By removing all sense of structured liberty from the novel, Brockden Brown shows that individual space is easily corruptible and that the new nation might not be as stable as hoped if it continues to be defined by individualistic desires.

Brockden Brown’s novel utilizes the power of the American gothic to destabilize the American conception of freedom as liberty to put faith in institutions. Theodore kills his own family when he hears what he believes is God calling on him to fulfill his duty of sacrifice. Because Theodore Wieland’s commitment to his own ideas of God is unchecked, he easily falls prey to the influence of voices and outside influences on his psyche. Clara and Theodore Wieland grow up without one religious sect to set their worship and moral codes this excess of freedom is ultimately what ends up tearing their life apart. In Charles Brockden Brown’s colonial novel Wieland, published in 1798, this controversial rhetoric of autonomy is interrogated through the family structure of the Wielands. Fears explored in the early American Gothic are still relevant in modern day society because the United States has yet to reach a unified consensus on what it means to be a truly free society. Freedom in the new nation meant, and still does mean, the freedom to work within and obey the established power structure. Eric Savoy, American critic, writes that “the specificity of American Gothic, what makes it distinctly American, does not come just from formulaic plots and situations of an aristocratic genre being adapted to the democratic situation of the new world” but rather that it troubles “the locus of cultural and political authority after the revolution and the perfectibility of human beings in a democracy” (Savoy 168). This genre emerged in direct conversation with the United States’ attempts to discover what exactly freedom meant in the fledgling republic. The American Gothic has a distinctly nationalistic undercurrent that reflects and challenges the precepts of the burgeoning nation in which it was formed. Wieland: Autonomy and The American Gothic

Wieland charles brown