Wieland, or the Transformation

Theodore Wieland hears mysterious voices. Are these the result of delusions, ventriloquism, or divine forces? In this Gothic thriller, novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) portrays a man beset by religious guilt which erupts into mania, transforming him into the murderer of his wife and children. Once the mystery of the controlling voices is revealed, Theodore's sister, Clara, undergoes her own transformation, as she moves from bitterness and despair over her brother's destruction to resignation and, finally, peace. Brown's fascination with the scientifically bizarre and the macabre influenced Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But he sought the solutions to his mysteries in nature and in the depths of the human mind, rather than in the realm of the supernatural.