"The Shock Which the Sound Produced": Bodies, Trauma, and the Audible World in Charles Brocken Brown's Wieland.

Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), considered the first American novel, represents the emergent nation's social, political, and architectural landscape as fundamentally shaped by sound. Yet, while voice has garnered much critical attention in regards to American identity, the significance of sound more broadly has been overlooked. This article argues that Brown presents sound as an opportunistic infection that alters physiological function as it circulates between speakers and listeners. In fact, Wieland's soundscape embodies the very qualities scholars like Cathy Caruth associate with traumatic experience: it resists boundaries of place and time; defies linguistic expression; and subjects bodies to shocking, repetitive events that haunt them. Ultimately, I argue that Brown's representation of the audible world generates new understandings of how trauma moves between and within bodies.