CALVINISM AND GOTHICISM: THE EXAMPLE OF BROWN'S "WIELAND"
Charles Brockden Brown's "Gothic" novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798) was long read as an expression of Enlightenment rationality. The author's purpose, according to this view, was to caution readers "against credulity and religious fanaticism."1 But the rationalist interpretation has come under spirited attack in recent years, partly as a result of a reassessment of le genre noir in general, and the Calvinist un? derpinning of Brown's tale has begun to gain the recognition it deserves.2 Nevertheless, the misreadings persist in one form or another, and even Larzer Ziff, who properly insists that "Brown ends his journey through the mind by approaching the outskirts of Edwards' camp," misconstrues the novel's denouement as a conventional happy ending. Further, Ziffs analysis of the sentimental seduction theme is a source of confusion, the effect of which is to trivialize Brown's principal concern.3 For the Carwin Clara Pleyel triangle has little to do with sentimental love: rather it is Brown's version of the temptation in the garden, and Wieland itself is his retelling of the biblical fable of the Fall of Man. It is well known that William Godwin's Caleb Williams had a major impact on Brown and that its publication in 1794 prompted the American to turn to the writing of fiction. Much stressed by critics, the Godwinian influence is usually cited as proof of Brown's radicalism and hostility to religion. As Joel Porte has recently shown, however, Caleb Williams possesses an "exacerbated Calvinist framework" and breathes the spirit of Paradise Lost. With Falkland in the role of the harsh Divinity and Caleb as the sinful Adam, it charts a course of guilt, suffer? ing, and relentless persecution, ending with a reversal in which the eponymous hero, having succeeded in vindicating himself in a court of law, is overcome by remorse and acknowledges that "he is precisely the 'monster of depravity' whom he had been represented as being all along." In the ruined Gothic world of Caleb Williams, argues Porte, there is no hope, no prospect of grace or redemption.4