Gordis
ENG BC3179x

READING WIELAND

Our final text this semester is a strange and somewhat mysterious novel. It’s full of weird people who do odd and sometimes frightening things, and it’s very different in genre from most of the texts we’ve read this term. On the other hand, many themes we’ve discussed over the course of the semester are treated in the novel. As you read, you’ll want to consider some of these issues and ideas.

For example, what’s the role of reason in the novel? How rational is the environment in which the Wieland children are raised, and what ultimate outcome does this seem to produce? Conversely, how is traditional religion represented? And how does Wieland’s faith fit into this representation?

You’ll also want to consider the role of rhetoric in the novel. From Wieland and Pleyel’s debates about Cicero to Carwin’s powers of speech, the force of rhetoric to move auditors runs through the text. What does this novel suggest about the power of rhetoric?

These issues are complicated by Brown’s "Advertisement," in which he writes that he "aims at the illustration of some important branches of the moral constitution of man" (3). The interpretive stakes are raised by the fact that Brown sent a copy of this novel to Thomas Jefferson, then vice president of the United States. Apparently, he thought that the novel might be "useful" to Jefferson (3). What might he have been thinking? Scholars have spent no small quantity of ink on this question, and some have suggested that Brown was weighing in on the debate between Federalists and Jeffersonians about the state of the republic. Very generally, (and at the risk of oversimplification), Jeffersonians envisioned America as a place of security and freedom, where men and women would curb their passions in the interest of the public good. They were committed to the belief that people could govern themselves when educated in the proper principles of virtue. For an example of this vision, take a look at the first two pages of J. Hector St. John de Cr�vecoeur’s third letter from Letters from an American Farmer, pp. 596-7 in the Norton Anthology (and please bring your Norton Anthology to class).

Federalists, on the other hand, tended to hold a Hobbesian view of man as essentially selfish and contentious, combined with a Calvinist sense of human evil and damnation. They hoped, therefore, for a government that would control man, without requiring virtuous people to maintain it. Instead, they argued, government should protect the worthy from the licentious. How might Wieland fit into this debate?

Of course, you’ll also want to consider more strictly literary ideas as well. How does Brown use the conventions of the gothic novel? How does he find gothic settings in a landscape bare of old castles and decaying monasteries? To what extent are the mysterious occurrences explained by the novel’s close? Does the power of reason manage to explain all of the terror away? Also, how reliable is Clara as a narrator? If you read this text as a psychological novel, consider Clara's mind as well as Wieland’s. Do the characters suffer from some kind of familial insanity, either inherited or produced by the isolated upbringing of the Wieland children, or both?

I hope that these questions help you to think about this novel as you read, but don’t spoil it for you. It’s a flawed novel in some ways, but it’s also a good read, and I hope that you’ll enjoy it.