Wieland (2024)

[page 105] Because of the novel’s epistolary form, complicated themes, and dedication to exploring interiority, adapting and directing Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland for film presents a herculean challenge. Director Cody Knotts–whose previous directorial credits include Breeding Farm (2013), Pro Wrestlers vs Zombies (2014), and Kecksburg (2019)–along with his wife, Emily Lapisardi, who plays Clara, adapted Brown’s novel. Transformed into a musical, the film premiered at the 2024 Modern Language Association Convention in Philadelphia. A quick glance at the corresponding IMDB page provides this description: “The first adaptation of American novel Wieland. and [sic] the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Religious fanaticism, schizophrenia, supernatural powers and repressed sexual desire combine into a deadly family drama.” Those familiar with Brown’s novel may be surprised by the themes that the film interrogates, as well as those that it ignores.

Brown’s Wieland, considered America’s first gothic novel,1 was inspired by James Yates’s 1781 familicide in New York. The narrative follows two sets of siblings—Clara and Theodore Wieland and Catherine and Henry Pleyel—through the events leading up to Theodore’s violent murder spree. The novel takes the form of a letter, written by Clara, to an unnamed recipient, so they may be “informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper” (7). Clara begins with her childhood, the death of her father via spontaneous combustion, the Wieland siblings’ friendship with the Pleyels, and her brother’s marriage to Catherine. Clara and Theodore inherited equal shares of their father’s property, Mettingen, and live within a mile of one another. Theodore’s family soon includes four children and a young ward, Louisa Conway. “Six years of uninterrupted [page 106] happiness” is quickly shattered when Theodore, on his way to retrieve a letter from Louisa’s father, hears Catherine call him back (23). Catherine, however, did not call for her husband’s return, and soon other instances of unexplainable vocal projections plague the residents of Mettingen. The appearance of these voices coincides with the presence of Carwin, who is later revealed to be their source. Carwin’s biloquism has the strongest impact on Theodore, who, driven mad by his inability to unify voice and body, murders his wife, his four children, Louisa, and, after a failed attempt to kill Clara, himself. In her account, Clara attempts to make sense of these traumatic events and piece them together in a way that will be not only revelatory but useful.

The first issue that viewers are likely to identify with Knotts’s adaptation of Wieland is its failure to clearly introduce characters and articulate the plot; those who have not read the original novel will have a difficult time following what is already a complex narrative, but even viewers familiar with the novel may have trouble recovering from jumps in time or maintaining a coherent chronology in the face of the film’s many deviations from its source. The elder Wielands, Clara and Theodore’s parents, are introduced and killed off without much fanfare, leaving their family history somewhat opaque. It is also not immediately clear what positions in their households are held by Louisa and by Judith, Clara’s maid. It is, in fact, often difficult to tell if action is taking place in Clara’s or Theodore’s home. The only immediately discernible location is the “temple,” which, rather than the “Tuscan columns” of the novel (12), appears to be a claustrophobic cellar or outbuilding. The film’s lack of clarity intensifies when the residents of Mettingen prepare for a play, donning costumes so that Theodore appears in a chainmail coif and eyepatch for an extended period and Henry Pleyel is wearing a Spirit Halloween-level crown when he storms out of Clara’s house after seeing her with Carwin.

Viewers familiar with Brown’s novel will also notice a change in the time period. Rather than the French and Indian [page 107] War, the film is set during the Civil War. This change is likely to accommodate the use of music that would be anachronistic if set one hundred years earlier: Frédéric Chopin and Stephen Foster dominate the score. There are occasional ensemble songs, but most of the singing is carried by Lapisardi as Clara. Lapisardi gives a strong vocal performance, with a voice and training that feels like a natural pairing with the historical pieces, which include hymns, ballads, and folk songs. In an interview with Library of America, Knotts says the film contains “period murder ballads . . . collected by pioneering nineteenth-century musicologist Francis James Child.” This is likely a reference to “The Unquiet Grave,” an English folk song collected in Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which Clara sings to what appears to be a zombie version of Pleyel; this song is not, though, a murder ballad. Whether through an issue with audio or lack of enunciation, the lyrics of the opening song, the hymn “Samanthra,” are difficult to discern, and the closed captioning is missing. There is one song, Mekyala Rayne’s (Judith) performance of the traditional spiritual “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” that is a jarring contrast from the rest of the score. Rayne’s voice is lovely, but she deploys a highly glottalized contemporary pop style, markedly different from Lapisardi’s more classical technique, that does sound anachronistic, even though the song is not.

In addition to facilitating the use of period-appropriate music, the shifted time period figures significantly in one important scene. Rather than serving to “enhance our enjoyment by affording objects of comparison” and increase their patriotism, as Clara says of the war in Brown’s original, the film features Theodore and Pleyel debating the righteousness of the Civil War. Pleyel argues for a non-violent reconciliation, while Theodore speaks to the necessity of violence to free others from bondage, saying, “I would gladly shed the slavers’ blood” (00:15:27-00:15:30). The film, however, does not acknowledge the Wielands’ historic and, as Bridget Bennett clarifies in “‘The Silence Surrounding the Hut’: Architecture and Absence in [page 108] Wieland,” ongoing participation in American chattel slavery. Their father’s fortune was built on the “cheapness of the land, and the service of African slaves,” while the “rustics who occupied the hut” indicated the continued presence of enslaved people in Mettingen (11, 177). By eschewing this critical layer of context, the film attempts to pose Theodore as ethically righteous, an unwavering moral compass for the family he would later murder.

More troubling than a small change intended to make Theodore admirable is what I take to be the film’s larger project. Every change to Brown’s original plot is deliberately calculated to transform Clara from a rational, forthright if traumatized narrator into a calculating, conniving, sex-crazed killer. The “twist” that the film introduces to Brown’s narrative reveals Clara as the ultimate cause of “illusions” at Mettingen; Clara is the biloquist and, hidden in a tree with some kind of wireless projector, creates visual illusions, framing her brother and a hapless Carwin for the events (01:36:22-01:36:27). It seems that the film’s version of Clara was inspired more by articles like James R. Russo’s 1981 “‘The Chimeras of the Brain’: Clara’s Narrative in ‘Wieland’” than by evidence from Brown’s text. Russo’s article refers to Clara as a “confessed madwoman,” but provides no evidence from the text that could be manipulated to support such a claim (60). In the Q&A after the film’s premiere, Knotts confirmed this vision of Clara, referring to her as “off her rocker.” Russo claims that Clara “flits back and forth between imagination and reality,” citing the fact that Clara describes her dreams as evidence of this—a stretch of logic, to say the least (60). In Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798), Brown himself contends with late 18th-century questions about women’s intellect that both Russo and the film seem to take for granted. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft, Alcuin examines the status of women as well as their potential. Though the form of a dialogue alone suggests that Brown was still thinking through questions like nature vs. nurture, he seems inclined to think of the brain as a Lockean tabula rasa and that women’s potential, like men’s, could be equally culti-[page 109]vated by an education like the one Clara received at Mettingen. Even (alleged) notorious sex-pest Jay Fliegelman notes Clara’s rational composure (xxiii). Russo’s article takes significantly more unsupported leaps of imagination than it claims that Clara does; later scholars have rightly dismissed the misogyny necessary to develop arguments like Russo’s.

Rather than evidence of madness, Clara’s admitted lapses in memory are interpreted by scholars such as Teresa Ramoni as a natural response to traumatic events. Brown’s Clara may not have a photographic memory, but there is little in the original text to suggest that she, like Dr. Sheppard in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is being deliberately manipulative or obfuscating in order to disguise her own guilt. Rather, Clara’s narration in the novel is deeply concerned with her inability to trust sensory input or distinguish illusory sensation. Clara’s narration focuses on her attempt to reckon with her own unreliability, just as other characters experience similar paranoia. In the moment of Clara’s narration where Russo finds his title, Clara says she would not be surprised if her reader believes her story to be a “fable” or “chimeras of my brain” because they were confusing even for her; however, she continues by reassuring her reader that “It was only by subsequent events, that I was fully and incontestably assured of the veracity of my sense” (52-53). In other words, she has the receipts.

In order to set Clara up as a sex-starved maniac, the film radically alters the timeline and relationships between characters. For example, at Theodore and Catherine’s wedding, Pleyel is seen flirting with Theresa, the Baroness de Stolberg, and rejecting Clara’s affection. Catherine attempts to comfort Clara, but also encourages her to be cautious: “For once he has a taste of sin, he may not return” (00:09:56-00:10:02). In the original, Clara refers to Pleyel’s affection for the Baroness as an “amorous contagion” but, though she is a romantic rival, does not appear to have any personal animosity for Theresa or find any critical faults with her character (33). For Knotts and Lapisardi, however, Theresa is a nymphomaniacal temptress [page 110] who will corrupt Pleyel and turn him irredeemably toward sin. Though they never meet in the novel, when Clara and Theresa speak at the wedding, Theresa is unexpectedly cruel. She asks Pleyel if Clara “is the child you speak so fondly of,” and when Clara protests that she is a woman, Theresa counters “one is not truly a woman ‘til they have experienced a man,” aligning sexual experience with womanhood, a trope never present in the novel itself (00:10:34-00:10:58).

Carwin’s relationship to the family is also changed to highlight Clara’s sexual frustration. He is introduced not as a wanderer but as a friend of Pleyel, who sits in drawing room conversation with the Mettingenites. After this meeting, Carwin tells Pleyel that he, too, dismisses Clara as a romantic possibility in favor of a sexually experienced woman: Catherine. Shockingly, Pleyel says nothing to defend his sister, apparently acquiescing to Carwin’s designs. In the novel, Carwin is having an affair, but with Judith, who reported to Carwin that Clara’s “perfections were little less than divine . . . [and] chiefly dwelt upon [her] courage” (150). In the novel, Carwin appears in Clara’s room, not intending to actually assault her but rather to imply the threat in order to “put this courage to the test” (151). Carwin’s motives are notoriously obscure, but he, like the novel’s Pleyel, appears to deeply respect Clara’s character and does not consider her virtue (i.e., virginity) as an impediment to womanhood or maturity. Tying sexual experience to womanhood is misogynistic, an inexplicable interpretation of Brown’s characters, and, frankly, boring.

But the film’s desire to make Clara the villain requires her love for Pleyel to be unrequited, disregarding their marriage at the novel’s close. While the film’s Pleyel dismisses Clara as naive or childish, the novel’s Pleyel does not overlook Clara at all. In the novel, Pleyel tells Clara how he thought of her as "a being, after whom sages may model their transcendent intelligence, and painters, their ideal beauty” (94). Lest readers think that Pleyel’s observations were anything less than thorough, he says that he wrote down all of his observations to the minutest detail, including “Even the colour of a shoe, the [page 111] knot of a ribband, or your attitude in plucking a rose” (94). It is ludicrous to suggest that a man who keeps an active journal of a woman’s daily shoe color is indifferent toward her.

Clara’s sexual frustrations are again clarified at the first appearance of Carwin, who asks Judith for a drink. Carwin has recently arrived in the United States from Spain, a fact visually represented in the film by the choice to have him appear in a cartoonish approximation of the traje de luces, the traditional bullfighter’s uniform. In the novel, Clara is moved to tears by Carwin’s voice and the sympathy for him that it evokes. In the film, Clara is overwhelmed by a lengthy, apparently involuntary orgasm in the hallway. The scene mirrors an earlier moment where Theodore is so overcome by lust for his ward Louisa that he masturbates outside the door while singing a monotone “come come come come,” a melody line of Stephen Foster’s 1855 “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.” The amount of times that the Wieland siblings are surreptitiously orgasming in the hallway suggests family gatherings would be an uncomfortable affair.

Though it would be unlikely for any audience to interpret Theodore’s actions in the hallway as anything other than masturbation, Knotts took a moment during the Q&A at the MLA premiere to ensure that attendees understood the intention of these lyrics. At this same Q&A, Knotts also made repeated reference to schizophrenia as a major theme in the film. Despite Knotts’s remarks and the film’s description on IMDB, it remains unclear who, precisely, is meant to have schizophrenia, however. In the novel, the source of the voice that Theodore claims directs him to murder remains unresolved, and readers might consider schizophrenia as a cause of these particular auditory hallucinations (though I find little value in such speculative diagnostic efforts). In the film, however, schizophrenia can hardly be the cause of the Mettingenites’ troubles if the illusory sights and sounds were Clara’s maniacal handiwork. The inclusion of schizophrenia in the film’s description, then, relies only on the ableist thinking that aligns mental illness with violence. [page 112]

To reduce Brown’s novel to female hysteria, evangelical purity culture, and sexual frustration overlooks the novel’s more interesting meditations on the will of the governed, Lockean epistemology, and the ‘transformation’ of the American populace. So strong is Knotts and Lapsiardi’s dedication to presenting a crazed, unreliable, murderous Clara that they are willing to overlook all evidence in the novel to the contrary. It is astonishing that, in introducing deviations from the text, the film adaptation becomes more misogynistic than the 18th-century original. The only way to explain a belief that Clara is an unreliable narrator is via a broader distrust of women’s accounts of trauma. In an interview, Knotts said that Wieland will be the first of many “cinematic adaptations of stories like those contained in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales,” and he promoted his forthcoming adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance at MLA. One shudders to think what kind of harlot he will find in Zenobia.

Notes

Special acknowledgements to Dr. Carie Schneider and Dr. Kaitlyn Lindgren-Hansen for watching and discussing the film with me.

1. Though not, as the film poster on the production company website states, “America’s First Novel” (Eternity Box Films). That honor is generally given to William Hill Brown’s sentimental novel The Power of Sympathy from 1789.

Works Cited

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Edited by Bryan Waterman, Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton, 2011.

Fliegelman, Jay. Introduction. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, Penguin Classics, 1991.

Knotts, Cody. “The Other American Gothic: Director Cody Knotts on Adapting Charles Brockden Brown’s Macabre Masterpiece for Film.” Library of America, 13 June 2023, www.loa.org/news-and-views/2158-the-other-american-gothic-director-cody-knotts-on-adapting-charles-brockden-browns-macabre-masterpiece-for-film/. [page 113] Accessed 13 Apr. 2024.

Ramoni, Teresa. “‘To Mimic My Voice’: Gender, Power, and Narration in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland.” Women’s Studies, vol. 52, no. 3, 2023, pp. 269-286, doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2155963.

Russo, James R. “‘The Chimeras of the Brain’: Clara’s Narrative in ‘Wieland.’” Early American Literature, vol. 16, no. 1, 1981, pp. 60-88.

Wieland. IMDB, www.imdb.com/title/tt24577704/ref_=nm_flmg_unrel_1_act. Accessed 13 Apr. 2024.

Kassie Jo Baron is an Assistant Professor at The University of Tennessee at Martin. Her research focuses on 19th-century American literature, with particular attention to literary representations of working-class women.

MLA citation (print):

Baron, Kassie Jo. "Wieland (2024)." Supernatural Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Art, Media, and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2024, pp. 105-113.