Abstract
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), one of the first novels by an American author set in the newly formed United States, and dealing with American topics, is generally classed as a “Gothic” novel and read as exploring issues of national identity. The Gothic form, popular in English literature, where it gave sensationalistic treatment to matters of gender, class, national identity and religious affiliation, proved adaptable to conditions overseas. Wieland, however, is less sanguine about the success of the nation-building and independence-achieving enterprise than other, later, novels of American national identity.
Highlights
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, published in 1798, is one of the first “American” novels, such works defined as having an American author and American subject-matter.1 It is set in
Rather than being seen as a self-indulgent genre that caters to a taste for sensation and for the irrational, it is generally recognized as doing what Jane Tompkins has called “cultural work.”2 These works distill, as she sees it, “the fears and dangers uppermost in the society of [the] time, especially as that society appeared to women,”3 though, as Scott Simpkins notes, given the number of male writers of the Gothic and the “ubiquitous male characters who populate the genre,” we should remember that the genre deals with “men and their often troubled versions of masculinity” [122]
Wieland is generally described as a Gothic text; Brown is said to have had a “Gothic imagination,”4 and the plot to be based on a “Gothic” event: the crime of a man who, claiming to have acted in obedience to the voice of God, had killed his wife and children some two years before the publication of the novel
Summary
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, published in 1798, is one of the first “American” novels, such works defined as having an American author and American subject-matter.1 It is set in.
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