Wieland

The Welsh name, Carwin, means “blessed,” but Carwin seems to be the opposite of blessed. He has been described as the most interesting and complex character in the story, but “character” may be the wrong word. Carwin embodies the archetypal trickster who introduces mischief and chaos, often bringing out unacknowledged tensions in a situation and provoking change in other characters. Tricksters such as Hermes, Loki, and Puck get themselves and others into difficulties as a result of impulsive behavior, but they often repent their mischief—as Carwin does—and put everything back as it was, albeit with some new, hard-won knowledge.

Although Carwin is present very early in the story, Clara does not become aware of him until she sees him walking across her land in the guise of a clown. Her strongest impression of him at that first sight is of a bent or stooping figure, a powerful invocation of Caliban from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The Tempest provides little description of Caliban other than that he is beastlike, but the character is typically represented as bent or stooped, and Clara’s description emphasizes the figure’s bowed head and sunken chest. The whole impression is one of stooping forward like an animal. The association with The Tempest is reinforced when Clara refers to the storm as a “tempest.”

In Wieland, the two aspects of the trickster are reflected in the temple and the summerhouse. The temple stands on a high promontory overlooking the river, and there, the characters hear a voice coming out of the air which seems to be associated with protection and guidance. The summerhouse lies in a hollow in the bank on the other side of the river. There, Carwin’s disguised voice seems to come out of the earth. Caliban is associated with sexuality, and in the summerhouse, Carwin dallies with the maid, Judith. There also, he plays his malicious trick on Henry, pretending to expose Clara’s sexual licentiousness.

Clara’s association of the figure with the pastoral setting of nature and agriculture also suggests the Greek demigod Pan, who is depicted as a man with the legs of a goat—note Clara’s emphasis on Carwin’s legs being long and thin—and depictions of Pan in art often show him slightly bent forward. Pan is also associated with sexuality and with mental instability, which links him to Theodore and to Clara’s stormy night and day spent contemplating Carwin’s face.

Carwin’s reference to Hermes further reinforces the trickster archetype. Hermes is a trickster and a messenger, and in her description of him, Clara makes a pronounced reference to his “slouched hat”; a slouch hat is a hat with a brim and low crown like a fedora, which resembles the petasus worn by Hermes in classical sculpture.

The characters who survive ultimately come to a better understanding of themselves and the nature of reality, and that is the function of the trickster. As Clara observes at the end of her final letter, if the characters had engaged their power of critical thought and placed reason and foresight over emotion, they would have been inured to Carwin’s tricks. In a broader philosophical sense, where order prevails, false beliefs can flourish unchallenged, and an injection of chaos may be necessary to burn away the falsity so that the characters can deal directly with reality.

Theodore means “Gift of God.” He seeks a closer union with God but falls instead into mental illness and death. At the start of the novel, Theodore is gentle, loving, sympathetic, and devoted to his wife, children, and sister. He is also a deeply passionate and deeply spiritual man. Possibly his most heroic moment in the story comes when Theodore says he is not meant to dominate his wife and family but to love and care for them. His kindness makes it all the more tragic when he kills his entire family under the delusion that he has been told to do so by God.

Like the other characters in the story, Theodore is prey to false beliefs. In his case, he longs to feel the euphoria of a direct connection to God, whereas the stark reality is that humans are not given that connection, particularly in the Protestant faith to which the Wielands nominally adhere. In addition, like Clara, Wieland takes for granted the existence of supernatural entities who can speak to humans. He considers the supernatural explanations for the disembodied voices as being far more likely than any human deception. Thus, when he and Henry both hear the voice in the temple, Wieland begins researching the Daemon of Socrates, which was supposed to have spoken to the philosopher, giving him good advice.

Theodore is particularly vulnerable to deception because mental illness appears to run on both sides of his family. His grandfather on his mother’s side appears to have experienced a delusional episode in which he believed his dead brother spoke to him and told him to kill himself. Wieland Sr. appears to have had bipolar disorder and possibly schizophrenia. People with schizophrenia or those who are experiencing a manic episode can have extreme difficulty in distinguishing reality from delusion. By breaking down the distinction, Carwin probably precipitates Theodore’s delusional state.

Carwin’s role as the trickster is to expose weakness so that it can be burned away—as was metaphorically the case with Wieland’s father. Tragically, once his delusions are removed, Wieland is unable to live with reality.

A name of French origin, Henry means “Head of the Household,” and although Henry Pleyel tries to play that role, he does it poorly. He pressures Theodore to lay claim to an ancestral seat in Europe, making the argument that if Theodore, as head of his household, makes up his mind to go, then Clara and Catherine—effectively his chattel—will do what he likes. Theodore Wieland, in possibly his finest moment in the story, chides Henry, saying that Theodore’s role as head of household is not to dominate said household but to care for it. Later, Henry moves into Clara’s house—assuming the role of head of her household—and takes it on himself to unfairly judge Clara over supposed tryst with Carwin, even after her brother accepts Clara’s account of that fateful night without reservation.

Catherine’s brother is boisterous, playful, and full of gaiety, but he is also capable of gravity when the situation demands. Unlike Catherine and Clara, he appreciates Theodore’s intellectual bent and shares Wieland’s interest in philosophy and religion.

Carwin’s intervention exposes Henry’s superficiality. Henry exhibits a lack of social acuity when he tells Clara that he has watched her closely and studied her in great detail so that the woman he loves can benefit by Clara’s example. His unusual attention toward Clara misleads her into thinking she is the object of his affection; it more than likely prompted her infatuation in the first place. In addition, he apparently doesn’t realize how insulting it is to Theresa–the girl he ostensibly loves–to tell her she should be more like Clara.

Wieland Sr. is subject to depression which evolves into bipolar disorder as he reaches adulthood. He becomes obsessed with religion and evangelism and is eventually consumed in an episode that appears to be one of spontaneous combustion. He is either a warning against the dangers of religious fanaticism or an example of how religious fanaticism may be an expression of an underlying mental illness such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. In either case, his religious fervor literally has the effect of burning him up from the inside. The manner of his death greatly influences Clara’s inability to accept the idea of a purely human agency behind their troubles. It raises the question of how one is to cope with the unknown in a rational world.

Mrs. Baynton is a friend to the Wieland family. The author gives no description or other background of the character. She lives halfway between Mettingen, where the Wielands live, and the farm owned by Henry Pleyel. She serves as a plot contrivance employed wherever the author wants to provide the characters with a place to stop and think or to have highly coincidental chance encounters.

Described only as beautiful, sweet, and virtuous, Louisa is 14 at the time of the story. Her mother, also named Louisa, fled England when her daughter was an infant. Louisa’s role in the story is to give the author an opportunity to recount the circumstances of her parents’ separation, using the tale as another opportunity to show how the intellectual or moral weakness of the victim contributes to their downfall.

Major Stuart is Louisa’s father. He plays no role in the story of Clara Wieland, but he provides Clara with an opportunity to demonstrate the danger of uncontrolled emotionality and a lack of critical thinking. As Clara points out, if he had not pursued a pointless revenge against a man who was at most tangentially responsible for the deaths of Stewart’s wife and daughter, he would not have died so young.

Judith, Clara’s maid, has an affair with Carwin and allows him into the house when Clara is gone. She boasts to Carwin about Clara’s fearlessness, which leads to Carwin’s little drama in Clara’s closet, in which he claims to have been testing her boldness.

When confessing to Clara, Carwin demands that he not be accused of seducing Judith. While Judith has many good qualities, she grew up in an environment where she was taught to trade on her physical charms, so she was not an unwilling or naïve object of his interest. This is one of two instances where Carwin is a defender of female sexuality. He doesn’t denigrate Judith as wanton or immoral; he acknowledges that she is a product of her environment, implying that the moral condemnation of female sexuality is located in society, not in the value of the woman herself.