He will, in effect, test the age of reason’s faith in itself. As part of his plan, Carwin arranges circumstances in such a way that Pleyel (as Henry is called) believes he hears Clara alone with Carwin. Pleyel concludes that she has been unfaithful to him and banishes her from his affections. Carwin thus succeeds in destroying Clara’s reputation—not in fact, as in the Richardsonian novel of seduction, but in appearance. He is less the seducer of women than of opinion.

But it is not only Pleyel who is misled. Even more tragically, Wieland himself is convinced that he has heard a voice—the voice of God obliging him to sacrifice his family as proof of his absolute acceptance of the divine will. He slays his wife and children and later, with a knife handed to him by Clara, kills himself. It is not clear whether the voice urging the sacrifice comes from Carwin, ventriloquizing and impersonating God, or is a product of Wieland’s troubled religious imagination, or both. Since Carwin is himself, to some degree, a victim of the “empire of mechanical and habitual impulses,” the complex questions of who is morally accountable and in what degree remain unresolved.

Nor are these issues untangled by the unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which explores Carwin’s previous history. Carwin narrates the discovery of his “wonderful gift” of “biloquism,” which, like Brown’s own authorial power to give voice to others, leaves him deeply anxious about what constitutes abuse of his “instrument.” But Carwin is not so anxious that he restrains himself from impersonating the voice of his dead mother to manipulate his credulous father. Yet later, as if to atone for these actions, Carwin surrenders himself to the severe tutelage of the charismatic utopian Ludloe, who seeks to use Carwin’s vocal gift so that “the ignorant and credulous might be moulded to our own purposes.” Concerned that Carwin should be obedient only to him, he warns Carwin to beware of other threats to his free will, especially love—“the strongest of all human delusions,” which gives to the object of one’s love “a power over the heart” that “will scarcely have limits.” Rather than clarifying the strange events in Wieland, Carwin the Biloquist suggests the infinite regress that awaits the reader who seeks first causes or explanations for actions that are themselves, Brown believes, part of an infinite series of reactions and conditionings that cannot be parceled into convenient units of cause and effect. Wieland and its fragmentary sequel ultimately cannot be located within the genre of the mystery novel, because they refuse to satisfy the deep psychological need of the reader for closure and resolution, those qualities that make that genre so addictive. Neither can they be called Gothic fictions. For all its Gothic trappings, Wieland subverts the demystifying and secularizing agenda of the Gothic novels. If the latter often invoke mysterious supernatural events only finally to explain them away as being caused by human agency, Brown, in contrast, views the psychology of human behavior as the real realm of ultimate mysteries. If the Faustian agenda of enlightenment science sought to demystify the world, Brown sought to remystify it.

II

Brown’s novel of authority misrepresented and authority imagined is a terrifying post-French Revolutionary account of the fallibility of the human mind and, by extension, of democracy itself. Ventriloquism and religious enthusiasm, the novel’s dramatic devices, seem with a sardonic literalness to call into question all possible faith in the republican formula vox populi, vox Dei—the voice of the people is the voice of God. Brown thus exposes the manipulative fictions of representation that disguise the fact that representation always involves distortion and loss (be it God’s will represented by the voice or “general will” of the people, “the people” represented by their officials, ideas represented by words, or objects represented by images). The fiction of representation was most famously exemplified in the late 1780s by a small group of privileged white men who, though often strenuously disagreeing among themselves, yet described themselves as “We the People,” a single homogeneous entity that the Constitution and the delegates to it, in effect, invented. Ten years later, in the year of Wielands publication, the Alien and Sedition Acts identified the threat of misrepresentation as not within but entirely external to the government. In response to the arrival of émigré radicals—Jacobins—from England and France and the increased power of newspapers and print culture to create national opinion, these acts outlawed treasonable conspiracies and any publications “with the intent to defame” the President or the government. Through the figure of Carwin, Wieland powerfully addressed these larger fears about the Jacobinization of the impressionable American mind.

Preoccupied with what he called “invisible agents” (the mystery of transmission and the metaphor of infection described, among other things, the very process of reading), Brown believed that the mind was as vulnerable as the bodies of thousands who died in the virulent yellow fever epidemics of 1793 and 1798. The first epidemic became the subject of his novel Arthur Merwyn; or The Memoirs of the Year 1793. The second afflicted Brown himself, mildly in body and powerfully in mind. It also forced the suspension of the serialization of Arthur Merwyn in the Philadelphia Weekly Magazine. Midway through the serialization, the Weekly’s editor died of the disease, a plague some had tellingly but falsely linked to ships arriving from the revolution-wracked French island of Santa Domingo and by implication to the “plague” of French Revolutionary ideology. An article “On Shaving” appearing in the very first issue of the Monthly Magazine, a journal Brown founded and edited in 1799 and 1800, instructed those “adverse to resign their throats to so keen an edge in the hands of another” and those “fearful of brush and soap polluted by indiscriminate use” on the fundamentals of shaving themselves. Beneath the republican ideal of self-suffiency is an exquisite sense of vulnerability.

Wieland’s subtitle, The Transformation, refers not only to the transformation of the character Wieland from loving father to murderous fanatic but to a broad historical transformation, the shift from a world that assumed stable forms and fixed relations between appearance and reality and between individual and society to a world sensitive to shifting values, deceptive appearances, mixed motives, and, most significantly, the tyranny of language over things, rhetoric over logic. A secure world made insecure, Brown announces, is the price of its having become “free.” By placing his novel in the decade before the American Revolution, Brown implies that the great conflict for American independence, rather than merely being a result of that larger “transformation,” decisively hastened it. The very fragmented quality of a text narrated by a victim of events and without an omniscient point of view speaks to this transition. Or, as Clara—both subject and object, narrator and character—puts it: “What but ambiguities, abruptnesses and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?” Here was the dark reverse side of Benjamin Franklin’s celebration of opportunity and self-interest in his Autobiography. In that sanguine work the terrifying implication of Lockean epistemology that things are not as they seem turns out to provide opportunities for Franklin’s successful manipulation of appearances. A limitless and inconstant world liberates the chameleon Franklin from a fixed identity and makes possible his process of self-creation.