[For this year’s
installment in my
annual Halloween series,
I’ll be AmericanStudying serial killers in American culture and history. Add
your boos and other thoughts in comments, please!]
On two ways a
singular American novel prefigures dominant horror narratives.
Theodore
Wieland, the killer in Charles
Brockden Brown’s Gothic novel Wieland; or the Transformation: An American Tale (1798), isn’t exactly a serial killer,
but he’s certainly a mass murderer: Theodore kills his wife Catharine, their
four young children, and a family friend in a murdering spree that the novel (or
at least its somewhat unreliable first-person narrator, Theodore’s sister Clara
Wieland) ultimately blames on a combination of the ventriloquist villain Carwin
and a streak of instability in the Wieland family. Brockden Brown’s book, long
considered one
of the first American novels, is as that brief description indicates also unique
and deeply strange, combining Revolutionary-era debates over Enlightenment
philosophy and science with Gothic suspense and horror, Clara’s sometimes
contradictory and always complex narrative voice and perspective with extended pseudo-medical
treatises on spontaneous combustion (the official cause of death for Theodore
and Clara’s father, a German immigrant and religious cult leader whose
unexpected end foreshadows Theodore’s tragedy) and Carwin’s “biloquism.”
Yet despite
those unique details and qualities, Brockden Brown’s novel still helped
establish (nearly as much as the works of his much more famous Gothic
countryman Edgar Allan Poe) some key tropes that have remained central to
our American horror stories for the subsequent two centuries. For one thing,
Theodore’s descent into madness and murder is clearly linked to both a
tellingly haunted place (the family’s isolated country estate) and a
nonscientifically hereditary horror (his father’s ailment and death). While
those elements have long been associated
with European Gothic fiction, they’re sometimes seen as absent from an
American tradition (as in Hawthorne’s
famous quote about why it’s so difficult to write a romance in this too-new
nation). Yet I would argue the opposite—that works like Wieland (and Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Poe’s
“Fall of the House of Usher,” and others) helped wed those Gothic elements to
an American context, originating a horror tradition that was both universal and
national (if to differing degrees—Poe’s “Usher” has far fewer specific American
elements than do Brown’s and Irving’s texts). Theodore Wieland’s is a
foundational American horror story to be sure.
As is Clara
Wieland’s, I would argue. Brockden Brown’s choice to write his novel in the
voice of a female first-person narrator is a striking one, particularly in his
late 18th century moment, and scholars have often linked or paralleled
it to Carwin’s ventriloquism and that central theme of voice and authority in
the novel overall. Yet I believe Clara also represents an interesting early
iteration of a hugely prominent 20th and 21st century
horror trope: the
“final girl,” the female protagonist who is threatened by the
slasher/killer yet ultimately outlasts and defeats him (often with the help of
a somewhat relucatant significant other, as Clara is eventually aided by her
suitor Henry Pleyel but only after he accuses her of a relationship with the
charismatic Carwin). Clara is threatened and menaced by both Theodore and
Carwin, and yet—or rather also—the latter pursues her romantically, linking her
gender and sexuality to the dangers and horrors she faces in a way that also
prefigures many elements of the final girl trope. “He had not escaped the
amorous contagion,” Clara writes
at one point of a complex romantic relationship—and while the phrase
reflects her (and Brown’s) often tortured prose, it also indicates the novel’s
close associations of love and madness, romance and horror. Associations that have
certainly endured into our own horror narratives.
Next killer
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other American killers or scares you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment