Carwin the Onanist?

I. Biloquium (A Footnote)

Near the End of Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel, Wieland, the principal villain, Carwin, reveals to the narrator, Clara Wieland, that he has a “power” that might implicate him in the recent catastrophes that have ruined their little community on the banks of the Schuylkill river in rural Pennsylvania. Although Carwin “know[s] not by what name to call” his extraordinary ability, Brown most certainly does, and he provides a footnote to prove it. Carwin, says Brown, possesses the talent of “biloquium,” which allows him both to throw his voice and to mimic exactly the voices of others, a “skill” that has been catalogued by such respected natural scientists as the “Abbe de la Chappelle.”¹ This ability, Brown continues, results “possibly” from:

an unusual flexibility or exertion of the bottom of the tongue and the uvula. That speech is producible by these alone must be granted, since anatomists mention two instances of persons speaking without a tongue. In one case, the organ was originally wanting, but its place was supplied by a small tubercle, and the uvula was perfect. In the other, the tongue was destroyed by disease, but probably a small part of it remained.

(226)

Brown ends his explanation by adverting to the “notorious” ability of animals to mimic the sounds they hear. “Dr. Burney,” he says, “mentions one who imitated a flute and violin, so as to deceive even his ears” (ibid.).

While Brown’s explanation establishes a constellation of loosely related phenomena—Carwin’s “faculty,” seemingly miraculous examples of the adaptability of human organs, mimicry in the animal kingdom—the footnote sheds little direct light on Carwin’s talent. In other words, the “proof ” Brown offers is really no proof at all. Instead, it gestures to a seemingly infinite regression of curiosities, each of which begs for an explanatory footnote of its own to bring its mysteries to light.

Brown’s evasive gloss on “biloquium” confounds readerly desire for foundational truths that might definitively explain the paranormal. In his tenuously developed link between biloquium, anatomical oddities, and the strange powers of animals, Brown undermines the increasingly specialized discourses of Enlightenment-inspired natural science that sought to establish causes, effects, and taxonomic designations for behavioral phenomena in the late eighteenth century.² Rather than lending credibility and evidence to Carwin’s extraordinary skill, then, Brown’s footnote suggests the inadequacy of science and reason for isolating, classifying, and stigmatizing individuals according to the traits they may occasionally or even repeatedly exhibit.

Criticism on Wieland has focused productively on the social and political implications of Brown’s first novel. Carwin’s verbal skills have been viewed as a symbolic center around which a series of interrelated concerns for the new Republic coalesce: the fallibility of Enlightenment idealism; the slippery and protean relationship between law, language, and truth; anxieties about the production and consumption of imaginative fiction; concerns about the machinations of secret societies and their effects on the public sphere, and so on.³ I want to suggest in this essay that Wieland, as well as its incomplete sequel (or “prequel”), Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist (1803–1805), is just as concerned with Carwin’s inability to control his sexual and bodily excesses as it is with more broadly conceived sociopolitical themes. Carwin’s struggles with self-control, I contend, can effectively be understood as part of a late eighteenth-century American obsession with properly disciplined and economically productive bodies.

In what follows, I begin by looking closely at Carwin’s confessions in both the Memoirs of Carwin and Wieland. Carwin’s behaviors and desires resemble those of other subjects of medical surveillance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most significantly “onanists,” or masturbators. Social anxiety about masturbation and its effects parallels contemporary debates about the proper function of literature and the imagination in developing capitalist America. In a way that is consistent with late eighteenth-century literary justifications for the potentially titillating effects of literature, Clara attempts to contain the sexual and verbal threats that Carwin embodies and projects by framing her story according to the trite...