86 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsare involved with each other; he returns to his fiancée and marries her. Wieland,
inheriting the fanaticism of his father, is evidently driven mad by the voices and
murders his wife and children. Carwin then confesses to Clara that he produced the
voices by the “art” of biloquium, a form of ventriloquism that enables him to mimic
the voices of others and project them over some distance. He was “without malig-
nant intentions,” he claims, and was simply carried away by his curiosity and his
“passion for mystery.” Wieland, escaping from an asylum, is about to murder Clara
when Carwin, using his “art” for the last time, successfully orders him to stop. The
unhappy madman then commits suicide, Carwin departs for a remote area of
Pennsylvania, and Clara marries Henry Pleyel after the death of his first wife. These
are the bare bones of the story, but what gives those bones flesh is the sense that the
characters, and for that matter the reader, can never be quite sure what is the truth
and what is not. Brown, for instance, was one of the first American writers to dis-
cover the uses of the unreliable narrator. Carwin professes the innocence of his
intentions, but he also talks about being driven by a “mischievous daemon.” More to
the point, the entire novel is cast in the form of a letter from Clara, the last surviving
member of the Wieland family, to an unnamed friend. And Clara does not hesitate
to warn the reader that she is not necessarily to be trusted as a reporter of events.
“My narrative may be invaded by inaccuracy and confusion,” she confesses. “What
but ambiguities, abruptness, and dark transitions, can be expected from the historian
who is, at the same time, the sufferer of these disasters?”
The indeterminacy goes further. “Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted
for by no established laws,” Clara observes. And it is never quite clear, not only
whether or not she and Carwin are telling the truth, but how complicit Henry Pleyel
and the younger Wieland are with the voices they hear. In his portraits of Henry and
Wieland, Brown is exploring the two prevailing systems of thought in early America:
respectively, the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the mysticism of Christianity.
He is also casting both into doubt. When Henry “overhears” something that suggests
Carwin and Clara are having an affair, he is convinced, he later admits, “by ... the
testimony of my ears.” He has become accustomed to trusting the evidence of his
senses, even though in this case – and many others, Brown intimates – that evidence
is wrong. Similarly, when Wieland hears what he takes to be the voice of God com-
manding him to kill his family as proof of his faith, he eagerly accepts the command.
Just as it remains unclear whether or not the voice commanding Wieland has been
projected by Carwin with malignant or innocent intention, so it is equally unclear
whether or not, given his fanaticism and the history of fanaticism in his family,
Wieland would have killed in any event. All that is clear is how unstable the instru-
ments of reason and faith are, and how little we can believe what our senses or our
more spiritual premonitions tell us. Like other authors of the time, Brown liked to
emphasize that his fictions were based on fact. He pointed out, in his prefatory
“Advertisement” for his first novel, that there had recently been “an authentic case,
remarkably similar to Wieland.” Similarly, in both Ormond and Arthur Mervyn, he
made use of an outbreak of yellow fever that had actually occurred in Philadelphia
in 1793; and in Edgar Huntly he relied not only on familiar settings, but on theGGray_c01.indd 86ray_c 01 .indd 86 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM