Wieland, or The Transformation

Congratulations to Viv, my fiancée, who passed her driving test earlier, and will, inevitably, get to drive our lovely new car. I just have to speak to my insurance company, after the long weekend, then she'll be burning rubber across town. If the town ends up red, you'll know she was out painting the town, perhaps in tribute to the car's fiery colour.

I'm reading a chilling 18th century American gothic novelist, Brockden Brown, incidentally, as dark clouds are starting to ensconce the blue skies here in Meadowvale. Before compulsory class readings begin, I figured I'd take in one last recreational book. The book I selected, Wieland or, The Transformation, was written in 1798 in the style of (Radcliffe) Gothic romances like The Mysteries of Udolpho (another title I had hoped to read this summer). Although a scant 58 out of 250 pages into the book, assuredly, I find this book mesmerizing. I'm particularly intrigued by the recurrence of an eerie, intervening, disembodied voice, which is haunting the main characters at their estate. Throw in the spontaneous combustion of the narrator's father, an American religious zealot, too. So far the most intriguing part of this novel is the sense of time artifacts, mechanical or human, such as the narrator's father's clocks, Albigensian (Cathar) books, Moravian wife. I was struck, in particular, by a comment made by the narrator concerning her father's grandfather clock, which she recalled establishes the haunted family's sense of time. That, and this fact compliments of the Charles Brockden Brown Society: "written in epistolary format, Wieland uses actual events—a murder in New York of a wife and children in 1781 by religious fanatic James Yates—as the basis of its story." A story written by the son of Quakers, about religious fanaticism, in the aftermath of the War of Independence. Interesting.