Writing under the Influence: An Examination of Wieland‘s “Well Authenticated Facts” and the Depiction of Murderous Fathers in Post-Revolutionary Print Culture
Daniel E. Williams, University of Mississippi
Volume 15, no. 3-4, April-July 2003
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland or The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) is the story of a man who murdered his family. Believing that God had commanded him, Wieland killed his wife and children, and later, when confronted with the horror of his actions, he took his own life. In his prefatory advertisement, Brown grounded his tale in fact, not fiction. So readers would not take Wieland’s murderous delusions as Brown’s inventions, he declared, “Most readers will probably recollect an authentic case, remarkably similar to that of Wieland.” Although Brown did not identify his “authentic case,” his critics have. In 1801, an anonymous reviewer (possibly Brown himself) in the American Review and Literary Journal pointed out that “the principal incidents, however incredible and shocking, are founded on well authenticated facts, and are sublime and tragical in the highest degree.” The reviewer then authenticated his own facts by referring readers to the sensational account of the James Yates family murder, which had appeared in both the New-York Weekly Magazine and the Philadelphia Minerva during the summer of 1796.
Another ECF article on the topic of “Charles Brockden Brown” is:
Periodical Visitations: Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn
by Louis Kirk McAuley (ECF 19.3, Spring 2007)
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Print Culture” include:
Clarissa Harlowe’s “Ode to Wisdom”: Composition, Publishing History, and the Semiotics of Printed Music
by THOMAS MCGEARY (ECF 24.3, Spring 2012)
True Crime: Contagion, Print Culture, and Herbert Croft’s Love and Madness; or, A Story Too True
by KELLY MCGUIRE (ECF 24.1, Fall 2011)
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