Wieland

Weiland (1798), by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the first Gothic horror novels printed in America and one of the earliest works in American literature to be influenced by European Romanticism. The narrative appears to have been based on newspaper accounts of the James Yates murders, in which a New York native murdered his wife and four children, claiming that the Holy Spirit told him to do so. Brown often fused history and fiction as a means of exploring progressive social issues like mental illness, slavery, and abuse.

Brown is one of the most highly regarded American authors of the 18th century. He was the first American author to have his works translated into French and German. Other American authors considered him a significant influence, including Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper. In England, Brown was influenced by well-known social progressive writers and thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Holcroft, and Robert Bage. Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley, reread Brown’s novels while she was writing Frankenstein.

This study guide refers to the Kindle edition of Weiland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist Digireads.com Publishing (December 23, 2019).

Content Warning: Wieland depicts or contains references to murder, death by suicide, and sexual assault.

Plot Summary

Wieland is told through letters in the epistolary format by Clara Wieland, who recounts the events leading up to the deaths of her brother and his family. She sets the stage by explaining that her father came to the New World to evangelize Indigenous people. Finding them uninterested in his teachings, he settled down to raise a family. His failure ate at him, however, until, falling into a depression, he experienced what appeared to be an instance of spontaneous combustion and died. His wife soon died as well, leaving their children to be raised by their aunt. The children, Clara and Theodore, form a friendship with Catherine Pleyel and her brother Henry Pleyel, called “Pleyel” by the other characters. Theodore and Catherine eventually marry and have four children. The Weiland estate is divided equally between Clara and her brother. Theodore and Catherine live in the main house, and Clara has her own house on her half of the estate.

Catherine’s brother Henry Pleyel returns from Europe and lives nearby, visiting the Wielands nearly every day. Clara develops romantic feelings for Pleyel, but he is in love with a girl in Germany named Theresa de Stolberg. The primary narrative begins with an incident in which Theodore believes he hears his wife Catherine’s voice warning him of danger. Returning to the house, he finds Catherine in the parlor surrounded by witnesses who claim she has been there the entire time Theodore was gone. A second incident occurs when Pleyel tries to persuade Theodore to uproot his family and move them all to Germany. Pleyel wants to go back and marry Theresa, but he doesn’t want to be separated from the Wielands. This time, they both hear Catherine’s disembodied voice saying that Theresa has died.

One day, Clara sees a seemingly uncouth stranger crossing her property. A few hours later, she hears someone come to the back door of her house and ask her maid in educated and sophisticated tones for a drink of water. Going to see who it is, Clara sees that the speaker, whose name is Carwin, is the same person she saw crossing her land. When Clara describes the stranger to her friends, Pleyel thinks he recognizes the description as someone he knows very slightly.

Arriving home alone one evening, Clara goes to her room to fetch something from her closet, and a voice at her shoulder tells her to stop, but the room is empty of anyone but herself. Clara disregards the voice, opens the closet, and discovers Carwin inside. He confesses that he intended to rape her, but having heard the “inhuman” voice, he knows she has some powerful supernatural protection and fears to challenge it, so he departs.

A few days later, Clara finds a letter from Carwin asking her to meet him at her house alone; he claims he will try to make right the harm he has done to her. Unsure whether she will take the risk or not, Clara stops first at her mother’s house and finds her brother and Catherine not at home. Clara finally makes up her mind to meet Carwin. She sees a light in her bedroom window and, creeping into the house, she is about to go up the stairs when she hears the familiar disembodied voice warn her to stop. This time, however, she catches a glimpse of Carwin’s face.

Disregarding the warning, she proceeds to her bedroom. There, she finds her sister-in-law, Catherine, dead in Clara’s bed. Theodore enters the room, speaking and acting strangely. Clara thinks he must have seen Catherine’s body and is incoherent from grief. The confrontation is interrupted by the sounds of a crowd approaching the house, and Theodore flees. The new arrivals tell Clara that Catherine’s children and Louisa Conway have also been murdered. Clara collapses into a long period of dissociation. When she recovers, she learns that the murderer was her brother Theodore. He heard what he believed to be divine orders telling him to kill everyone he loved.

After she recovers from the prolonged shock, Clara agrees to go away to Europe with her uncle, but first she wants to see her brother. Her uncle warns her that Theodore is confined to an asylum, but his murderous compulsion isn’t satisfied yet. He believes he is still morally required to kill Clara. He has already escaped prison twice. Once, he attacked Pleyel, and the second time, he tried to get to Clara while she was ill. Clara makes one last trip back to her house at Mettingen for her journal. There, she encounters Carwin, who has come back, hoping to explain himself to her.

Carwin confesses that he is a biloquist (ventriloquist), and he couldn’t resist playing games with the residents of Mettingen. He was responsible for all the disembodied voices—both good and evil—that Clara and her family have heard. He fled the night of the murders and did not know that they had been committed by Theodore, and he denies that he had anything to do with the voice that compelled Theodore to kill his family.

At that moment, Theodore arrives. He has broken out of prison again and come in search of Clara. Carwin intervenes and uses his power of ventriloquism to persuade Wieland not to harm Clara. Wieland comes to his senses and realizes what he has done. He dies by suicide in grief and remorse.

At first, Clara is so traumatized that she refuses to leave her house until it burns down, leaving her nothing else to cling to. She finally allows her uncle to take her away to Europe. They settle in France. Pleyel has married Theresa, the woman he was in love with, but she dies in childbirth. Eventually, Pleyel and Clara get married.