One thing that struck me as I finished Wieland was the idea of multiple Claras. Like how we talked about
the I-character and the I-narrator and how there were two Claras – the one in
the present who is retelling the story as it happened to her and the past Clara
who is being described in the story.
But as I
began the final chapter something occurred to me: aren’t there really THREE
Claras? There's the one who is telling the story at the beginning of the novel
(who by the end is clearly very emotionally traumatized not only from the
events which have recently occurred to her and her family, but she is also
further traumatized by recounting in detail these events), the I-character
Clara who was maybe a bit naïve or “gifted with ordinary equanimity or
foresight,” and then a third, future (kind of) Clara who narrates only the
final chapter and is a person who is no longer grief-stricken and seems to have
a much more clear view of the world.
These
different Clara’s kinds remind me of how when you’re doing research on an event
for a paper of some kind, there are different types of sources you want to get.
There’s the details from during the event (the I-character Clara), just after
the event (the I-narrator Clara’s commentary on the occurrences), and then
information about the event and what it could mean form commentary that comes a
while after the event has concluded and resolved (the Clara of the final
chapter).
This third Clara is the one whom I
ended up having the most interest in. On some levels, she kinda has a certain
amount of…..I don’t know what. But it makes us question ourselves and what has
been presented to us in the novel when she tells us on the final page that the
victims are to blame for the things that happened to them. “That the evils of
which Carwin and Maxwell were the authors, owed their existence to the errors
of the sufferers.” Okay, maybe this is the reaction that Brown wanted, but, at
least in the world of today and what people our age debate the most about, this
has GOT to cause some sort of reaction to the effect of bringing to
conversation around to rape culture and how we can’t blame the victim.
Who knows? Maybe that statement speaks
on some level about the ideology that we have always been exposed to since the
beginning of this country’s independence. But it may also speak to the state of
mind which Clara has come to be in since these events and is some sort of PTSD.
Again, who knows?
I digress, sorry about the Segway there.
Everyone was thinking it, I merely said it. ANYWAYS, part of why this third
Clara is my favorite is because she acts as a denouement which also allows the reader
to have some sort of closure as to what happens to the other characters other
than assuming that Clara either was really ill and died or killed herself like
she had contemplated so many times throughout the book.
I think her final lines about the
victims being to blame though are a part of how much we trust her as a
narrator. In the very beginning of the novel, we establish that she is a
rational person and can be trusted (though this is somewhat questionable
towards the end) but being able to see her again with full control of her
faculties and not in the throes of sorrow gives us a sense of trust in what she
says to be true.
I feel like she established this
when she explained how she had recovered as far as you can after these sorts of
events when she says, on the first page of that final chapter, “time will
obliterate the deepest impressions. Greif the most vehement and hopeless, will
gradually decay and wear itself out.” And from that moment onward we’re all
like, “Yeah! She didn’t lose her mind!” Well, maybe she did for a while, but
she got better after a bit, it just took some time.
