When Theodore Wieland murders his wife and children in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation (1798), his sister Clara, the novel's narrator, clings to the belief that an external power urged him to action. Perhaps the power was God, as Wieland fervently maintains. Yet Clara also considers alternatives: it may have been a bodily disease or the influence of Carwin, the mysterious biloquist who has been deceiving her family with his ability to mimic and “throw” voices. Uncertain of the true cause of Wieland's crimes, she questions herself, “Did I place a right construction on the conduct of Wieland? … Was there not reason to doubt the accuracy of my perceptions?”Footnote 1
The doubts about motives and causal relations that Clara raises in this moment characterize her struggles as a first-person narrator throughout the novel. This essay suggests that they also reflect the uncertainty of an era in American cultural history, one in which diverse theological and medical explanations for hearing voices and seeing visions circulated side by side. Clara alternately wonders whether her family members have been inspired by heaven, possessed by demons, deceived by humans, or perverted by bodily diseases. This confusion, I contend, is symptomatic of her embroilment with the early republic's rapidly expanding conditions of belief. She inhabits a “secular age,” we might say, in Charles Taylor's sense of the term: she can trace puzzling phenomena to supernatural sources, but only as one optional explanation among many medical, political, legal, and sociocultural others.Footnote 2 As Taylor explains, his understanding of the “shift to secularity” in the West “takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”Footnote 3 This locating of the secular in possibilities of belief and unbelief challenges traditional accounts of secularity as a “subtraction story” in which science gradually “crowds out” religious faith.Footnote 4 It also offers a foundational vocabulary for approaching the particular “conditions of belief” that haunt Clara Wieland throughout her narrative. To this end, I recover a currently underdeveloped historical context for Brown's novel, the arguably distinct moment in American secularity when religion and medicine offered equally viable definitions of mystical experiences and “religious madness.” By attending to these contrapuntal discourses and their influence on Clara's strained attempt at a didactic narrative, I show that Brown tests the appropriateness of eighteenth-century novels' traditional morals at a cultural moment in which there is, indeed, always “reason to doubt” (164).Footnote 5
Connecting Clara's doubts about causality to her immersion in the volatile religious and medical discourses of the early republic enriches recent studies on Brown and the public sphere, in which Brown is approached as a site for “reconceptualizing the social dynamics” of his age.Footnote 6 While theorists like Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen Shapiro have drawn much-needed attention to the political and socioeconomic issues in Brown's texts (race, class, sex–gender), they have largely neglected to incorporate religion and medicine into their picture of his works’ cultural context.Footnote 7 My account of the interwoven religious and medical discourses circulating in the early republic thus expands the purview of the recent cultural scholarship on Brown's fiction. It also complicates traditional interpretations of Brown's views of religion. Scholars who have considered the religious commitments in Wieland often read the novel as either a pointed response to the Bavarian Illuminati crisis of the late 1790s or, more commonly, a retrospective engagement with seventeenth-century American Calvinism.Footnote 8 The latter argument takes two forms: some scholars, such as Jane Tompkins, interpret the novel as directly critiquing the Wielands’ lingering attachments to Calvinism.Footnote 9 Others understand Brown to underwrite a secularization narrative, in which the characters’ Calvinist leanings recede before their (perhaps reckless) faith in Enlightenment reason and/or their legal or pre-Freudian understandings of wrongdoing.Footnote 10 Despite these scholars' several readings of Brown's interest in Calvinism, they similarly assume that Wieland responds to a rather uniform moment of religiosity in America's past – a moment that, in their constructions, had stopped existing by Brown's era and that, according to contemporary religious historians, never actually existed at all.Footnote 11 I complicate these interpretations by probing the novel's investment in the dynamic secular environment of the early republic, an age to which religious historian Amanda Porterfield attributes “a pervasive sense of self-doubt and mistrust of the world.”Footnote 12 Rather than responding to any unified moment in America's religious history, Brown's novel portrays the muddle of religious truths and medical facts destabilizing Americans' worldviews at the moment of its writing. In turn, this attentiveness to the spiritual and intellectual instability of the early republic allows Brown to ironize the confident lessons of eighteenth-century didactic fiction, as represented in Clara's forced didactic conclusion to her rhetorically convoluted narrative.
The tangle of discourses Clara struggles to reconcile in her narrative includes “moderate” Protestantism's disdain for religious enthusiasm, as well as Protestant-minded physicians' warnings about faith practices that lead to mental derangement. To begin, I historicize these turn-of-the-century discussions of faith and madness and examine the questions Clara raises about agency and causation as a result of contemplating them directly. When Clara questions whether Wieland has been instigated to murder by “a perversion of his organs, or a delusion from hell,” she articulates a debate between natural and supernatural explanations of phenomena that defined the early republic's unstable religious environment (140). I then contend that these same distinctly secular uncertainties prompt the indirect style and ironic conclusion of Clara's narrative: because she cannot determine whether she and her family are victims of devils, deities, deceptive humans, or their own biological idiosyncrasies, she finds recourse in narrative strategies that do not require assigning characters agency or establishing clear causal relations between events. This difficulty, readers are invited to conclude, is the struggle of living and storytelling in a secular age. Clara's unsuccessful attempt at an objective, didactic story points to the need for new, less morally and structurally rigid literary forms in the looming nineteenth century.
Deviltry and Diagnoses
Clara's first-person narrative takes shape as a letter she writes to a beloved friend or relation at his or her request. In it, she relates three enigmatic sequences of events in her family history: her father's apparent combustion and death one night during her childhood; the series of disembodied voices she and her brother's family hear after the biloquist Carwin appears on their estate; and, finally, her brother's murder of his wife Catherine and their young children, which he believes is divinely inspired until the climactic scene of his suicide. Clara only began to consider the significance of the first sequence, she admits, after the start of her mysterious encounters with Carwin. She thinks, or, more accurately, recalls thinking in that recent period of her life, “Was this [her father's death] the penalty of disobedience? this the stroke of a vindictive and invisible hand? … Or, was it merely the irregular expansion of the fluid that imparts warmth to our heart and our blood?” (18).Footnote 13 The debate that Clara articulates here surfaces repeatedly in her reactions to the mysteries leading up to her brother Wieland's death. She wants to attribute her life's dark happenings to either an omnipotent supernatural power or a natural bodily dysfunction, but she feels powerless to decide which. She similarly probes the possible natural and supernatural causes of her experiences when she questions whether her brother Wieland's criminality resulted from “a perversion of his organs, or a delusion from hell” (140). Here the supernatural power in question is hellish, rather than heavenly. Still, the basic structure of Clara's dilemma is the same. She does not know whether she inhabits an “enchanted” world, subject to the power of spirits both good and bad, or a disenchanted one, in which the power of intent belongs solely to human minds and everything else operates by natural law.Footnote 14
Clara's confusion about the possible natural and supernatural forces influencing her family's fate coincides with Taylor's broad depiction of the “secular age” of the post-Enlightenment West. He describes the “typical” modern condition: “We cannot help but be aware that there are a number of different construals [of life], views which intelligent, reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on. We cannot help looking over our shoulder from time to time.”Footnote 15 Clara evinces this “condition of doubt and uncertainty,” positioned so prominently in Taylor's sweeping narrative of modernity.Footnote 16 Even so, the causes of her condition are historically specific: she responds to a particular manifestation of secularity in late eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic America. The “secular age” of the early republic has its roots in American religion's dramatic expansion and diversification following the Revolutionary War. Religious adherence among Americans increased from 17 percent in 1776 to 34 percent in 1850.Footnote 17 The number of religious denominations doubled in the same time span.Footnote 18 In 1776, 55 percent of Americans active in a religious body belonged to the established Congregationalist or Episcopalian church of their region.Footnote 19 By 1850, only 19·1 percent of Americans belonged to these two denominations, while adherence to Methodism had shot from 2·5 percent to just over 34 percent.Footnote 20 Patterns of belief also varied greatly between regions and even between states and cities in the same region. Pennsylvania, the chosen setting for Wieland, had one of the highest rates of religious adherence in 1776, averaging 24 percent.Footnote 21 At the same time, the city of Philadelphia had one of the strongest showings of religious skepticism.Footnote 22 When Charles Brockden Brown sets Wieland in a rural community near Philadelphia, he places Clara and her family in the middle of the nation's complex religious milieu.
Religious disestablishment factored strongly into this unsettled moment in America's religious history, creating a “free market religious environment” in which small upstart sects could pose a legitimate challenge to more costly, organized churches.Footnote 23 Yet legal disestablishment was only one sign of the Jeffersonian religious and political values gaining strength at the time. Jefferson and his supporters argued that religious belief and political authority alike must rest with the American people.Footnote 24 In the realm of religion, this emphasis on individual liberty translated into a defense of unrestrained freedom for assumedly private conditions of belief. Jefferson reasoned with Americans in Notes on the State of Virginia, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”Footnote 25
By thus urging Americans to leave their neighbors to their private views, Jeffersonian liberalism laid a foundation for the plurality that many historians recognize as the defining trait of the early republic's religious environment.Footnote 26 As John Lardas Modern suggests, the religious choices that emerged in the early republic (and continued emerging throughout the nineteenth century) were “remarkable and representative achievements.”Footnote 27 Yet for Modern and other religious historians such as Finke and Stark, the previously unmatched pluralization of American religion in the late eighteenth century also defined the age's secularization. In the process of allowing others their religious beliefs, Americans had first to confront that there were differences between their respective views, that their individual faiths were, in Taylor's words, only “one human possibility among others.”Footnote 28 Doubts about the meaning or truth of their own beliefs naturally followed. America paradoxically became more secular precisely as it became more religious.
Perhaps predictably, this dynamic array of religious faiths and doubts led Americans to adopt diverse views on religious revelation and madness. The central point of controversy was whether God ever speaks or appears to contemporary believers directly. On one side, a self-declaredly “rationalist” cluster of Protestant denominations including Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Unitarians, and Universalists denounced seeking God through voices and visions as a distraction from the purity of “true” religious faith.Footnote 29 True or pure religion, in their articulations, was subdued, reasonable, morally instructive, and individualized – unsurprisingly, all traits they associated with their own traditions. At the same time, rapidly expanding evangelical denominations like the Methodists and Baptists upheld direct revelation as a still-valuable component of religious experience.Footnote 30 While seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Calvinists interpreted divine revelation as a sign of election, these post-Revolutionary evangelicals treated it as a way for all believers to foster a stronger relationship with God. Their doctrines, though, also warned against the dangers of divine possession or madness, which would result if believers did not protect themselves from sin and demons.Footnote 31
As was the case among many late eighteenth-century Americans, Clara's religious inclinations do not align neatly with either of these loose, fluctuating strains of Protestantism.Footnote 32 Instead, her faith is an amalgam of multiple religious discourses, a highly personalized creed she describes as “seldom verbally expressed, or solicitously sought, or carefully retained” (20). Such an individualized creed consists with the images of faith Clara perceives in her upbringing. Clara's mother's faith is nontraditional by default; she is simply too far removed from any town to participate in an established congregation (13). Clara's father, by contrast, staunchly defends the rightful privacy of religious faith. Although familiar with the Bible and the doctrines of the Camissards, an apocalyptic faction of French Protestantism, Wieland Sr. “allie[s] himself with no sect,” choosing instead to build a temple in his backyard and frequent it alone, twice a day, throughout his adult life (12). This dedication does not interfere with his openness to other truth claims, however. An exemplary product of a secular age, one in which multiple destabilized worldviews must coexist, Wieland Sr. accepts his religious views as private views and readily instills in young Clara that “other modes, practiced by other persons, might be equally acceptable” (13). He never doubts that his faith is true for him. Still he is certainly not going to push it upon others. They have the right to their own (private) conditions of belief.Footnote 33
Once her parents die, Clara's receptivity to diverse religious perspectives only increases. Rather than modeling a particular religious standard, Clara's new guardian leaves her to formulate her own religious inclinations, free from any “weighing of proofs” or “dissection of creeds” (20). Clara responds by treating religion as a topic for inquiry among many others; her “mixed and casual” religious sentiments emerge as one valuable result of her education in “most branches of useful knowledge” (20, 19). Only after facing the “calamity” of her family's fate does she realize that her malleable creed's appeal is also its limitation: there is no certainty in her noncommittal religious sentiments. When her brother claims that God instructed him to murder, she vacillates between defending his claims and denouncing them as mere delusions. Raised in an only casually religious culture, Clara recognizes both as equally viable stances.
Not fully convinced that Wieland murdered at God's command, Clara must also consider possible “secular” explanations for his actions. The alternative she contemplates most seriously – that Wieland suffers a “perversion of his organs” – echoes the increasingly standard response of late eighteenth-century skeptics of religious revelation. Since those who claimed to hear and see God directly were clearly not divinely inspired, they had to be mentally deranged. This medicalization of revelation would surely have appealed to nonbelievers or atheists, making it a secular explanation in the sense of “not religious.” Yet, following religious-studies scholar Tracy Fessenden's revisionist understanding of American secularity, we might also note the slippage between this supposedly secular medicalization of religious enthusiasm and the ideals of a “rational” Protestantism.Footnote 34 What first appears a strict division between medical and theological accounts of religious experience proves a much hazier association of “rational” Protestantism and “secularized” medicine, on one side, with enthusiastic religiosity defined as its other. Thus the rise of medicine challenged one religious worldview by quietly bolstering another; it helped to infuse “rational” Protestantism into the invisible framework of so-called secular American culture.
To preserve the reputation of this self-determinedly rational faith, eighteenth-century physicians like Richard Blackmore, Nicholas Robinson, and Benjamin Rush carefully distinguished between signs of “religious madness” and causes of it. Believers with perverted bodily organs might very well act overly or oddly religiously. However, their disorders result from their malfunctioning bodies, not their religiosity; just as insanity makes fierce men fiercer or proud men prouder, it makes believers overzealous, Robinson explains.Footnote 35 Blackmore defends the fundamental healthiness of religious belief even more adamantly. His medical tracts inveigh against the “atheist, infidel, and loose libertine,” who, “offering violence to reason,” blames religion for causing mental disease.Footnote 36 Bodies may become perverted for many reasons, but religion is not one of them.
Yet there is an underlying caveat in Blackmore and Robinson's seemingly general defenses of “religion.” Pure religion, they imply, does not cause madness. Distorted forms of religion – say, the enthusiastic practices of Methodism – may very well predispose adherents to it. As one of the early republic's most prominent physicians and a well-known moral philosopher, social critic, and Presbyterian, Rush discriminates more explicitly between the two than do many of his contemporaries. Like Robinson and Blackmore, Rush is a “religious materialist,” who traces mental derangement strictly to physical disruptions in the body, particularly the vascular system.Footnote 37 Even so, Rush readily allows that the physical disruptions can themselves have nonphysical triggers – for example, hearing evangelical sermons on religious visions.Footnote 38 Accordingly, Rush's distinction between material and nonmaterial causes of religious madness becomes somewhat of a technicality, rightfully overshadowed, in his formulation, by an opposition between (true) “religion” and religious “errors.” Rush writes, “Let not religion be blamed for these cases of insanity. The tendency of all its doctrines and precepts is to prevent it … and even the errors that have been blended with it produce madness less frequently than love.”Footnote 39 By separating true from erroneous religion, Rush medicalizes the hierarchical categories of “rational” post-Revolutionary Protestantism. True religion fosters healthy-mindedness; corrupted forms of religion predispose believers to religious madness.
Rush and others divide this religious madness into two primary types, both of which Clara evokes when characterizing her father and brother in Wieland. Footnote 40 The first, religious melancholy, or in Rush's terminology religious hypochondria, involves an abnormal fixation on a religious “object,” such as the state of one's guilt-ridden soul or the chances of one's salvation.Footnote 41 The result, according to Blackmore, is an extreme heightening of the “diffidence, scruples, and fears” that define Christian humility, “even sometimes to so deep a despondence and self-condemnation as borders on despair.”Footnote 42 Although Clara does not assign a label to her father's mental disquiet in the months before his death, her description of his condition utilizes strikingly similar language. She writes, “Suddenly the sadness that constantly attended him was deepened … he hinted that his peace of mind was flown, in consequence of deviation from his duty” (13). Although readers may pass off as mere coincidence the similarity between this characterization and Blackmore and others’ descriptions of religious melancholy, Clara's familiarity with eighteenth-century medical terminology becomes harder to refute once she introduces Wieland Jr. As she describes him, “This man is of an ardent and melancholy character. Those ideas which, in others, are casual and obscure, which … easily escape when the scene is changed, have obtained an immoveable hold upon his mind” (30). Clara's specification of the symptoms of her brother's melancholy in the second sentence proves that she uses the term in more than a colloquial sense. Wieland Jr. suffers from melancholy as it is clinically defined.
The second major type of religious madness that appears in Clara's narrative is enthusiastic madness or, in Rush's formulation, amenomania. Sufferers of this disorder believe that they are “the peculiar favorites of heaven,” God's “viceroys, chosen saints, and servants, sent on an especial errand.”Footnote 43 As a result of their mistaken sense of chosenness, they misinterpret all of their opinions as “illuminations from the Spirit of God” and maintain that “every impulse that drives them to any odd and ridiculous action, is a divine call from Heaven.”Footnote 44 When Clara reads Wieland's court confession, she is torn between believing that he is actually inspired, as he claims, and attributing his crimes to exactly the type of derangement that Robinson describes.Footnote 45 Although she never reaches a conclusion, her description of Wieland at her story's climax suggests evidence for the latter. Robinson's medical writings specify that a victim of enthusiastic madness will have a “fierce, grim, and rough aspect,” as if “his reason is disturbed, his judgment confused, and the exercise of his intellectuals is lost.”Footnote 46 Similarly does Clara describe Wieland's appearance after he escapes from jail and seeks to murder her: “His locks were tangled, and fell confusedly over his forehead and ears … His features were the seat of a wild and tranquil solemnity, but his eyes bespoke inquietude” (161). In eighteenth-century medical terms, Wieland has all the appearance of a believer who has lost his mind.
One of the advantages of medicalizing such behavior, says Rush, is that it rightly displaces agency and guilt from diseased persons onto diseased bodies. In past eras, sufferers of religious madness would have been persecuted as witches or heretics. With modern society's materialist understanding of religious delusions, however, these deviant believers can be hospitalized instead.Footnote 47 The irony in Rush's conclusion is twofold. First, as he contrasts modern and premodern reactions to enthusiastic religiosity, Rush overlooks an obvious third alternative: that some believers, such as eighteenth-century evangelicals, might actually value revelation as a meaningful component of religious experience. His conclusions about seeing and hearing God mirror those of religious skeptics, despite the overtly religious frame in which he presents his work.Footnote 48 In addition, as Rush and his contemporary medical materialists attribute religious melancholy and enthusiastic madness to bodily diseases, they further confound, rather than resolve, long-standing debates over the agency “inspired” believers have in their actions. In an enchanted world, human actors are constantly subjected to the whims of “extra-human but intra-cosmic” forces.Footnote 49 There is no such phenomenon as pure personal agency. Treating religious voices and visions as symptoms of mental derangement might seem to reassign this agency to the thinking individual. Yet in the early republic the opposite was actually true: physicians carefully sought bodily causes for mental diseases to lessen sufferers' potential agency in their actions, displacing guilt from their minds or souls onto their material bodies. In Peace of Mind and Health of Body United (1750), English clergyman Lewis Southcomb speaks to the way eighteenth-century physicians and clergymen subtly distinguished between sin, a disease of the soul, and religious madness, a disease of the body. Whereas a guilt-ridden soul requires repentance under the guidance of a minister, a diseased body reflects no moral shortcoming and demands treatment from a physician.Footnote 50 The distinction is important, Southcomb and others maintain, because it protects victims of mental derangement from unwarranted social condemnation. That it deepens already troubling questions about humans' responsibility for their actions is a side effect they prefer to overlook.
Wieland asks readers to confront these troubling consequences of the “secular age” of the early republic, an age in which claims like Wieland's drew such tangled arrays of religious and medical explanations. When Clara admits that she is “by no means certain” whether Wieland is “a maniac, a faithful servant of his God, the victim of hellish illusions, or the dupe of human imposture,” she struggles with precisely the questions of causation that her era's multiple discourses on religious revelation and madness leave unresolved (140). She sees multiple methods of displacing her characters’ guilt but has no way of determining which option is right or what each implies about human agency. As a result, Clara's various theological and medical explanations prevent her from assigning agency to anyone or anything at all. Clara is haunted, perhaps by actual ghosts but more clearly by her own spiritual and intellectual noncommitment; she does not know who or what, natural or supernatural, is responsible for her family's undoing.
As I have suggested, Clara first reacts to this uncertainty by constantly questioning her family members' agency and the supernatural or natural powers at work in their fate. Yet her preoccupation with agency and causation does not last; by the time she begins writing, she has become all too aware of the futility of her obsession. Thus in her narrative she maintains a (perhaps unconscious) critical distance from her previous pursuit of questions of causation; she adopts or falls into a rhetorical style enabling her to get past her baffling questions without having to provide their answers.
Narrating Secularity
Clara deliberates over the possible natural and supernatural forces driving her family's fate from the first moments that unexplained voices and visions disturb her peace at Wieland's estate. She does not begin to acknowledge the futility of these concerns – that is, to adopt the attitude that will inform the voice and structure of her narrative – until her climactic encounter with Wieland following his escape from prison.Footnote 51 The scene's order of events is literally a matter of life or death: Wieland wants to murder Clara, but, just before he can, Carwin enters the room. By this point in the narrative, Clara already knows that Carwin has been deceiving her family with his ability to “throw” voices, and she speculates that he is guilty of crimes more severe than that.Footnote 52 Aware that he possesses the sole power to save her, though, she reevaluates her previous judgments, thinking now, “Whether [Carwin] were infernal, or miraculous, or human, there was no power and no need to decide. Whether the contriver or not of this spell, he was able to unbind it, and to check the fury of my brother” (168). Clara fails to realize until this moment of crisis that labeling Carwin's influence over her family as “infernal, or miraculous, or human” is not only impossible but unnecessary. Regardless of whether or how Carwin “contrived the spell,” it is Wieland who poses the immediate threat to her life; she must react to his violent intentions, not contemplate whether they sprang from natural or supernatural causes. Clara evinces the same change of perspective in an address to her “revered” reader later in the scene: Carwin “has told thee his tale, and thou exculpatest him from all concern in the fate of Wieland. Be it so: I care not from what source these disasters have flowed; it suffices that they have swallowed up our hopes and our existence” (172). When Clara states that she “care[s] not,” in the present tense, about the source of her family's demise, she is not being apathetic. Her complete preoccupation with guilt and causality prior to her near-death experience proves that she actually cared strongly about the sources of her family's disasters. Instead, readers are now witnessing a change in Clara's perspective, one that remains with her years later as she records her family's history. At great psychological cost, Clara has learned that seeking to identify agents and clear causal relations in an age with so many competing explanations is futile.
The style and structure of Wieland reflect Clara's evasion of these questions of causality. Significantly, Clara composes her narrative years after the events in it have taken place. By this time, she knows that she cannot ascertain who or what is to blame for her family's fate. She has already realized that she has “no power and no need to decide” whether supernatural or natural forces motivated her family's and friends’ actions (168). Hence she records her past concerns about causation with present-tense commentary reflecting her lately acquired submissiveness to fate's inscrutability. As she writes in her letter's opening paragraph, “Henceforth I am callous to misfortune. I address no supplication to the Deity. The power that governs the course of human affairs has chosen his path” (7). Clara's dispirited tone is readily apparent, but the reasons for it do not emerge vividly until the novel's climax. Clara had tried to care about the forces controlling her fate – tried to discern whether their origins were natural or supernatural – but realized it was to no avail. Now she accepts indifference as her only remaining alternative.
Understandably, then, Clara's narrative features rhetorical devices permitting her to recount her personal history without reentering its psychological snares. She wants to share her past but stop short of repeating its errors. The rhetorical “solutions” she adopts as a result are evident from her introductory statements:
The decree that ascertained the condition of my life, admits of no recal [sic] … That is neither to be questioned nor denied by me. It suffices that the past is exempt from mutation. The storm that tore up our happiness, and changed into dreariness and desert the blooming scene of our existence, is lulled into grim repose; but not until the victim was transfixed and mangled … till every remnant of good was wrested from our grasp. (7)
The only active subject nouns in this paragraph are the “decree” that ascertains Clara's life conditions and the “storm” that tears up her family's happiness – vague metaphorical references to agents of destruction whose identities Clara does not proceed to clarify. What remains is in the passive voice, further deemphasizing traditional questions of causation and agency. Rather than confronting the question who or what tore up her family's happiness and wrested “every remnant of good” from their grasp, her sentences prioritize outcomes and effects over agents and causes. The passage's syntactical oddities and numerous tense switches supplement such obscurities in her narrative's causal relationships. When Clara states that “it suffices” to know the past is irrevocable, she cuts off questions about causality before readers can raise them.
The same nonstandard syntactic constructions; artful manipulation of the passive voice; and vague, metaphorical sentence subjects define Clara's rhetorical style throughout her narrative, nowhere more vividly than in her thoughts just prior to Wieland's suicide. When Wieland hears a disembodied voice, actually Carwin's, instructing him that “thy senses have misled thee to commit these acts,” he sinks to the floor in despair (170). Clara responds to his visible despondency, “That nature should long sustain this conflict was not to be believed. My state was little different from that of my brother … My heart was visited and rent by his pangs – Oh that thy phrenzy had never been cured!” (171). As in her introduction, Clara's employment of the passive voice and of nondescript subjects like “nature” and “fate” obscures the natural and supernatural forces at work in Wieland's destruction. She manages to narrate the past by circumventing the questions she does not know how to answer.
Clara's artfully constructed predicate, “was not to be believed,” points to an additional source of indeterminacy in her narrative: her periodic inversion or disruption of standard verb phrases. Clara employs the technique perhaps most creatively when she repeatedly reassures her reader that what she relates “cannot be disproved” or is “neither to be questioned nor denied” (136, 7). In each case, Clara combines multiple negative words and word parts – “not,” “dis-,” “neither/nor,” “denied” – into phrases that might support the conclusiveness and authority of her perceptions. Yet the sentences undermine themselves: Clara's negatively worded vows of truth ultimately reinforce their own instability, not their reliability. Clara recalls thinking after reading Wieland's court testimony, “I had no grounds on which to build a disbelief. I could not deny faith to the evidence of my religion” (135). The unintuitive wording of Clara's assertions – that she has no grounds for disbelief and cannot deny her evidence, rather than that she does have grounds for belief and can believe her evidence – betrays the uncertainty beneath her performed reassurances. While positive sentence constructions would suggest that Clara possesses convincing evidence for her conclusions, her more convoluted alternatives imply that she merely lacks enough contrary evidence to eliminate them as possibilities. Clara continues her account of the same moment:
These ideas connected themselves with the image of Carwin. Where is the proof, said I, that daemons may not be subjected to the control of men? … That conscious beings, dissimilar from humans, but moral and voluntary agents as we are, some where exist, can scarcely be denied. (135–36)
Clara's incessant return to the “grounds” for her beliefs suggests the pressure she feels to affirm their truthfulness and her narrative's reliability.Footnote 53 Yet in an age in which she cannot determine agency or causality, the closest she can come to establishing conclusions is to deny their opposites, or, even more confusingly, to deny her ability even to draw them into question. Of course, such cumbersome verb constructions only further enshroud her conclusions in doubt. Clara's insistence that her narrative “cannot be disproved” leaves noticeably unanswered questions whether it can, then, also be proved.
These unanswered questions about Clara's narrative are complimented by an equal abundance of unanswered questions within Clara's narrative. Arguably the most distinctive elements of her narrative style, Clara's rhetorical questions perform explicitly what her nonstandard verb constructions and metaphorical subjects accomplish indirectly: they let her advance her plot, but only on uncertain grounds. Some of Clara's questions reveal self-doubts or desires for affirmation as she weighs possible explanations for her family's fate. After learning that insanity is often hereditary, for example, she demands to know, “Was I not [like Wieland] transformed from rational and human into a creature of nameless and fearful attributes? Was I not transported to the brink of the same abyss?” (135). Other questions convey concerns about her restrictions as a narrator. Before she introduces Carwin, she pauses to consider, “[H]ave I not projected a task beyond my power to execute? … O most fatal and potent of mankind, in what terms shall I describe thee? … How shall I detail the means which rendered the secrecy of thy purposes unfathomable?” (41). In the first case, and others like it, Clara's rhetorical questions function much like her nondescript subjects: they introduce mysteries she cannot explain and evoke powerful forces that only possibly affected her fate. The latter type of question shifts attention from Clara's doubts about her past to her doubts about her restrictions as a narrator.Footnote 54 By voicing concerns about how she will relate her personal history, Clara reveals her consciousness of the unique difficulty of her situation. Despite her deep personal investment in her subject, she cannot address even some of its most basic questions, like whether a vengeful deity or irregularly expanding body fluid caused her father's death (18).Footnote 55 To cope with these uncertainties, the distinctive uncertainties of a “secular age,” Clara finds recourse in all the rhetorical peculiarities already examined: she juggles nonhuman subjects, the passive voice, nonstandard verb inversions, and open-ended rhetorical questions to advance her story without having to settle questions of causation.
The Moral of the Story
Clara's rhetorical acrobatics can only carry her so far, however, which she discovers the moment she tries to give her tale a moral. Clara expresses from the beginning of her narrative that she intends for it to be didactic. She promises in her introductory paragraph, “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” (7). Even with such resoluteness, however, Clara struggles to moralize on her tale, an understandable difficulty considering she cannot first determine the agency of the characters within it. Faced with the pressure of designating which characters in her story deserve readers’ moral judgment, Clara must confront, once again, that she does not know who or what is responsible for her family's fate. In this case she cannot evade her questions through rhetorical vagueness. If she is going to fit her tragic narrative into the tradition of didactic literature that she clearly intends, she must determine which of her characters are to blame.
And so Clara derives her tale's moral from the only character's guilt of which she is certain: her own. Clara repeatedly circles her narrative back to her own guilty implication in her family's demise. She assesses her guilt quite severely after admitting that she felt an instinct to stab Wieland when he cornered her: “I estimate my own deservings; a hatred, immortal and inexorable, is my due. I listen to my own pleas, and find them empty and false … Is there a thing in the world worthy of infinite abhorrence? It is I” (165). Clara's exaggerated sense of her own blameworthiness proves intimately related to her motives for recounting her family's past. When she finds herself questioning why she does not simply cease writing and “terminate at once this series of horrors,” she resists out of a resolve to “spurn the cowardly remorse that bids me to seek impunity in silence, or comfort in forgetfulness” (169). That Clara sees her narrative as an act of confession or exposure shows how deeply she implicates herself in her family's tragic fate. She is haunted not only by her inability to determine what caused her family's deaths, but also by her sense that she somehow contributed to them.
This plaguing guilt dictates the moral lesson that Clara intends her narrative to deliver. After introducing her family's history as a tale for mankind's benefit, she promises, “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” (7). Although some of the lessons that Clara previews here apply selectively to other characters in her narrative, they all warn against errors or shortcomings of which she deems herself personally guilty: because of her early exposure to her father's shocking death and her lax education in religion and “most useful branches of knowledge,” she is easily deceived by Carwin's biloquism, and she cannot prevent her family's tragic downfall (20). The same lessons surface again in the final lines of her narrative. Clara begins her concluding statements with a seeming admission of her own inadequacy for her intended task; she instructs readers, “I leave you to moralize on this tale” (181). Yet, immediately following, she attempts precisely the didactic work she has just entrusted to her readers. Although she admits that it is always “mournful” when “virtue should become the victim of treachery,” she continues that, of course, the “sufferers” really brought evils upon themselves: “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attribute; or if I had been gifted with ordinary equanimity and foresight, the double-tongued deceiver [Carwin] would have been baffled and repelled” (181). Under the burden of finalizing her tale's instructive value, Clara judges Wieland and Carwin, her two main characters, more strongly here than at any point throughout her narrative. Still the overall impression readers can gather of the two men's guilt is inconclusive; Clara's abrupt transfer of blame from perpetrators to victims, authors of evil to authors of errors, makes Wieland and Carwin's roles in her personal history more ambiguous, not less (181). By comparison, and perhaps in part because of its correspondence with her introductory statements, Clara's final self-indictment is markedly definitive. Forever unsure of whether others chose their courses or acted under the influence of natural or supernatural powers, Clara ultimately turns to rationalizing a moral out of her own experienced guilt and confusion. If she is going to moralize on her tale at all, she must attribute its tragic ending foremost to her personal failures.
A strong contingent of Wieland critics, especially those interested in Brown's commitments to eighteenth-century didactic fiction, interpret Clara's self-incriminating moral as the lesson that Brown intends the novel to present. According to this reading, Clara is guilty of precisely what she states: she fails her family and her narrative because she is led astray by her own emotionality and lack of critical skepticism.Footnote 56 Brown provides partial evidence for such an interpretation in his advertisement for the novel, where he describes himself as a “moral painter” who must convey his subject “in its most instructive and memorable form” (4). To prove further that Brown's intended moral is the self-accusatory one that Clara states, however, critics have had to look outside Wieland, usually to Brown's supportive readings of other eighteenth-century didactic novels.Footnote 57 Although Clara is uniquely self-conscious of her errors, the attribution of a female protagonist's demise to her own sensibility is, of course, a standard convention of eighteenth-century moral fiction, and one Brown applauded in other novelists’ work. Read with novels like Richardson's Clarissa in mind, Clara's self-condemning moral becomes much easier to interpret as an accurate acknowledgment of the consequences of her irrational fancies.Footnote 58
Yet for all the similarities between Clara's lessons and those of other eighteenth-century novels, a dissatisfying irony pervades her conclusion, an incompleteness that suggests that the moral of Brown's story may not be as straightforward as Clara sets hers out to be. The ease with which Clara blames herself at the end of her convoluted narrative feels out of place rather than conclusive: by focussing on her own guilt so intently, she seems but to evade, once again, the questions of agency and causation that her culture's entangled spiritual and intellectual discourses have made impossible for her to answer all along. Perhaps she has failed her family and narrative in all of the ways she assesses. Even so, the responsibility she attributes to herself individually feels overwrought. Her individualist moral philosophy becomes ironically inadequate amidst the tangled array of religious and medical discourses that characterizes her “secular age.”
Reading Wieland as a response to the secular uncertainties of the early republic accordingly challenges interpretations of the novel as a lesson in becoming self-disciplined. When, as contemporary readers, we blame Clara for not thinking more rationally – for deciding what is probable before considering what is possible, as Thomas Koenigs summarizes her mistake – we overlook that natural or “rational” explanations of her family's experiences do number among the many possible options she considers.Footnote 59 They just do not provide her with any clearer answers than do the alternatives. Indeed, to blame Clara for not discerning the “rational” explanations for her family's fate is to endow the nonreligious discourses of the early republic with a level of irrefutable authority that they simply did not have. Clara's moral conclusion may well resonate with a common lesson of eighteenth-century didactic novels. Still, even as Brown employs these novels’ traditions, his nuanced portrait of early republican secularity suggests the need to recognize their tensions. Wieland points out the irony of expecting individuals to think rationally and self-assuredly in an age thoroughly imbued with doubt.
To understand Brown's perception of the tensions underlying moral fiction more thoroughly, consider his theoretical essay “Walstein's School of History.” Published less than one year after Wieland, the essay describes a school of fictitious historians, Walstein and his pupils, whose methodologies Brown praises as the highest in their field. At first glance, the essay seems very much to reinforce readings of Clara as a failed narrator and moral influence, for Walstein and his students’ exemplary writing styles and lauded protagonists are everything that Clara's narrative and character are not. Their texts show the “same minute explication of motives, the same indissoluble and well-woven tissue of causes and effects, the same unity and coherence of design … and the same felicity, purity, and compactness of style.”Footnote 60 More importantly, they attach the same universal value to individual moral and political duty, teaching readers that human society can indeed be “powerfully modified by individual members,” if those individuals exercise reason and self-control.Footnote 61 To this end, Walstein's students place their historical protagonists amidst “many perils and perplexities,” which only their “powerful displays of fortitude and magnanimity” allow them to escape.Footnote 62 The morals of their stories are consistent: in an age when “virtuous activity may, in a thousand ways, be thwarted and diverted,” the only recourse available to individuals is to be self-disciplined.Footnote 63 Those like Clara (or Richardson's Clarissa) who fail to exercise their individual powers for productivity and pleasure will rightly fall at their own hands.Footnote 64
Yet, as in Clara's case, the individual fortitude and perfect discipline expected of the protagonists in Walstein's fictitious histories become troublingly ironic in light of the uncertainty of their (secular) modern ages.Footnote 65 Brown suggests that Walstein's texts are valuable because they show individuals standing apart from the thwarting influences of their societies. They offer readers fictionalized historical proof that “right intentions may be instilled in [individuals], and some good may be done by each within his social and domestic province.”Footnote 66 The related question they do not adequately address is how these celebrated individuals can establish their individual fortitude and “right intentions” in an age that offers them “unmingled mischiefs” in place of certain truths.Footnote 67 Walstein and his students propose as an indirect answer their proper education, particularly in “productive” disciplines like law and medicine.Footnote 68 Yet even these disciplines have their limitations, which Walstein and his students bring out by returning repeatedly to the fundamental “uncertainty of history.”Footnote 69 Regardless of the wisdom they gain through education or self-discipline, modern individuals live in an age when “actions and motives cannot be truly described,” when historians “can only make approaches to the truth,” and when the causes of human happiness and misery are “numerous, complex, and operate upon a wide surface.”Footnote 70 The result is a tension in Walstein and his students’ work between the spiritual and intellectual certainty expected of estimable individuals and the indeterminacy acknowledged as the pervasive condition of secular modernity. Their stories ask readers to be disciplined, happy, and confident but give no sense of the basis for such certainty in an age rife with doubt.
Brown uses Clara's frank assessment of her moral shortcomings in Wieland to reveal the same irony underlying eighteenth-century didactic fiction. Drawing on the lessons of novels like Clarissa, Clara tells readers that she failed to prevent her family's tragic undoing when she had the power; her initial preoccupation with the natural or supernatural forces at work in her family's fate prevented her from taking conclusive action and makes her worthy of blame. Still the question that haunts “Walstein's School of History” lingers: how can individuals living in a secular age, an age “bereft of universal principles,” as Amanda Emerson suggests in her reading of Wieland, establish the strong perspective or perfect discipline that Clara and many eighteenth-century didactic novelists suggest is necessary for personal flourishing?Footnote 71 Clara blames herself for wavering among her possible explanations for her experiences, and perhaps Brown intends his readers to do the same. Yet Brown's attentiveness to the tangled medical and theological discourses of the early republic evinces a less straightforward interpretation: that what Clara denounces as an individual failure appears from a different angle as a fitting response to the indeterminacy of her age. If Clara doubts, Brown suggests, it may indeed be with good reason.
