Satan in Wieland

*My book ended on page 222, so I don’t know where I’m supposed to quit, plotwise.  There may be spoilers.

In our discussion of the Satan character in Wieland, I was struck by a specific ambiguity that confused me in part.  In discussing the rôle of a Satan character, it’s important to extract the two important parts of such a character:  that of the supernatural and that of evil.  This is important because I would argue that the Satan rôle changes characters, but each of the two aspects at a different point in the story.  

In the beginning of the story, the voices, which I will call part of the supernatural, incomprehensible characterization, seem to be benign.  They act as perhaps an oracle, warning of danger.  For all the characters know, they could be protected by a “power that protects you [that] would crumble my sinews” as Carwin says (85).  At that point of the plot, before Wieland exposes his insanity and Pleyel recieves the letter from his ‘dead’ beloved, it seems like the supernatural character is an unknown protector, while Carwin, after revealing himself to Clara, defining an intent to rape, and casting himself as a character of malice, seems to embody evil.  His use of the voices in tricking Clara in her bedroom could be seen as a twisting of the essentially good supernature through a comprehensible and human greed. 

This paradigm, and the character that represents Satan, as both ‘evil’ and ‘supernatural’, shifts with the fall of Wieland into madness and the confessions of Carwin, that all of the voices which gave the supernatural a feeling of protection and benignity were actually truly comprehensible and natural, and while not in the cleanest of interests, in not intended to harm… at least, so he says.  And, well, even if it was to harm, there is not a great aspect of incomprehensibility behind his actions. 

On the other hand, the aspect of the incomprehensible unveils itself as malignant.   Embodied in the madness of Wieland and the strange lights that seem to haunt the family mysteries, the supernatural consumes Wieland and through him his family.  It throws Clara into a melancholy and is an irrational destroyer. 

By the end of the book, the true Satan is no longer Carwin, who seems to vindicate his seemingly evil intent, defending his bad actions as simple failings through human desires, and not intentionally maleficent, and does not have a supernatural ability, to see spirits protecting Clara or anything.  On the other hand, the incomprehensible, irrational supernatural is shown as destructive and by definition is supernatural.  It makes be believe that the true Satan in this book is the supernatural.  Since supernature is by definition irrational, one could see the true antagonist in this story irrationality. 

This malevolent irrational leads me to contrast this novel to the Romanticism of Blake, where nature and the unconscious are able to further human thought.  While this book makes use of the untamed nature as central to the discussion, and indeed acknowledges the existence of something beyond the rational, it looks upon that with horror.  In this book, it seems living in a rational, human form is the only option versus a nature of destruction.  Though you can also see this destruction of man by nature in Belle Dame Sans Merci and I’m off topic and really tired… weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee