Such a "balanced" approach to gender has significant implications for scholars of Brown's career as a whole and for interpretations of his novels in particular. Each of his novels focuses on a bachelor, involves marriage, or explores definitions of manhood. Wieland, for example, showcases competing visions of early national manhood. 3 Wieland represents the emotional manhood of religious fervor frequently found among revivalists and distrusted by "men of reason," such as the Wieland family friend, Pleyel. While Wieland and Pleyel each offer a version of manhood, Wieland also makes clear that neither is sufficient, for the former leads to the family's destruction and the latter is unable to prevent the tragedy. Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly all have bachelors at the center of their narratives. Ormond at first appears to be the classic bachelor, the murderer who attempts to rape the woman he seeks. But Ormond might also be examined with masculinity and gender power structures in mind. One might ask, for example, whether the gender stereotypes have ultimately shackled Ormond and driven him to monomania.4 Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly are particularly important, for both of these novels were concurrent with Brown's editing of the Monthly Magazine. Both novels also appear in the periodical, Huntly in a fragment, Mervyn in summary form in "Walstein's School of History." The critical history of these two novels frequently draws attention to how each narrator may be unreliable; the motives of each protagonist always fall under scrutiny. In the light of Brown's interest in promoting bachelorhood, the actions of each character take on a new hue. Brown might indeed have hoped that readers understood his protagonists as virtuous rather than unreliable and their actions, though arguably suspicious, worthy of emulation (not unlike Franklin in The Autobiography). Moreover, each novel has an obvious connection to the issues of marriage, for Arthur Mervyn ultimately marries Achsa Fielding and Edgar Huntly is engaged to Waldegrave's sister.