The Tragedy of Isolation: Fictional Technique and Environmentalism in Wieland

98Notes 'The HamUtons' "Eros" chapter makes interesting background reading with its good brief discussion of Updike's response to Denis de Rougemont's Love in the Western World. Hamilton, pp. 200-14. For pertinent commentary on The Centaur see the following: Joyce B. Maride, "The Centaur: The Altruistic Lover," in Fighters and Lovers: Theme in the Novels of John Updike (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 61-83. Also, Joyce Carol Oates, "Updike's American Comedies," MFS, 21 (1975), 459-72. "David Myers, "The Questing Fear: Christian Allegory in John Updike's The Centaur ," TCL, 17(1971), 75. THE TRAGEDY OF ISOLATION: FICTIONAL TECHNIQUE AND ENVIRONMENTALEM IN WIELAND Stephen R. Yarbrough Pennsylvania State University Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation is a study of the tragic effects of intellectual and emotional isolation. Modern criticism has overlooked this central fact, partially because of its inattention to Brown's fictional technique and because it has tended to focus its thematic analyses upon the following passage from the novel: The will is the tool of the understanding, which must fashion its conclusions on the notices of sense. If the senses be depraved it is impossible to calculate the evils that may flow from the consequent deductions of the understanding.1 Taking this passage to be Wieland's thesis has led scholars to some rather diverse conclusions,2 but two conclusions follow necessarily: first, the novel must be a display of the results of wrong thinking; second, the narrator, Clara, must present the novel's intellectual norm since she relates the events, and states the thesis, after the fact. Only the first of these conclusions is acceptable. Certainly, most of the characters get themselves into trouble when they slavishly follow the dictates of their preconceived ideas, especially when these ideas derive from esoteric traditions, belong to previous ages and have since been abandoned, are new and untried, or are merely common opinions and not the result of disciplined thought. Examples of such faulty philosophy are present in the elder Wieland's enthusiastic acceptance of the Camissard doctrine; in the younger Wieland's addiction to the Studies in American Fiction99 past and to his belief in spiritual intervention; and in Pleyel's absolute acceptance of the testimony of his senses, as well as in his dependence upon social convention. Each of these characters takes an intellectual stance at one time or another. Each of these stances—deism, determinism, rationalism, spiritualism, conventionalism—proves faulty. That these ways of perceiving reality are not the standard in Wieland few will deny. But to exclude these and then to conclude that Clara's views must be the standard is to forget entirely that at the time of her writing she is vacillating between depression and hysteria, having only a few lucid moments in between. Clara's problem is not that she fails to pay her allegiance to the proper philosophy, nor that her senses are "depraved," but that she fails to test her observations and feelings against those of her fellows. Like everyone else in the novel,3 Clara is isolated intellectually (she never takes part in the various disputes), emotionally (she refuses to confess to Pleyel her affection for him, until it is too late), and even physically (of all the Wielands, only Clara lives alone) . The only difference between Clara and other characters is a difference between a passive retreat from involvement and a stubborn adherence to an unfounded belief. The results of these two kinds of isolation are the same: no major character, Clara included, ever understands the meaning of the novel's events. This is not to say that Clara is unreliable as a narrator of the facts; she is, however, unreliable as a spokesman for an intellectual norm. She does, as Butler argues, represent intellectual independence,4 but not in the way that he intends. Rather, Clara is intellectually rootless. She makes both deistic and deterministic statements, intermingled in such a way that critics have been able to argue for her being in one camp or the other; she even accepts, right from the beginning, that the strange voices are of supernatural origin. Those who have seen Clara as the...