The Afterlife of Coverture: Contract and Gift in “The Ballad of the Sad Café”

naomi morgenstern is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She has published essays on a range of twentieth-century writers and theorists, including Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Catherine Mackinnon, E. L. Doctorow, and Alice Munro. Her examination of marital philosophy in the work of Charles Brockden Brown recently appeared in the Blackwell Companion to Early American Fiction. She is working on a book-length study of conjugal politics and American literature.