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Cicero’s Pro Cluentio and the “Mazy” Rhetorical Strategies of Wieland

Abstract Although Clara Wieland tells us of her brother’s admiration for Cicero, throughout the entirety of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, only one work by Cicero is identified by name. Early in the novel, Pleyel and Wieland are debating the merits of the Oration for Cluentius, a Ciceronian defense for a man accused of poisoning his murderous stepfather, in which Cicero defends sophistry and moral relativism. He argues that a lawyer cannot be held accountable for what he has said in another case. The sophistic arguments Cicero makes in this oration exemplify what bothered Brown most about the legal system. The oration, connected to the novel both thematically and rhetorically, is a key to understanding Wieland. Clara, a “double-tongued” narrator, because she is modeling her own “eloquence” on that of Cicero, recounts a “mazy” story of family violence in which it is impossible to ascertain motive, guilt, or truth. By writing a novel in which sensory evidence cannot be relied upon and truth is obscured by a quest for motive, Brown was able to criticize legal practices that sanctioned sophistry and moral relativity by demonstrating how easily the average reader-juror could be manipulated and confused by an eloquent and unreliable speaker.