An Adventurous and Lawless Fancy: Charles Brockden Brown's Aesthetic State

On the eve of the series of disasters that will destroy her peace and pleasure, Clara, the narrator of Charles Brockden Brown's novel Wieland (1798), prepares to hear her brother, Theodore, recite a tragic tale just arrived from Germany and written by a promising novice Saxon poet:

The exploits of Zisca, the Bohemian hero, were woven into a dramatic series and connection. According to German custom, it was minute and diffuse, and dictated by an adventurous and lawless fancy. It was a chain of audacious acts, and unheard-of disasters. The moated fortress, and the thicket; the ambush and the battle; and the conflict of headlong passions, were pourtrayed in wild numbers, and with terrific energy.

(78)¹

This elegant but ominous scene would seem to project two distinct possibilities: aesthetic pleasure or irrational chaos. On the one hand, like the recitation of Cicero, singing of ballads, and playing of violin and harpsichord that were the typical "occupations and amusements" (23) of the Wieland circle, the tale reflects Brown's allusive romantic and pedagogical tendency, an illustrative example of refinement whose implicit purpose is to both define the tastes of his characters and educate those of his readers. Accordingly, although Brown's German poet suggests the gothic sensibility of Goethe, Schiller, or Christoph Wieland,² the story itself is of no significance; any that represented genteel romance reading and stirred the delicate passions of educated Americans like the Wielands would have sufficed. On the other hand, the story's content and form prefigure both the events and the narrative style of the story Clara is about to tell.³ The "dramatic series and connection" of the hero's exploits and his "chain of audacious acts" represent a plot barely held together by the "adventurous and lawless fancy" of the tale's narrator: an associative imagination whose train of ideas is as "wild" as the "headlong passions" it seeks to represent.⁴ Thus, the Wielands' final exercise of aesthetic sociability, one culminating "six years of uninterrupted happiness" (26), stands as a representation of the wide spectrum of aesthetic experience conceivable in Brown's world. It indicates as much the possibility of moral improvement through pleasure as it does the psychic confusion that follows in Clara's narrative.

The passage is thus an important clue to understanding how the multiple aesthetic registers in Brown's fiction reveal both the complexity and coherence of his diverse representations of imagination, as well as their manifold political implications. Critics of Wieland often mistakenly read the violence at the end of the novel as an indictment of the aesthetic forms at the beginning.⁵ Although such fatalistic inductions were staples of republican antinovel discourse, the object of Brown's critique in Wieland and his other novels is neither the danger nor the failure of aesthetic experience, but rather the wide and contradictory range of its implications and effects. The distinction is crucial. Brown's novels deal with not only the excessive and "distempered" imagination but also with aesthetic education and pleasure, philosophical inquiry and enlightenment, and utopian possibility. Indeed, the principal tension in Brown's novels concerns the imagination's mutable status as both the source of the various possibilities of irrationality and the faculty through which art finds its moral ends. The imagination in Brown's fiction is the site of fanatical delusion and deceptive error, to be sure, but also correct judgment, rational speculation, and transformative sublimity. It is at once the potent source and susceptible object of confusion and crisis, as well as art and idealism. It is, like the novice Saxon poet, vulnerable to tragic dissolution but full of creative potential.

Yet we must take care not to reduce this multivalence to merely antithetical correlates of reason and passion. Not only do Brown's novels themselves defy such binaries, but the models of aesthetic experience that inform them often assume the imbrication of reason and passion. As we shall see, the chief problem in the theory of the imagination in the eighteenth century is not so much a distinction between the real and the...