Clara is a member of the family about whom the novel revolves.
Does anyone know of other early cases?) Wieland is set in Pennsylvania, in between two wars: the French and Indian, and the Revolutionary War. (Except for Defoe’s Moll Flanders, this is the earliest example I know of a female narrator to a novel. The novel is narrated by a woman, Clara Wieland. Without giving away later events, I will briefly outline the background of the story. Even if I don’t look up the note, the asterisk breaks the flow of my reading! With an introduction and notes, it is admirable in most respects but purist that I am, I find fault with the use of asterisks to let the reader know of a note that is available for this point in the text. The volume that arrived from the central Jamaica location was an edition put out by Oxford University Press in 1994. My Queens library came through for me, as it so often does.
To put this in perspective, consider that in that year Washington Irving was 15 years old, James Fenimore Cooper was 9, Hawthorne would not be born for six years, and Poe for eleven years! Wieland was published in 1798 (when CBB was 27). I had never heard it until the third week of January, when Brown was featured in my “On Writers and Writing” literary calendar. The name Charles Brockden Brown will doubtless not mean anything to most modern readers. (Though not central to my theme, I cannot refrain from adding my view that the American death penalty is our violent streak, institutionalized.) Violence makes up the core of Charles Brockden Brown’s best-known novel, Wieland or the Transformation An American Tale. With the apparently imminent Timothy McVeigh execution now in the news, it seems as good a time as any to consider the place of violence in the American way of life.
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