The Predicaments of Radical Individualism and the Gothic Return of Paternal Legacy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Abstract

Scholars have read Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland in the context of early American republicanism, viewing the fall of the younger Wielands’ enlightened utopia as a sobering reflection on the nascent republic, as the family tragedy sheds light on the flipside of the early American Enlightenment. The bankruptcy of the Wielands’ enlightenment idealism, however, also reveals that they remain tragically bound to the gothic legacy of the first Protestant father.
 Wieland dramatizes how Clara’s enlightenment ends up being eclipsed by the return of the father’s sins, as she unwittingly inherits his radical individualism. This paper examines how the frontier immigrant father’s millennialistic fanaticism returns, leading Clara to gravitate toward an occult belief and a fatalist outlook. Indeed, Clara’s attempts to counter the oppressive paternal curse with her faith in benevolent Providence flounder, emblematically demonstrating the inherent limitations of her radical individualism. Clara’s descent is punctuated by her symbolic dread of her brother Theodore, the heir to the persistent curse of their patriarchal heritage. At the same time, her fear is mediated by a mystical voice that Carwin fabricates to embody divine authority. Clara’s near-blind obedience to what she imagines to be an occult agent is reminiscent of the elder Wieland’s apocalyptic fervor. As Clara’s moral fortitude succumbs to epistemological uncertainty and despair, the haunting shadows of her paternal lineage disrupt her rational inquiry and optimistic worldview, casting a pall over her struggle for enlightenment and self-realization.