Murderous Masculinities the Early Republic of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland

Abstract

This essay examines Charles Brockden Brown’s first novel, Wieland (1798), particularly as it engages and critiques gender and nationalism in the fictive treatment of familicidal murders that took place in the eighteenth century. More broadly, Brown’s novel highlights the competing realities facing men and women in the early republic, as they navigated the shifting landscape of political and religious ideology in the turbulence of post-Revolutionary America. A close examination of Wieland offers a revealing glimpse into the tensions between patriarchy and femininity, republicanism and religion, and competing masculinities in the newly born republic that was limitlessly optimistic even as it was beset by national and familial violence.

Keywords

• charles brockden brown
• wieland
• masculinities
• patriarchy
• familicide
• sacrifice
• masochism