In his essay Of Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, Benjamin Rush writes that of government we have assumed, has created a new class of duties to every American. After explaining many of these duties, such as patriotism, virtue, humility, and self-denial, Rush boldly states that consider it possible to convert into machines.(1) The phrase is startlingly direct in unmasking thinking behind Federalist-era assumptions about what constituted proper duties and virtues of American citizens. The early republic needed to create citizens with ideologies in order to sustain a form of government, especially because of widely held Enlightenment assumptions about man as balanced precariously between reason and passion.(2) These virtues, so vital to success of new country, were evidenced not only in essays, treatises, and political pamphlets, but in early republic's fiction as well, which, according to Cathy Davidson, while often seeming to uphold virtues, actually questioned the efficacy of prevailing legal, political, and social of ruling elite.(3) Wieland, like perhaps no other novel of its time, catalogues tension between two vastly differing ideologies, virtue and anarchic abandon, and this battle leaves its scars in Clara Wieland's disintegrating voice. However, such a reading leads to an important question which has long troubled readers of novel: what are social and cultural ramifications of a novel that so graphically catalogues disintegration of a happy community? If, as Davidson has contended, emergence of novel in early republic was viewed by men of power and prestige as sign of a time when their authority was being called into question,(4) then in what ways does Wieland threaten established order? In short, what is significance of cataclysmic |storm' ... that sweeps through Wieland?(5) By exploring multivocality of Clara's voice and investigating its importance, I will argue that very significance of Wieland lies in fact that, unlike many other early American novels, Brown's offers no explicit instruction. Paradoxically, it is absence of such a message which constitutes very essence of story.(6) For by refusing to teach its readers how to read novel, Wieland implicitly calls into question true nature of Federalist authority, which depended for its power upon dichotomies between order and anarchy, and reason and unreason. It is this very either or-ism that sustained Federalism in 1798, and that Brown's novel questions. In short, by graphically cataloging multivocalic quality of Clara's voice, Wieland attempts to introduce possibility for new political relations in republic--relations based not upon Federalist metaphysics of opposing polarities, but instead upon assimilation and plurality. At one point in Wieland, a confused and frightened Clara confesses that my mind seemed to be split into separate parts, and these parts to have entered into furious and implacable contention.(7) Indeed, Wieland raises, on many levels, questions about authority and control: What is nature of Carwin's control over Clara and over Wieland? What happens to human beings who rely to excess upon their sense perceptions to govern their lives and decisions? To what extent do cultural institutions, such as education and religion, influence human behavior? However, on an even larger scale, novel becomes locus of a struggle over narrative control, as competing narratives vie to be heard amid a whirlwind of differing voices. As narrator of this tale, Clara's voice is controlling agent for all others, and Wieland is a graphic record of its decay. From outset, Clara tries to maintain what might be termed a republican voice--steady, reasonable, fair, and chaste.(8) Mirroring predominant political and cultural values of eighteenth-century America, Clara's voice operates under its own unique system of checks and balances and strives to maintain its integrity and composure throughout novel. …