"I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief": Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland

Abstract

"I May Be a Stranger to the Grounds of Your Belief":Constructing Sense of Place in Wieland Lisa West Norwood (bio) America has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldome furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate—that the field of investigation opened to us by our own country, should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe,—may be readily conceived. The sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to the heart, that are peculiar to ourselves, are equally numerous and inexhaustible. It is the purpose of this work to profit by some of these sources; to exhibit a series of adventures, growing out of the condition of our country, and connected with one of the most common and most wonderful diseases or affections of the human frame. —Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly Charles Brockden Brown's frequently cited note "To the Public" in Edgar Huntly reveals his interest in the unfolding "field of investigation" that separates American views, politics, and morals from their European counterparts. Such a "field of investigation" can only be both literal and abstract to Brockden Brown. It is literal in the field's origin in the American landscape, whose symbolic and narrative value he explores in the novel. It is abstract in the sense that he does not explicitly name the landscape as his subject matter; he rather refers to "the incidents of Indian hostility" and "the perils of the western wilderness," topics that are associated with the landscape and grow "out of the condition of our country" but do not describe the landscape itself. In this note, Brockden Brown appears to espouse the argument that Myra Jehlen sets forth in American Incarnation, that "it is precisely because the concept of America is rooted in the physical that it can be infinitely metaphysical. The concept of the New World could not come to everyday life as a pure abstraction; it had to interpret some actual territory, a real [End Page 89] place" (9–10). However, as Jehlen herself admits, the "incarnation" of the idea of "America" in continent, individual, or nation does not lend itself to fiction writing but rather invites "the possibility of a fundamental conflict between the ideology of fiction and that of America" (134) because of its transcendental tendencies and resistance to multiple points of view. Wieland, unlike Edgar Huntly, has received little critical attention on landscape or sense of place.1 Yet the narrative of Wieland, like Brockden Brown's other early work, also revolves around the capacity of the landscape to generate and retain meaning. If Brockden Brown's note in Edgar Huntly supports Jehlen's concept of incarnation, his use of place in Wieland does not, for it focuses more directly on connecting interpretations of the landscape with the particular demands of fiction writing: how to incorporate landscape description into narrative, how to link places and events in the novel, and how to present competing methodologies of sense of place among the characters. As a result, in Wieland, the connection between land and subjectivity is both less explicit and more intimate than in Edgar Huntly. It is less explicit because the landscape of Mettingen cannot be reduced to a consistent symbolic meaning, and more intimate because the novel reveals that there is no thinking that is not tied to the places in the novel or the connections between them. Clara attempts to localize Mettingen and describe the settings as they relate to the characters and everyday activities. Pleyel and others employ surveying language, creating geometric and abstract formulations that compete with the establishment of domestic space. Carwin confuses the others' sense of place with his ability to project his voice into different places, especially "impossible" places, such as the space between the lattice and the rock in Clara's summerhouse "not wide enough to admit a human body" (72). Thus, even more so than the rhetoric in the preface to Edgar Huntly that associates the new views of the American landscape with a new literature and system of morals, Wieland seeks to establish the ways sense of place is constructed and contested in...