The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 85considerations.” Modern Chivalry tends toward similar conclusions. The portrait of
Teague O’Regan, after all, betrays the same distrust as the Federalist papers do of
what Hamilton and his colleagues called “theoretic politicians” who believed that
faction could be cured by “reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political
rights.” In the novel and in the papers, there is the same suspicion of populism, of
ordinary people denied the guidance and control of their natural leaders, and a sim-
ilar need to emphasize what Madison chose to term “the great points of difference
between a Democracy and a Republic.”
Brackenridge was not a professional author – he earned his living as a lawyer –
and neither were William Hill Brown, Rowson, and Foster; the person who has
earned the title of first in this category in America is Charles Brockden Brown
(1771–1810), although it is now fairly clear that Brown was one among several men
and women who labored between 1776 and 1810 to earn their income from their
writings. Under the influence of the English writer William Godwin, Brown wrote
and published Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798), a treatise on the rights of women. Then,
further stimulated by Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams and his own critical ideas
about fiction, he wrote his four best novels in just two years: Wieland; or, The
Transformation (1798), Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (1799–1800),
Ormond; or, The Secret Witness (1799), and Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-
Walker (1799). All four reveal a confluence of influences: to the moral and social
purpose of Godwin was added the sentimentalism and interest in personal psychol-
ogy of the English novelist Samuel Richardson and, above all perhaps, the horrors
and aberrations of the Gothic school of fiction. To this was added Brown’s own sense
of critical mission. He believed in writing novels that would be both intellectual and
popular, that would stimulate debate among the thoughtful, while their exciting
plots and often bizarre or romantic characters would attract a larger audience.
Brown was also strongly committed to using distinctively American materials: in the
preface to Edgar Huntly, for example, he talks about rejecting “superstitious and
exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras” in favor of “incidents of Indian
hostility and perils of the Western Wilderness.” The result of these ambitions and
influences is a series of books that translate the Gothic into an American idiom,
and that combine sensational elements such as murder, insanity, sexual aggression,
and preternatural events with brooding explorations of social, political, and philo-
sophical questions. These books also make art out of the indeterminate: the reader
is left at the end with the queer feeling that there is little, perhaps nothing, a person
can trust – least of all, the evidence of their senses.
Brown’s first novel, Wieland, is a case in point. The older Wieland, a German mys-
tic, emigrates to Pennsylvania, erects a mysterious temple on his estate, and dies
there one night of spontaneous combustion. His wife dies soon afterwards, and their
children Clara and the younger Wieland become friends with Catharine Pleyel and
her brother Henry. Wieland marries Catharine, and Clara falls in love with Henry,
who has a fiancée in Germany. A mysterious stranger called Carwin then enters the
circle of friends; and, shortly after, a series of warnings are heard from unearthly
voices. Circumstances, or perhaps the voices, persuade Henry that Clara and CarwinGGray_c01.indd 85ray_c 01 .indd 85 8 8/1/2011 7:54:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 57 AM