Abstract
A lingering question in criticism of <em>Wieland</em> asks why the narrator, Clara, uncharacteristically withholds knowledge of events and perpetrators—a decision making for exciting reading but showing a baffling artifice. Why does this traumatized protagonist spend so much time imparting her past ignorance when the eventualities are known to her at the time of her writing? Some suggest that Clara withholds the <em>facts</em> in an attempt to impart a <em>feeling</em> to readers, enlisting their sympathy and casting Carwin as the villain. Others read Clara's narrative strategies as a product of mental instability, perhaps even insanity. But there exists another possibility: I suggest that Clara's narrative logic is part of a larger theory of causality, accepted with complete faith by Clara and her companions, and characterized most often by a conceptualization of “flow” in the text. This term flow, and related ones like “chain” and “train”, are used with almost neurotic constancy to describe the connections between precedents and antecedents, defining the actions of the present in terms of past inertia and predicting the future with prophetic surety. Likewise, these terms feature heavily in the long, pregnant passages regarding the drift of consciousness in the interior life of the narrator. Clara's retention of the eventual facts need not be read as an artificial device of story-telling, nor a manipulative tool in the prosecution of Carwin, but instead as emblematic of the novel's interrogation—and ultimate critique—of Enlightenment faith in perfect continuity, a faith which would justify Clara's dogged commitment to revealing events only in their original sequence. Ultimately, I argue that Brown's novel gestures toward the possibility of a more open Gothic model of events and thoughts, which could address the problematic ambiguities that remain despite Clara's attempt to impose a rigidly causal and chronological narrative.
Highlights
Misleading Causality In the last years of the eighteenth century, Charles Brockden-Brown wrote the first major American Gothic novel, reworking a famous criminal case of arson and murder into a dizzying narrative of mystery, religious fanaticism, and the inexplicable
The primary way in which Brown's Gothic poses an uncertain alternative to totalizing and concreted structures of certainty comes in the manner of the story's telling, the text's meticulously reconstructed narration by Clara, which clashes with the thematic interest in Gothic ambiguities
Their group's educated society is marred by inexplicable voices, which confuse and concern them as the voices seem to come from impossible distances or absent speakers
Summary
The novel's opening features the purposeful aim of its narrator with Clara's claim that her story will “exemplify the force of early impressions, and show the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline” (5). Citing the worthiness of his source in his father's God, and the natural, followed flow of his thoughts, Wieland believes his final actions—nothing less than the murder of his family—to be beyond reproach This sensibility, though not the murderous end, is echoed in Clara's writing as she too attempts to piece out the flowing movement of her thoughts and the story itself, as a means of justifying her vision of understanding. It could stretch to cover the sort of faithful credit to persons which fails in the text, as in Clara's treatment of Carwin, and Pleyel's treatment of Clara It is precisely the power of the Gothic, Brown's Gothic especially, which looks to condition its readers into a sense of this humbleness before the irreducible complexities of the world, the unaccountable vagaries of fate, and the dangers of a position of mastery over narrative and understanding
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