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Wieland Summary

Wieland is an American gothic novel set in the years after the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and before the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). It is structured as a first person narrative in the form of two letters by Clara Wieland.

In the first letter, Clara begins her narrative by informing her readers that her tale concerns the horrors that befell her family and she hopes that its telling will impart a moral lesson. Her father was an extremely religious man whose Calvinist beliefs were filtered through the lens of an apocalyptic French Protestant sect, the Camissards. His character was inclined to sobriety, melancholy, and religious ecstasy. Believing he had a missionary calling, he moved to the rural outskirts of Philadelphia from Saxony…

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Posted By lavalle w #296569 at Jan 17, 2013 2:21 PM

in Wieland, how well do people (individually or collectively) govern themselves? And what might we begin to think Brown has to say about "self-government"?

The novel is, after all, very much interested in what guides people's conduct. So here are the specific questions for this week: What examples do we have in the novel of characters rejecting their inheritance (literally or metaphorically), of breaking with custom and tradition? And how does that turn out for them? What forces guide the characters' conduct? What things seem to be good guides and what things bad guides?

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