SOURCE: Patrick, Marietta Stafford. “Romantic Iconography in Wieland.” South Atlantic Review 49, no. 4 (November 1984): 65-74.

In the following essay, Patrick argues against critics who claim that Wieland is an unsophisticated novel dependent on the conventions of Gothic and sentimental novels. According to Patrick, the novel questions the process of transformation, perception, and personal identity, suggesting that it has far more in common with the later works of American literature than with earlier ones.

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland has been treated by older critics as a derivative novel. Pattee in an early introduction considers the novel in light of such popular eighteenth century literary forms as the sentimental, the Gothic, and the social novel in England.¹ Wieland does illustrate certain motifs of the sentimental and Gothic forms, but as Herbert Ross Brown observes, these trappings, especially the use of the epistolary form, seem incidental rather than primary; in Wieland, as...