Title: Wieland, Illustrated: Word and Image in the Early American Novel
Abstract: CHARLES Brockden Brown liked to draw. In his youth, he sketched out designs for towers, stairs, doors, windows, courtyards, rooms, closets, walkways, halls, multistoried buildings, single-story buildings, campus plans, and gardens, and he embellished them with an assortment of arches, domes, pediments, cornices, modillions, lunettes, and tympana. He drew with tools and, less often, freehand. He experimented with black ink and with watercolor paints. As Brown's first biographer, William Dunlap, notes Brown would for hours be absorbed in architectural studies, measuring proportions with his compasses, and drawing plans of Grecian temples or Gothic cathedrals, monasteries or castles. Brown's interest in visual composition is echoed in his self-identification as American novelist in the opening Advertisement published with Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798). Explaining that the incidents related in the following pages are extraordinary and rare, Brown admits that readers' probable skepticism is natural and warranted. Having elected to write about extreme characters and events, Brown forcefully asserts his justifications: [I]t is the business of painters to exhibit their subject in its most instructive and memorable forms. Because the author of such a tale aims at the illustration of some important branches of the constitution of man, he must consider himself an artist who embellishes past events into fictional ones.1Brown's choice to label himself a moral painter reveals the exceptionally close, even constitutive, relationship between his experiments with the visual arts and those with the verbal arts. Significant examples of Brown's early and varied interests, the sketches appear in the same notebooks in which he wrote, including the one in which he mapped plans for Wieland. Yet while many accounts have established Brown's occupation as a novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, and editor in order to articulate his significant role in a capacious republican print culture, much less has been done to assess the images in Brown's manuscripts.2 The drawings in his (still mostly unpublished) letters, journals, and other early writings remain almost wholly unrecognized as significant imagistic texts within a larger early American literary culture.3 These now-fragmentary and scattered drawings present especially promising examples of what Sandra M. Gustafson calls new opportunities . . . for interpreting and representing the regimes of eras past.4 The sketches Brown made on the verge of his career as eighteenth-century America's most prolific novelist constitute a vital, but understudied, part of his various textual regimes. Taken seriously, Brown's drawings suggest readings of Wieland's familiar moments and directions for analyzing his novelistic strategies.Well known to scholars and teachers of early America, Wieland is set in the rural Delaware Valley just outside Philadelphia and offers readers a group of characters whose suspicions, zealotry, fears, devotions, and desires lead to a horrific quintuple homicide, an attempted murder, and a suicide. Clara Wieland, the narrator; her friend and lover, Pleyel; and her brother Theodore Wieland succumb to the ventriloquial tricks played on them by the mysterious stranger, Carwin, who has been lurking around their estate, hiding behind foliage, under windows, and within bedroom closets. Under the influence of Carwin's thrown voices and the conjurations of his own mentally disturbed mind, Theodore Wieland believes he is commanded by God to violently murder his family. Clara escapes unharmed only when Carwin uses his ventriloquism to intervene at the last minute, an act that saves her from possible rape and sure death at the hands of her murderous and deranged brother.5 In the end, Wieland realizes his error and commits suicide; Clara and Pleyel eventually marry.Critical accounts of Wieland have read the problems of the novel as emanating from the tightly knit Wieland family themselves, and not from the mysterious outsider Carwin. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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