Gather Wieland And Memoirs Of Carwin The Biloquist Articulated By Charles Brockden Brown Issued As Copy

reread this, one of my undergrad favorites, Wieland is an American Gothic hallmark and, as I read it, I was reminded how indebted Tartt's "The Little Friend" is to Wieland Harriet, like Clara Wieland, is unreliable and possibly mad.
But the unreliability of Wieland's narrator has more facets that give Wieland the flavor of a good whodoneit, right up to the very last line.
I also found the fact that Clara like so manyth century female narrators moralizes ironic and a little bit delicious, given the fact that she may be insane.
The book is dark, gloomy, genuinely scary at times, and thoroughly enjoyable for it, Well played, Charles Brockden Brown, Probably my favourite uni book so far, The plot twist Was not expecting, I respect this one still I'm afraid I've read just about enough gothic novels, Also, the author of this one seems to introduce new characters and events only as a way to advance the plot or make it make sense when necessary.
I went into reading this book expecting to hate it, but I actually enjoyed it way more than I expected! I think

we need to bring back writers using spontaneous combustion in their novels again because that shit was so funny to read lol What an arduous read! This being the second time reading Wieland, I must say however that I liked it a lot better than the first time around.
It is not without its qualities: the character of the narrator Clara is certainly interesting, as is the question of guilt and responsibility in her brother and in Carwin.
Also, the secluded, almost incestuous nature of their little community is striking, especially in the light of questions regarding puritanism and the prewarofindependence setting of the novel and postwar date of publishing America.
For me, however, these qualities are overshadowed by the many lengths this novel has, It drags along for most of its course without really gripping the reader, This I found especially disappointing since Wieland is first and foremost a Gothic novel, and there are Gothic novels from that time that are just more effective in delivering on their promise in terms of atmosphere.
I can recommend Wieland as a canonical piece of American literature that deals with many issues pertinent at the time but if you read it for mere pleasure and expect a scary and effective page turner, it might not be the book you want to read.
This was a most unusual read in terms of my ventures into the gothic genrein this case early American gothicbut it was utterly absorbing! Originally published in, it has many of the literary conventions of the period and to contemporary reader, the prose can seem very purple !, but the story is compelling and indeed disturbing.
The story's dark events are based on a trueth century incident and the scenario is by no means unfamiliar thest century.
Very chilling!

Additionally, for those fascinated by depictions of "nature" in literature, this provides a distinctly early American interpretation of "wilderness.
" In this novel, the dark forces of socalled untamed nature ominously circle the newborn city of Philadelphia, Charles Brockden Brown certainly has a way to gimmick around the actual themes in his writings but i love how he negotiates americas past trauma of puritanism through ventriloquism.
at first a seemingly random plot device that slowly turns into absolute devilry and drives everyone insane/enables already mad characters to completely flip.
this was WILD An early American novelperhaps the most famous oneabout a family destroyed by mysterious voices that come out of the air with warnings and commands.
Narrated in plainspoken prose by Clara, the sister of the titular Weiland, the novel depicts a family attempting to devote itself to the reasonable discourse befitting a young republic they regularly gather in a neoclassicalstyle temple with a bust of Cicero in the center.
But the temple was designed by their father, a religious fanatic immigrant from Germany who died under strange circumstances.
I won't spoil the plot if you don't know it already, but as in many Gothic novels, the agent of the apparently supernatural actions turns out to be human.
Or does he The novel leaves a lot of things unexplainedmany weird events escape its ostensible commitment to reason.
The effectand, I suppose, the purposeis to call into question reason itself, perhaps to sound a rueful warning about that reason's political corollary in democratic governance.
On the other hand, perhaps the novel offers itself as a solution to the problem of endemic fanaticism and passion: maybe the novel is a protoFreudian "writing cure" to keep us all sane.


As for its quality, Weiland is powerfully intense in parts, but between those parts are acres of verbiage, mainly consisting of Clara's selfinterrogations and effusions.
I understand the point of this type of writingthe novel even at this point in its history is supposed to make the inner life publicbut it does grow tiresome after a while, and one begins to appreciate Jane Austen's mastery of dispensing with the firstperson narrators of all those eighteenthcentury epistolary and memoiristic novels and instead revealing subjective states through free indirect style, not to mention Poe's insight that the communication of fear and terror benefits from narrative compression.


This volume contains an unfinished prequel, the memoir of Wieland's villain, I found this more interesting than Weiland itself, since it details more of the political and philosophical context of Brown's fictional world.
In short, Carwin, a wouldbe intellectual escaped from the Pennsylvania farm of his oppressively knownothing father, encounters a political radical named Ludloe who invites him to join a secret society that may have already founded a utopia on an island in the southern hemisphere.
. . and then the text breaks off, It seemed like we were going to find out more about the political stance of these texts, especially if the Rousseauist/Godwinian ideals are shown to be sinister, but alas.
I gather that Brown's political views are hotly debated by scholars,

These novels are well worth reading, for their moments of high drama and terror and for their hardly mitigated skepticism, even if they can't equal the power of the novels and stories they went on to influencethose of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville.
what a chore to read Another undergraduate reappraisal, No reappraisal needed. This still creaks like an arthritic tiptoeing across an uneven subfloor, I read Wieland previously this is for the Carwin novella fragment, which is tantalizing as well as frustrating given its incomplete nature.
Among the fascinating aspects of the fragment are the account of Carwin discovering ventriloquism, his early attempts to use it to influence his father, and the convoluted yet provocative detente between Carwin and his mysterious benefactor Ludloe.
The philosophical discussions between them make up the bulk of the text, and hint at elements of Enlightenment philosophy, essentialist vs.
existentialist views of human nature, the definition of liberty and how it could possibly pertain to the American Revolution, and the tenets and establishment of utopian societies.
But the moments of gothic horror/terror are where Brockden Brown shines, and these mostly occur in the first few pages of the novella one imagines that more of these thrilling and sensationalist moments would have come in the completed novel.
It's a good read for American literature completists, Gothic enthusiasts, and Charles Schultz aficionados, but mostly obscure to the average reader, and unfortunately for good reason.
I read WIELAND: OR THE TRANSFORMATION for different reasons than I think the majority will read it, I'll bet a lot of people read it because it's a very early example of the "American Novel", Most are probably assigned it for a class, Perhaps some read it because of interest in a particular aspect religious mania, biloquisim as portrayed in popular culture.
. . God knows. I read it as part of a general overview I've taken on of the Gothic novel and so, being a "root of American Gothic" novel, here it was and so I read.
. .

I'm going to reverse my usual approach to these things and give my opinion first, because what little joy can be gleaned from reading WIELAND comes from it's surprises and I'll probably give those meager joys away.


So, should a casual reader read WIELAND No, not really, The central idea is interesting but and please know that I am quite an apologist for older writing styles the writing is enervating and the story not too well told.
You could spend your time on much better stuff, unless you have a particular interest,

Okay, so, that out of the way, WIELAND is famous for being an American Gothic novel why Because, let's see, the main characters' father spontaneously combusts in the first chapter and this isn't any Dickens "they found nothing but a heap of ash", afterthefact kind of thing.
He goes to worship in his specially built temple in the hills north of Philadelphia and pretty much explodes violently.
His burned body is found, We never know why he exploded, This is unimportant to the main plot, really, or at least unrelated in a factual sense, The father is a religious oddball, so that may have some tonal import,

Then comes the second Gothic aspect, The book proper is about Clara Wieland and her brother Theodore and how they are plagued by occasional voices from nowhere, and how the sister is both attracted to and repelled by an odd but charismatic and beautifully voiced young man named Francis Carwin.
These voices cause much wonderment and get our narrator, sister Clara, into a pretty pickle of suppositions about her reputation and entertaining men at odd hours and many misunderstandings are fretted over and speechified about.
Clara thinks there is something odd about Carwin, and finds evidence that he is possibly a murderer,

Then, suddenly, brother Theodore kills his entire family because he hears the voice of God telling him to wife andkids!.
There is no forewarning. Theodore also wants to kill Clara and Carwin because God tells him to and he is not at all sorry about his mass bloodshed.
Then Carwin reveals to Clara that he can throw his voice with amazing accuracy he is an expert mimic and also, wait for it.
. . a Biloquist, which is to say he is a Ventriloquist without a dummy and has been the source of all the mysterious voices, except he DID NOT cause Theodore to hear some divine, homicidal voice.
Then Theodore, who is roaming the countryside, traps them in a room, Then the book ends. Then,odd pages later, the book actually ends,

Coincidences abound. There is much flowery and highfalutin' talk about reputations and respect and love and such Clara loses her dashing young boyfriend, but that's okay, she regains him in the extended ending.
As the introduction by Fred Lewis Pattee states even while trying to rehabilitate Brown's reputation, the writing is poor: sloppy and overly embellished.
The wind doesn't just blow, "nature signs her resignation through her sweetest of voicings, spreading melancholy across the fair land even as she caresses the cheek of.
. . " and on and on with much effulgence, And I usually have a pretty high tolerance for this tommyrot, as I try to place writing in its proper time period.


Even worse, Brown changed his mind about the plot halfway through, so Carwin isn't evil, he's just misunderstood and, in a twist relatable to American classic CALEB WILLIAMS, under the control of some evil man never seen.
Unfortunately, this leaves all kinds of details from earlier in the book either hanging as red herrings drying in the salty, literary wind or hastily wound up in a totally botched extended ending.
Poo!

Carwin is kind of interesting as a character, Much has been made of the Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist's focus on Brother Theodore's religious mania, and that's also pretty well done and frightening he evidences no traces of insanity, but Carwin's misguided tricks drive him crazy.
Not really noted, as far as I can tell, is that Carwin is also, essentially, a creepy stalker fixated on Clara, going into her house and bedroom when she's not there, reading her diary, hiding in her enormous closet, sticking his head through the window to cast his voice to her.
Creepy stalker is Carwin.

Oh, and about that last part ventriloquism is essentially treated as superpower in this book, It has nothing to do with not moving your lips or animating a little man made of cork to distract people into thinking your voice is coming from somewhere else as you drink a glass of water and say "I vant a gottle of geer".
No, if you are in a house or even wandering the countryside and you happen to be an expert mimic as well, your target will hear the voice you cast right next to them, even when they're alone, JUST AS IF YOU ARE SPEAKING IN THEIR EAR.
If you are Carwin, you can even mimic the sounds of a rampaging crowd or animals, Crazy!

As noted, Brown changed gears mightily about halfway through writing the book, At some point, Carwin was going to explain to Clara why he was doing what he was doing other than being a creepy stalker in the first place, but that chapter got so big that Brown broke it off and published it separately as a serial called MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST and that's appended to the end of the book.
It's a little more fun than WEILAND, especially as it unconvincingly tells us how young Carwin first learns of his amazing ability whilst looking for a lost cow on his father's farm in the Lehigh valley.
Later, Carwin, a bit of a shirkawork, lives with his rich old aunt and gets indolent, tricking people by telling them his welltrained dog can talk.


Then, the story proper starts and Carwin is taken under the wing of the mysterious Ludloe, a seemingly beneficent and welltraveled man who appears to be training Carwin for something but what Indoctrination into some vast secret society, it appears, through which he can help all of mankind.
But Carwin can never tell anyone of the existence of the society under pain of death and destruction to whomever he told isn't it always the way.
But Carwin is unsure Ludloe asks him to romance and marry a wealthy Irish women under the pretense of cataloging her late husband's archeological ephemera.
Should he accept Should he tell Ludloe about his amazing power Might Ludloe know already and is waiting to see if Carwin doesn't tell him, thus proving his disloyalty and ending Carwin's life And why does Ludloe have a strange map of some mysterious and remote island nation on his bookshelf, where rivers and town are marked but nothing is named Who are the secret society What are their goals

Too bad we'll never know Brown never finished it.
I'm not sure, but I expect the answers would have been longwinded, overwrought and disappointing, regardless, .