Our good friend the "mysterious voice" pays Clara another visit on page 97. As she is about to open the closet and reveal whatever horror might lie inside, she hears a scream warning her not to open the door. This warning bears close resemblance to the previous contact the voice has with Clara at the summer house. Both times, she is cautioned against danger by this invisible entity. Both occurrences sparked my curiosity, and led me to speculate about the identity of this voice.
In the scene where Clara discovers Carwin in her closet, Carwin alludes to the fact that the voice/spirit that seems to watch over Clara is preventing him from bringing harm to her. Carwin's statement led me to think that the spirit is probably not your stereotypical, frightening "ghost," but rather, a guardian. Cutting right to the chase, I think there's a good chance that the voice is that of her father's spirit. This speculation also gives some small explanation as to the strange circumstances of her father's death, because I think he sacrificed himself to a higher being in order to have the opportunity to forever protect his children. The fact that Clara was about to read the book her father wrote immediately prior to hearing the voice in this scene is, in my opinion, Brockden Brown's way of hinting at the fact that there is a connection between it and her father.
When it comes to if the mysterious voice was Clara's dad I would have to respectfully disagree. I believe that the entire point of Brown's novel is to get the characters to truly question what they know about god/spirituality. Thus far Brown has placed us in a scenario where all the characters believe there to be some super natural incident, but then later realize that the incident is something that can be explain in the natural world.
ReplyDeleteI have come to the hypothesis that the mysterious voice is none other than her lover (or what to be lover) Playel. But how? How could it possibly be that the lover turns out to be the mysterious voice? As we see in Chapter 13, start at page 138, Playel goes into a very in depth (nearly the entire chapter) explanation on how he "monitors" Clara on a daily basis and takes very detailed notes. I feel as if Playel has to be the voice since he shadows Clara obsessively, if he was not then he would have provided a description of the source of the voice during said explanation of shadowing. This of course is just one person's opinion, but the way the author has been going with this novel I believe that there must be some sort of human explanation as to the voice that has been following Clara and other characters that we have seen.
If you believe that Pleyel is indeed the mysterious voice that is continually warning Clara of danger, than why does he warn her not to open the closet and then later accuse her of having an affair. If he was able to see that she was about to open the closet and was able to know that, if not Carwin, then something dangerous was within the closet, how could he not have seen that nothing actually happened between Clara and Carwin. I think it is much more likely that if the mysterious voice is a character that has already been introduced that it is Chathrine Pleyel rather than Henry Pleyel who is the voices origin. So far we have heard very little about Cathrine and most of the time she is quiet and goes unnoticed.
ReplyDeletePersonally I believe that the voice has no "human" origin. Although the book has characters that challenge the supernatural with logic (Pleyel, Wieland, Carwin) the book still takes place in a time before Scooby-Doo where the supernatural is still widely believed in. It is very possible that the voice might have supernatural origins which when revealed may shake many of the character's faith in logic and reason and allow them to see that there is more to this world then meets the eye.