{"id":174521,"date":"2026-07-20T12:16:18","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T16:16:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=174521"},"modified":"2026-07-20T12:16:18","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T16:16:18","slug":"charles-brockden-brown-declares-independence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/07\/20\/charles-brockden-brown-declares-independence\/","title":{"rendered":"Charles Brockden Brown Declares Independence"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Fire <\/em>(circa 1805),<\/em>\u00a0William Blake, The Morgan Library<\/a> via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The philosopher\u2019s stone, desired by alchemists for its mythic ability to transmute lead into gold, was once in Philadelphia. Johannes Kelpius\u2014mystic, monastic, and magician\u2014supposedly came into possession of said stone shortly before his death in 1708. But rather than letting it be acquired by less reputable occultists, he dispatched a confidant to throw it from Germantown\u2019s banks deep into the water of the Wissahickon Creek or the Schuylkill, depending on which account you believe. The German-speaking Transylvanian was a character from a gothic novel\u2014an apocalyptic wizard who (so it was claimed) lived in a cave where he transformed \u201cdarkness into light, death into life,\u201d and \u201cmetals into gold.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the very end of that revolutionary century another Philadelphian had similar occult ambitions, albeit of a literary sort, in generating something new and glowing from the base materials of gothic literature. Charles Brockden Brown\u2019s 1798 <\/span>Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale\u2014<\/span><\/i>frequently claimed to be the first novel published in the United States\u2014begins with a religious iconoclast not unlike Kelpius who spontaneously combusts while worshiping in a temple overlooking the Schuylkill. Brown describes how a \u201cfaint gleam suddenly shot athwart\u201d the temple, seemingly the result of some occult experimentation. \u201cIn a moment,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe whole was reduced to ashes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

In the explosion of the temple by the Schuylkill, there was more of America than just in the parallels to religious renegades like Kelpius. For Brown, <\/span>Wieland <\/span><\/i>wasn\u2019t simply a European novel set in the New World, but a different type of work entirely. The author castigated his contemporaries across the Atlantic for their reliance on \u201cpuerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimerical shadows.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, what he sought in <\/span>Wieland <\/span><\/i>was a kind of hyperrationalism\u2014as many of that tale\u2019s mysteries are subsequently explained. <\/span>Wieland <\/span><\/i>then was an act of clearing the brush for new plants to grow, where the temple\u2019s immolation mirrored the writer\u2019s desire to burn away European antecedents. As Brown wrote, \u201cWhy then slumbers the American muse?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Wieland <\/span><\/i>is an odd book (albeit a good one). Though Brown declared independence from European culture, the influence of popular gothic tropes are obvious. It doesn\u2019t even have the weirdest opening of that genre\u2014in the first few pages of the English novelist Horace Walpole\u2019s <\/span>The Castle of Otranto, <\/span><\/i>from 1764, a character is pulverized by a giant helmet that mysteriously falls from the sky. Brown\u2019s novel, however, is gothic in a manner that could only be American, and one particular to the mid-Atlantic, where eccentric sects proliferated, including Anabaptists, Moravians, the Ephrata Community, and Kelpius\u2019s own apocalyptic, cave-dwelling \u201cSociety of the Woman in the Wilderness.<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Brown trades in gothic subjects as varied as somnambulism, ventriloquism, and spontaneous combustion. But his main concern is very much that American contradiction between the cool rationalism of our founding documents and the fervent irrationalism of our national character. Brown was strung between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. He was born in a city that was the exemplar of the former\u2014Benjamin Franklin\u2019s adopted hometown\u2014five years before the Declaration of Independence was signed. But Pennsylvania was also where a grimoire called <\/span>The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses <\/span><\/i>numbered among the first books ever printed<\/span> in the colony, a place whose countryside\u2014the setting for all of Brown\u2019s novels\u2014was (and is) filled with barns affixed with colorful, geometric hex signs to ward off curses. The inherent tension between these two traditions might be most bluntly expressed in <\/span>Wieland<\/span><\/i>\u2019s<\/span> eponymous character (the son of the unfortunate combustible), who begins murdering at the behest of unseen commentators, which are later revealed to be the commands of a huckster capable of throwing his voice. In Brown\u2019s most influential novel, in other words, a (European) father\u2019s demise is facilitated through magic, but that of his son is explained through science.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Brown desired books that reflect American \u201cskies, which give us the varied and kind return of seasons,\u201d and\u00a0 \u201cmountains which furnish us with all that is grand and elevating.\u201d Marveling at the muse of landscape, Brown hoped that Americans would \u201cblow the spark of genius into flame.\u201d If Brown fancied himself the first spark, then he never became part of that great conflagration, not having reached the stature of later authors like Washington Irving or James Fenimore Cooper, much less the apogee of the American Renaissance embodied by Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville. Championed by Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats, he was hardly an unknown in his time; in 1808, he became the first American novelist to be translated into a foreign language. In a series of 1824 essays from <\/span>Blackwood\u2019s Edinburgh Magazine, <\/span><\/i>the writer John Neal included Brown and himself among a shortlist of the first Americans \u201cwho could look upon literature, as a profession.\u201d But two centuries later, how many Americans know who Brown is, much less Neal?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless, Brown is certainly familiar to literary scholars of the time period, as his major works like <\/span>Wieland <\/span><\/i>and his 1799 follow-up, <\/span>Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-walker,<\/span><\/i> remain in print, while the former was adapted for a 2024 film and Sara Sligar\u2019s 2025 novel <\/span>Vantage Point<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> a cheeky modernization which trades the hustler\u2019s ventriloquism for deepfake technology. Even if largely unknown, there is a mesmerizing pull to Brown for those who have read his work, described by Philip Gura in <\/span>Truth\u2019s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel <\/span><\/i>as an oeuvre that \u201cexplored the limits of rationality, emphasizing the random irruption of the irrational into even the most settled lives.\u201d A concise explication of America: a nation that was enacted through the sober prose of legal documents and constructed through the barbarity of enslavement and genocide, our own ghost story.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By that accounting, <\/span>Edgar Huntly <\/span><\/i>was the more authentic \u201cAmerican Tale.\u201d The narrative begins with the titular protagonist<\/span> stalking a suspected murderer through the wilderness. When Edgar demands\u00a0 a confession, the suspect (a somnambulist with the fantastically gothic name of Clithero) denies committing that particular murder, but instead guiltily admits that he believes himself to have killed a woman in his native Ireland (a confession seemingly unrelated to the suspect\u2019s own sleepwalking). Halfway through the novel, after these strange interactions, Edgar awakens in a cave confused as to how he has arrived there, finally concluding that, like Clithero, he is also a somnambulist. Then in the darkness, Edgar is attacked by a panther, which he brutally kills with his bare hands, ravenously eating its flesh and drinking its blood as a frenzied, intoxicated blood sacrifice. Emerging from the cave, Edgar comes upon a group of Lenni Lenape, whom he similarly murders in an act of superhuman strength. \u201cI was the instrument of their destruction,\u201d reflects Edgar, this \u201cscene of carnage and blood was laid to me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Edgar Huntly <\/span><\/i>begins as a conventional gothic novel only to become a violent, psychedelic, American phantasmagoria\u2014less Ann Radcliffe than Cormac McCarthy. It is consummately American in its expressions of our national contradiction, our ignorant sleepwalking through history, and our collective amnesia as to how we\u2019ve arrived at the present. What is the United States, after all, other than a massive, haunted graveyard? Brown may have been a literary nationalist, but he was an honest one\u2014the first American novelist mostly in that the brutal reality of <\/span>Edgar Huntly <\/span><\/i>prophetically anticipates those of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. His is an interrogation of the American paradox, of cankerous irrationalism gilded in reason, a reality often ignored, denied, or obscured. When Brown completed <\/span>Wieland <\/span><\/i>he sent a copy to Vice President Thomas Jefferson \u201cto intreat his acceptance of the volume.\u201d Mr. Jefferson responded with a polite thank you from which it was clear that he hadn\u2019t bothered to read it.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ed Simon is the author of several books, including<\/span><\/i> Devil\u2019s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain,<\/span> named one of\u2009 <\/span><\/i>The New Yorker\u2019s <\/span>best books of 2024 and most recently<\/span><\/i> American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America<\/span>. He is Public Humanities Lecturer in English at Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of<\/span><\/i> The Pittsburgh Review of Books.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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