverse manner, that if the senses are required to function in natural gloom, in artificial (hence "false") light, or in darkness, mental perception is correspondingly obscured. The degree and the quality of illumination, then, are all-important. It is this point which Wieland, Pleyel, and finally Clara spectacularly fail to comprehend.

Brown's narrative ultimately depends for force upon the cumulative effect of misapprehended experience; but, for purposes of discussion, it may be divided into four main parts: (1) a prolog, dealing with the elder Wieland's background in Europe and with his death in Pennsylvania; (2) a central action, constructed around the eight voices produced by the ventriloquist Carwin and reaching a climax in Clara's discovery of the body of Wieland's wife; (3) a denouement, in which Clara learns that Wieland has murdered his family and that Carwin is the agent of the voices; and in which Carwin's confession, Wieland's threat of death to her and his suicide bring on her mental collapse; (4) an epilog, written in France three years after these last events, in which Clara tells of her restoration to rationality and of her union with Pleyel. What now follows is a synoptic analysis of Wieland in accordance with this structure, with particular reference to Brown's schematic employment of light-dark contrasts.

1. The Prolog (chs. I–II). The elder Wieland, convinced that his religion has been "expressly prescribed to him" (14), builds a classical temple to his deity and retires there for worship each noon and midnight (the midpoints of light and darkness). His religion has the appearance of the light of reason (the classical temple and midday), but it is also associated with the darkness of unreason (revelation and midnight). On the final evening of his life he goes alone to his shrine. There his "fancy" pictures a "person bearing a lamp" and at the same moment a "spark" lights upon and consumes his clothes. Watching from a window, his wife and her brother (Clara's uncle) see "gleams" and "rays." Running to the temple, the uncle discovers that the elder Wieland's body is scorched; before his...