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Episode 344: 'Wieland' by Charles Brockden Brown
00:33:08
John J. Miller is joined by Brent Cline of Hillsdale College to discuss Charles Brockden Brown's 'Wieland.'
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- [00:00]
Brent Klein
Foreign.
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John J. Miller
Welcome to the Great Books Podcast. Today we'll talk about Wieland by Charles Brockton Brown. I'm your host, John J. Miller of National Review and listening to a production of National Review. Our guest is Brent Klein, a professor of English at Hillsdale College. He's podcasted with us previously on Ernest Hemingway and Gene Toomer, the writer of the Harlem Renaissance. He joins us in in the studio as we record from Hillsdale College's campus radio station, WRFH in Michigan. Brent, welcome back to the Great Books Podcast.
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Brent Klein
Good to be here, John. Thank you.
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John J. Miller
Why is Wieland by Charles Brockton Brown a great book?
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Brent Klein
I think it's a great book for a couple reasons. The first one being it's a pioneer in American literature for its introduction of what I think the first instance of what we would call the American Gothic. So if you think about when America, sort of America really came in its own in terms of literature, and you're thinking Thoreau and Poe and Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville, that's all American Romanticism. Romanticism's weird, crazy looking brother is the gothic. And all those authors were reading Charles Brockton Brown, maybe not Emerson. He was probably doing his own thing in Europe. And so it's a pioneer of bringing this European idea of the gothic into America that is necessarily going to influence that wave of authors that shape what we understand to be American literature. The second reason, and more related to the actual story of Wieland, it's a pretty compelling encapsulation of early American republic anxieties in terms of the project of America. And is this thing going to actually work? Wieland comes out in 1798, so this is hardly a sure thing that America is actually going to last. And a lot of I think that cultural anxiety plays out in the story of Wieland, so much so that I think it deservedly like if you want to understand the early American republic, you can do worse than reading this piece of fiction.
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John J. Miller
We're going to talk about all of that. The story of Wieland, its characters. What is the gothic? This question about American anxieties. Also ventriloquism, madness and murder.
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Brent Klein
That's a good time.
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John J. Miller
It is. And finally, is this the first great American novel? We're going to get to all of that. I do want to jump quickly into the story just to give our listeners a taste of what this story is about. Our narrator in Wieland begins by saying, this tale is wild, but you need to know about my dad. So who is this narrator and what's going on with the dad?
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Brent Klein
So the narrator is Clara Wieland. That's not. The eponymous Wieland title refers to her brother Theodore. But Clara is the narrator because she has survived all of the mayhem that's going to happen in this book. And so to properly explain this grotesque story, she's got to go back in her family tree. And what we find out with her family tree is that on both sides of her family, but especially on her father's side of the family, what do you want to call it? Mania? Religious mania? Psychological disturbance seemed to be a genetic component of the Wieland line. And the father ends up emigrating from Germany over to the United States, I guess. Not the United States yet. On the banks of the Schuylkill river outside of Philadelphia, he makes this estate called Mettingen. And he's haunted by the idea that he must evangelize to the Native Americans. And he gives up on that. It's not working. And this is all being told by Clara, his daughter. He gives up on it, and he feels that he has abandoned God and he walks out to this little gazebo temple that he has made on the banks of the river. And your readers are obviously expecting what I'm about to say here. He spontaneously combusts, as one does, as one does when they have let down the Almighty. So what haunts the story, because Claire is just telling us this, is that there's this family problem, there's this sin of the father that's still visited in the blood of the Wielands, that there's a desire to be holy there, a desire to be. To be divine. But in having done that, his father was convinced he failed. And then so perturbed by the failure, he spontaneously combust. And it's not like a bomb goes off when you see him in the story, in Claire's narration, he's got all these burns on him. I mean, it's not as ridiculous as expected, but spontaneous combustion wasn't understood at the time. So to be fair to Charles Brockden Brown, this would not be like a 2024 book, you know, telling that someone got impaled by a unicorn or something like that. They really didn't know what was going on. So it's this immediate, mysterious destruction of the father. And on that same estate, Clara, her brother, her brother's wife, and their children, as well as their bon vivant friend named Pleyel, all live on this estate together. And in comes the mayhem.
- [05:26]
John J. Miller
The full title of Wieland, which was published, as you say, in 1798, is Wieland or the Transformation Colon An American tale. So it's got like three names almost. We just call it Wieland. But this question of the American tale is interesting because you introduced this term to us, the Gothic. And when I think of the Gothic, I think of Europe and crumbling castles, and I also think of some of the things you just mentioned with mania, strange deaths and so on. What is the Gothic? And how does Charles Brockton Brown make it American?
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Brent Klein
I think actually the quickest way to think about the Gothic is to think about the Romantic. And if you're listeners know the Romantic, then they're talking about the inexhaustible of the interior spirit. Let's. Let's go spelunking in our soul and see all it contains. Hooray for freedom, hooray for emotion, hooray for expression. But the Gothic is. You went spelunking in your soul to find the great heights, but then you also found that the nasty monsters that are in there as well. And so the Gothic sort of comes off of the Romantic, I think. And, you know, I think the key word to think about for the Gothic is. Isn't ghosts or castles or anything like that, but hauntings. That the past is always in the Gothic rearing its head. And you have some characters who are. Who are trying to get away from the past, and so they're haunted by it, others are haunted by it, and they want to reclaim it. So this is why you have castles in Europe. This is why you have. I mean, is a ghost anything other than a haunting? Right. And so you have these. You have these features in Europe of castles and depraved dukes and counts and things like that. Well, America. America doesn't have that. And when he writes his, I think, third or fourth book, Edgar Huntly, Charles Brockton Brown gives this little preface when he talks about the Gothic. And he says, look, castles, ugly tarns, these ponds and these counts, these crazy counts, these bandits in the Italian woods, that all belongs in Europe. America needs its own Gothic. And he is very intentionally saying, this belongs to us. It's a part of our land, it's a part of our culture. So when, for instance, you read Edgar Huntly, Native Americans play a part in the Gothic. And Americans, there's no castles, there are caves, there are huts in the wilderness. And so a lot of these ideas that we think of with an American Gothic start with Brown, with this very sort of mission statement of, no, I'm bringing this to America. And I think you see that in Wieland in the sense that the entire Mettingen community of these three adults. And the children are trying to break away from the past. They are trying to have this mini republic of progressive, rational minds. But they have this haunting of the father, this idea that, oh, maybe things aren't as rational and enlightened as we thought they were. And, you know, when the mayhem begins. One, I think the great questions for the novel and why it is a great book is this question of why can't they fend off the madness that's coming? Why can't they. Why can't they reason this stuff out? Why can't they use their enlightened minds to push away the snakes that are in the garden of Mettingen?
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John J. Miller
In Gothic novels and Gothic fiction, you often have damsels in distress, vulnerable, sometimes heroic female characters. And Clara Wieland, our narrator, is that in this book we've learned a little bit about her father. But, Brent, who is she? Who is this narrator?
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Brent Klein
Sister, of course, to Wieland. She lives on her own little house on the estate, so her brother and his wife and their kids live in the larger mansion, and she's off to the side. So she very much is a, quote, unquote, modern woman of the times. Charles Brockton Brown himself was in favor of women's rights in terms of property and law, as well as. I don't know if he went as far. I shouldn't say he went as far as voting, but he was certainly of the progressive mind. And Clara sort of performs that. She's autonomous, she's strong, she's rational. She's also a gothic heroine, which means she faints about sex seven times over the course of the novel. Right. It's very. It's very classic gothic for that reason. So she actually is a nice mixture. And I think one of the interesting things about the book is that it's narrated by Clara, and she is clearly traumatized by it. And even in the narrating of the story, she feels it all coming back. She. She struggles actually getting through the narration because what's happened to her is. Is so cataclysmically awful.
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John J. Miller
And then there's her brother and her brother Theodore Wieland, and he hears voices.
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Brent Klein
Yeah. So this is what's great about the book, because at first you're like, oh, I understand. This is where it all comes from. But then you start to scratch the surface and say, this. This thing's even weirder than I thought. Yeah. Wieland takes after his father in the sense that he believes he. He has the potential to sort of reach that enlightened state. Now he takes his father's religious gazebo that's right there on the banks, and he turns it into a gazebo of the Enlightenment. So he puts a bust of Cicero in there instead of it being a place of prayer. So he's a movement away from the religious father. And yet, when these voices start occurring in Mettingen, he's the one who sinks into himself. He's the one who becomes the brooding gothic villain that ultimately is going to be the cause of so much destruction.
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John J. Miller
A third character then, is called Carwyn. He's a mysterious stranger. Who is this guy? How does he enter the story? What is his role?
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Brent Klein
Carwyn is of a like mind to those enlightened souls at Mettingen on the banks of the Skolko River. But Carwyn is also a sort of gothic wanderer, and he comes from Europe and he doesn't have any kind of community, and he just sort of lurks. And he shows up one day and Clara gives him some water, and she's sort of fascinated by him. And he starts coming around more and more. But while he comes around, these strange things start happening in Mettingen, which are these voices, these voices telling them to do this and to that, and they can't account for who the voices are because this first voice sounds exactly like Wieland's wife, and the next voice sounds exactly like Clara, and the next voice sounds like Playa. And so. But it's not them. So it's confusion is sown and spoiler alert on a. On a book that's over 200 years old, Carwin is the author of all these voices. He has this. He has this ability that in the book is called biloquism, but we would know as. As ventriloquism. So he's able to throw his voice, he's able to make his voice sound like other people. And so he's sowing all of this confusion. Now what he is saying as a voice is, look, he's just a wanderer. So he's trying to. He's trying to live on Mettingen without basically anyone knowing about it. He's trying to protect himself. So these voices are things like, hey, don't go over there. Don't do this, do, do that. They're not dangerous voices, they're not malicious voices. They're just voices there to protect him.
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John J. Miller
When you read a summary of this book, even. Even jacket copy, you always see about ventriloquism, right? This is at the heart of the tale, the word ventriloquism. We all know it never actually appears in the book. They use this. What archaic terms. Biloquism.
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Brent Klein
Oh, is that how you pronounce it?
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John J. Miller
I don't know.
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Brent Klein
I don't know either. That's how arcane the word is.
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John J. Miller
You know, biloquist, biloquism, but B, I, L, O quist. So it's like a ventriloquist, but it's a different.
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Brent Klein
Oh, that makes sense with two bi.
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John J. Miller
Exactly. But a ventriloquist, you know, throws voices, it can sow confusion and so on. Is this not a strange plot device? Is it hard to suspend our disbelief here and just say, yeah, I could imagine a guy coming into town and throwing his voice everywhere and confusing everybody in the way that Carwyn does? Because this is the center of how the plot turns.
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Brent Klein
Yes, because you have the introduction of these strange voices. No one can account for one another. So. Oh, I thought you were a virtuous woman, says Pleyel to Clara. Turns out you're not, because I heard you doing this. You were with this man late in the night. I thought my wife was here, but she wasn't there. So nothing is making sense to these characters. And it's more than just confusion. It's sowing the seeds of madness. For Theodore Wieland, yes, it's a difficult conceit to accept, and it's not Even just a 2024 thing. Even critics at the time were like, look, this is. This is a bit much, is it not? And. And it. And I want to say it is a bit much, but the biloquism. Thank you, John. Thank you for the correction. The biloquism would be too much to take if it wasn't obviously so packed with meaning. So packed with meaning in terms of the very. The book, which is, you gotta accept that this guy can do that. But once you do, you realize, oh, all of their enlightenment, all of their rationality was just the spider hanging over the flame. Like, it really wasn't actually that strong? And so if we accept it as just a kind of force that makes certainty no longer possible, then I think you can accept it as a metaphor in the text as much as it is a literal physical ability to make the book work.
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John J. Miller
You've got to suspend your disorder belief and believe in the power of this. And there's even, like an editorial note at the start of the book where Charles Brockden Brown says, basically, you're going to read some extraordinary stuff in here and just hang with me.
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Brent Klein
He says, exactly, yes.
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John J. Miller
But one of the things I found interesting about it is. Could a ventriloquist trick people the way that Carwin does? And are we not confronting something similar to that in our own world right now through AI and deep fakes? Is this problem that Charles Brockton Brown presents to us from the late 18th century, isn't that a problem we're confronting today?
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Brent Klein
Well, I think that's why it works in the book. So even if you can't accept that this works in real life, in the world of the book, they have to deal with it and therefore it's transferable to something like deepfakes and AI. So if you're just doing this mimetic, oh, if the book isn't absolutely realistic, then I reject it. And it's like, okay, you're going to reject a lot of world literature, but if you say, okay, what is biloquism? What is ventriloquism in this text? It's this, it's this figure of, of. Of madness and uncertainty, of a shifting sands under your feet, then I can apply that to all kinds of different places. And I think something that's really important for the book and maybe distinguishes it a bit from the deep fakes is that Carwin, as I mentioned earlier, is only trying to protect himself just so he can get by. So it all gets out of hand. So he doesn't intend Wieland to go mad and create the destruction. He just, he creates. He doesn't intend any of this besides, you know, protecting his own tail. Whereas. So I think that's really powerful as well because here you have this ability that this man has. And the reason Karwin later, when he confesses everything and he says, look, I didn't hurt anybody. The reason I did this was because this is gotten me out of a lot of jams in life and therefore I used it.
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John J. Miller
Is Carwin a villain? Is he evil?
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Brent Klein
I think he's a type of villain. I like the formula of a villain, which is he who knows the most but cares the least. And that does not fit Carwyn, because he cares very much. He's horrified at what he's done. He is a villain in the way we understand a villain to be a villain of weakness. He has been the unknowing, I can't even say unknowing. He has been the undisciplined agent of chaos in Mettingen, but he is not the author of the evil that controls the last third of this book.
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John J. Miller
Alright, so let's get into that because as he's throwing his voice and confusing everybody and so on, Theodore Wieland, the brother of Clara, our narrator, Theodore Wieland, starts hearing some funny voices. What are they telling him to do?
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Brent Klein
They're telling him to kill his wife, his children, and his sister. And this. This happened in colonial America. This happened actually. The doctor who was friends with the actual Charles Brockton Brown was a doctor on the case of this man, William Beadle, who murdered his family because he thought God told him to.
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John J. Miller
So based on real events, based on.
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Brent Klein
It really is, like, ripped from the headlines. If you can do law and order sound effects right after that, that'd be really helpful.
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John J. Miller
So the voices are telling him to kill his family. That's pretty dramatic. That's more than just a voice trick.
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Brent Klein
Right. And so this is why when Carwin says, I didn't intend any of this, it's absolutely true. But what Carwyn did is seemingly opened a door that got into that genetic. I mean, we can think about it in terms of, like, we know psychology runs on genes to some level, and Charles Brockton Brown did not.
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John J. Miller
But Theodore Whelan seems to have a capacity to believe this and then follow this voice that he's hearing that he thinks is maybe in his head.
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Brent Klein
And the only reason he seemingly does this is because of Carwyn. But that's not true, because there's the component of his father that Clara introduced at the beginning. And this is what I mean by the sins of the father. Theodore Wieland has to deal with this, and he fails.
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John J. Miller
Right.
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Brent Klein
He actually does kill his wife and his children. And when I first read this book, John, this is one of two books that have made me gasp out loud. Because I read this when I was studying for PhD comprehensive exams. I took it off a library shelf. I knew nothing about it. All I knew was published in 1798. So here I am reading this Colonial American book, early Republic book about a woman who's distressed. Read this hundred times, and then we get to the fact that, oh, my gosh, he has killed his wife and kids. And I gasped. Thomas Hardy, Jew. The obscure kind of gasp. And Clara, of course, survives, since she's telling the tale. But what. What I think Brockton Brown does so well is that you and I, as readers, don't know that Theodore Wieland is hearing these voices. So there's kind of a red herring in the middle half of the book, middle third of the book, I should say, where it's about Clara's virtue and reputation being lost because of Carwyn doing something and throwing a voice. And that's what we're hung up on. And that's the slowest part of the book. But then out comes the murders. And we realize that whole time that Wieland was in the background, he was having not just voices, but visions, lights and figures appearing before him.
- [20:19]
John J. Miller
Clara has a love interest in the book who is Henry Pleyel. And so there's this romantic element to the book as well. But, Brent, I want to stick with the killings for a little bit. Let's do that, if you don't mind.
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Brent Klein
That's what everybody wants.
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John J. Miller
This reminded me in so many ways of The Shining, the 1977 novel by Stephen King, then the 1980 movie that.
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Brent Klein
I just read it this summer. It was fantastic.
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John J. Miller
Me, too. It's a really good book and made super famous by Jack Nicholson, who's kind of the Theodore Wieland figure in that film. But this novel, Wieland, prefigures all of that.
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Brent Klein
Yeah. And I think. I think you could do worse than see Wieland in the Shining. And that doesn't suggest that Stephen King knew Wieland or anything like that. But this idea of a good man, and, in fact, Theodore Wieland is a better man than Jack Torrance. Jack Torrance. Thank you, Jack Torrance, who has once abused in his depths of his alcoholism, has hurt his child, and he's trying to recover from what he's done, and the family's trying to repair itself. There's nothing like that in Wieland. Wieland adores his family. He's a very progressive. I use that term lightly, Father, but in the sense that he listens to his children, he listens to his wife. He's not a tyrant or anything like that. So the idea of this good man collapsing and collapsing into such moral bankruptcy that he would destroy them, that's at the core of both of these books. And in both of these books, there is this power that's drawing that good man out of what they know to be what is true.
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John J. Miller
He thinks he's acting under divine orders.
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Brent Klein
It's Abrahamic.
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John J. Miller
Right. So there's a madness to it. But you mentioned at the top of the show religious mania. So how does religious mania play into this story? And how does that connect with what you said earlier about American anxieties? What was on the mind of Charles Brockton Brown when he was introducing these ideas?
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Brent Klein
Yeah, the religious mania, I think, is really a fascinating move by Brown, because when you read the first half of the book, you would understand Theodore Wieland to be a deist. It's Cicero that he puts on the bust in his little temple on the river, not Christ Not a Bible, not a cross or anything like that. He's not a particularly religious man. So the idea of Carwin and the uncertainty and the idea of hearing voices is opening up something that he didn't otherwise seem concerned about. And I think it really is just the sort of shape it takes, because when we think about it in terms of the American Republic, I don't think Brown is worried about religious mania in the country. I mean, maybe the Jacobin influence or something like that. I think that's for Brown. I don't think religion is the real target here of, oh, look how religion drives a man insane. This was not a religious man. It's what uncertainty can do. Once you start not being able to trust your senses, once you start being completely unreceptive to others about willingness to suspend your disbelief. Because that's the problem with. That's the problem with Wieland. Before he ever goes mad, there are these scenes where they're having intellectual arguments and Wieland cannot be convinced. There's nothing you can say that will convince him. So it's just this impenetrable fortress. So once he goes Abrahamic and says, I have to kill my children, God has told me this. He's in his own world. He's completely isolated from everybody else. No one can speak into that, though, to be fair, they don't even know it's. It's happening. So I don't think the book is. Is. Has an axe to grind with. With religion. I think there are other characters in the book who do this kind of madness in stories that are being told that have nothing to do with religion. I think you have an intellectual, rational, enlightened man who can't hold back from madness. Like, why is that not enough? And I think that's the most powerful part of Wieland, is because he has given us a man who, in that early Republic, should be the paragon of rationalism in our fledgling republic, and he's not.
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John J. Miller
So he goes on his killing spree. He murders a bunch of people in his own family. We do get a body count. It is, as you say, gasp worthy when it happens. How does this tale conclude? Does have a happy ending?
- [24:52]
Brent Klein
You know, if Brown was a little more dangerous, a little more edgy, he could have stopped at a chapter early and really had a dark ending. But I will say it does not. It does not end well. We have some sense of reconciliation. Pleyel, the friend who thought Clara was a fallen woman, he and her eventually come together in Europe, but Wieland comes to kill. He has killed his family. And he's in prison. And he escapes from prison and comes to Clara and says, I gotta finish the job. And this is all for God. This is all for your benefit. And Carwyn is instrumental in breaking him from that hallucination, that delusion, Whatever term I should say there. But when. When Wieland realizes. Wieland does come to a realization of what he's done, and when he realizes it, he kills himself. And this was a danger that was warned about when he was first taken into prison. And Clara wants to visit him, and her uncle says, don't you dare visit him, because if you let him know that this isn't true, he's gonna be even worse off. So Wieland has no kind of happy ending in terms of an individual character, but Clara as a character remains. Remains traumatized throughout the entire book. There is clearly in this text an inability to recover from what has happened. And so that this is not just an episodic mark. That's an interesting tale in the life of Clara Whelan. This is something that has. She's recovering from, but she is still horribly scarred by.
- [26:19]
John J. Miller
This is a wild story. And this guy is really the first American novelist, first great American novelist. He's even before Washington Irving. I mean, you mentioned earlier, you know, Poe and Hawthorne, these other American romantics. They have their dark moments and so forth. You can see how Brockton Brown is writing into a kind of tradition with these other authors who are more familiar to us. Is this the first great American novel? Is he the first great American novelist?
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Brent Klein
I mean, I think the answer is yes to both of those. Wieland is his most influential and powerful. I think Edgar Huntly teaches a little better just because of what it does in America.
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John J. Miller
And that's a later novel he wrote.
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Brent Klein
In, like, five years. He did everything he's famous for. I think he's a great novelist. I think he's. Wieland is a great novel. Of course, I give the caveat. Charles Brockton Brown is a sloppy writer. I think you think of Charles Brockton Brown the way you think of someone like, I'm gonna get in trouble by saying this, but someone like Buddy Holly in American music, which they're doing some things that are just singing. But when you see where rock pop music is gonna go in a decade, and by the time you get to the Beatles, you're like, oh, this was a lot more simple, Right? But you don't disqualify Buddy Holly for that. And so I think Charles Brock and Brown needs to be contextualized in Early Republic, the United States. I don't think he's Hawthorne. I don't think he's Melville. He's not Poe. But I think as a figure in American literature, I am still surprised he is as forgotten and unread like he is. Not only because I think he represents the early American republic, not only because he's influential in the American Gothic, but these books, Wieland, Edgar Huntly, Arthur Mervyn, those three especially, they're wild rides. They're absolutely wild rides that you did not think was going on before 1800.
- [28:13]
John J. Miller
And those three novels are collected by the Library of America in a single edition. It's called Three Gothic Novels. And you get all three. It starts with Wieland, you know, this wild tale. And there's more if you want more of that. He has a reputation, Charles Brockton Brown does, as a kind of writer's writer, you know, influential. The people you just mentioned, the Hawthornes and Poe's and so forth, they would have read this guy and thought, that's interesting. I want to write in that vein. In a sense, more enjoyed by writers than the reading public. Is that fair?
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Brent Klein
Yeah, he wasn't extremely successful commercially. He never really had his time. But to be fair, that's true of Poe and that's true of Hawthorne. I mean, let's. Like Hawthorne has this famous line about being mad about the scribbling women because he's not getting as much press and fame as they are. So I think that's fairly standard and nothing to blame him for. But I think when you look at who Mary Shelley, when she's writing Frankenstein, she's reading Brown, John Keats is reading Brown, Poe is reading Brown, Hawthorne is reading Brown. And they all. They don't think he's Dante necessarily, but they see him as an important figure. And for him to be as forgotten as much as he is, I think is strange, especially at a time now when, you know, the scary story, the thriller, the suspense stories. This is what I was trying to get at with the Buddy Holly thing. Like, this is the origin story of the American version of that. And if you're trying to do a history of American rock, then, okay, you gotta spend a chapter on Buddy Holly. No matter what you think happens 10.
- [29:46]
John J. Miller
Years later, Charles Brockton Brown did not live to his 40th birthday. Born in 1771, died in 1810. So not a long life. Brent, how did you discover him and this book, Wieland, as a reader, especially because it's so obscure?
- [30:05]
Brent Klein
Academia. I mean, that's the only reason I know who this guy is. I was studying for my comprehensive exams and PhD and this was on the list. Went and got it from the library. It's one of those old school library books, right? So it's just. It's bound by the library. So there's nothing on the back, there's nothing on the front. You don't know anything about it. I'm reading this thing, and that's why I gasped, because I just didn't think America had it in her to produce a writer like this. And as I'm reading, I'm like, oh, my gosh, why does he phrase certain things? He's using these double negatives that make it unnecessarily confusing. And he's not a craftsman. He's not a craftsman. You know, I tell students, and this is unfair to some degree, but if you have, like, Hawthorne on one end and Melville on one end, and Hawthorne is the perfect craftsman, every word is in its right place. Melville, he forgets about characters. Things take strange turns. It doesn't have the kind of symmetry of a Hawthorne story. But Melville is. I'm a Melville man, right? Melville is doing this religious stuff. Melville is doing these philosophical, metaphysical things, and he's wild. He's the Dostoevsky American. Dostoevsky to Hawthorne's Tolstoy and Brown is not a craft. He's not a Hawthornian craftsman. You're gonna read this and say, like, wait, who is that character? Character hasn't been brought up for, like, 55 pages. Could you have helped me out here a little? And he won't, or why did you phrase it this way? But I forgive him these things. I mean, he's imperfect. I forgive him these things because what he did at the time he did it was shocking. I mean, truly shocking, and I think really profound.
- [31:39]
John J. Miller
Final question. What is the case for reading this book now? Is it just an artifact from the 18th century, or is it worth picking up and reading today?
- [31:50]
Brent Klein
Oh, I think it. I think it's definitely worth picking up reading. Even when you know the plot. Because, you know, obviously a lot of spoilers today, but the trickery that he does, once you suspend that disbelief, the way he fools you into not thinking about the titular character for so long, and then when he emerges, have him as a maddened murderer of his own family, is a great trick. And, you know, in the same way that Stephen King is fun to read, just in the sense of, hey, you got me to turn the page, that's really commendable. He's doing this at a time when people are reading the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and this thing is as far away from that sort of if you're thinking about the sort of Puritan early America, this was early America too. Maybe that's just individual taste, but I personally love seeing that.
- [32:38]
John J. Miller
Brent Klein, thanks so much for joining us and telling us all about Wieland by Charles Brockton Brown.
- [32:43]
Brent Klein
I always hope I can come here and talk about something as wild as this book.
- [32:47]
John J. Miller
You are always welcome. You just listened to the Great Book Books Podcast, a production of National Review. Please subscribe to the Great Books Podcast and leave reviews of the show that helps us keep this podcast going. Some of your ideas for future episodes, you can reach me through my website at heymiller. Com on Twitter, my handle is at heymiller. And last of all, special thanks to all of you for listening. We'll be back next week. The new episode of the Great Books Podcast.