The Flow of Narrative: Misleading Structures and Uncertain Faiths in Wieland

Misleading CausalityIn 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. Beyond these interests in uncertainty, much of the novel's notorious difficulty stems from its fractured narrative, rendering it more a series of set-pieces than a cohesive story. The first set-piece is Wieland Sr.'s solitary temple, built on a hill of the property to which he retreated from religious persecution in Europe, which subsequently recalls the formative imagery of Winthrop's "shining city on a hill". Yet while there is indeed an inexplicable luminescence in Wieland's temple, it is not that of radiant peace but in fact, the flicker which preempts a mysterious conflagration, a spontaneous combustion which kills the elder Wieland. This unexplained event and the temple of lonely meditation which houses it models some of the complex interactions between belief, uncertainty, and violence in the text even as the optimistic ideologies of American destiny and Enlightenment progress are called into question.The novel's Gothic qualities question such totalizing structures as Brown reworked the Gothic form to fit the US landscape and the conflicts inherent to its expansionist and Enlightenment projects. Lacking the castles and cathedrals of Europe and the political or religious controversies which haunt them. Brown defends his alterations, dismissing the "[pjuerile superstition and exploded manners. Gothic castles and chimeras," of European practitioners and instead invokes "incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the Western wilderness, [as] far more suitable" subjects for Americans (Brown, Edgar Huntlv 3). But despite dismissing chimeras and super- stitions, which suggests a skeptic's disenchantment of the Gothic world, Brown's oeuvre manifests a striking, critical approach toward the comfortable rationalist subject. Indeed, supernatural forces and even madness hover at the fringes of civilization and the civilized. Far from evacuating the Gothic of the power of irrational and supernatural forces, Wieland describes the susceptibility of figures of comfortable surety and provokes an acceptance of uncertainty, and the possibility of an accompanying faith, as necessary qualities of openness to non-material values and to others. But 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.Wieland Sr.'s death left his two children, Clara and her brother, the younger Wieland, each half the property, including that lonely temple which they convert into an outdoor parlor for company and lively talk. But 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. Not long after, their group is introduced to a mysterious wanderer, Carwin, whom Clara finds fascinating. The mysterious voices begin to threaten Clara, who twice hears them conspiring behind her closet door, and worse they work upon Wieland Jr., who follows in his father's obsessiveness, albeit one transformed by Enlightenment philosophies. Under what he believes to be God's direction, Wieland kills his family and unsuccessfully attacks his sister, only to be drawn off by the vocalizations of Carwin, who has just told Clara that he is a talented ventriloquist. The novel ends with Wieland being arrested and Carwin admitting to teasing the group with his powers, even using them to move surreptitiously among them, but adamantly denying having given Wieland order or cause to resort to murderous acts. The possibility of Wieland's madness and/or supernatural agency Ungers in the text, disputed by the rationalistic family friend, Pleyel, who marries Clara at the novel's close. …