Charles Brockden Brown and the Philadelphia Germans

If Charles Brockden Brown's major novels may be broadly identified by geography, it is apparent that they all gravitate around Philadelphia, though with varying degrees of focus on the city per se. Arthur Mervyn (referred to as "his Phila. Novel" [Smith, Diary 290]) obviously maintains this focus most completely, save for scant involvement of the hinterlands of Chester County. Edgar Huntly, on the other hand, is set mostly on the near frontier, domain of Native Americans, with a reminder of Old World complications that fester in the psyche of an Irish immigrant. Ormond savors of French and internationalist motifs, with its Monrose (transplanted De Moivre) family, Ormond's adventures in the East of Europe, and the fabled exploits of his sister, Martinette De Beavais, in the French Revolution. But Wieland, Brown's first published novel—designated "An American Tale"—is remarkably German, so indicated by the names of persons and places, along with a variety of circumstances linked to Germany's history and culture. At the earliest stage of composition, Brown even contemplated shipping his Wielands back to Germany to claim their Saxon inheritance¹—a thought likely abandoned as his interest was in the American, not the European, Germans, they being a better subject here and one he was acquainted with. In the entire novel, Philadelphia, where events are environed, gets mentioned by name only three times, twice in the beginning and once toward the end (one of which references has nothing to do with the Wielands), while Germany and matters German are referred to by name 30 times—a far from peripheral presence, the extent and ramifications of which point to a subtext that indexes social concerns.

Indeed, if one wants to get the full thematic impact of Wieland, it is helpful to think German, as, at the outset, the very application of the titular German name and its relation to the implied Abraham and Isaac motif dealt with by a leading German writer of that name (Christ of Martin Wieland) are among the most commonly unanswered—and equally unaddressed—questions regarding the novel. By an interesting twist, the Germanness of Wieland is actually anti-German,² having its ultimate basis in Brown's chauvinist Americanness, backed by an emerging Federalist bias on his part, and, more than that, a reflected antipathy for Otherness. It was an antipathy called for by the times, that being a good way to be amidst the anti foreigner frenzy of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a mechanism for the expulsion of undesirable foreigners—as most of them suddenly became. Though long-lasting, the Germanophobia, so great in early and mid-eighteenth-century Philadelphia, gained so little real exposure beyond those times, it is not entirely surprising that one has to find it brought to light in a work of fiction.

That Brown gave prior consideration to the German element in Wieland is apparent from the fact that national origin was a choice quite deliberately made on his part. For, as has been observed, the reference in the Wieland "Advertisement" to the "authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland," which Brown tells us "most readers will probably recollect" (Wieland 3), was the sensational James Yates murder case written up in 1796.³ This occurrence in key particulars parallels the situation Brown would employ, as both Yates and Wieland are "imbued," as Alexander Cowie puts it, "with a conviction that they have a divine injunction to kill their families—a wife and four children, [and] neither man, when arraigned, evinces the least sign of remorse for his acts. Both also set about attacking their sisters—unsuccessfully; both escape more than once from their places of confinement and both are retaken and tried" ("Historical Essay," Wieland 324). So Brown has from a major source this person with an Irish name (Yates, likely so rendered from Yeats) and an incident quite distant from Philadelphia (Tomhanick, in the extreme western corner of New York State). If he wanted a person capable of outrageous violence, surely, with the great anti-Irish sentiment in Philadelphia of 1798 (the Irish being the...