The Fall of the House of Wieland: Love of God vs. Love of Self in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay attempts to provide a new perspective on Wieland’s reason for murdering his wife and four children in Charles Brocken Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation. Countering the critical consensus that Wieland’s devout faith in and love of God is what drives him to kill his own family, I contend that the real modus operandi for his murder is not his love of God but his love of self. I also argue that Wieland’s apparent obsession with religious faith is inextricably linked to his uncanny relationship with his sister Clara, which is an unconscious manifestation of his narcissistic desires. Having inherited his forefathers’ religious faith, Wieland forces himself to believe that he is a sincere believer in God and leaves himself with no outlet for his self-love. Wieland thus projects his narcissistic desires onto his sister, Clara, who bears a close resemblance to him, and in his unconscious endeavor to justify his unreasonable desires for his sister, he projects them once again onto his wife and children with whom he is so “happy” that he feels guilty. This is how Wieland ends up deceiving himself that he honors and glorifies his God through his act of murder. Through Wieland’s transformation from a man of noble intention into a monstrous criminal, Brown demonstrates how dangerous it is completely to deny one’s narcissistic desires and thereby offers a critique of the tradition of Calvinism and Puritanism which pressured people to have ardent faith and instilled guilty feelings in people who did not know how to have a conversion experience.
Abstract
This essay attempts to provide a new perspective on Wieland’s reason for murdering his wife and four children in Charles Brocken Brown’s Wieland, or the Transformation. Countering the critical consensus that Wieland’s devout faith in and love of God is what drives him to kill his own family, I contend that the real modus operandi for his murder is not his love of God but his love of self. I also argue that Wieland’s apparent obsession with religious faith is inextricably linked to his uncanny relationship with his sister Clara, which is an unconscious manifestation of his narcissistic desires. Having inherited his forefathers’ religious faith, Wieland forces himself to believe that he is a sincere believer in God and leaves himself with no outlet for his self-love. Wieland thus projects his narcissistic desires onto his sister, Clara, who bears a close resemblance to him, and in his unconscious endeavor to justify his unreasonable desires for his sister, he projects them once again onto his wife and children with whom he is so “happy” that he feels guilty. This is how Wieland ends up deceiving himself that he honors and glorifies his God through his act of murder. Through Wieland’s transformation from a man of noble intention into a monstrous criminal, Brown demonstrates how dangerous it is completely to deny one’s narcissistic desires and thereby offers a critique of the tradition of Calvinism and Puritanism which pressured people to have ardent faith and instilled guilty feelings in people who did not know how to have a conversion experience.
참고문헌 (15)
- Brown, Charles Brockden, "Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale" (1994), Oxford UP
- Clark L. David, "Charles Brockden Brown, Pioneer Voice of America" (1952), Duke UP
- Doren, Carl Van, "Early American Realism", The Nation, 12, pp.577~578 (1914)
- Elliott, Emory, "Introduction, In Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale" (1994), Oxford UP
- Gilmore, Michael T, "Calvinism and Gothicism: The Example of Brown’s Wieland", Studies in the Novel, 9(2), pp.107~118 (1977)
- Manly, William, "The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown’s Wieland", American Literature, 35, pp.311~321 (1963)
- Rank, Otto, "Beyond Psychology, In Beyond Psychology", pp.62~101 (1958), Dover Publications
- Rombes, Nicholas, Jr, "‘All Was Lonely, Darksome, and Waste’: Wieland and the Construction of the New Republic", Studies in American Fiction, 22(1), pp.37~46 (1994)
- Samuels, Shirley, "Wieland: Alien and Infidel", Early American Literature, 25(1), pp.46~66 (1990)
- Surratt, Marshall N, "‘The Awe Creating Presence of the Deity’: Some Religious Sources for Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland", Papers on Language and Literature, 33(3), pp.310~324 (1997)
- Tompkins, Jane, "Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860" (1985), Oxford UP
- Weldon, Robert F, "Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: A Family Tragedy", Studies in American Fiction, 12(1), pp.1~11 (1984)
- Wolfe, Eric A, "Ventriloquizing Nation: Voice, Identity, and Radical Democracy in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland", American Literature, 78(3), pp.431~457 (2006)
- Ziff, Larzer, "A Reading of Wieland", PMLA, 77(1), pp.51~57 (1962)
- Zivkovic, Milica, "The Double as the ‘Unseen’ of Culture: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger", Facta Universitatis, 2(7), pp.121~128 (2000)