Weiland; or, The Transformation, An American Tale, With Related Texts (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Weiland; or, The Transformation, An American Tale, With Related Texts Mark Sullivan (bio) Charles Brockden Brown. Weiland; or, The Transformation, An American Tale, With Related Texts, ed. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009. xlvii+353pp. US$12.59. ISBN 978-0-87220-974-9. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro's excellent introduction and detailed notes for Weiland (1798) add a considerable depth of knowledge to this new edition of Charles Brockden Brown's first novel. Brown (1771–1810), a noted novelist, historian, and editor, had been positioned as one of, if not the first American novelist during a time of increasing political and cultural conservatism (ix). Barnard and Shapiro associate the conservative legacy that Brown has enjoyed to the biography of William Dunlap, who "labored to obscure Brown's progressive and cosmopolitan concerns" (xi). In doing so, Dunlap sought to ensure Brown's position in the distinctly American culture that emerged after the War of Independence. The strength of the introduction for this edition is in considering the extent to which these "progressive" concerns occupy Weiland. Brown's theory and approach to the novel as a form are espoused in his two essays on the subject, "Walstein's School of History" (1799) and "The Difference between History and Romance" (1800), both included here as related texts. To measure Brown's importance to American culture as a critic or author risks repeating the project Dunlap undertook, and Barnard and Shapiro are astute in avoiding tracing literary traditions from Brown; instead, they focus on the connections between his essays, influences, and the novel itself. Barnard and Shapiro primarily consider the influence on Brown of the Woldwinite writers, in particular "Mary Wollenstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcraft, Robert Bage, and Thomas Paine" (xviii). The tenets of the Woldwinite project encompass a total rejection of the old regime, "because it is artificial and illegitimate" (xviii), advocating the "development of more rational, constructive and transparent [End Page 741] institutions" (xviii). The culmination of this mandate is enacted through culture, which is able to "generate larger social transformation because society works through chains of associative sentiment and emulation" (xviii). Barnard and Shapiro do not locate the origins or intentions of Weiland entirely in this influence, but they do consider the novel to be an interrogation of the "relative stability of Enlightenment-era social and political agendas, and the causes for their demise" (xiii). To summarize the novel would be an error as this is precisely the tertiary reading that Barnard and Shapiro are writing against. In pointing out that Brown's "complex back stories and subplots are remarkably coherent and precise" (xi), Barnard and Shapiro are quite right to suggest that the novel's depth belies the sensationalism of family tragedy and murder within the narrative. Brown's approach, for Barnard and Shapiro, evokes a sense of social education through culture, achieved by "placing his characters in situations of social and historical distress as a means of engaging a wider audience into considerations of progressive behaviour" (xiv). This is not the definitive blueprint for Weiland but certainly presents a comprehensive understanding of the influences working on Brown's inception and execution of the novel. The related texts serve to further illustrate the context of the novel's publication. The accounts of the Yate (278) and Beadlee family murders (280), from which Brown takes inspiration for Weiland, allow the reader to consider the novel within a wider culture. The subtitle, "The Transformation," is decidedly apt in Barnard and Shapiro's reading, as Brown creates a series of movements, not least towards and away from rationality (xii). The German sub-genre of the Gothic taken here as Brown's adopted form for Weiland was in its origins the fruition of "frustration at blocked modernity" (xxvi). Brown's rendering of a tragic family near Philadelphia sees the metaphysical or the divine as benign; the threat is manifested from within, and the family's own inability to escape a method of reasoning wherein the irrational is possible ultimately causes its downfall. The progressive sensibilities that Brown endowed upon the Weiland family taken in conjunction with the stylistic influence of the German Gothic subgenre present Weiland as...