Customer Reviews

Charles Brockden Brown : Three Gothic Novels : Wieland / Arthur Mervyn / Edgar Huntly (Library of America)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Charles Brockden Brown is known as the "Father of the American novel" and is considered to be our first professional author. At least by those who do consider him at all. To be perfectly frank, I'd never really heard of the guy before now. But this excellent gothic tale, which was based on the true story of a farmer who thought that angels had commanded him to kill his own family, is so clearly the forerunner of the fiction of everyone from Hawthorne and Melville to Poe and Henry James to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard right on up to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King, that it is hard to believe that his work is not better known nor taught more often.

Wieland, his first novel, tells the story of a religious fanatic who builds a temple in the seclusion of his own farm, but then is struck dead, apparently by spontaneous combustion. Several years later, his children, in turn, begin to hear voices around the family property, voices which alternately seem to be commanding good or evil and which at times imitate denizens of the farm. Are the voices somehow connected to a mysterious visitor who has begun hanging around? Are they commands from God? From demons? Suffice it to say things get pretty dicey before we find out the truth.

This is a terrific creepy story which obviously influenced the course of American fiction. Brown develops an interesting serious theme of the role that reason can play in combating superstition and religious mania, but keeps the action cranking and the mood deliciously gloomy. The language is certainly not modern but it is accessible and generally understandable. It's a novel that should be better known and more widely read, if not for historical reasons then just because it's great fun.

GRADE: A

I was pleased to see that the editorial review of this (typically gorgeous) Library of America series entry stole my breath. Brockden Brown's fascinating and brutal gothic novels are the true foundation of what's dark about American literature. Perhaps even more irresponsible than Poe in his fascination with the grotesque (spontaneous combustion, anyone?), Brockden Brown long anticipates Poe and Freud (and Faulkner and Jackson and ...) in his bleak explorations of our most terrible fears, and our worst secrets. Without scenes like the axe murder in "Wieland," would we have King's (or Kubrick's) "The Shining"? Impossible. Let's hope that the Library of America will add a Volume 2 to this one, including Brockden Brown's lesser known (and impossible to find) works like "Ormond."

One of the joys of the Library of America has been how the LOA has breathed new life into long forgotten and neglected writers. Like William Dean Howells and William Maxwell, Charles Brockden Brown's works have been discovered again thanks in large part to the apotheosis of being published by the LOA. Based in Philadelphia, Brown was a leading writer of the 1790s and first decade of the nineteenth century. While Brown certainly shaped certain gothic strands of the American literary tradition, his influence did not end there. Mary Shelley and Margaret Fuller both admired Brown and one suspects that Brown's strong female protagonists may be one of the chief reasons.

"Three Gothic Novels" includes almost all of Brown's novels though there are important books missing. "Wieland" is a spooky story involving a ventriloquist and how he impacted the dark legacy of a family. "Arthur Mervyn" offers a harrowing look at Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 and, if not as good as DeFoe looking at 1666, Brown shows how society broke down during an outbreak. With such various themes as sleepwalking, revenge, Native Americans, the frontier and various other topics, there is no easy categorization of "Edgar Huntley." All of these tales are dark, suspenseful and, haunting.

While he is excellent in building a plot, revealing characters and keeping a reader on the edge of his seat, Brown is not for everyone but it must be conceded he is not as difficult for the uninitiated reader as many 18th century writers. While these novels generally involve what would now be labeled as horror, Brown was not adverse to confronting the issues of his age and it is a pity that the LOA has not yet collected his "Alcuin" that deals with gender roles and marriage and "Ormond" which is an action tale dealing with gender roles, the Enlightenment, the influences of the French Revolution and, of all things, lesbianism. Still, while the LOA could have included more, what they produced is excellent. Brown is an important and solid writer who can still be enjoyed two centuries after his death. Unlike Washington Irving or Cooper or any of the later founders of American literature, Brown never quite got his due but then he died young and did not produce many books. While Brown never reached the levels of Poe or Hawthorne or Irving or even Simms, he was an important writer who can still be enjoyed today. Readers are once again in debt to the LOA for helping bring another great American writer out of obscurity and into our libraries and onto our bookshelves.

Out of the three novels, I have only read Wieland, but if the other two are as good as this one, I would definitely be willing to read them.

Wieland is one of my all-time favorite books. This novel looks at how religion, the unexplainable (or seemingly unexplainable), and madness affect ordinary people. There are no monsters lurking in the shadows, but the novel does look at how people deal with horror in "real" situations.

The Library of America is providing a valuable service to all devotees of American literature by providing reliable texts of so many important American writers. Here, they have done an excellent job of presenting the three best novels of America's first professional novelist. However, Brown only wrote six novels altogether, and anyone who cares about "Wieland," "Edgar Huntly," and "Arthur Mervyn" will probably also want "Ormond" in the package, as well as the fragments "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert" and "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist."

This Library of America edition contains three Charles Brockden Brown Novels, so my rating is based on an average of what I would have given the three novels individually. Here is how I scored them: Wieland - 5 stars, Arthur Mervyn - 3 stars, Edgar Huntly - 4 stars.

Brown is considered to be the first notable American author. Wieland is a chilling Gothic masterpiece that leaves you marveling and cringing at each twist and turn to the very end. This is a novel that will stay with you for a long time. I can't really discuss much of this novel without revealing its secrets, so I will not. Wieland, alone, makes this a worthwhile purchase.

Arthur Mervyn, starts out strong and compelling, and it seems like it is going to be on par with Wieland but falls apart and disintegrates into unbelievable and uninteresting sentimentality.

Edgar Huntley is a very good novel that uses the cleaver technique used lately in several films where things appear to be one thing at the time but are revealed to be something quite different when the truth of what actually happened is revealed later. I don't know if this is the first novel to use this technique but it has to be one of the first.

I agree with some of the other reviewers that it would have been a more complete "Gothic" edition if it also included Ormond and the unfinished Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist.

The Library of America is providing a valuable service to all devotees of American literature by providing reliable texts of so many important American writers. Here, they have done an excellent job of presenting the three best novels of America's first professional novelist. However, Brown only wrote six novels altogether, and anyone who cares about "Wieland," "Edgar Huntly," and "Arthur Mervyn" will probably also want "Ormond" in the package, as well as the fragments "Memoirs of Stephen Calvert" and "Memoirs of Carwin, the Biloquist."