Carwin’s presence in the novel highlights that the supposedly rational and free figures of this seemingly idyllic Pennsylvania community are more concerned with material possessions than philosophical ideals. Carwin’s presence reveals that behind Theodore’s mask of enlightenment rationalism hides a staunch patriarch whose authority is founded on, and supported by, an age-old androcentric perspective on the nature of familial society and the power structures that operate it. The entrance of Carwin and his preternatural powers into the world of Mettingen sets up a contrast with the supposedly enlightened, Cicero-loving, Theodore Wieland. In light of Davidson’s argument about the inherent ambiguity of early American gothic, it is also possible to read Carwin as an outsider figure, unknown to the protagonists in the Wieland, and consequently mysterious, but with “a remarkable potential for good.” Ref?ĢIf Carwin is freed from his conceptual straightjacket as gothic villain and is placed in the context of alternative cultural schemata such as Hermetic philosophy, and utopian idealism, he becomes a figure of potential heroic dissidence, a radical individualist who rejects not only the materialist tendency of his age but also the patriarchal foundations on which the social structure of the eighteenth-century American colonies was founded.
In Carwin’s case, then, the interpretive stress has often lain on his potential to do evil. Peter Kafer argues that “Carwin is just a mischievous wanderer with a special talent for projecting voices.” He concludes: “while Carwin may be some sort of villain, there is nothing heroic about him” (Kafer 129). Bill Christopherson finds Carwin to be “more red herring than protagonist” (Christopherson 34). David Punter describes Carwin as “a rationalist friend of the family who claims to have been trying to teach Wieland a lesson in religious credulity” (Punter 167). Grabo, for example, has interpreted Carwin as “a most shabby villain” and “the agent of stupid mischief rather than the engineer of evil” (Grabo 10).
Over the past decades, the reputation of Carwin’s narrative function in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) and the subsequent “Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist” (1803) and often discussed as a figure with a supporting role only, one of mystery, trickery or evil. Davidson has explained that “the struggling individual has, in the Gothic world, a remarkable potential for good but an equally powerful motivation (and opportunity) for corruption” (Davidson 215). 1In writing about early American gothic fiction, Cathy N.
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