In this notebook (also used by his father) Brown first set down an outline for Wieland. Permission for use can be obtained from Pamela Sinkler Todd through The Library CompanyĬharles Brockden Brown. Never before exhibited publicly, this Sharples, almost surely a youthful Brockden Brown, has been handed down to his now-closest descendant and literary executrix. Many of his pastels hung in Peale’s Museum, then on the upper floor of Independence Hall. English-born Sharples limned most of the important men of the new nation in its capital after he arrived here in 1793. It might still make a good Tim Burton musical in the vein of Sweeney Todd. Still in print today, her supremely creepy narrative dominated American Gothic for half a century. In a new nation where sometimes the voice of the people is misperceived as the voice of God, this Americanized version of the Bible’s Abraham has a new twist: Was that God speaking, or that suspicious ventriloquist lurking around the neighborhood? At the crucial moment, the voice stays Wieland from slaying his sister Clara, who survives to tell the tale. His son turns the place into a neo-classical Temple of Reason, and there gets another divine decree – to sacrifice his family. But when he disobeys an unnamed heavenly command, he spontaneously combusts. Wieland’s mystic father prays ardently in the summer house he built near his mansion overlooking the Schuylkill.
0 kommentar(er)
