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"Dangerous Transformations: Charles Brockden Brown’s Subversive Aesthetics"
Anthony Galluzzo, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
June 1, 2006

In Chapter IV of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland, narrator Clara introduces the topic of war, only to immediately change the subject. She recalls those “six years of uninterrupted happiness,” when, paradoxically “the sound of war had been heard, but it was at such a distance as to enhance our enjoyment by affording objects of comparison. The Indians were repulsed on the one side, and Canada was conquered on the other. Revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those who occupied the scene, contributed in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity, and furnishing causes of patriotic exultation” (25).

As Edward Cahill notes in a recent article on Charles Brockden Brown’s conflicted relationship to the “imagination,” the Wieland circle, centered in the family estate at Mettingen, understands the French-Indian War in primarily imaginative—or even, aesthetic—terms, based on Clara’s retrospective account. The latter term seems suitable here, if we attend to Clara’s language, which conveys both an actual and a cognitive distance from those recollected “revolutions and battles,” suggesting the sort of aesthetic distance—if not disinterestedness—definitively formulated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. War, significantly reduced to a “sound,” is enjoyed in a state of contemplative repose, where it must have offered enough variety to afford “objects of comparison,” or so Clara Wieland implies. These “objects” are nonetheless curious renditions of bloody and terrible events, as Clara’s coolly dispassionate tone underlines the discrepancy between her nearly formalist appreciation of this spectacle and the actual realities of war evoked, in which repulsed Indians and a conquered Canada are alternately reduced to “curiosity” or “exultation.” Her “aestheticization” certainly borrows from Edmund Burke’s theory of “sublimity,” with its notion of “terror”—at a distance—as “openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (Burke, 54). The Burkean overtones of the Wieland circle’s “enjoyment” are notable, especially when we attend to the ironies of Clara’s nostalgic “portrait”; how the distanced, disinterested, and disembodied, if not positively Kantian, delights experienced by Wielands and Pleyels alike, derive from the massacred bodies of English, French and Indian; how this conflation of “sublime” aesthetic experience and Anglo-French-Indian bloodletting echoes Burke’s own hyperbolic evocation of sublimity through his representations of revolutionary “terror” in the 1790 Reflections, all to negative political effect; how several radical critics at the time noted the more than sublime, at times sensationalistic, tenor of Burke’s ostensibly political monograph, implicitly linking the later, “objectively” historical account with the earlier aesthetic treatise, which, as Tom Paine writes, is “well calculated for theatrical representation.”

Clara utilizes this idyllic recollection in order to introduce Carwin and the destruction he seemingly creates through his various “biloquial” interventions. Carwin, the “double-tongued deceiver,” uses his unique “gift”—or, perhaps, technique is the more appropriate term in this regard—to manipulate each member of the Mettingen circle, unleashing the affective and decidedly interested “springs of action” lurking beneath the disinterested appreciation that, according to Clara, characterized friends and family members alike during those six years.

But what if we were to read Carwin—whose talent for ventriloquism and impersonation might be read as one powerful early American articulation of imaginative power—in a positive light? What if the destruction he wreaks upon the Wielands is, in fact, an adumbration of a subversive and decidedly interested aesthetic agency as against the Wielands’ genteel disinterest? If this is the case, can we perhaps read the Wielands as somehow related to the new institutionalized public sphere of the United States during the 1790s? What sort of gesture—both aesthetic and political—might we discern in Brown’s literary representations? Exploring both Arthur Mervyn and Wieland, I provide a few provisional answers to these questions.