Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist Read Online

Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist

Table of Contents

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

MEMOIRS OF CARWIN THE BILOQUIST

NOTES

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

WIELAND and CARWIN THE BILOQUIST

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN (1771-1810) was born to a merchant Quaker family in Philadelphia, and was educated at Robert Proud’s School. In his early twenties he committed himself to literature, and avidly read the latest models from England and Europe—especially Rousseau, Bage, Godwin, Southey, and Coleridge. By 1795 he was earnestly devoted to fiction; once engaged, he composed at breakneck pace, publishing between 1797 and 1802 seven romances, a long pro-feminist dialogue, and numerous sketches and tales. Four of those romances earned him the perhaps dubious title of the Father of the American Novel—Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Arthur Mervyn (Part I, 1799; Part II, 1800), and between those two parts, Edgar Huntly (1799). All four are remarkably sophisticated moral, psychological, and political allegories that burned into the artistic consciousness of Poe, Hawthorne, Fenimore Cooper, and Melville. By the 1820s, a decade after his death, he was ranked both in America and England with Washington Irving and Cooper as the embodiment of American literary genius, the first American writer successfully to bridge the gulf between entertainment and literature.

JAY FLIEGELMAN teaches American literature and American Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchical Authority, 1750-1800.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:
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Wieland was first published in the United States of America by T & J
Swords 1798. Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist was first published in the
United States of America in serial form in The Literary Magazine
1803-1805.
This edition with an introduction by Jay Fliegelman
published in Penguin Books 1991

Introduction and notes copyright © Viking Penguin,

a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Brown, Charles Brockden, 1771-1810.
[Wieland]
Wieland; and Memoirs of Carwin the biloquist/Charles Brockden
Brown; edited and with an introduction by Jay Fliegelman.
p. cm.-(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67449-5

http://us.penguingroup.com

INTRODUCTION

Charles Brockden Brown’s powerful and disturbing novel Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) was the first published novel by the first native-born American author to make a profession of, and a living by, writing. The novel inaugurated the Gothic preoccupation with the psychological and historical meaning of America, which a half century later would become so central to the works of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, all readers of Brown. “America,” Brown wrote, “has opened new views to the naturalist and politician, but has seldom furnished themes to the moral painter. That new springs of action and new motives to curiosity should operate ... may be readily conceived.” Written when the political character and values of America were being debated and tested, Wieland offers an extraordinary narrative dramatization of one of the most crucial issues of the early national period: the conflicting claims of authority and liberty. The psychological, social, and political dimensions of that issue are brought together in a plot sufficiently complex as to make a brief summary useful.

Narrated by Clara Wieland in the form of a letter, Wieland takes place in rural Mettingen, Pennsylvania, in the years between the conclusion of the French and Indian War and the beginning of the American Revolution. Some years before, while still young children, Clara and her brother Theodore had been left orphans when their father, a German mystic who came to America to convert the Indians, died in a fire of mysterious origin. Wieland (as Theodore is called) marries a young woman named Catharine Pleyel, whose brother Henry comes to live with them and with Clara. Wieland has inherited his father’s religious “enthusiasm,” a word that in the eighteenth century meant the confusion of imagination with revelation. Transformed into a religious determinist, in part, by brooding over his father’s death and the meaning of certain scriptural passages, Wieland seeks the revelation of a higher will by which he may be guided. In a historical period that celebrated liberty, he articulates the deep psychological and cultural pleasure of submission: “the supreme delight of knowing thy will and performing it.” Henry, on the contrary, is a rationalist who rejects all guidance but that of his own reason. These two figures somewhat crudely represent the temperamental division of the age into rationalists and evangelicals, a division that Brown will expose as a false dichotomy.

After a period of peaceful fraternity, strange occurrences begin to happen in this little community. Disembodied voices are heard—one warning Wieland of dangerous things to come and another, even more ominous, overheard in Clara’s closet plotting her death. Shortly after these events an old acquaintance of Henry’s by the name of Carwin appears at the Wielands’ home and ingratiates himself into their rural society. It is Carwin who, unbeknownst to his hosts, is responsible for these frightening voices. He has mastered the new eighteenth-century science of biloquism—or ventriloquism—the ability not merely to throw one’s voice but to impersonate the voices of others. Carwin’s motives are never made fully clear. But the reader does learn that Clara’s maid has given such admiring accounts of her mistress’s courage and rationality that Carwin feels compelled to test her, to determine how accessible to wonder and panic she really is.