Property's Narratives: 'Unreasonable and Unnatural Distributions of Human Will' in Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Early American Contract Law

• Published in: Early American literature 2022, Vol.57 (1), p.123-148
• Main Author: Sirenko, Valerie
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; African American literature; Bentham, Jeremy; Brown, Charles Brockden; Brown, Charles Brockden (1771-1810); Contract law; Fate; Free agency; Free will; Gothic fiction; Ideology; Interpersonal relations; Kinship; Literary characters; Literary devices; Literary influences; Literary translation; Literature; Logic; Narratives; Negotiation; Pedagogy; Property rights; Right of property; Self concept; Subjectivity; Wills
• ISSN: 0012-8163; 1534-147X; 1534-147X
• DOI: 10.1353/eal.2022.0005

This article examines how Charles Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn (1799) intervened in a transformation in the way property rights were imagined in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within the context of contract ideology's emphasis on free will, Brown presents property rights as a fluid set of shifting relations that require continual negotiation. Viewed this way, property's contingency and instability allow Brown to foreground the ability of narrative to shape legal outcomes. By examining Brown's novel in relation to early legal discourse on the last will and testament, in which the language surrounding contractual agency competed against kinship rights, I argue that Brown took advantage of the contradictions in the way law imagined agency to challenge Lockean conceptions of subjectivity. As an alternative to the Lockean paradigm, Brown proposes that narrative's role in shaping property outcomes provides an opportunity to redefine autonomous selfhood around one's ability to harness the narratives that define property's shifting rights and relationships.