Destroy Thee I Definitely Won’t

On Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

Years ago, for school, I wrote an essay about the novel Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown. It went really well and I got a master’s degree.

But there was something I missed, the first time I wrote about Wieland. Or, I didn’t miss it, but I didn’t pay it the attention it may have deserved: toward the end of the novel, the eponymous character murders his wife and four children. He thinks he has heard the voice of God, or a god of some kind, instructing him to do it, so he does it.

It’s not that I missed the family murder twenty years ago. I just didn’t consider it such an important thing. It happens offstage; both reader and protagonist learn the children and their mother are dead after the fact. The kids aren’t even a prominent part of the story. We are told they exist at some point, and later on we and the protagonist learn that her brother, their father, has killed them.

If you know what Wieland is like, you can hardly blame me for downplaying the part where a dad kills his wife and kids. First published in 1798, the novel is absolutely wild. There is a mischievous, rogue ventriloquist. Another character inherits an estate and lordship in Europe, but he prefers to continue living in Philadelphia. And that’s years after his father spontaneously combusted in the temple he built to a god that only he worshiped or believed in.

At some point, in recent months, I don’t recall why, I remembered that child murder is an important part of Wieland. It mattered more to me in 2025 than it did in 2005.

Henry Fuseli’s The Fire King

In the years between my two readings of Wieland I became a father to two daughters. But I don’t want to overstate the significance of that. You don’t have to have kids to know it is bad when someone kills kids.

What is more substantial than that, I think, is that for twenty years I have heard of many real-life fathers slaughtering their offspring, often though not always along with the women who gave birth to them. I have come to understand, as news of these killings has reached me, that family murder is another one of the incomprehensible things men sometimes do, along with gambling away houses, cars, and life savingses—which men are doing more and more, these days – and other forms of domestic violence.

You might imagine, now that I am 500 words into this essay, why I have had trouble getting started on it. I wanted to write about this once-neglected aspect of Wieland. I realized that in order to do that I would have to spend time contemplating something I have trouble looking at directly.

How, I have wondered, should I establish in this essay that men killing their children is a systemic problem, rather than a bunch of isolated incidents that have nothing to do with each other, or with the offenders’ gender?

How would I insist that it matters? Would I cite statistics of how often parents kill their kids, and how fathers do it more frequently than mothers?

Those have to be some bleak statistics. And like my father before me, I get depressed easily. It doesn’t take much to bring that stuff on.

Maybe, I thought, I could skip writing about Wieland altogether. I could read another Iris Murdoch novel instead. But I awoke one recent morning to a news alert from the Kansas City Star, my city’s threadbare newspaper. It concerned an event from the day before: a local father had taken the lives of his two children in their home. I looked up the street he killed them on, and it was five miles from where I live.

This dad shot both his kids, set fire to their house, and took his own life down the road from the outdoor swimming pool I have taken my kids to many times. It’s a mile past the movie theater where they saw Moana 2 with my wife, their mother, last month. I never met the children this man killed, but they went to schools in the district where I am sometimes a substitute teacher.

I had tried to write this essay several times, and felt too encumbered to carry on. I had turned my attention to other things.

When I heard about these new killings, it’s not like I felt I had the world’s blessing all of a sudden, like the universe was trying to tell me to write this essay. That would be a fairly messed up thing to believe. It was more like I had to recognize that whether I liked it or not this thing I would rather look away from was staring me in the face.

I had at least three things in common with that man who killed his kids, and with many others who have committed his crimes: we were men; we reproduced; and we stuck around to help raise our children, for better or worse. And it’s definitely for worse, in his and similar cases. For me it remains to be seen.

I think I’m doing a good job of raising these two girls, with their mother. I have never done anything to physically hurt them, and if I have harmed them emotionally it was not through malice but clumsiness and everyday insensitivity. I cannot imagine wanting to bring them harm.

But I am willing to bet that some of the murdering fathers would have said those same things, and might well have meant them, before they did what they did.

People change, often not for the better. They lose their jobs. They suffer cataclysmic humiliations, and have no means of coping with them. Their mental health diminishes, sometimes out of nowhere. They develop tumors that put pressure on parts of their brains that influence behavior, like the Marine who shot forty-two people, killing eleven of them, at the University of Texas in 1966. Maybe that violence wasn’t his tumor’s fault; maybe he just felt like killing people; and I have never felt like killing people, least of all my offspring; but that doesn’t mean I never could. I’ve got big hands and my arms are a little strong. Our kitchen has a dozen sharp knives in it, and we live in a country where it’s easier to get a gun than it is to get galleys of a forthcoming book that I might like to review for a reputable publication.

Dark clouds of potential violence hover over everyone. The ones that hang over men are bigger and darker than everyone else’s, because men are the ones who inflict the most pain.

Those dark clouds are, I think, one of the many things Wieland is about.

I remember, from the first time I wrote about the novel, that I had trouble summarizing it. I face the same problem again, today, and it’s a hard one.

Wieland is all over the place. It’s like if Shirley Jackson wrote The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle as one epistolary novel, with a narrator who is trying to keep track of events that unfold around her in real-time. I’ve just finished reading it again, after all these years, and I think the only way to sum it up succinctly is to omit major events from the accounting.

Clara Wieland lives with her brother, his wife, their children, and their friend Pleyel on a farm some miles outside Philadelphia. It is the eighteenth century, not long before the American Revolution. They had a father, who established the farm, but he died under mysterious circumstances. The Wieland family claims it was spontaneous combustion. Their patriarch went to the temple and prayed every day, to the god only he knew about. But at some point his god abandoned him, or so he thought, and this ruined his state of mind. Later, that god caused him to burst into flames, and he died.

If you tell someone you’re reading Wieland, by the way, and they have heard of the novel, they are likely to nod, laugh, and say, “You mean the spontaneous combustion book? You’re reading that one? Huh.” This is the condescending response I got twenty years ago from other grad students in my program.

At the start of the novel, the Wieland children are all grown up and having the time of their lives. They spend their days discussing rhetoric and philosophy. It seems likely that Clara will marry Pleyel. It is only a matter of time before he proposes.

But things get weird. Theodore Wieland, Clara’s brother, goes to fetch something from another building on the farm. He returns empty handed and disoriented. He is convinced that his wife has just called to him, summoning him back to her company without delay. But she cannot have done that, they assure him. She was right there the whole time. She didn’t call to anyone, she was hanging out quietly inside.

One night, in her room, Clara hears men talking in her closet. As she listens she realizes they are making plans to rape and murder her. She runs from the house in terror. But there is no sign of any men having been in there. Was it her imagination? What is going on?

Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers

Into their midst comes a stranger named Carwin. Clara thinks he is ugly, and that he looks common. But he speaks well. He is charming. He befriends Pleyel, and one night Pleyel is on his way to see Clara when he overhears her having an amorous time with another man, out under the night sky. He feels betrayed. He leaves the farm. When Clara catches up to him in town, he tells her what he heard. She has no clue what he is talking about and denies it. But he doesn’t listen. She returns to the farm in defeat.

Clara gathers that Carwin, the mysterious stranger, has had something to do with all of this. She isn’t sure what. And I really am skipping over some events here—but it isn’t long before Wieland, Clara’s brother, murders his wife and children, claiming he was ordered to do it by a raging deity. He was only obeying divine orders.

He is taken to the nearest prison, and Carwin soon confesses to Clara his involvement in recent events. He is responsible for some of them—but, he insists, not all of them.

Carwin is what’s called a biloquist, a kind of superpowered ventriloquist. He can mimic any voice he hears with uncanny accuracy, and he can throw his voice quite a long way away. He can make it sound like two men are plotting to rape you from inside your closet. He can make it sound like your wife is calling you back to a building you have walked away from. He can stand nearby and convince you that your chaste girlfriend is making love to another man. He can perhaps even make you believe that God, or a god, has ordered you to kill your wife and children.

After Carwin’s confession, Wieland escapes from his prison cell. He goes straight to Clara. He explains to her what he has done. He says that although he felt conflicted about it, he led his wife to the site of her murder, under God’s orders, and told her, “I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must.” Then he took her life, having already killed their kids.

He is about to end Clara’s life, when Carwin uses his uncanny vocals to tell him, in the voice of a god, to stop what he is doing. “Man of errors!” he bellows: “cease to cherish thy delusion: not heaven or hell, but thy senses have misled thee to commit these acts. Shake off thy phrenzy, and ascend into rational and human. Be lunatic no longer.”

It works. Wieland realizes what he has done, and in a state of extreme despair he stabs himself to death.

Wieland is a strange novel. It is made no less weird by the nagging ambiguity of some of its major events. Given, for example, that Carwin is a mischievous biloquist, it seems altogether likely that he is responsible for Wieland killing his family, that he modulated his voice so as to convince the poor guy that God was telling him to slaughter his spouse and offspring. But when Carwin confesses to Clara he insists that while he was indeed behind the other voices she and her friends have been hearing, that one wasn’t him. Yes, he has this great power, and it’s true he can’t help himself from using it to cause trouble. But he maintains that he had nothing to do with the deaths of her nieces, nephews, and sister-in-law.

Carwin could be lying. But he is vehement in his denials of responsibility, when it comes to inspiring homicides. He is—arguably—pretty convincing. If nothing else, his denial leaves open the possibility that he had nothing to do with Wieland’s crimes, that they were divinely inspired.

When I first wrote about the novel, I took the position that Carwin is telling the truth when he denies complicity in Wieland’s murders. One reason for this is that when Wieland hears the voice of God telling him to do these awful things, he sees a bright light shining down on him, much like the light that was seen from afar by witnesses to the elder Wieland’s supposed spontaneous combustion. Those events could be linked to one another. There really could be a minor god of some kind, a resident spirit of Philadelphia that’s blowing people up and telling them to kill their families. Carwin may have happened to be there at the same time.

I always thought that Wieland is, in this way, not unlike an eighteenth-century X-Files, with skeptical heroes who don’t know what to believe when they are presented with mysteries that only seem to deepen upon investigation, and which appear to be supernatural. Thinking about it now, I wonder if Twin Peaks is a better equivalent, with evil spirits running amok in the woods, and utter confusion on the part of the investigators as to how those spirits work.

And, as long as we’re here, I will briefly explain the thesis I wrote about Wieland. I read up on trickster narratives, particularly those told by Native Americans, and argued that Carwin is essentially a trickster figure. He’s like Bugs Bunny, a modern trickster if there ever was one: he is common but charming; he has his way of bending reality to his will; and when he comes into contact with stuck-up jerks he can’t help finding some way to undermine them.

I look back on that argument with a degree of skepticism. Insisting that Carwin is a trickster, like you find in Native American folklore, seems to me now like something uncomfortably akin to cultural appropriation. Most of the work on trickster narratives that I drew on was by white authors, and maybe that wasn’t my fault; but suffice it to say, while I don’t regret writing the thesis I did, I wouldn’t do it quite the same way now.

What the trickster-narrative reading of Wieland gave rise to, and what interests me more, is the way that identifying Carwin as an antihero flips the narrative on its head. When I read Wieland, I was reluctant to see Clara as the hero and Carwin as the villain, which is how Charles Brockden Brown seems to present it. Sure, Carwin does some messed up things; he should know better than to simulate the voices of rapists and scare women at night. But he never hurts anyone physically, and we don’t know for sure that he did anything worse than frighten Clara. It really is unclear whether he got those children and their mother killed. And if he didn’t, then all he has done is mess with rich people, whom I think the novel portrays as deserving to be messed with.

It is established early on that the Wieland family are displaced European aristocrats. They have wealth and they don’t have to work. They spend all of their time absorbed in reading and arguing about Cicero. At one point, Clara mentions that a war has broken out, and not only are they completely uninvolved, they find it stimulating. She tells us:

The sound of war had been heard, but it was at such a distance as to enhance our enjoyment by affording objects of comparison. The Indians were repulsed on the one side, and Canada was conquered on the other. Revolutions and battles, however calamitous to those who occupied the scene, contributed in some sort to our happiness, by agitating our minds with curiosity, and furnishing causes of patriotic exultation.

I don’t know what Brown intended by putting these words in Clara’s mouth, but she comes across to me like the kind of person who goes out flag-waving when the United States bombs a new country. War is a hideous thing. It gets people killed, but for the Wielands it’s an exciting diversion, a cause for “exaltation.”

The most damning thing of all is that these people either own or have recently owned slaves. It’s easy to miss that detail, as it’s buried in an early paragraph in which Clara tells the story of how her father came to live outside Philadelphia:

For a while he relinquished his purpose, and purchasing a farm on Schuylkill, within a few miles of the city, set himself down to the cultivation of it. The cheapness of land, and the service of African slaves, which were then in general use, gave him who was poor in Europe all the advantages of wealth. He passed fourteen years in a thrifty and laborious manner.

She mentions the slaves “were then in general use,” implying that maybe the family doesn’t still own slaves. But having recently owned slaves isn’t much better than currently owning them.

The point is, when I read the novel, I knew that Brown likely saw Carwin as the villain, but I took him to be a kind of exterminator. He wanders the countryside, finds these displaced aristocrats, and gets to work relocating them to Europe where they belong. And that is where Clara ends up; she mentions in the final chapters that she’s gotten married and is living out the rest of her days in the Old World.

One of the odd details of Wieland is that when Brown published it, he mailed a copy to Thomas Jefferson, who was at that time serving as president of the United States. This has been taken to be significant, a sign the author was trying to tell Jefferson something by writing his novel. Wieland is taken to be a kind of warning, in which the Wieland family represents the young, imperiled nation, and Brown demonstrates how vulnerable they are to threats represented by Carwin. Or something like that.

It’s a brilliant thing to do, to send your novel to the president, because people even several hundred years later might well wonder why you did that, and try to figure it out. It appears to mean, if nothing else, that you’re trying to communicate something urgent, as it must be heard by the most powerful man around.

Twenty years ago, I liked to think that in Wieland Brown was maybe portraying for Jefferson the vestigial Europeans who lived on inherited wealth and were not doing the young United States any favors. It’s not such a bad thing, when they get ousted by the wandering ventriloquist. Let’s get these losers out of our country.

It doesn’t matter so much to me now what Brown was trying to tell Jefferson. It’s possible he wasn’t trying to tell him anything. I’m preoccupied now with how Brown wrote a novel about a father who kills his kids, and we live in a nation where dads kill their kids.

I am hung up on it. It bothers me.

Here is one of the bleak statistics I referred to earlier: according to an Indianapolis Star analysis of media reports and data from Gun Violence Archive, between 2020 and mid-2023 there were at least 227 family annihilations across the U.S. The death toll: 754. Family annihilators killed themselves in 64 percent of cases.

I don’t know if it’s necessary to cite these figures, but I didn’t know until I looked into this that the word for these crimes is filicide.

It is true that mothers kill their children sometimes. We are more likely to hear about it when they do. Casey Anthony is a household name, but until I googled “men who killed their children and wives” I had never heard of Coloradoan Chris Watts, who strangled his wife to death and suffocated their two daughters in 2018; or Brandon Allan Kendrick II, who killed his wife and four children, two of which weren’t his, by shooting them in their heads, in Alabama in 2024; or Idaho’s Chad Daybell, who was convicted of killing his wife and his girlfriend’s two children in 2019. According to the news, Chad and his girlfriend thought the apocalypse was coming. They believed the children were zombies whose bodies were still moving despite the kids inside them being already dead.

These men are each responsible for a lot more death than Casey Anthony, but they got a lot less publicity. I can’t verify the reason for that, but I imagine it has something to do with how our culture jumps at every chance to portray women as hysterical freaks who can’t be trusted. That is more or less what my doctor said, at least, when I told her I was writing this essay at my annual physical.

Other dads might not be like me. I wonder if sometimes they do consider killing their families, and will fold their arms and scoff at me for virtue-signaling when I insist I have never felt the murder impulse at home.

But I’m not too worried about it. I doubt many dads will fold arms. They do kill their families sometimes, but I wouldn’t say it’s commonplace.

Is rage commonplace? I don’t know. Maybe it is among fathers. I, myself, don’t have much of it.

I have sadness. I have trouble getting out of bed some mornings. I can be morose when I should be happy.

Where, though, in the life I have now, could blinding rage come from? Through what crack in the foundation of my psyche could it go seeping in?

The cracks are definitely there. Rage is a thing that seeps.

At noon on a Sunday, in January—not that the time of year matters—I was lying on the floor of my living room with some blank pages and this pen, intending to address myself to that question. I had been thinking about sources of murderous rage for several days. I thought I knew what I had to say. I had been looking for a chance to write these words down. I thought I had found one.

Just as I made it to the end of writing one sentence, my elder daughter Moriah walked into the room. She wanted to show me she had figured out how to yo-yo.

It never fails: if the kids are in the house, and I turn my attention away from something frivolous like scrolling social media to something that seems more worthwhile, like writing, or reading a book, one of the kids will come in and interrupt me. It’s like they can sense my tenuous ability to concentrate from the other end of our house. They know they must find me and break it.

I watched Moriah yo-yo with the yo-yo, forgetting what I had been about to write. It would come back when I turned again to the page before me.

Before I could do that, though, she asked if I would watch a TV show with her. She is twelve and recently discovered Stranger Things. Her mother, Stefanie, and I never got past the first episode of season four, when we watched the show. We don’t like the sound of bones and a jaw being twisted and snapped out of place. We’re sensitive people. But since Moriah was watching the show, I thought I would join her for season four. I would brave the unpleasant sound effects in the name of spending time with her.

I was glad to do that. Whenever I am able, I will drop what I am doing to accommodate her. Her time is more important than any essay. I was afraid of my father, growing up, and would not have asked him to join me in doing anything. I mess things up all the time, but at least I haven’t inspired fear in my children.

And I am not about to say that interruptions like this one are potentially maddening; or that if they increased in frequency, or were even less well-timed than they are already, I could see myself reaching a breaking point and asking to borrow my neighbor’s gun for a few minutes.

I lay on the TV room floor, watching Stranger Things. It was an episode that featured Robert Englund, from A Nightmare on Elm Street. He plays an old man who was long ago convicted of killing his wife and children. He maintained all along that it was the work of a terrible demon. It’s really not unlike what happens in Wieland.

But I have been thinking—and I promise this is relevant, or that I’m convinced it is—that one feature of my life as I currently inhabit it is that I no longer have a will. I don’t really want anything anymore. I buy stuff sometimes, but I am not motivated by strong desires. I lack goals and vision.

I don’t make plans for things I want to do with my time, because I know how unlikely it is that if I make a plan I’ll get to follow through with it. I may wake up one morning wanting to visit the art museum, where I’ll look at nice paintings. But if Rose wants to go to the YMCA swimming pool, or Moriah wants to visit a vintage clothing store, then if I insist on following through with my desire to see the great art we have in Kansas City, it will make Stefanie’s day more difficult. She will have to take the kids someplace, and a little more of the burden of caring for them will shift to her.

She carries enough burdens as it is. I don’t want to see the art so much that I’m willing to make her Sunday more difficult.

Everyone is better off if it doesn’t occur to me to want anything. And so it mostly doesn’t. Over the years, I have in large part trained desire out of myself.

I do things for the sake of my own happiness. I can be selfish. But mostly I am here to please others. After twelve years of fatherhood, I am more C3PO than Han Solo, more Blaster than Master, more Jimmy Hart than Ted DiBiase.

The things I say, feel, do, and want matter—but they matter one-quarter the amount they matter for people without families and spouses. They are missing out on a lot, not being part of families, but they are whole in a way that I can’t be. I wouldn’t trade what I have for what they’ve got, but I can’t deny that I envy how they can watch a 76ers game at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon from start to finish—whereas when I, on that recent Sunday, attempted to do the same, Moriah returned, and asked if we could watch another episode of Stranger Things.

I was glad to turn off the game and watch Stranger Things. I find scripted television more interesting than sports, and I like Moriah. Also, I’m not sure I even like the 76ers. I just started watching basketball and don’t know what team to root for yet.

And I don’t mean to suggest I am resentful about this loss of will, or whatever it is I’m describing. All I mean to do is probe my life as I currently live it for weaknesses.

One thing I do not have is an apocalyptic reverence for my father, or the memory of my father, or for father figures in general. That could be the most crucial thing, the part that keeps me from doing something rash to my family.

Wieland is not a novel that probes its characters’ psychologies, but it’s clear that younger Wieland is influenced by what happened to the elder. The bright light that killed their dad appears to him, and when that illumination tells him what to do he believes he must obey. He thinks it’s God speaking to him, the ultimate Father, who delivered judgment on his literal father and ended his life. He whines that he doesn’t want to kill his wife and kids, but that doesn’t stop him from getting the job done.

And it may well be the job his father failed to do. In chapter one, when we hear about the elder Wieland growing convinced that his personal god abandoned him, shortly before his spontaneous combustion, we get his explanation for the falling out between him and his personal deity:

When he designed to be communicative, he hinted that his peace of mind was flown, in consequence of deviation from his duty. A command had been laid upon him, which he had delayed to perform. He felt as if a certain period of hesitation and reluctance had been allowed him, but that this period was passed. He was no longer permitted to obey. The duty assigned to him was transferred, in consequence of his disobedience, to another, and all that remained was to endure the penalty.

What could the command have been that he saw fit to disobey? Did his god tell him to kill Clara and her brother, when they were still children, along with their mother? Is it the job of every father on this plantation to eradicate the younger generation, lest they themselves be set ablaze by a higher power?

I am writing this in early 2025, a time when folks like me are watching the news to see what our madman president will do next. Soon after his inauguration, Mel Gibson was ecstatic on the news. He was so glad we had our vengeful president back. He couldn’t wait to see what he would do. He said on live TV, “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off, you know?”

I had heard Tucker Carlson say a similar thing, not long before then. And while on the one hand I am inclined to write these statements off as nothing more than indications that these men entertain rape fantasies, I hear in their words a certain mania for something like what Wieland does in Wieland. Daddy’s taking his belt off. What if he decides the belt is not enough? What if this time he’s really had it? What if Daddy’s madder than he’s ever been, and his mind is like the mouth of an erupting volcano? You will fall in and be consumed once and for all.

I’m not religious, at all. My dad was angry a lot, but my mother taught me patience and mercy. My elder brothers showed me I didn’t have to be like our dad.

Our father wasn’t even a bad guy. He just had a temper, and was willing to thrash me with his belt when I was three years old or so. I can’t fathom doing that, myself, but the man was born in 1942. Who knows. He got easier to live with as time passed. He didn’t instill in me the kind of rage and terror that leads men to madness, and for that I am thankful.

And I have anchors that keep me from spiraling, the way men of middle age in the US often do. I have Stefanie to keep me from adopting wrong ideas. The kids are old enough to do the same in a pinch. If I started listening to podcasts that insist I eat raw beef for longevity, shout at neighborhood cats to make my voice strong, and replenish my mannish energy by harassing women outside a Planned Parenthood, one of these people who live with me would say something. They would save me from myself.

If I lost those anchors, who knows what might happen. Even if I didn’t lose them, I can see how things could go sideways.

Let’s say I started feeling religious and joined a church, and didn’t realize until I was fully involved in it that they were a doomsday cult. Let’s say someone new moved in across the street, a secular Jim Jones or miscellaneous miscreant, who identified me as a pliable man—which I know I kind of am—and proceeded to break me down and usher me toward unspeakable crimes over the course of eighteen months.

What if I experienced some kind of breakdown, and thought I heard the voice of God saying my family had to leave this world, and I with them? What if my happy participation in this four-person unit turned sharply in another direction?

I can say with confidence that I don’t see family violence anywhere on the horizon of my life. But the problem with horizons is that there are things beyond them you can’t see.

That, I think, is the wisdom in Wieland, the part that’s truly scary. All it takes is a command given in the right voice to inspire a man to annihilate his family. And that depiction of the American man has only grown more harrowing, as men have gotten more isolated. There’s a loneliness epidemic. Suicide rates are high, and there are any number of disembodied voices echoing in people’s homes that inspire outlandish beliefs and behaviors that get people hurt or worse. They don’t come from biloquists, they come from podcasters. Look into the vacant eyes of Joe Rogan or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and you might well understand why Charles Brockden Brown would worry for his fellow Americans–who, in the two centuries since he wrote Wieland, have not lost their capacity for inventing their own personal gods, and worshipping and obeying them at the expense of everything.

What if the thing he wanted Thomas Jefferson to know was that the country he led was full of gullible, isolated cranks who were ready to commit mass murder at the drop of a hat? What if he wanted to tell the president that his people were in danger of becoming what we now are?