Private property : Charles Brockden Brown\u27s Gendered Economics of Virtue

By Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, College at Brockport faculty member. Private Property explores Charles Brockden Brown\u27s novels Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly; his dialogue on women\u27s rights, Alcuin; and a few less well-known works such as The Man at Home series of essays and Carwin, the Biloquist, with attention to Brown\u27s differentiation of gender in economic matters. Author Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds takes on the terms of economic positioning in these works, suggesting that Brown\u27s fictional women look nothing at all like his men within the republicanism that was growing to embrace an emerging capitalism during the American 1780s and 1790s. The new economic realities of this era contained the seeds of a changing definition of virtue, a definition suited to an economically defined and specifically capitalist male citizen operating in an increasingly large public space of activity. At the same time, an emerging cult of domesticity came to define the virtue of women within the growing U.S. capitalist economy.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1299/thumbnail.jp