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    Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale
    Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale
    Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale
    Ebook328 pages5 hours

    Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale

    By Charles Brockden Brown and John Matteson

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Based on a terrifying real-life incident, this tale of seduction, insanity, and murder is one of America's earliest novels. It unfolds in rural Pennsylvania of the 1760s, where a religious fanatic massacres several members of his family. Part thriller and part psychological drama, it explores the corruption of law and order within a small community.
    The American Gothic style of author Charles Brockden Brown combines intellectual and supernatural elements — a literary mode that influenced later authors such as Poe and Hawthorne. Wieland, his best-known work, was acclaimed by John Keats as "very powerful" and by John Greenleaf Whittier as "a remarkable story." Interpreted variously as a historical parable, an allegorical view of the writing process, and a cautionary tale of unbridled religious fervor, this novel reflects the colonial era's social and political anxieties and offers intriguing glimpses of the American mood at the close of the eighteenth century.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMay 10, 2012
    ISBN9780486122007
    Wieland; or, the Transformation: An American Tale
    Author

    Charles Brockden Brown

    Charles Brockden Brown (January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810), an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, is generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. He is the most frequently studied and republished practitioner of the "early American novel," or the US novel between 1789 and roughly 1820. (Goodreads)

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Eh. It was all right. Started out as a very intriguing ghost story and I was looking forward to finding out what was really going on. But the ending was a let-down. There were a couple of plot holes, even though the last chapter read entirely as an attempt to fill a couple of them. But it would probably make a great PBS miniseries.
    • 2/5
      I really didn't like this book. At first, I thought it was because of the style of writing. This book was written in 1798, and it is a little difficult to get used to some of the conventions of that time period. But that wasn't it. Even excusing the writing style, I didn't like this book.I didn't like the characters at all. Clara Wieland and her family all struck me as bored young men and women with nothing better to do than sit around gossiping. The "villian" of the piece, Carwin, reminded me of many of the villians in real life today who claim "It's not my fault. I couldn't help myself". He spent three chapters explaining how he just couldn't keep from using his "evil power" and came off sounding like a whiny adolescent.But, worst of all, this is a book where NOTHING happens. The reader isn't shown anything; we're told the whole story. And, there's no indication of the "invisible power and nameless fear" mentioned on the back cover. There's just nothing spooky or suspenseful about this story.I found the biography of the author from the 1856 Cyclopedia of American Literature, included in this volume, much more interesting than the novel. It seems Brown was quite prolific; as Wieland was his first published novel, it would be interesting to see if his later works improved.

    Book preview

    Wieland; or, the Transformation - Charles Brockden Brown

    Copyright

    Introduction copyright © 2010 by John Matteson.

    All rights reserved.

    Bibliographical Note

    This Dover edition, first published in 2010, is an unabridged republication of the text of the work originally published by T & J Swords, New York, in 1798.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771–1810.

    Wieland, or, The transformation : an American tale / Charles Brockden Brown ; with an introduction by John Matteson.

    p. cm.

    This Dover edition, first published in 2010, is an unabridged republication of the text of the work originally published by T & J Swords, New York, in 1798 —T.p. verso.

    9780486122007

    1. Pennsylvania—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775—Fiction. 2. Gentry—Pennsylvania—Fiction. 3. Combustion, Spontaneous—Fiction. 4. Tricksters—Fiction. 5. Religious fanaticism—Fiction. 6. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 7. Fathers—Death—Fiction. 8. Radicals—Fiction. 9. Psychological fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Wieland. III. Title: Transformation.

    PS1134.W5 2010

    813’ .2—dc22

    2009049820

    Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

    47599901

    www.doverpublications.com

    Table of Contents

    Title Page

    Copyright Page

    Introduction to the Dover Edition

    ADVERTISEMENT

    CHAPTER I

    CHAPTER II

    CHAPTER III

    CHAPTER IV

    CHAPTER V

    CHAPTER VI

    CHAPTER VII

    CHAPTER VIII

    CHAPTER IX

    CHAPTER X

    CHAPTER XI

    CHAPTER XII

    CHAPTER XIII

    CHAPTER XIV

    CHAPTER XV

    CHAPTER XVI

    CHAPTER XVII

    CHAPTER XVIII

    CHAPTER XIX

    CHAPTER XX

    CHAPTER XXI

    CHAPTER XXII

    CHAPTER XXIII

    CHAPTER XXIV

    CHAPTER XXV

    CHAPTER XXVI

    CHAPTER XXVII

    Introduction to the Dover Edition

    Horror works best when it undermines the things we think we can most rely on. Although Gothic fiction was still in its formative years in 1798 when Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) published Wieland; or, The Transformation, the young American author already understood this precept exceptionally well. One by one, Brown’s novel shakes the foundations of almost every assumption that supplied comfort and stability to everyday life in the new American republic. The Americans who grew up alongside Charles Brockden Brown were a generation whose ideas were shaped by the Revolution and solidified during the making of the Constitution. To a large extent, they possessed a shared faith in the constellation of values and institutions that defined the fledgling nation. First, although they were overwhelmingly Christian, they were more willing than any previous generation of Americans to entertain the Enlightenment principle, stating that ideas of science and the evidence of the senses were more credible than scriptural revelation. Secondly, they believed in the family as a wellspring of stability and virtue, and they supported meritocracy—the idea that society functioned best when a person of talent was free to triumph over a person of inherited wealth and social status. Finally, they believed in the power of law to restrain evil and protect the innocent.

    In Wieland, each of these credos is either shattered, or distorted beyond recognition. The Wielands, children of a man of fierce, half-cracked piety, are models of high-minded domesticity. They pride themselves on their love of art and reason, and they thoroughly trust their eyes and ears. Their ruin comes when a man of undistinguished origins uses a supernatural talent in a monstrous, arbitrary fashion to mislead their senses, eventually destroying not only their position of privilege, but the family itself. Then, after the acts of horror have been committed, the law proves powerless either to comprehend or to restrain the deranged perpetrator. At a time when most Americans placed confidence in the virtue of their fellow citizens and the sufficiency of their public institutions, Charles Brockden Brown raised a chilling voice of doubt. In an infant republic, his was a peculiarly republican vision of terror. The essay that follows will address, in turn, Brown’s biography, the socio-political climate at the time of Wieland, and the means by which the novel translates broader societal circumstances into the stuff of horror.

    I.

    Charles Brockden Brown was the first American novelist who tried to earn a living as a man of letters, and Wieland was the first novel he published. If for no other reason than this, both the book and the man who wrote it would figure importantly at the very foundation of American literature. Brown was born in Philadelphia, the fifth son of Elijah and Mary Brown. Inclined toward radicalism in both his politics and his reading, Elijah Brown became an enthusiastic reader of the English reformer William Godwin, as well as Godwin’s wife, Mary Wollstonecraft.¹ Godwin astonished the English-speaking world with his outspoken appeals on behalf of atheism, anarchy, and radical personal freedom, whereas Wollstonecraft won notoriety for her groundbreaking feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. The elder Brown passed his leftward leanings on to Charles, who was deeply influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau before turning his attentions, like his father before him, to Godwin, most notably the latter’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Elihu Hubbard Smith, a friend of Brown’s, stated both Brown’s feelings and his own when he wrote, Godwin came, & all was light. Under Godwin’s influence, Brown grew to distrust the authority of established institutions, which he saw as interfering with the capacity of individuals to observe the world without prejudice and to follow their natural understandings of justice and truth.

    If Brown’s formative years were rich in reading and radical thought, his material fortunes were less stellar. When Brown was thirteen, his father was imprisoned for debts. Whether out of loyalty or because he had nowhere else to go, Charles spent, as he later remembered, "twelve hours in each day, that is, . . . I passed the night, for 8 months together in a Jail." Continually awakened by clanking chains and assaulted by the blasphemies of inmates, he formed early on the impressions that would later enable him to imagine Theodore Wieland in his dungeon.

    The Browns recognized in Charles their best hope to return the family to prosperity, and, with their strong encouragement, the boy commenced the study of law when he was sixteen. His heart was never in it. No one, he lamented, was ever less calculated for the drudgery of business than myself. Science and literature, Brown averred, were the Idols of my soul. But it was more than a subjective aversion to commerce that held him back. His political guru Godwin had argued that legislation . . . is not an affair of human competence and that truth and virtue could only suffer under the mistaken guardianship of authority and laws. Brown could never, in good conscience, serve a system that he found contrary to freedom and reason. The great lesson that his legal studies taught him was a negative one: that language—whether it rested in the hands of a lawyer, a writer, or, perhaps a ventriloquist—is a highly elastic tool, equally serviceable to a hero or a scoundrel. Although he continued to go through the motions of his legal studies, Brown privately resolved never to practice law. The resulting sense of having failed his family no doubt contributed to a period of deep melancholy that possessed him in the early to mid-1790s. His letters to friends from this period are strewn with manipulative threats and seemingly delusional falsehoods. Brown was using language as his character Carwin would later exploit it: to procure cynical amusement and selfish advantage.

    Brown eventually rallied from his mental instability and quietly began to pursue his real professional ambition: to become his country’s first self-supporting novelist. He gave it a spirited effort. Following the appearance of Wieland, his first and best book, Brown published five more novels in the next four years, including Ormond, Arthur Merwyn, and Edgar Huntly. In a sense that is almost incomprehensible today, Brown’s abandonment of law in favor of a literary life was a giant step away from the intellectual center of his culture, a place that was already setting commerce above art. In 1798, the idea that a novelist might exert more influence than a lawyer over the cerebral life of his community would have astonished most Americans. Five years after Wieland was published, the eminent Virginia attorney William Wirt observed, Men of talents in this country... have been generally bred to the profession of the law, and indeed throughout the United States, I have met with few persons of exalted intellect, whose powers have been directed to any other pursuit. By the time Wirt had written these words, Charles Brockden Brown had already given up his career as a novelist and turned largely to political pamphleteering. His quest to prove that an American man could support himself by writing fiction had ended in failure. Looking back on his efforts in fiction, he wrote despondingly, I should enjoy a larger share of my own respect, at the present moment, if nothing had ever flowed from my pen, the production of which could be traced to me. He was barely thirty-nine when tuberculosis claimed him in 1810.

    II.

    On a December evening in 1781, James Yates, a resident of Tomhannock, New York, known to his neighbors for his kindliness and sober habits, read the Bible as he sat with his wife and their infant daughter by the cozy fireside. Their other daughter was also in the room, and the couple’s two sons slept nearby. All at once, Yates perceived a new light shining into the room. In its strange glow, he beheld two spirits, one of whom commanded him to destroy all his idols. Yates threw his Bible into the fire, snatched up an axe, and dashed outside. A few moments later, he returned, having hacked his sleigh to pieces and killed one of his horses. Unappeased, the spirit demanded the lives of Yates’ family. The distracted man summarily dashed out the brains of his two sons. A few minutes later, after a desperate chase along a nearby road, Yates’ wife and infant daughter were also dead, brought down by his axe. Yates now tracked down his remaining daughter, who had taken refuge in the barn. The girl, sobbing, pleaded to be spared. For a moment, her father relented. Bizarrely, he commanded her to sing and dance. As she did so, Yates weighed his pity against his perceived spiritual duty. The latter won out, and he split the girl’s forehead with a hatchet. Brought to trial for his five murders, Yates freely confessed the bloody deeds but denied any criminal intent, claiming that the homicides had been inspired by a holy apparition.

    The first complete account of Yates’ night of mayhem did not appear in print until July 1796, when the story was featured in The New York Weekly Magazine. It is likely that the case caught Charles Brockden Brown’s attention a month later, when it was reprinted in the Philadelphia Minerva. The incident fascinated him, and it supplied him with the authentic case to which he refers in the prefatory Advertisement to Wieland. But Brown had much more general public issues on his mind than the Yates murders when he spun out his Gothic tale.

    It is easy enough for us to imagine Charles Brockden Brown’s America—pre-Industrial Revolution, pre-Louisiana Purchase—as a placid, slow-moving society. To the people who lived in it, however, it seemed anything but. America, as one French observer saw it, was a country in flux; that which is true today as regards it population, its establishments, its prices, its commerce will not be true six months from now. [Wood, 319] The atmosphere of instability and continual change was felt among wealthy families like Brown’s fictitious Wielands as powerfully as within any other social station. The pastoral setting of the Wieland family estate would seem at first glance to be well insulated from the strivings and reversals of the marketplace; their lives at their country manor appear to approximate the Horatian/ Jeffersonian ideal of genteel withdrawal from the turbulence of the city. Nevertheless, in the waning years of the eighteenth century, the way of life that the Wielands personify was under assault, both from populist critics and from economic reality. Then as now, the upper classes in America were viewed with a combination of admiration and envious contempt. However, the dominant mood appears to have been one of anti-aristocratic backlash. In the year of Wieland’s publication, a semi-literate New England farmer named William Manning spoke for a rising tide of sentiment when he published The Key of Liberty, an angry denunciation of all orders of men who live without Labour, a class that he regarded as parasitic, politically manipulative, and innately hostile to the interests of working people. Yet at the same time that Manning inveighed against moneyed privilege, the status of the idle, landed aristocrat was becoming harder to maintain, especially in the North, where more and more aspirants to the life of the country gentlemen were learning that their dreams were receding from their financial reach. In his superb history of the period, Empire of Liberty, Gordon S. Wood writes convincingly of patrician northerners who were forced to abandon their hopes of living without having to work. Even if there were no Carwins in the world of Charles Brockden Brown, the Wielands might have been regarded in their time as an endangered species.

    At the time of Wieland, the United States faced a more general threat in the form of hostility to free speech. In response to the XYZ Affair, a diplomatic crisis that brought the country to the brink of war with France, the United States government adopted the now-infamous but then highly popular Alien and Sedition Acts, which, among other provisions, criminalized the publication of false or malicious writings against the government and the incitement of opposition to any act of Congress or the President. The meaning of the still-new First Amendment was up for grabs, and fundamental questions arose: Did the Bill of Rights protect the right to lie? By what principles should one balance the right to speak as one chose against the right of citizens to be protected from malicious falsehoods? At the same time that these questions were being debated, political journalists were testing the acceptable limits of acceptable commentary. James Callender, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Brown’s home city of Philadelphia, scandalized the nation with his less than accurate reporting on the alleged sexual and fiscal transgressions of Alexander Hamilton. He was merely the best known of a host of pundits who specialized in smears and scurrility. America on the eve of the nineteenth century was, then, a country fearful of violence, unsettled in its social relations, and uncertain as to whom or what it could safely believe. This was the nation that Charles Brockden Brown addressed in Wieland.

    III.

    I used to suppose, Clara Wieland laments in Chapter Nine of Brown’s novel, that certain evils could never befall a being in possession of a sound mind; that true virtue supplies us with energy which vice can never resist. Of course, she learns otherwise. Clara’s words might serve as a philosophical keynote to the entire text of Wieland, which contains no shortage of passages that mourn the downfall of reason, civilized behavior, and the nobility of humankind. I have lost all faith in the steadfastness of human resolves, Clara confesses in another place, and other passages brood darkly on the spectacle of virtue brought low by treachery. To read Wieland with a credulous spirit is to feel oneself stripped naked—to sense that none of one’s trusted defenses against evil will avail.

    Before Carwin’s arrival, it seems that no force could ever displace the Wielands’ world from its foundations of goodness and rationality. Significantly, one of the talismanic objects in the temple that stands as the family’s shrine to reason and art is a bust of Cicero, the ancient Roman orator whom America’s revolutionaries revered as a human symbol of law and eloquence. Theodore Wieland’s specific relation to Cicero is through the spoken word. Eager to learn the best way to recreate the oratorical éclat of the great Roman, he seeks a true scheme of pronunciation for the Latin tongue and obsessively studies various editions of brilliant speaker’s works in hopes of restoring the purity of the text. In the righteous world of the Wielands, the art of refined speech is a path toward integrity and the transcendence of human failing. Yet Brown’s depiction of Wieland’s faith in the saving capacities of speech merely sets the stage for a grotesque reversal of values; at the same time that Wieland is perfecting his Cicero, Carwin is elsewhere, cultivating his ventriloquism.

    Carwin’s more sinister form of virtuosity is also a form of technical mastery, in itself not lacking in merit. However, in his case, the gift has been divorced from the will to use it prudently. Unlike Clara Wieland’s beau, the ideal Henry Pleyel, who has rejected all guidance but that of his reason and who, even more than Theodore Wieland, stands as Carwin’s polar opposite in the novel. His ideas and objectives are bounded to the passing moment, and commonly suggested by the momentary exigence. When Carwin first appears visibly in the novel, Brown is careful to style him as a stranger to the staid, temperate upper class to which the Wielands belong. His clothing is disheveled, and he has none of that gracefulness and ease which distinguish a person with certain advantages. His very demeanor suggests anarchy and disarray. Nevertheless, Clara immediately concedes his superior talent; the energy and musicality of his voice surpass those of her brother and Pleyel, whom she had previously supposed to be peerless speakers. Carwin is the novel’s representative of meritocracy—the person of obscure origins and uncultivated appearance whose sheer ability and audacity enable him to contend with the children of status and privilege. Yet Carwin is actually the perversion of the self-made man. To those who, in the wake of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), would argue the social benefits of laissez-faire economics and the invisible hand, Carwin opposes the subversive power of his invisible voice. Emphatically, his example illustrates that what gives pleasure to one does not always contribute to the benefit of all.

    Carwin’s particular monstrosity is, of course, as Clara Wieland puts it, that He is able to speak where he is not. However, his subterfuges depend less directly on his ability to throw his voice than his capacity to simulate the voices of other people. He is able to exert authority over others by disassociating his voice from his personality and usurping the ethos of a more trustworthy identity. This, in another form, was what James Callender and the other scandalmongers of the press were doing in Brown’s time (and, by the way, what tabloids and less reputable cable news purveyors continue to do in our own). By donning the trappings of believability, by dressing up their falsehoods as reliable news, they could manipulate opinion almost at will. Similarly, Carwin needs only to speak his words in the tone and accents of another, and he is instantly believed. The distressing aspect of the way this works in Wieland is perhaps not Carwin’s superior cleverness, since his charades are often somewhat amateurish; rather, one is astonished to see how readily the apostles of reason, Pleyel and Wieland, are led astray. Once Pleyel, Brown’s quintessential man of reason, receives the suggestion that Clara has shed her virtue, his judgment of her guilt is practically unshakable. The sheer stupidity of Wieland in obeying Carwin’s commands to slaughter his family would defy all credence, if Brown did not have the Yates case to back him up. Again, it is the flimsiness of reason, not the titanic power of its opposite that is the true cause of alarm. Flimsy as well in Wieland is the rule of law. The courts that try Wieland for his homicides lack the necessary understanding to deal justly with a man who has committed a series of horrible acts but has done so with a motive that he sincerely believes to have come from heaven. The penal system, too, is a failure; Wieland escapes multiple times, and the only person who can finally subdue him is not a constable, but Carwin, the rogue who incited Wieland’s violence in the first place.

    Also unsettling are the contradictions in the very structure of Brown’s narrative. Whereas his novel is dedicated to undermining our confidence in our ability to discern truth, Brown is preoccupied with establishing the truthfulness of his tale. A long footnote explains the feasibility of ventriloquism, and a prefatory advertisement to the reader insists both that a person like Carwin may exist and that Wieland’s rampage had its precedent in fact. Similarly, although Brown’s novel explores in lurid detail the collapse of established morality, the novelist presents his work as a moralizing story, written, as Clara tells us on the first page, to [contribute to] the benefit of mankind by teaching the duty of avoiding deceit. And yet the very horror of Wieland resides in the possibility that we might not recognize deceit when we see (or hear) it. In the end, Brown walks away from his allegedly ethical purpose. In the last paragraph, Clara sets the reader free to moralize on this tale as he will. If we accept this charge, we do so with the awareness that Brown has done his utmost to shatter our confidence in our ability to do so.

    In one of the last columns that she wrote for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune before her fateful journey to Europe in 1846, the great literary critic Margaret Fuller praised the publishing house of W. Taylor for issuing a new edition of the then-forgotten Wieland. The fact that Brown’s work had long been both out of print and out of favor struck her merely as proof of a defect in the nation’s aesthetic sense. She wrote, Brown, man of brooding eye, the teeming brain, the deep and fervent heart; if thy country prize thee not and has almost lost thee out of sight, it is that her heart is made shallow and cold, her eye dim, by the pomp of circumstance, the love of gross outward gain. Whatever might be said of Brown’s technical foibles, Fuller observed that he was nevertheless all alive and fulfilled the purposes of being and that his gravest page is joy compared with the mixed, shallow, uncertain pleasures of vulgar minds. Although Fuller’s definition of joy may differ from our own, we may still count ourselves the better because of the purposes of being that were fulfilled by Charles Brockden Brown.

    JOHN MATTESON

    ADVERTISEMENT

    The following Work is delivered to the world as the first of a series of performances, which the favorable reception of this will induce the Writer to publish. His purpose is neither selfish nor temporary, but aims at the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man. Whether this tale will be classed with the ordinary or frivolous sources of amusement, or be ranked with the few productions whose usefulness secures to them a lasting reputation, the reader must be permitted to decide.

    The incidents related are extraordinary and rare. Some of them, perhaps, approach as nearly to the nature of miracles as can be done by that which is not truly miraculous. It is hoped that intelligent readers will not disapprove of the manner in which appearances are solved, but that the solution will be found to correspond with the known principles of human nature. The power which the principal person is said to possess can scarcely be denied to be real. It must be acknowledged to be extremely rare; but no fact, equally uncommon, is supported by the same strength of historical evidence.

    Some readers may think the conduct of the younger Wieland impossible. In support of its possibility the Writer must appeal to Physicians and to men conversant with the latent springs and occasional perversions of the human mind. It will not be objected that the instances of similar delusion are rare, because it is the business of moral painters to exhibit their subject in its most instructive and memorable forms. If history furnishes one parallel fact, it is a sufficient vindication of the Writer; but most readers will probably recollect an authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland.

    It will be necessary to add, that this narrative is addressed, in an epistolary form, by the Lady whose story it contains, to a small number of friends, whose curiosity, with regard to it, had been greatly awakened. It may likewise be mentioned, that these events took place between the conclusion of the French and the beginning of the revolutionary war. The memoirs of Carwin, alluded to at the conclusion of the work, will be published or suppressed according to the reception which is given to the present attempt.

    C. B. B.

    September 3, 1798.

    CHAPTER I

    I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows. You are a stranger to the depth of my distresses. Hence your efforts at consolation must necessarily fail. Yet the tale that I am going to tell is not intended as a claim upon your sympathy. In the midst of my despair, I do not disdain to contribute what little I can to the benefit of mankind. I acknowledge your right to be informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit. It will exemplify the force of early impressions, and show, the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline.

    My state is not destitute of tranquillity. The sentiment that dictates my feelings is not hope. Futurity has no power over my thoughts. To all that is to come I am perfectly indifferent. With regard to myself, I have nothing more to fear. Fate has done

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