Narrators and Character - Multiple Claras in "Wieland"

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.