SOURCE: Manly, William M. “The Importance of Point of View in Brockden Brown's Wieland.” American Literature 35, no. 3 (November 1963): 311-21.

In the following essay, Manly suggests that Wieland has more in common with the darker works of Poe and Hawthorne than with the sentimental tradition with which it is often associated.

Students of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland have often noted its relationship to the Richardsonian sentimental novel. Fred Lewis Pattee was the first to suggest similarities when he wrote in his early Introduction: “The book is to be classed with the seduction novels so popular at the close of the 18th Century—a book of the Clarissa Harlowe type.”¹ Leslie Fiedler later elaborated the sentimental seduction theme into the major experience of the novel,² and a more recent reading has found Wieland to be a sentimental novel with a reactionary middle.³

Surely there are sentimental-seduction materials in Wieland: Clara...