The Americanization of Gothic in Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Abstract

Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland challenges us to consider what happens to gothic tropes as they are carried across the Atlantic. The novel also asks us to consider the function of sentiment in establishing gothic effects as well as how gothic emotionality enables seduction and makes it, in at least one sense, inevitable. Sentiment and seduction, in Brown’s hands, are features of the gothic that render experience both questionable and meaningless. The effect that is created in the novel is often called “uncanny”;¹ but I would prefer to call such effects “queer.” I use “queer” in this essay to signify a number of different things. In the first place, queer signifies what is odd and, perhaps in an uncanny way, off-putting, bizarre, or strange. I am interested in how the text gives rise to such effects. I also use queer as a transitive verb, in the sense of queering a situation or relationship. This happens a lot in Brown’s novel, and I want to look at these situations and examine what they share. Finally, I use the word queer to describe nonnormative sexual relations of various kinds, as indeed I did in my recent book, Queer Gothic.²