Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre, Representation, and Equity in Clara Howard and Jane Talbot

Abstract

This essay argues that Charles Brockden Brown's last two complete novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot , exploit the generic expectations produced by sentimental novels in order to explore ways of understanding intention, obligation, representation, promises, and consent. Keeping Brown's early legal training in mind, this essay traces the novels' interest in alternatives to contractual models of relationship, one of which is the concept of equity. In this reading, Clara Howard proposes taking literally the idea of a married couple having "one will," collapsing two people into one so that the two act with a single intent so that there can be no contractual relationship between them at all. Jane Talbot , in contrast, imagines proliferating identities within individuals so that they can be simultaneously interior to a contract and part of the exterior authority that enforces it. Brown identifies obvious limitations to an equitable model of social relations. His explorations remain valuable, however, because they indicate an early resistance to and dissent from the contractarian models that would come to dominate the nineteenth century.