SOURCE: Jordan, Cynthia S. “On Rereading Wieland: ‘The Folly of Precipitate Conclusions.’” Early American Literature 16, no. 2 (fall 1981): 154-74.

In the following essay, Jordan suggests that Wieland's ending, often considered flawed, represents a deliberate strategy of the author to caution readers about hastily-drawn conclusions.

Starting with William Dunlap, author of the first critical biography of Charles Brockden Brown, critics of Brown's novels have persistently resorted to external data—especially Brown's “headlong rapidity of composition”—to account for apparent inconsistencies in the texts, the most prominent of these being the characteristically “muddled” ending.¹ Critical readings of Wieland, for example, have offered various extratextual explanations—apologies—for its conclusion: on the one hand, Brown is portrayed as a “careless writer” whose inattention to revision forced him to concoct an improbable “deus ex machina denouement”; on the other, his opportunities for revision are shown to have been severely limited by the...