SOURCE: Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall. “Wieland: Accounting for the Past.” In Private Property: Charles Brockden Brown's Gendered Economics of Virtue, pp. 99-131. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Hinds discusses issues of class and inheritance in Wieland.

Within the unfolding drama of international capitalism, Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale appears less than interested in a growing market economy or in any private world modeled on the contingencies of exchange in the public sphere, in part because Wieland, Brown's first novel, is set in the country, far away from the immediate pressures of such a market. Yet I will argue that Brown establishes in this novel a context for the interchange of market and private values, for in its idyllic setting, Wieland's cast of characters enacts a drama of “upper-class” suffering brought on by the isolation and insularity their inherited luxury has enabled...