Charles Brockden Brown's Clara

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how Charles Brockden Brown, frequently called the father of the American novel, believed he wrote strong, independent female characterizations in his novels. This paper refutes that supposition by demonstrating how dependent Clara is on her brother in Brown's 1798 novel, "Wieland". It explores how every action and reaction on Clara's part shows just how much of an archetype of the typical 18th century woman Clara really is.

From the Paper:

"Charles Brockden Brown includes many elements of Romantic literature, the emphasis on the imagination, a predilection for the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the diseased, and even the Satanic, in the dark image of Carwin. He allows Clara, through his selected mode of storytelling, (epistolary) to examine the human personality, in search of spiritual and rational truths. Brown knew that "Romantic critics such as Schleiermacher called for readers' sympathetic identification with the author" (Leitch 12). He understood that "writing books that sold required entertaining as well as edifying their readers" (Lauter 1233). Brown was astute enough to realize that the developing changes in the country after the American Revolution, with the advent of factories to manufacture the goods formerly produced by women in the home, created an audience of educated, idle women (Lauter 1243)."

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