![]() ![]() She’s guided by her own inner reason and rationalism. It’s a great shift in voice, and the best part of the book. He tells her how he was able to gain power over her entire family. In Chapter 27, Carwin tells his story to Clara Wieland, the book’s narrator. To tell any of the plot would spoil your joy of watching it unfold. You’ll probably see it on the book’s cover. I’m not going to tell you what his power is. He is Carwin, the book’s great personality, and he has an amazing power. Who is that somebody? God? One of God’s angels? The story is set in rural Pennsylvania, along the Delaware River, surrounded by the dark woods, in the years before the American Revolution. The vision of Charles Brockden Brown is a common American theme: Times of change are times of crisis for the perceptive storytelling mind. Something was being born, a new idea about social relations and power. In 1798, the Alien and Sedition Acts shook the barely constituted USA. ![]() Events a decade on either side of this novel were wild with change. Or the tail end of the Age of Reason (Kant dies in 1804, recall). It was published in 1798, the same year as Lyrical Ballads, the monumental (to Shelley, to me) volume of poetry by Wordsworth and Coleridge that contains both “Tintern Abbey” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” These two books came at the beginning of the modern age. ![]() A friend told me that Wieland was the poet Shelley’s favorite novel. ![]()
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