Like a proper Gothic novel, Wieland starts well before the actual narrative does, with the family's genealogy. We are told of Theodore Wieland's father, the descendant of a German artist, who is apprenticed to a London merchant at an early age. By pure chance, a book by an Albigensian sect turns him from an uninteresting hardworking apprentice into a Protestant sectarian. A one-sided reading of the Bible strengthens his Old Testament-like zeal. Clara's comment on this first misreading in the novel is insightful: "Every fact and sentiment in this book [the Bible] were viewed through a medium which the writings of the Camissard apostle had suggested. His constructions of the text were hasty, and formed on a narrow scale. Everything was viewed in a disconnected position" (8). Both Brown and Clara, author and narrator, notice this misreading, but what neither notes is that misreading will become a family tradition, as later events will show. At any rate, as soon as old Wieland receives his inheritance he takes off for the New World, where he will try to convert the pagan Indians. Along the way though, he gets distracted by more earthly concerns: he starts a plantation and founds a family, and after fourteen years finds himself well off materially, but negligent spiritually. Guilt starts gnawing at him and, the narrative implies, inflames him: in his little temple where he worships his vengeful Old Testament God, old Wieland dies of spontaneous combustion. His wife dies soon after.

        Time passes, and the past seems all but erased when orphaned Theodore and Clara Wieland reclaim their father's plantation, Mettingen. They convert old Wieland's temple, in which he was wont to meditate on his disobedience, into a classically styled salon, where they can freely converse on philosophy and literature. A bust of Cicero, placed on a slab of American marble, emblematizes Mettingen's transformation from a Calvinist mission control into a neoclassical utopia. She comments on the happiness she, her brother Theodore, his wife Catherine, and her brother Henry Pleyel--incest anyone?--experience in the temple: "Every joyous and tender scene most dear to my memory, is connected with this edifice" (22). Every joyous and tender scene--Clara apparently forgets this was the place where her father went up in flames. To further suggest their erasion of the past, they engage in philology, not of the bible, but of pagan orators. Clara relates in detail the discussion on Cicero's oration for Cluentius that ensues after Pleyel accuses Wieland of a misquotation. Perhaps philology is intended to prevent further misreadings of the kind that proved fatal to their father, but significantly, a letter, and then a sudden rainstorm prevent the matter from getting resolved (28). We begin to see a pattern here: misreadings occur, and they are not corrected.

        This is perhaps a good moment to reflect on what I mean with "misreading." So far, the misreadings have been, literally, faulty readings of actual texts--the bible, one of Cicero's orations. But I want to go one step further, and suggest that much of the Wielands' behavior is a result of a more general misreading: the characters in the novel misread situations, voices, other characters, their own history. Briefly returning to the patriarch of the Wielands will clarify this broader notion of misreading.

        Conspicuously absent from Clara's discussion of her father's fate are the economics of his and her utopia. Neither Brown nor Clara are very specific about economics, but we do get one hint: "The cheapness of land, and the service of African slaves, which were then in general use, gave him who was poor in Europe all the advantages of wealth" (10). Mettingen, old Wieland's base for converting the savages, and now the locus of a neo-classical, Jeffersonian utopia, is built on slavery, a moral anathema to most Protestants as well as to most Enlightenment thinkers. Clara shows her morals to be confined by class, and it never occurs to her, nor indeed to Brown, to ask if perhaps this was part of the patriarch's disobedience: Clara continues the family tradition of misreading.

        This habit of the Wielands is most fully expressed in and through Theodore Wieland. Amidst the confusion caused by Carwin the biloquist, the novel's evil character who happens to be able to not only imitate but also project voices, Wieland begins to hear what he thinks is the voice of his particular deity, a voice which commands him to butcher his family. Theodore, continuing the tradition begun by his father, misreads God's word (after all, it's very unlikely any God who instituted holy matrimony would want a husband to kill his wife and children) and willingly obeys its murderous command. The second violent explosion in the Wieland family, the massacre allows Brown to fully exploit the Gothic fascination with violence, sexuality, and incest, and again shows Clara's inability to read a situation properly. Wieland's murder of his wife, in his sister's bed, combines sexuality with violence, and the location suggests Wieland's relationship to his sister has an Oedipal quality to it. None of this, however, is commented on by Clara.

        The extent to which Clara tries to avoid the theme of incest is indicated by her convoluted and circumlocuted language. She recollects what she felt at the emotional climax of the story, when her brother threatened to kill her: "Death in this form, death from the hand of a brother, was thought upon with indescribable repugnance" (199-200). This awkward passive construction, which denies Clara her status as a subject, is made even more suggestive by diction--"repugnance" is a term that better denotes disgust of unacceptable sexuality than fear of dying. Wieland's misreading is indirectly the cause of miswriting on Clara's part.

        If Clara speaks in coded language concerning sexuality, she is quite explicit in her condemnation of Wieland's religiosity--though not of his counterpart Pleyel's rationalist deism. Wieland hears a voice which he believes to be God's, oddly enough the only strange voice not caused by the novel's resident biloquist Carwin, and follows its command to butcher his entire family. Pleyel overhears what he thinks is an amorous conversation between Clara and Carwin, orchestrated by Carwin, and immediately assumes Clara is a fallen woman. Without even telling her what he thinks has happened, he deserts her. Clara is so distressed she falls violently ill and almost dies. Neither of the two men in Clara's life pause to wonder if their senses aren't deceiving them, and the result is almost complete destruction.

        The next misreading is Clara's. Three years after all these terrible events, Clara is happily reunited with Pleyel in marriage, and remarks that Wieland's error was his own: "If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes . . . the double-tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled" (224). This is a curious misinterpretation of events, since Wieland's downfall, as Clara made clear earlier, was specifically not caused by Carwin's machinations. On the other hand, Pleyel, to whom Clara's comment is applicable, is never mentioned in her moralizing remarks at the end of the novel. Of course Pleyel's "moral duty" was to convince himself more fully of Clara's guilt before accusing her of being a fallen woman, and one wonders how Pleyel escapes Clara's condemnation. While he is supposed to be a rationalist, his extreme empiricism is to be blamed for relying overmuch on sensory evidence when he should question what his senses perceived. Earlier in the novel, Clara did wonder if her testimony would convince Pleyel that he didn't hear what he thought he heard: "What but my own assertion had I to throw in the balance against it [the supposition of her guilt]? Would this be permitted to outweigh the testimony of his senses?"(102) However, when all is said and done, she gives up her fight for authority and ceases to doubt Pleyel--their happy reunion exists by virtue of her disregarding the facts. One doesn't need to be a twentieth-century psychoanalyst to realize that Wieland, unlike Pleyel, suffers from delusions (and Brown points this out in a footnote referencing to medical authorities), and considering that, can one still ask Wieland to "frame juster notions of moral duty"? Guilt is assigned to the wrong party, and Pleyel, who caused her so much suffering, escapes guilt-free--Clara submits in marriage, and after her father misread the bible, and after she misread her father, now she misreads both her brother and her lover.

        Reading and writing, quotation and misquotation play a large part in Wieland. The narrative's form itself is an indication of how Brown intended the written word to vouch for its own authenticity: the narrative is presented in the shape of a long letter Clara addresses to "a small circle of curious friends, whose curiosity . . . had been greatly awakened"(3), and even has her afterword appended to it. Furthermore, on occasion Brown comments (in the prologue and through footnotes) on the likeliness, if not the authenticity, of the miraculous events that occur in the novel, by referring to scientists, medical journals, and newspaper accounts. From beginning to end the novel is concerned with acts of reading and writing. Old Wieland begins by reading a Protestant text and proceeds to misread the Bible. At important points throughout the novel, letters appear and disappear (appearing and disappearing letters will be crucial to the plot of Brown's next novel, Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker). As noted earlier, at one time a letter interrupts a philological discussion on one of Cicero's orations. The utopian life led by the Wielands and their train is determined by books, and their social life is negotiated through reading, writing, and the discussion thereof. Clara's life herself is recorded in her diary, and subject to interpretation and misinterpretation: towards the end of the novel we find out that she, while recording the day's events in her journal, was being watched by Pleyel, who read over her shoulder as she was describing a mysterious voice, Carwin's--an entry which is immediately misread by Pleyel as talking about an amorous encounter. Finally, we realize at the end of the novel that Clara is misreading her own life and times, when she incorrectly blames Carwin for Wieland's murderous behavior, and allows Pleyel's misreadings to be forgotten. In the utopia of Mettingen, an American microcosm, misreading is hereditary, and after old Wieland, Theodore Wieland, and Henry Pleyel, now Clara herself misreads the world around her.

        A final note. It has been remarked often enough that American history, both colonial and post-colonial, is a history of texts and books. Perhaps the most significant act in the early colonial history is the drawing up of the Mayflower-compact, an act of writing that created a Puritan utopia out of nothing. A few years later, the exclamation by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that "we shall be as a city upon a hill," explicitly links the Puritan colonists to Israel's chosen people by way of the holy book, and the Puritan historiographical tradition of typology (consider for instance the works of Cotton Mather and the typological musings of Jonathan Edwards) indicates to which extent early America was an enactment of biblical accounts. One hundred and fifty years later, when revolutionary sentiments are stirring, Thomas Paine's Common Sense sells a half a million copies and is instrumental in the struggle for independence. Seventy-five years later again, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is published, and we know Abraham Lincoln credited Stowe as "the little lady who started the big war." Even today reading and misreading of texts are at the heart of America, if we remember the discussion on the Constitution and the Federalist papers that the recent scandals surrounding the presidency gave rise to. Is it a coincidence that a controversial book of poems, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, was among the gifts exchanged between the president and his intern? I think not--I smell a conspiracy here.

        One can only wonder if Brown, a young writer in a young country, was fully aware of the seminal importance of reading and writing, and the possible consequences of misreading and miswriting. Certainly, his stylistic control, or lack thereof, and the various dangling plot elements, seem to suggest he wasn't, and he probably never thought of his novel as a deconstructionist text that undermines its own authority on purpose. Moreover, but this is a point that requires more attention than I can give it here, Brown's choice of first-person narrative relates his authority as a writer to Clara's authority as a narrator, and when one misreads, so does the other. Wieland may not the best early American novel, but with all its flaws, and one wonders if Brown realizes this, it does have an important lesson to teach us--to read carefully.

Works Cited

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland: and, Carwin, the Biloquist. Ed. Emory Elliott. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.