SOURCE: Scheiber, Andrew J. “‘The Arm Lifted Against Me’: Love, Terror, and the Construction of Gender in Wieland.” Early American Literature 26, no. 2 (1991): 173-94.

In the following essay, Scheiber explores the ambiguity of Clara's characterization, attributing that ambiguity to her status within masculine and patriarchal institutions of the time.

A persistent locus of critical contention in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland has been the character of Clara, the novel's narrator. Nina Baym has argued that “Clara is not a character in any traditional sense,” but rather “serves only as a vantage point from which events are misapprehended and experienced in their fullest capacity to shock and terrify” (95). J. V. Ridgely, puzzled by what he sees as some crucial lacunae in Clara's narration, finds it “unaccountable” that she fails “to ponder the process by which she and Pleyel have been able to restore themselves” (12). Even Bernard Rosenthal, one of the recent...