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Theatre: William Shakespear

According to Harold Kittel, "Wieland criticism during the past generation has generally taken a psychological or philosophical tack--either bringing Freudian insights to bear on characters' behavior (particularly Clara's) or examining the ways in which the novel questions Enlightenment assumptions it was formerly thought to dramatize" (Kittel 123). Both approaches have of course served to open the book up nicely, but I would like to look at the novel from a third angle, one that may in fact be closer to Brown's own angle of view--that of literary antecedents or models, specifically Wieland as a Nineteenth-century American re-telling of Shakespeare's Othello, a re-telling that, like Shakespeare's play, depends for its impact on some of the most basic Christian nature metaphors of Genesis. Bayre, among others, has identified Othelloas a possible source for Wieland, but little work has been done on the significance of this background to the interpretation of Brown's tale.[1] I will argue that Brown wrote Wieland as a conscious echo of the Othello story, that he coopts Shakespeare's ontology and uses it to address what is arguably the question of the play, viz., whether there is a moral principle reigning in the universe. The link to Othello is important to a full understanding of Brown's point, because he insists on locating both psychology and philosophy in a decidedly literary frame of reference which asks, ultimately, not about the mind or about systems of knowledge, but about the issue addressed by all great classical literature: what Gods rule the earth, and are they our friends, our enemies, or merely indifferent? Or, to make the same point in a slightly different way, although the landscape of Wielandis clearly a kind of psychological metaphor, and although Lockean issues of perception clearly underlie these psychological issues, there is a third level on which these others implicitly depend. Beverly Voloshin makes this argument of dependence nicely:...