Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and the Aesthetics of Terror: Revolution, Reaction, and the Radical Enlightenment in Early American Letters

Abstract

Carwin, the ventriloquist anti-hero at the center of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland , employs his own voice like a catalyst, as his duplicitous tricks expose the unconscious determinants of the Wielands' behavior. Critics have read Carwin and his biloquism as figures for novelist, novel writing, and finally, imaginative pursuits in general. I argue that Carwin's destructive "play" is at least partially valorized in the narrative, and in this way echoes the usefully destabilizing work of imaginative production that I would identify with an interested and insurgent model of aesthetics. This "interested" aesthetic draws on the utopian elements found in both the eighteenth-century tradition of sensibility and the new Kantian aesthetic, moving beyond the legitimating function of these various aesthetic ideologies.