Abstract:
In the context of the eighteenth century, the role of women was both complex and
contradictory. Amid the backdrop of emerging liberalisms, women’s subjectivities in the
eighteenth century appeared to be largely constructed by prominent texts that attempted to
contest and curtail women’s ability to function as liberal subjects. One way in which this was
accomplished was through discourse about the female body, which worked to inscribe women’s
supposed vulnerability. The gothic novel is an apt site for interrogating such constructed
vulnerability, as the conventions of gothic horror often position their female heroines in perilous
and precarious circumstances. This is reflected in gothics like Charles Brockden Brown’s
Wieland (1798), where the female protagonist Clara Wieland is terrorized by a host of threats: a
precipice, an abyss, and other perils.
My analysis of Brown’s Wieland focuses on how this American gothic explores questions
about the female subject. I position my discussion of female subjectivity in the context of Judith
Butler’s work on the nature of subject formation as well as Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage.
Accordingly, I propose that women’s subjectivities in the eighteenth century can be read as a
kind of precipice stage, in which prominent ideas about women’s vulnerability—those that
disproportionately exposed them to violence and precarity—were mistaken for articulations of
the female subject’s actual self. This vulnerability, I argue, was instilled as means to reinforce
the self-sufficient liberal (male) subject.
In this paper, I argue that Brown’s exploration of the female subject articulates the
horrific results of this precipice stage for the female subject. The bizarre occurrences that
distinguish Brown’s Wieland—including spontaneous combustion and a ventriloquist hiding in a
closet—not only create conditions of gothic horror, but these conditions allow for interrogating
the consequences of the discursive and deadly forces that ultimately walk women to the edge of
the precipice, where, like in Lacan’s mirror stage, they are shown “themselves.”
