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Charles Brockden Brown and the Conundrum of Complicity
Abstract
Charles Brockden Brown's four major novels, all written between 1798 and 1800, are devoted to the conundrum of moral complicity-The impossibility of pinpointing moral accountability for harms in a world where intersubjective life makes it impossible to separate one person's action from the actions of others. This essay argues that for Brown, this conundrum constituted the narrative precondition of fictional storytelling and served as the source of his fiction's formal innovation, theoretical self-consciousness, and gothic weirdness. This essay suggests, too, that the conundrum of complicity served as the prompt for a synoptic mode of reading that Brown introduced to American fiction.
At the end of the eighteenth century, professional and lay audiences alike negotiated the lines between mental health and disorder, questioning whether criminal behavior, for example, laid within medicine’s jurisdiction. This essay examines the role of literature in developing a “diagnostic logic” that trained readers in evolving forms of mental surveillance. First, it shows how physicians like Benjamin Rush relied on popular and literary sources to create new diagnostic categories, citing newspaper crime reports and Shakespearean plays as medical evidence and encouraging readers to interpret familiar behavior through the lens of pathology. Next, I turn to Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) to demonstrate how the novel’s suspicion of empiricism could paradoxically heighten readers’ desire to sort and predict behavior. Soliciting readers’ interest through scenes of gothic horror, the novel concludes by urging readers to apply their diagnostic skills in more mundane social settings. Moreover, unlike Rush’s straightforward assessment of pathology’s mitigating impact on accountability, Brown’s novel invites readers to reach their own conclusions on the ethical implications of diagnosis. Ultimately, I argue, texts like Wieland did not simply work alongside medical tracts to authorize the surveillance of an increasing number of pathologized behaviors, but deepened readers’ engagement in doing so.
What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, this book contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, the book explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. The book’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In this book’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”
This book presents the first detailed account of the discussion of the free will problem in British philosophy in the 'long' eighteenth century, beginning with Locke and ending with Dugald Stewart. In this period, the question of the nature of human freedom is posed principally in terms of the influence of motives upon the will. On the libertarian side of the debate are those who believe we are free in our choices. A motive, these philosophers hold, is a reason to act in a particular way, but it is up to the agent which motive he acts upon. On the necessitarian side of the debate are those who believe that there is and can be no such thing as freedom of choice. According to these philosophers, there will usually be one motive that is stronger than any other and that determines choice and action. Among the issues raised in eighteenth-century discussion of this issue are the nature of motives, the place of 'indifference' in an analysis of free will, the tenability of a distinction between 'moral' and 'physical' necessity, the relation between the understanding and the will, and internal coherence of the concept of freedom of will. James Harris places this debate in the context of the eighteenth-century concern by introducing the methods of 'experimental' inquiry into the philosophy of mind, and shows that at no point in this period is it uncontroversial that necessitarianism is the natural concomitant of a 'scientific' approach to human choice and action.
This book is about the role causation plays in the attribution of both moral responsibility and legal liability (in the law of crimes, torts, and to a lesser extent, contracts). The book strips away many of the usages of the word 'causation' in law and legal theory, on the grounds that such usages have little to do with causation itself. What remains is the law's use of 'causation' to name a natural relation that is at the heart of both ordinary and scientific explanations of the world. Some normative defense is offered as to why causation in this sense is a proper basis for assessing degrees of both culpability and permissibility in morality and also in law. A more extended metaphysical defense is also offered, as to the nature of the causal relation and as to the nature of the things related by the causal relation. This normative and metaphysical analysis is used as the springboard from which to critique much of what the law currently says about causation, including the law's counterfactual test for cause in fact, its notions of intervening cause, foreseeability, harm within the risk, accomplice liability, the causal status of omissions and of non-omissive allowings, and more besides. The result is a rethinking of causation's nature and role in our legal and moral practices of assigning blame and responsibility.
Henry Home - better known by his judicial title Lord Kames - was an important figure in enlightenment Scotland. Kames published many books and essays across a variety of fields of knowledge. A substantial number of his publications related to his vocation as an advocate, and later a judge, in Scotland. This paper provides an introduction to Lord Kames' rich legal life, particularly the way it was shaped by his experience as a Scottish lawyer in eighteenth-century Edinburgh. The paper is an introduction to a reprint of the third edition of the Principles of Equity, part of the Old Studies in Scots Law series, published by the Edinburgh Legal Education Trust. One of Kames' most important legal works, the Principles of Equity subsequently achieved "institutional" status, that is to say it represents a formal source of law in Scotland. The Principles was the first systematic monograph treatment of equity in English, and contains a sophisticated analysis of the interaction of equity and common law in the abstract, and in relation to Scots law particularly. The paper considers Kames' historically informed account of an evolutionary development of equity, and its underlying justificatory premises, as set out in the Principles. The paper considers how lawyers, and others, in both Scotland and America, cited the Principles in reported cases and doctrinal writing, and how Kames' influence can be sketched through his legal and non-legal works. The final section of the paper considers Kames' subsequent reputation, noting the fluctuating respect accorded to Kames' works, including the Principles, by lawyers. The paper concludes that the on-going development of the meaning and relevance of institutional works in Scotland suggests that a renewed interest in Kames' critical approach is possible.
American Literature 72.4 (2000) 721-750
At a critical moment in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland (1798), Clara Wieland is confronted late at night by Carwin, the mysterious stranger whose appearance in her family circle first disrupted its peace, and then, she believes, destroyed it entirely. Though she has no clear idea how he did it, Clara holds Carwin responsible for the horrors she has recently experienced, including her brother’s ecstatic murder of his wife and four children, and Clara’s rejection by the man she loves, who has come to believe that she was engaged in a degraded sexual affair with Carwin. When she shrieks and collapses at the sight of him, Carwin fearfully demands to know what he has done, admitting only that “‘my actions have possibly effected more than I designed.’” Though her evidence against him is incomplete, Clara continues to insist on Carwin’s culpability:
“Wretch!” I cried when my suffocating emotions would permit me to speak, “the ghosts of my sister and her children, do they not rise to accuse thee? Who was it that blasted the intellects of Wieland? Who was it that urged him to fury, and guided him to murder? Who, but thou and the devil, with whom thou art confederated?”
Commentators have frequently condemned Clara’s apparent “need” to hold Carwin responsible for Wieland’s violence. Her persistence in the belief that “what his agency began, his agency conducted to a close” (266)—even after he explains his ventriloquism and denies using it to “prompt” (225) Wieland to murder—is seen by Norman Grabo as evidence of Clara’s mental instability and by Toni O’Shaughnessy as proof that Clara cannot accept either her own implication in her brother’s subsequent suicide or the existence of multiple and ambiguous causation in general. Andrew Scheiber argues that Clara “displac[es] the blame onto outside elements—namely, Carwin,” out of a need to deny the truth she “has intuitively known all along, but has been loath to admit to herself or others”: that the brother on whom she depends is really “anything but benign or protective.” On a larger interpretive scale, Michael Bell insists that Wieland’s delusions are produced by his own imagination, and that they represent contemporary fears about the dangers of fiction, while Shirley Samuels argues that Wieland “contains a family destroyed from within, though agency is ascribed to outside forces,” and thus the new American “family-republic” is endangered by its own inner potential for destruction. Turning these arguments around, I suggest that it is the critics who need to deny Carwin’s agency, because to admit it would destroy the force of interpretations that depend on Wieland’s violence having been produced solely from within his own damaged mind. When Michael Gilmore declares that Carwin “acknowledges his misconduct, but, as he correctly insists, he has committed no crime punishable by human law,” he is wrong about the law, and consequently, like the other critics named above, wrong about the novel.
For Clara’s belief in Carwin’s guilt makes her neither a fool nor a self-deluded neurotic. She takes precisely the position about Carwin’s criminal responsibility that a well-instructed jury might have reached at the time. If, as the novel strongly implies, Carwin did exploit Wieland’s propensity toward religious mania, if he “urged him to fury and guided him to murder” in a spirit of reckless curiosity, then he is as guilty of the murders as if he had performed them himself and Wieland is relieved of all legal responsibility on the grounds of insanity. Thus, if Clara’s insistence on Carwin’s responsibility is both reasonable and legally defensible, it begins rather than ends the discussion. As many critics have noted, in Wieland connections between motive and act, intent and consequences, are frequently severed or ambiguous. Psychological states are murky and unknowable; external phenomena are often deceptive and unreliable. Yet the novel insists that actions must be judged and questions of responsibility must not be evaded. Significantly...
This paper considers some aspects of the morality of complicity, understood as participation in the wrongs of another. The
central question is whether there is some way of participating in the wrongs of another other than by making a causal contribution
to them. I suggest that there is not. In defending this view I encounter, and resist, the claim that it undermines the distinction
between principals and accomplices. I argue that this distinction is embedded in the structure of rational agency.
Liberty, Necessity, and Moral Responsibility
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Complicity beyond Causality. A Comment
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A Theory of Complicity
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Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, Corrected and Improved
- Kames Henry Home
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Introduction to Principles of Equity by Henry Home, Lord Kames, ix-xxvi
- Lobban Michael
Edited and with an introduction by LobbanMichael. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2644
- Kames Henry Home
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Juries of the Common Reader: Crime and Judgment in the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown
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