“To Mimic My Voice”: Gender, Power, and Narration in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Over the course of a three-year period beginning in 1798, Charles Brockden Brown wrote and published seven novels. While the texts of this impressive oeuvre are often linked for their shared Gothic elements and lauded for their ability to capture the zeitgeist of the New Republic, there is another, more obvious, thread that ties them together: their names. Indeed, each of Brown’s full-length novels is titled after a person. This cast of eponymous characters includes, for instance, the male protagonists Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly; the lesser-known Stephen Calvert and mononymous Ormond; and the female subjects of Brown’s final two novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot. Wieland, a Gothic tale about the tragic events that befall a family in Mettingen, Pennsylvania, also partakes in this titling tradition, albeit in ways that are more nuanced. For while Theodore – the man whose fanatical religious beliefs provoke him to enact the murderous wishes of a mysterious, and perhaps purely imagined, voice – is called “Wieland” throughout Brown’s novel, his appellation is also a surname that belongs to and is shared by a number of individuals, one of them being the novel’s narrator, Clara. Wieland’s title, an ambiguous signifier that simultaneously evokes and erases its female narrator’s presence, serves as an apt metaphor for the discourse surrounding Brown’s first novel. For while Wieland has been consistent in generating robust scholarship, that conversation has been quick both to miss and misrepresent Clara. In a slew of mid-to-latetwentieth-century articles, Clara was maligned by scholars who described her as neurotic, malicious, and mad. For example, Walter Hesford maintains that Clara is motivated by her “repressed guilt and incestuous desires” (234). William Manly writes that she is on the verge of “insanity” (318). And James Russo argues that the “confessed madwoman,” Clara, is “indirectly responsible” for all of the tragedy in Wieland, holding her accountable for both Carwin’s schemes and her brother’s killings and suicide (60). According to