Although Leslie A. Fiedler calls Charles Brockden Brown the "inventor of the American writer" and sees the revolt of the European middle classes reflected in America through “feminism and anti-intellectualism,” Brockden Brown seems to have difficulty imbuing Clara, his narrator in Wieland, with these same qualities (145). From the single-line reference [in the advertisement] to the book's narration by "the lady whose story it contains", to the final explanation of this narrator's marriage to a man who placed her in an untenable (and potentially life-threatening) situation with its erroneous and unspeakable accusations, Charles Brockden Brown created, in the character of Clara, a faithful representation of the predicament of the typical 18th-century American woman. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”? Get an original essay Despite the fact that Clara is allowed (by her brother) to live alone in her own house, called Mettingen, due to her desire to “administer a fund and manage a household” of his own is a superficial independence at best. She is independently wealthy, thanks to the inheritance left by her father, who acquired his wealth through slave labor. Her residence is only three-quarters of a mile from her brother's house and "the short distance allowed us to exchange visits as often as we wished," meaning her brother's help was located within a short distance from its front door (Brown 20). Clara certainly has male company who come and go in her home, but the visitor is mainly Pleyel, her brother's brother-in-law, and the man with whom she is secretly in love (a woman of this era would never be the first to do so). openly declare one's feelings before receiving a similar declaration from the object of one's affections!). Despite her outward appearance as an intellectual woman interested in art, music and literature, she is nonetheless a sheltered, inexperienced woman, walled in a small corner. of the world, surrounded by his brother Théodore Wieland, his wife Catherine and Henry Pleyel. Aside from the rare visit from a stranger who caused much excitement in the neighborhood and the occasional visit from family acquaintances, Clara is isolated from the world at large. This therefore makes Pleyel's disaffection a much more upsetting experience when it occurs. Although Wieland's readers are aware of the deception that leads to Pleyel's antipathy toward Clara, she does not, and her reactions are those of a typically helpless 18th century. woman of the century. She has no weapons to fight back when Pleyel accuses her. "Matter, oh wretch! thus exquisitely shaped, on which nature seemed to have exhausted all its graces; with charms so terrible and so pure! How have you fallen! From what height you have fallen! Such a complete ruin... so unheard of” (Brown 95). After his hideous and shocking accusations, Pleyel leaves Clara standing at home, confused and hurt by his perfidy. Who does she turn to for comfort and help? her brother, Wieland, who assures her that he believes in her integrity because she is his sister (Brown 101) When Wieland lets Clara know that Pleyel had some sort of proof of her affair with the enigmatic stranger Carwin, she is. distraught, because she has no way of proving her innocence “What would I have to weigh but my own assertion? Could this be allowed to prevail over the testimony of his senses? I had no witnesses to prove my existence in any other place" (Brown 102). Clara steps out of the role of the typical 18th century womanwhen she decides to approach Pleyel in his own apartments to ask him for explanations. A woman going to a man's room alone, without an escort, was a way of gaining the reputation that Pleyel already attributed to her. But, alas, when she arrives and tries to find an answer to the puzzling question of what has changed so much in Pleyel's attitude towards her, she is at a loss for an explanation while Pleyel, always the one who resists any explanation including the supernatural or challenging one's senses, cannot be influenced. He accuses her again, packs her things and leaves her there. And like any well-bred 18th century woman, she fainted. (Brown 109-110). Clara's relationship with Pleyel is not the only one that demonstrates the weakness of her position. The desperate situation of his brother, murderer of his own family and potential murderer of Clara, is also beyond his control. She has no power to change her beliefs that the voice of God instructed her to commit her deadly misdeeds. And when Wieland finally comes for Clara, just after Carwin has given his limited explanation of what happened and the role he played in it, she is unable to pick up the knife to defend herself against the figure of male authority in his life2E. She is broken when he uses his knife to carry out the act she had contemplated and rejected (Brown 111-112). For much of the desperate period following her brother's murder of her family, Clara's uncle assumes the role of authority figure, assuming that Clara is too weak to resist the attack. truth, and urging her to move to Europe with him. Certain that her life is coming to an end, Clara gives her consent “simply because he was entitled to my gratitude and because my refusal hurt him” (Brown 169). She eventually travels to Europe, following the death of her brother and her own failure to die from the oppressive burdens she carried. It was during her stay in Europe that she found Pleyel. But no, it's not Clara who convinces him of his integrity. It is Carwin, the mysterious author of their sorrows, who goes in search of Pleyel and confesses to him his role in the deception. Faced with a rather supernatural realistic explanation, Pleyel accepts the truth of Clara's innocence (Brown 218). This final chapter is a great example of how women of this era had no power. Clara's words, even if Pleyel claims to love her, are not enough to convince him of her innocence. His reputation must be restored by another man. Then, as if Pleyel had not almost caused her death because of the depression she suffered, Clara marries him. In the last chapter, even if she condemns her brother for not having formulated "more just notions of moral duty", she allows Carwin to go free and Pleyel not to be censored for the treatment he reserved for her, which is typical of her new position as a married woman. . She cannot publicly castigate the man she is married to (Brown 223-224). Charles Brockden Brown includes many elements of Romantic literature, an emphasis on the imagination, a predilection for the mysterious, the strange, the occult, the sick and even the satanic, in Carwin's dark image. It allows Clara, through her chosen mode of narration (epistolary), to examine the human personality, in search of spiritual and rational truths. Brown knew that "Romantic critics such as Schleiermacher called for readers' sympathetic identification with the author" (Leitch 12). He understood that “to write books that sold, one had to both entertain and edify their readers” (Lauter 1233). Brown was astute enough to realize that the changes that occurred in the country after theAmerican Revolution, with the advent of factories to manufacture the goods formerly produced by women at home, created a public of educated, idle women (Lauter 1243). With the restrictions that society placed on 18th-century women preventing them from seeking employment outside the home, owning property, or participating in the country's political decisions, Brown realized that the majority of fiction readers of that era were women and that she would need a strong and identifiable narrator. However, in trying to write a popular novel that would appeal to female readers, he had to put himself in a woman's shoes and try to bring out a more feminist perspective. Rather, Clara begins to sound like a woman who writes like a man. In this case we have a “man, writing like a woman, writing like a man” (Aaij). Even if Brown imbues his gothic story with the darkest elements of evil and manages to "connect a bygone time to the present" and is "endowed with a moral truth, namely that the misdeeds of a generation live on in the successive generations", as Hawthorne believed a good romance should do (7-8), he fails to connect him to his supposed main character, Clara. Instead, the tortured past religious frenzy of his father and his strange death by spontaneous combustion is linked to the madness that envelops his brother Wieland Throughout Wieland, readers wonder who the main character is. Is it the narrator, Clara, from whose point of view? is the story being told? Or is it Theodore Wieland, the main character referred to in the subtitle The Transformation, or is it Carwin, the evil character who sets the whole sequence of evil events in motion with his strange vocal ability? (Aaij) ? Charles Brockden Brown's novel, Wieland, succeeds on the Gothic level, full of evil acts, mystical events, tormented young girls. , and the eventual triumph of love at the end. However, where it fails to exemplify the Romantic ideal is in individualism, an important characteristic of Romantic fiction. Brown’s characters are “passive matter in his hands. He cares little, if at all, about individualizing himself” (Duyckinck 8). His inability to create a strong, identifiable female character in Clara is likely the reason he was not financially successful. And following Wieland with Carwin's Memoirs the Biloque is just another way of putting Clara in her place in the 18th century. If Clara's story is surrounded by a title page on which she has no place, and an advertisement in which she is only from one point of view, she is also enclosed on the other side, because Brown's intention is that she never have the last word; the end of the story is Carwin's, whose autobiographical account gives him the last word - if Brown's audience welcomes Wieland (Aaij). Perhaps Brown himself made a distinction between romanticism, which "denotes a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual at the center of all life" (Holman 416), and the romantic novel, which is "marked by a strong interest in action, with episodes often based on love, [Clara and Wieland, Clara and Pleyel, Wieland and Catherine, Carwin and Clara] adventure, [the midnight rendezvous of Clara, her return home following the murders] and fights [the confrontations of Clara and Carwin, the murders of Wieland, his attempted assassination of Clara, the arguments of Clara and Pleyel, the disagreements of Clara and her uncle]. ..a novel more concerned with action than with character” (Holman 416). If this is the case, then Charles Brockden Brown must be called a successful romantic writer, although he is less than technically a writer, 2001. 1-28.