Wieland Research Paper

Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown does not seem like much at first glance, but ends up being quite the thriller that one may not want to consider reading before bed. Wieland is about a young woman named Clara and the mysterious events that have plagued her and her family. At a young age, she lost her father to his death of spontaneous combustion; years later Clara and her brother have grown up and try to live a normal life. Their sense of normalicy is interrupted when a mysterious stranger named Carwin shows up and strange things begin to happen such as voices coming from a closet, and murders. Wieland can be classified as a gothic novel as it main focus is dark, magical, and mysterious. A gothic novel is “a novel in which magic, mystery,

The gothic novel began to become widely popular in Europe, and eventually spread to the United States in the 18th century. “Charles Brocken Brown was the leading author of Gothic romances” (Hart, 292). “These works distill, as she sees it, the fears and dangers uppermost in the society of [the] time, especially as that society appeared to women,” (Wasserman, 198). This piece of evidence strengthens the argument that Brown is also noted to be an early master of female

Clara’s father goes into a tower to contemplate his life, when “At the same instant, a very bright spark was seen to light upon his clothes. In a moment, the whole was reduced to ashes (Brown, 16). A few paragraphs down, the narrator continues “such was the end of my father. None surely was ever more mysterious” (Brown, 16). Clara’s father’s death was a mystery that takes everyone by shock, which turns into a lifetime of unanswered