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A Reading of Wieland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Larzer Ziff
Larzer Ziff*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley 4
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Extract

Wieland is conventionally and correctly regarded as a novel of purpose which marks a turn from the stories of love and seduction fathered by Richardson to the kind of story made prominent by Holcroft, Bage, and Godwin. The particular purposes of Wieland, however, have never been precisely identified, and this reading is offered in the belief that the novel has been subjected by most students to a form of damnation through faint praise. By marveling that an American in 1798 could produce readable fiction, they place undue emphasis on mere chronology and slight the importance of the novel as part of a more meaningful cultural continuity. Wieland is an important novel because of the extraordinary manner in which Brown employs sentiment against itself (rather than simply dismissing it, as it is averred he has done), penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , 1962 , pp. 51 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1962

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References

Notes

1 The best such argument is to be found in David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1952).

2 Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland or The Transformation, “Hafner Library of Classics” (New York, 1958), p. 77. This is a reprinted edition of the 1926 edition which, in turn, is based on the 1798 text. All page references (hereafter in my text) are to this edition.

3 The following remarks take issue with the contentions of R. W. B. Lewis in The American Adam (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1955). But although I find Brown saying quite the reverse of what Professor Lewis discovers, it must be remembered that The American Adam is designed as a dialogue. In using Arthur Mervyn, Lewis finds Brown carrying one part of that dialogue; in using Wieland, I find Brown carrying another. I agree with Lewis as to the nature and importance of the dialogue.