Theatre: William Shakespear

According to Harold Kittel, "Wieland criticism during the past generation has generally taken a psychological or philosophical tack--either bringing Freudian insights to bear on characters' behavior (particularly Clara's) or examining the ways in which the novel questions Enlightenment assumptions it was formerly thought to dramatize" (Kittel 123). Both approaches have of course served to open the book up nicely, but I would like to look at the novel from a third angle, one that may in fact be closer to Brown's own angle of view--that of literary antecedents or models, specifically Wieland as a Nineteenth-century American re-telling of Shakespeare's Othello, a re-telling that, like Shakespeare's play, depends for its impact on some of the most basic Christian nature metaphors of Genesis. Bayre, among others, has identified Othelloas a possible source for Wieland, but little work has been done on the significance of this background to the interpretation of Brown's tale.[1] I will argue that Brown wrote Wieland as a conscious echo of the Othello story, that he coopts Shakespeare's ontology and uses it to address what is arguably the question of the play, viz., whether there is a moral principle reigning in the universe. The link to Othello is important to a full understanding of Brown's point, because he insists on locating both psychology and philosophy in a decidedly literary frame of reference which asks, ultimately, not about the mind or about systems of knowledge, but about the issue addressed by all great classical literature: what Gods rule the earth, and are they our friends, our enemies, or merely indifferent? Or, to make the same point in a slightly different way, although the landscape of Wielandis clearly a kind of psychological metaphor, and although Lockean issues of perception clearly underlie these psychological issues, there is a third level on which these others implicitly depend. Beverly Voloshin makes this argument of dependence nicely: "Speculations about whether it is the mind that is not apprehending nature properly or whether nature is unapprehensible" is the characteristic psychological issue of gothic fiction, she writes. That issue depends on undermining Locke's assumption "that nature acts in a uniform and orderly fashion and that human nature is typically constant." This in turn implicitly involves a third level of inquiry testing the very foundations of Creation, since "our only assurance of the congruence of idea and object is Locke's assertion that a benevolent God has fitted the mind to nature." Once Locke's assertion is seriously challenged, it puts into play a number of more general questions, including whether there is in fact a God at all (Voloshin 263).

Voloshin and others are certainly correct that much of the i plot hinges on the dangerous lack of correspondence between !i the world as it exists and as we perceive it, but the assault on i Locke, at this level, turns out to be largely a gothic plot device, since [almost] all the mysteries of perception are painstakingly explained away by the end of the novel. The real issue that remains is not so much whether Nature is comprehensible, as whether it is morally indifferent or inherently Tragic in much the way that Shakespeare suggests, and whether Wieland, like Othello, was tragically heroic, or merely a fool who rested his faith in the fiction of something higher than nature. Brown's i text addresses this question by artfully evoking the cosmology of Shakespeare's play, as I hope to show; but at the same time it ! pushes the nihilistic implications further than Shakespeare dared to do, by effectively undercutting some of Shakespeare's most basic, and most comforting, Christian assumptions about the ontology in which these events occur. Both Othello and Wieland base part of their epistemology on Christian nature images from Genesis, but Brown uses them ironically, twisting them until Mettingen becomes a kind of anti-Eden, a poisoned environment which suggests that an indifferent principle of chaos and not a benevolent God underlies visible reality.

I

Brown derived the basic idea for the Wieland story from a real incident, the unfortunate case of JamesYates, a NewYork farmer who in 1781 killed his wife and children on the command of an angel.[2] Despite this real-life source, the dramatic shape of Wieland follows Othello very exactly, as does the emotional tone it generates. The protagonists of both Othello and Wieland are men who are seemingly the cynosure of their generation, yet who are strangely isolated from society. Both men are obsessed with purity and duty, and both regard Heaven, not earth, as the foundation of their reality (that is, they are idealists.) Both have their Eden-like happiness invaded and eventually destroyed by an evil schemer whose primary weapon is a specific kind of deceit that has power to weld a fabric of appearances into the semblance of reality. In both cases the frenzy generated by the protagonist's disorientation culminates in murder, when he strangles his beloved wife in a curtained bed, at first halfheartedly and then fatally, as an apparently selfless gesture of devotion to purity. In both cases this mayhem is followed by a scene in which the hero becomes aware of his delusion, prompting him to commit suicide by knife. There are a number of other echoes, including specific verbal ones, for example Catherine's cry, "Why talk you of death?" (Brown 171), echoing Desdemona's question "Talk you of killing?" (Shakespeare V. ii.35). Of course one can also identify some significant differences between the details of Wielandplot and that of Shakespeare's play, but even marcy of these can be readily identified either as accommodations to the real-life source material (the addition of the children as victims); to the necessities of genre (Clara as narrator); or as gothic trappings designed to heighten the experience of pity and fear. Frequently they fit more than one of these categories: the addition of the children, for example, also serves to heighten the pity and fear felt by Brown's Nineteenth-century audience.

More important than the many similarities of plot, however, is the fact that Brown has also chosen to adopt most of the constitutive metaphors of Shakespeare's ontology. Foremost among these is the metaphor of sea and storm. Othello is built around a complex conceit that compares men to ships at sea, who are subject to a greater underlying power of immense force. This conceit is given special emphasis in the beginning of Act II, for example. As we await the arrival of Othello and company on the shores of Cyprus after a storm, several gentlemen on the shore describe the fury of the elements that have