Erica Burleigh (Auth.) - Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing-Palgrave Macmillan US (2014) PDF

Intimacy and Family in
Early Amer ican Wr iting

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Intimacy and Family in
Early Amer ican Wr iting
Erica Burleigh
INTIMACY AND FAMILY IN EARLY AMERICAN WRITING
Copyright © Erica Burleigh, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-40407-7
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the

United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
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States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-48718-9 ISBN 978-1-137-40408-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137404084
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from
the Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: May 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my parents, Lew and Rinda Burleigh,
who first showed me what intimacy and family are,
and whose love sustains me.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Intimacy, Integrity,
Interdependence 1
1 Discursive Intimacy: Franklin Reads
the Spectator with Bifocals 13
2 “Regular Love,” Incest, and Intimacy
in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette 45
3 Incommensurate Equivalences: Genre,
Representation, and Equity in Clara
Howard and Jane Talbot 69
4 Sisters in Arms: Incest, Miscegenation, and
Sacrifice in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s
Hope Leslie 99
5 “Mangled and Bleeding” Facts: Proslavery
Novels and the Temporality of Sentiment 125
Notes 143
Bibliography 179
Index 197
Acknowledgments
This section is by far my favorite part of the book to write, because I am

able to thank the many people who have helped bring this book to life.
Multiple communities of friends and colleagues supported me
before and during this project. Beth Bailey, Jennie Kasanoff, and
Chris Baswell provided my earliest models of what scholarly life could
look like. James Basker, Larzer Ziff, and Ron Paulson each helped,
in his own way, to make the eighteenth century an inviting intellec-
tual home long before I took up residence there. Michael Moon read
several early versions of most of the chapters and gave invaluable criti-
cism. Sharon Cameron, Frances Ferguson, and Walter Michaels made
me a better thinker and a better writer.
My family—Lew, Rinda, Jen, and Lewis—gave me emotional and
at times financial, nutritional, and transportational support through-
out my years at Johns Hopkins. I thank them for their love and their
willingness to listen to me tell long and pointless stories about people
they don’t know from centuries long past. Many thanks as well to
the family members I acquired during those years: Bill Regner; Sarah
Regner; Joyce and Dayne Yost; Jerry Lawler; Laura, Jay, and Matt
Yacobucci; and Paul and Carla Hausman.
Baltimore was enlivened and enlightened by the presence of
Nick Beauchamp, Scott Black, Dan Denecke, Claire Jarvis, Jenifer
Karyshyn, Crystal L’Hote, Chris Lukasik, Tim Mackin, Jason Potts,
Josh Steckel, Rachel Trousdale, and Amit Yahav.
Research on the fourth chapter was aided immeasurably by a Mel-
lon fellowship at the City University of New York (CUNY) Center for
the Humanities; I am particularly grateful to my seminar coleaders,
Alyson Cole and Kyoo Lee, and the seminar participants—particularly
Glenn Burger and Karen Weiser—for their generosity and thought-
provoking questions.
The insufficiency of feminist critical analysis in this book is not the
fault of the feminist theory reading group members. Drs. Gentile,
Lee, Pease, Stein, Yukins, and sometimes Reitz: mea culpa.
x Acknowledgments
John Jay’s English department is full of wonderfully warm,

smart, funny people, and each of them makes teaching there a joy.
JoEllen DeLucia was a fabulous intellectual coconspirator, whose
loss to the wilds of central Michigan is deeply regretted. Those who
remain, however, have been extraordinarily supportive, and this book
has been shaped (in ways they probably never imagined) by con-
versations with Vicky Bond, Al Coppola, Jay Gates, Jonathan Gray,
Richard Haw, Ann Huse, John Matteson, Jean Mills, Paul Narkunas,
Tara Pauliny, Allison Pease, and Amanda Springs.
Versions of chapters three and four appeared in Early American
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and the New England Quarterly;
I am grateful to the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Penn
Press, and the MIT Press for permission to reprint, and particularly
grateful to Elaine Crane, Ann Twombly, and Lynn Rhoads for their
care, intelligence, and good humor in helping me to prune, pare, and
parse words, sentences, and arguments.
I am also deeply grateful to Brigitte Schull, Ryan Jenkins, Rachel
Taenzler, Kyriaki Tsaganis, and the manuscript’s anonymous reader,
all of whom have been tremendously generous with their time, exper-
tise, and patience in shepherding this book to press.
Finally, this book would never have seen completion if not for the
love, support, and occasional harassment of some of my very favorite
people. Alexis Akre, Rachel Cole, Amy Greenlee, Kate Jones, Jordan
Stein, and Geoff Lawler, you remind me why I wanted to write about
intimacy and attachment in the first place.
Introduction
4
Intimacy, Integr ity,
Interdependence
I t is a truism among early Americanists that few people survive child-

birth in the early American novel. Fictional infants are almost invariably
stillborn or die around the same time that their mothers (themselves
usually seduced, unwed, and abandoned) expire. This macabre narra-
tive consistency—found in texts like Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Tem-
ple (1791), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), and P. D.
Manvil’s Lucinda, or the Mountain Mourner (1807)—might indi-
cate that early American writers were not exactly optimistic about the
future of the family in the new nation. At the same time, a counternar-
rative found in both fictional and nonfictional American writings of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests that such
writers also worried that the country might enjoy a bit too much fam-
ily feeling: incest recurs as both an implicit and an explicit element of
many early American writings, from the satirical Adventures of Jona-
than Corncob, Loyal American Refugee (1787) to Charles Brockden
Brown’s Gothic Wieland (1798) to William Hill Brown’s sentimen-
tal Ira and Isabella (1807) to Rowson’s equally florid sequel, Lucy
Temple (1828).
This near-obsessive replication of nongenerative pregnancies and
equally, if perhaps more reassuringly, childless sibling love stories
emerges in texts that seek also to comment explicitly upon the politi-
cal future of the newly formed nation; the marital, sexual, procreative,
and sibling relationships they depict constitute another level of com-
mentary on that future. That early American writers explored the
possibility of modeling national union on the family and sought
the language of kinship to explain other forms of individual and
2 Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing
communal bonds is perhaps unsurprising. What is more intriguing,

however, are the ways in which that rich and expansive language of
family ties adapted itself to encompass a wide and at times conflicting
range of ways—blood relation, emotional connection, moral agree-
ment, spatial proximity, reciprocal obligation, political affiliation, and
universal brotherhood—through which to understand union. This
book explores that language and those ideas through the prism of
intimacy.
By intimacy I mean the combination of social, emotional, spatial,
and legal terms by which a person comes to be bound to another
person or to a community. Drawing on the early eighteenth-century
periodical press, American writers later that century and on into the
nineteenth used modes and representations of intimacy to redescribe
political union, and Americanness, as more than a product of geogra-
phy or legislation. Writers in the early republic worked through several
ways to understand the grounding of individual and communal inti-
mate bonds, among them shared secrets, moral agreement, spatial
proximity, reciprocal obligation, and universalism. Among these ana-
logical devices, the trope of the family recurred to produce volatile
and contradictory images—both intimately familiar and frighten-
ingly alienating—through which early American writers and readers
encountered and responded to upheavals in their cultural landscape.
Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing argues that the
trope of the family in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American
writing served to familiarize and domesticate potentially threaten-
ing changes in the structure of people’s relationships to one another,
among them women’s increasing participation in socially visible are-
nas, the pacification of native peoples, separation from England, and
the rise of antislavery sentiment. These images did so, however, in ways
that challenged and ultimately undermined the apparent intimacy and
familiarity of family relations, bequeathing to Americans a particu-
larly fractured and contentious understanding of what makes a family,
what grounds unity, and what sustains a nation—arguments we are
still having today, and in much the same terms. Intimacy and Family
in Early American Writing examines the powerful and protean meta-
phors of familial relation by carefully reading representative literary
texts from successive historical moments alongside a broad range of
their contemporary legal, philosophical, and political texts in order to
better understand the reciprocal relationships between these materials
and the social reality they alternately reflect and shape. I use the term
“intimacy” to describe the modes of relation—ranging from gossip to
family admonishment to patriotism—that develop in eighteenth- and
Intimacy, Integrity, Interdependence 3
early nineteenth-century American writing, as authors struggled to

understand and express the competing demands of various allegiances
in the emerging nation.
Consider, for example, the positions articulated in debates about
adopting the US Constitution. Republicans rightly feared the pater-
nalistic provisions Federalists wished to enshrine, hinting of aristocratic
privilege and intellectual elitism; Federalists rightly feared the possibil-
ity that the public would vote its passions rather than its convictions,
that people might be led astray by charm and populist appeals rather
than considered political positions.1 These fears, resentments, antago-
nisms, and differences are familiar as part of the inheritance of this
country’s origination in a field of debate as well as a field of war.
But they represent as well different models of personhood, summed
up most succinctly in the presumed opposition between intimacy and
integrity.
The two are often imagined as mutually exclusive: intimacy threat-
ens autonomy; maintaining integrity means shunning close relation.
Thus, for example, the rejection of the Cartesian subject as overly
insular by a literary politics embracing intersubjectivity; thus the cri-
tique of moral theory that privileges a deontological ethic of justice
over an ethic of care (a critique that tends explicitly to gender justice
as masculine and caring as feminine); thus the sense that formalism
precludes attachment; thus the rhetoric of “losing oneself” in another
and the matched but inverse fear of dying alone.2
Criticism of the literature of the early national period in America
has tended to follow this division between individual and integration
and to allow this division to bleed into others. So one of the primary
debates in this field has been between the uses of “print rationality”
and those of sympathy in sentimental novels for forming a national
polity, another between print as the basis of the public sphere and spo-
ken language as the cohesive element of union, and another between
the influence of what we think of as public and the significance of
more private realms in constituting a sort of national subjectivity. And,
it bears saying, these divisions have more often than not also marked
a gender division, with—to no one’s surprise—masculinity aligned
with reason, the public, formalism, instrumental universality, and the
autonomous self, and femininity aligned with feeling, the private,
organicism, local, provisional interpretation, and interdependence.3
I contend that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature
reflects a simultaneous imagination of the individual and relation—of
intimacy and integrity. This book argues that writings in the early
years of the American nation formulate a resistance to precisely the
line of inquiry that seeks to separate the two. It reads early national
literature as asking why personal liberty and mutual obligation need
be in conflict and attempting—with varying degrees of success—to
work out models of individual identity and civic cohesion that encour-
age both.4 My effort in the following chapters has been to imagine
an eighteenth-century inheritance that is governed not primarily
by formal elements—law, reason, judgment—nor by the emotive—
sentiment, sympathy, identification—but rather by a middle term
of nonrational discursivity: intimacy. By this I do not mean irrational—
rather, I mean a coherent, articulable, but nonfunctionalist sort of
interaction.
I have chosen the word “intimacy” as a central term in this project
because, as the first chapter outlines, it stands somewhere between
the categorically useful but analytically reductive categories “public”
and “private.”5 These terms have been instrumental in providing per-
spectives on a number of critical foci—perhaps most notably those of
print culture and of gender—but they obscure a great deal as well. In
its strongest form, this book’s argument would maintain that there
was no public sphere in the eighteenth century and that it is there-
fore a mistake and an anachronism to view the period through such
a lens. I don’t actually want to make quite such an extreme argu-
ment, however; rather, I hope that this book will indicate some of the
shortcomings of the language of the “public” and the “private” as
one whose organizational power narrows our ability to see the much
richer language and history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-
ries. I nominate “intimacy” as one term that may help us to better
make sense of the messiness of the period: its conflicts and counter-
narratives; its divagations and diversions; and its persistent, at times
perverse, refusal to occupy the more convenient historiographical cat-
egories we might hope it would fit.
Intimacy, and the form in which it produces itself in earlier
eighteenth-century British periodicals—gossip—enact the discur-
sive, rather than spatial, negotiation of terrain in which this book is
interested. Consider the origins of the word “intimate”: it derives
from intimare, to publish, or proclaim, which in turn derives from
intimus, inmost or deepest. “Intimate” thus emerges as an ety-
mological conundrum: it is the proclamation of what is inmost or
deepest, a revelation that by definition renders the thing revealed no
longer inmost or deepest but exposed, external. The word itself has
built into it the tension I want to maintain between two arenas often
imagined to be easily separable—the internal and the external, the pri-
vate and the public, the self and the other. It sits atop a division that it
simultaneously recognizes (in drawing from each side) and erases (in
suggesting that the two are not really divisible).6
One way to think about intimacy would be as a problem of impos-
sible attainment: once one reveals what is inside, it is outside. Thus
the simultaneity of proclamation and internality seems logically
impossible—either the idea is not proclaimed or it is not internal. If a
person thinks that her interiority is what is most crucially herself, then
the moment of revelation could feel like a moment of loss. Another
way of thinking about it would be to imagine that revelation makes a
person recognize herself by making her legible to someone else and
thereby grants her a greater capacity to have depth and interiority.
A person’s capacity to reflect upon herself is contingent on seeing
someone else see—or rather hear—her. Between these accounts, it
becomes difficult to decide whether intimacy destroys or produces the
self. Early American writers wrestled with this question in a number of
different fields—politics, morals, social rules, family structure, domes-
tic arrangements—and this book tries to tease out the logic informing
the various answers their works posit.
Intimacy, of course, also has concurrent associations with illicit
sexuality—intimacies, like liberties, are things taken or granted (in the
language of sexual exchange) in secret or private ways. This sexual
residue attached to the word and the usually gendered associations
with the words “intimacy”—it’s what women want, it’s what men
fear—imbue the term with the gendered resonance that clings to
the theoretically neutral notions of internal and external.7 This gen-
dered and sexualized element of intimacy is taken up most directly in
the first chapter, which presents a common model of print discourse
that Ben Franklin, as a periodical essayist, borrowed from his British
predecessors: gossip. This approach to essay writing was not strictly
functionalist (though often didactic) and not meant to produce sym-
pathetic emotion nor a more argumentative recounting of facts and
consequences; intended to instruct but not quite to persuade, it cov-
ered formal and tonal ground not often addressed in discussions of
early American literature. It forged a new kind of discursive intimacy
between speaker and audience, inviting readers to learn protocols of
social behavior from an insider position. The essays, in other words,
are written as though they presuppose that their readers share the
essays’ (or essayist’s) sense of propriety, thereby allowing readers to
access the didactic function of the essays without simply being lectured
and, more importantly, to do so while maintaining the sense either
that they did already know how to behave—how to think, act, speak,
opine in polite company—or that their ignorance is ably masked by
their ability to chuckle at the ignorance of others. “Chuckling” here is

almost too strong a term, because while gossip presupposes a certain
amount of malicious delight in the pratfalls of others, the tone of these
essays is rarely vindictive. It is a gentler, more gracious response, but
that gentleness is predicated less upon sympathy for the figure under
discussion than the relief that such a figure is socially removed from
the reader.
In tracing the development of this intimate nonrational discursivity,
I hope to moderate between critical discussions of the formal, rational
elements of public discourse, which tend to examine the founding
documents and the debates surrounding them, and discussions of the
more emotive elements of nation formation, which tend to read the
novels of the period. I hope to open up the possibility of a different
tonal register through which to read both novels and essays of the
period—one that tries to reconcile intimacy of relation and integrity
of person against a backdrop of political concerns.8
The critical work in early American literature of the last two decades
focuses largely on sentiment and politics. Critics concerned with sym-
pathy and sentiment attend to the wiles of the author in creating a
seductive narrative (a narrative as enticing as the seduction it more
often than not recounts) and the political ends for which such readerly
feeling can and cannot be mobilized, usually grounded in the assump-
tion that sympathy and identification are natural corollaries capable of
motivating action.9 In contrast to more strictly rationalist accounts
of Enlightenment thinking, theorists of sympathy have highlighted
the equally important role of emotional engagement in literary and
political development. Such readings also continue and extend earlier
critical concerns with the ways in which Enlightenment ideals received
shape in both political and literary writing.10 While illuminating the
intersection of emotion and politics has been richly productive,
the set of concerns that emerges in such readings tends to understand
eighteenth-century writings as a staging ground for concerns—about
whether American literary history, or a particular author, tends toward
liberal or republican ideals; on the uses and transmission of sympa-
thy; about the development of concepts of “public” and “private”
realms—which (inevitably, teleologically) reach fuller literary expres-
sion in the nineteenth century.
While my work is indebted to such scholarship, it is less interested
in playing what can be loosely categorized as “emotion” and “reason”
off one another, or in determining which one preponderates in public
discourse at any given moment, than it is in exploring the ways in
which authors sought to represent the mutual interactions of both. It
understands those interactions, moreover, not as precursors of more

robust nineteenth-century literary forms or political developments
but in the terms of a given text’s immediate context. The multiple
ways writers imagined what might bind people into communities are
not reducible to protoliberal or protorepublican ideological positions.
Moreover, the sentiments that emerge in such texts are not neces-
sarily pleasant, nor do they necessarily invite identification on the part
of the reader. That is, unlike sympathy, which fuses subject and object,
intimacy creates fellow feeling but stops short of identification. Char-
acters experience emotions beyond their control or understanding,
directed toward figures that their communities find inappropriate—
that they themselves find inappropriate and that readers are certainly
invited to reject—and yet cannot free themselves, in part because the
logic that underlies their affections is one predicated on biological
connection as a kind of affective relation and vice versa. Family love
takes on an ineluctable fatality in early American narratives at odds
with celebratory representations of family as seats of refuge and order.
Intimacy and Family in Early American Writing seeks to bridge
the gap between literary critical and historical approaches that often
divides scholarship in early American writing. Literary critics tend to
consider emotion in early American writing through the lens of affect
theory, and in so doing, they tend either to turn affect into a transhis-
torical category or to insist upon the historically particularized nature
of affects like sentiment and sympathy. My work seeks to underscore
both the historical specificity of emotion’s manifestations and its per-
sistent continuities across time. That is, Intimacy and Family in Early
American Writing both tracks the particular iterations of familial
affect at particular moments and also notes the ways in which these
iterations, despite their qualitative differences, nevertheless recur.
My thinking about the representation of family and its function
as an image and metaphor in early American writing of course builds
on Jay Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution
against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800, which, nearly thirty years
after its first publication, remains one of the most thorough accounts
of familial language in the Revolutionary era, stimulating discussion
and response among scholars of disparate methodological persuasions.
This project draws from some of these critiques and elaborations of
Fliegelman’s work, like them seeking to attend more fully to repre-
sentations of women as well as those of men, to challenge the notion
of a static and egalitarian model of family, and to synthesize and
move beyond the limiting dichotomies of public spheres and private
realms, liberalism and republicanism, and idealized universalism and
particularized inequality, which have dominated the last few decades

of early American scholarship.11
In order to do this, I begin by examining the essays Franklin wrote
under women’s pseudonyms, arguing for a continuity of gender ven-
triloquism identified initially (in the British press) with the adoption
of “feminine” forms of speech—like tattling—and expanding, under
Franklin’s satirical eye, into a method for examining the very gen-
dered suppositions that underlie not just essay writing but social and
political life as well: an expansion of tone and content that asks insis-
tently how the intimacy of relation—families, neighbors—ought to be
related to both the autonomy of persons (a category in which Franklin
includes women) and the interests of the state.12
The second chapter begins with a brief discussion of Thomas
Paine’s Common Sense, arguing that—like other Revolutionary and
early national era essays—it invokes the rhetoric of family to articu-
late a historically common analogy between nation and family but
did so in a way that opened up the idea of family to a new range of
meanings. The gendered community structure invoked by Franklin
is here refigured in nightmarish terms. The images of kinship vio-
lated as a metaphor for political relations sundered that recur in these
writings act as a catalyst for revolution but also leave uncertain in
what terms future political arrangements might be framed. The Arti-
cles of Confederation (1781) sought to ground political relation in a
“firm league of friendship” but could not even act in concert to raise
taxes to pay war debt. When John Jay, in Federalist no. 2 (1787),
referred to Americans as “a people descended from the same ances-
tors,” he nevertheless bolstered that apparent genetic correlation with
a geographic one, describing “one connected, fertile, widespreading
country,” blessed with a “succession of navigable waters [that] forms
a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together,” as though
the (imagined) bonds of shared genetic ancestry were insufficient to
hold the new nation together.13
In the second chapter, I argue that early American novels register
concern about the consequences of integration and union—intimacy—
and their effects not only on the individual but also on the capacity
of the social order to perpetuate itself. This chapter turns to two of
the most frequently read (then or now) novels of the early Ameri-
can period, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Hannah
Webster Foster’s The Coquette, and argues that the two articulate a
distrust of intimacy as a model for social production. The Power of
Sympathy mobilizes incest (as does Brown’s posthumously published
Ira and Isabella, or, The Natural Children [1804]) as a logical end
point for theories of affection in order to suggest that the very struc-
ture of intimacy threatens to dissolve the possibility of social relation
and reproduction. The Coquette seems to emerge from an opposite
perspective, launching a protorepublican defense of autonomy, but
finds both that excessive adherence to republican principles of lib-
erty and independence push people out of their communities and that
relying on social bonds for direction cannot effectively secure them
within those communities. The two novels in effect rehearse the long-
standing tension between individual liberty and reciprocal obligation
under governance, though they do so in terms of family and friends.
Neither novel can hypothesize a workable balance between liberty and
duty, autonomy and connection. More than simply suggesting that
these tensions are ongoing and negotiable, the novels prophesy social
destruction because there does not seem, in their narrative trajectory,
either resolution or fruitful fusion of these frictions.
The third chapter examines two turn-of-the-century novels by
Charles Brockden Brown, which seem to promise a way out of the
social and political dead end presented in the earlier novels. Clara
Howard and Jane Talbot, both published in 1801, were Brown’s
last substantial fictional efforts before turning full time to business
and magazine publishing. While they pick up themes from his more
well-known novels, Wieland, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn
(counterfeiting, the reliability of language, observation), literary
critics have left them virtually unexplored because of their generic
structure (epistolary, marriage-minded) and their sententious con-
tent (the conflict between love and duty, will and law). I argue that
Brown is precisely interested in exploiting the rhetorical possibilities
of the sentimental genre, the legal consequences of the marriage plot,
and the philosophical possibilities of the epistolary form; he marshals
them to suggest a possible solution to the reflexive paradox of inti-
macy identified in the earlier novels. He imagines that if persons can
themselves embody the juridical apparatus, there will be no conflict
between the intimate and the institutional and ultimately no con-
flict between the individual and the interpersonal. By internalizing
both liberty and obligation, and by imagining that neither love nor
argument produces (moral) concurrence, Brown satisfies himself that
there is no tension between autonomy and obligation: the two are
identical with each other.
The fourth chapter reads Catharine Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope
Leslie as offering a different model for this sort of internalization.
Sedgwick likewise locates juridical authority not within positive insti-
tutional structures but in the natural law that is “inscribed” in the
heart. This internal moral duty, however, mandates a familial rela-

tion among all that entails mutual obligation toward all, thereby
refiguring the incest trope of earlier novels as a universal norm rather
than a local social problem. She imagines, moreover, that incest and
miscegenation can be the same, thereby registering and all but evacu-
ating racial difference at the same time. Authority, incest, and race
are yoked together through the “interposition” that dominates the
novel thematically; the interposition of one body between the action
of authority—whether figured as law or as violence—and that author-
ity’s devolution upon the body of another person produces relation
between the interposer and the intended victim of authoritarian vio-
lence. In articulating this account of relation, Sedgwick’s text counters
the idea that maintaining the social realm requires literal biological
reproduction.
The fifth and final chapter reads proslavery writing of the first half
of the nineteenth century as the logical inheritors of Sedgwick’s appar-
ently liberatory racial and familial politics. Her emphasis on family ties
as ones that use sentimental attachment to transcend race, combined
with an incipient feminism that celebrates feminine self-sacrifice, ironi-
cally parallel the concerns of novels that likewise understand the family
in affective terms, but, going back to the imagery apparently discarded
during the Revolution, understand that family to be a patriarchal one, in
which the relations of the father to his subordinates—wife, children,
slaves—are structured as ones of unidirectional power. For example,
Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) imagines, as
so many pre–Civil War novels did, that sectionalism might be eased
by the intermarriage of white Northerners and Southerners. Hentz
hoped that Northerners like Eula Hastings, the bride of the title,
would discover that slavery was a loving, familial institution—one that
(in an echo of George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery) was infinitely
superior to the heartless wage slavery of the North. Such works’ cel-
ebration of patriarchal, rather than republican, models of governance
intersects with both their explicit political agenda (to defend slavery in
America) and their implicit rhetorical strategy (to launch this defense
by appealing to readers’ sympathies and to their patriotism).
This book is quite interested in such varying models of and fig-
ures for reproduction. In colonial America, as Franklin’s Polly Baker
points out, the need is not just for a figurative polity but also for
an increase of actual persons for “a new Country that really wants
People.”14 The novels of the period, though, while populated with
inordinately fecund young women, nevertheless rarely feature any
surviving offspring—which in part may reflect contemporary infant
mortality rates, but in part may allegorize a pessimistic view of the

future of the republic. Thus while this project attends to other more
abstract methods of social reproduction, particularly those available by
reading essays and novels, it also keeps an eye on representations of
biological continuation as a possible index of optimism about the
perpetuation of social and political bonds. As a reader, one could be
part of an imagined community of like-minded readers, a recipient
of contemporary moral and political philosophy about the necessity of
national union, or inspired by rhetorical fervor to feel a patriotic bond
with other Americans. Without children to provide a next generation
to imbibe those lessons, though, such readerly gleanings might end
with the lives of nonreproducing individuals.15
This is, of course, a central, if specious, component of the confused
rhetoric about the “sanctity” of marriage: the idea that marriage and
the production of biological children are foundational to “civiliza-
tion” and that any other model of union—particularly one without
biological children—endangers that foundation. Thus it is curious
to note that childlessness transformed its status from the marker of
tragedy—the end of the line for one family and thus potentially for an
entire social group—to relative irrelevance. By the opening of Sedg-
wick’s literary career, in the 1820s, ground had been cleared for a
logic that could envision models of social reproduction without the
necessity of children. (Of course, this promptly gives way to novels
populated by children with no parents—but that’s another story, for
another book.)16
Chapter 1
4
Discursive Intimacy
Fr ankl i n Reads the Spectator w i t h B i f o ca l s
B eginning a book about the trope of family in early American lit-

erature with a discussion of gossip in early eighteenth-century British
periodicals may seem (to put it charitably) counterintuitive. With-
out this background, however, the discussion that follows would be
missing a crucial antecedent: how people thought about relation-
ships between people that were not familial—nor national, nor eco-
nomic, nor political, nor even necessarily emotionally deep, let alone
steeped in the sentiment and sensibility that would come to dominate
discussions of human connection in the second half of the century.
Understanding how noninstrumental (or not primarily instrumen-
tal) relationships were figured makes clear the ways in which later
eighteenth-century American writers both repudiated and repurposed
different languages of union.
I argue that early eighteenth-century essay writers learned to value
the structure of gossip for three reasons: first, because of its capacity
to create a provisional intimacy not structured by affective or institu-
tional relationships; second, because that intimacy produces limited
but mobile communities through apparently oppositional but in fact
reciprocal modes—both enforcing social norms and suggesting the
pleasure of violating those norms through gossip; and third, because of
its capacity to depict spaces in terms of conversation rather than actual,
geographical locations. From closet to tea table to theater to coffee-
house, at the moment of exchange, environment recedes (although it
is never entirely forgotten) and the sensation of shared secrets takes
precedence, marking a discursive space of intimacy. By “discursive
space,” I mean not simply to refer to physical space—the auditory
range, for example, required to hear gossip—but to temporal space as

well, which is a function of the longevity of a given conversation. That
is to say, the space carved out by gossip is temporary and provisional,
its boundaries not necessarily coterminous with the conclusion of a
conversation but always potentially available and always potentially
collapsible. Thus gossip-structured essays served to sponsor a form
of social cohesion explicitly not rooted in rational discourse. By this I
do not mean to suggest that gossip constitutes a version of irrational-
ity but to argue that it is one mode of sociable relation not governed
by the rational communicative imperatives so frequently associated
with the eighteenth century in general and its print culture in par-
ticular. Gossip accomplishes this cohesion precisely because it is a
nonrational, nonfunctionalist form of communication.
It is also persistently gendered. Consider the way in which the very
title and first issue (1709) of the Tatler make explicit a connection
between tattling and gender: having instructed his male audience that
he will tell them “what to think,” Richard Steele, in the persona of
Isaac Bickerstaff (the gentleman astrologer whose “Lucubrations”
the Tatler purports to be), “resolve[s] also to have something which
may be of Entertainment to the Fair Sex, in Honor of whom I have
invented the Title of this Paper.”1 This gendering has been taken to
align gossip with femininity and femininity with the private, so that
gossip becomes a private form of language because it is associated
with women.2 These associations do not line up perfectly, however.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conceptions of gossip undeni-
ably describe it as a feminine vice, in direct contrast to the useful
public discourse of men. But it is not clear that, given the structure
of gossip, we need to understand this initially feminized mode as
exclusively private. The gendered divisions between gossip and con-
versation, between coffeehouse and tea table, are not clear cut—as
evidenced in part by the Tatler and Spectator’s adoption of gossip’s
structure for the very goal of propounding useful public discourse.
Nor does the gendered division map onto a public/private division
quite so neatly. Gossip acts as a point of permeability between public
and private, one that not only Steele but also many writers of peri-
odical essays exploited in considerations of how civic (but not always
civil) discourse might shape and direct a nation. This uneven lining
up of gender with social and discursive space underscores a second-
ary argument running throughout this chapter: that what is most
interesting about eighteenth-century imaginings of public and pri-
vate realms is how people imagined negotiating the spaces between,
across, through, and around those realms.
Discursive Intimacy 15
Or consider the development of the word “gossip” itself: while

it was used as a verb occasionally prior to the nineteenth century,
the far more common understanding of “gossip” was as a noun sig-
naling a relationship of affinity between persons. Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary (1755) first defines “gossip” as “one who answers for the
child in baptism,” a definition the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
follows in its first, etymologically derived definition, from godsib, of
a baptismal sponsor or godparent. The OED next defines gossip as “a
familiar acquaintance,” a term applying primarily to women. John-
son, by contrast, lists its second meaning as “a tippling companion”
and third as “one who runs about tattling like women at a lying-
in.” The “tippling companion”—presumptively male, rather than the
other presumptively female persons who run about tattling—marks
precisely the kinds of informal, noninstrumental relationships whose
structure essay writers were interested in adapting—largely but not
exclusively feminized, then, but also not aligned with either rational
discourse or sentimental attachment.
I use the term “gossip” here in part to capture the complex and
contradictory sets of relationships its evolving meanings contain—
relationships both sacred and profane, lasting and ephemeral, and
explicitly and pejoratively feminized but also applied to both men
and women. I also use it in the interest of simplicity: eighteenth-
century periodicals proliferated terms for conversations about other
people, ranging from the rather harmless (if childish) “tattling” and
“prating” to the perhaps repugnant but not necessarily pernicious
“gossip” or “idle talk,” from the shocking but ultimately inconsequen-
tial “scandalizing” to regulatory “censure,” from libelous “calumny”
to downright vicious “backbiting.” Lumping these modes together
under the somewhat anachronistic rubric of “gossip,” if reductive,
helps isolate the common structure shared by each of these terms and
highlights that structure’s significance in eighteenth-century periodi-
cal literature.
At its most basic, gossip’s structure is one of inclusion (of the gos-
sipers in a relationship of shared knowledge) through exclusion (of
the object of gossip, who is the object of that shared knowledge).
This definition will become more nuanced as the chapter investigates
particular print instances of this intimate conversational structure, but
for the moment, I want to stress that gossip is not interested in its own
effects. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have consequences nor that
those consequences can’t be specifically mobilized: it is precisely the
argument of this chapter that certain periodical writers do seize on
both the structure and topic of gossip as a means to produce discursive
intimacy in a printed text. Rather, I want to underscore the fact that

gossip is not normally understood to be functional or socially useful;
it is in fact generally understood to undermine social bonds: it hurts
people, it renders conversation vapid, and it registers and encourages
selfishness.3 In this respect, then, gossip simply perpetuates itself for
the pleasure of perpetuating itself: it does not require (though it may
have) a purpose or function.
The chapter begins by considering gossip as a mode of discourse
and its theoretical implications for performances of femininity and the
stability of any sort of public/private dividing line, even in the period
often understood to originate that division. It then substantiates this
critique of public and private by examining the use of a gossiping
structure in two of the most prominent early eighteenth-century Lon-
don periodicals, the Tatler and the Spectator. The chapter next turns
to two other periodicals—one contemporaneous, the other appearing
more than a generation later—which imitated the personas of the first
two and played up the gendered ascription of gossiping: the Female
Tatler and the Female Spectator. It concludes with two sections on
Ben Franklin’s essays published in periodicals: The first addresses his
gender-bending use of gossip as an explicit theme and topic, while the
second assesses his ventriloquism of a figure who would usually be an
object of gossip.
Th e P u bl ic , the P r ivate, and Gossi p

Gossip’s disruption of the boundaries between what are most often
termed “public” and “private” poses a problem for the usual narra-
tive of the development of the public sphere, and my understanding
of public and private thus obviously qualifies the model articulated
by Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere. On the Habermasian account, the public sphere emerges out
of the creation of an intimate sphere (aligned with the domestic) that
constitutes persons with a sense of their own subjectivity, which indi-
vidual subjectivities then become available for abstraction into liberal
citizenship.4 But gossip in the early eighteenth century appears to draw
from, or depend on, a division between public and private that ante-
dates the historical “origin” of the public sphere at the beginning of
the long eighteenth century. Moreover, it establishes the existence
of two such realms only to suggest their mutual interpenetration.
How can something depend on a division it erases?
There are a few ways to answer this question. One response would
hold that there is a public and a private in the Habermasian sense in
the early eighteenth century, but that abstraction is not a prerequisite

to entry into the public sphere. Another would argue that the mutual
constitution of the public and the private means that they are always
on the verge of collapsing into each other. Another answer would sug-
gest that there is no such distinction in the eighteenth century, that
this division is more properly understood to occur in the nineteenth
century when gendered habitation of the public and the private seems
to solidify. Still another version would claim that the public and the
private become distinct for men in the eighteenth century but that
women had to use other modes of mobility—like gossip—in order
to have access to the public and that men adapted this mode as a way
of producing a sense of intimate readerly inclusivity. In some sense
these all seem at least potentially plausible, though there are signifi-
cant rebuttals to each—if abstraction is not required, why do writers
omit or disguise their identities? Doesn’t reciprocal definition sug-
gest overlap without dissolution? What could mass print production
mean if not the creation of a public? If the gendering of roles and
spheres really solidified in the nineteenth century, why would there
be such a sharp sex division in the eighteenth century? I suggest that
the incipient division of realms Habermas traces is incomplete in the
eighteenth century: the public sphere was not so public because of
the exclusionary practices of its actual geographical spaces; the domes-
tic arena was not so private, given the expansive definition and size
of families (nonnuclear relatives, visitors on extended stays, servants)
and, in urban spaces, given the proximity of other domestic spaces;
the first moves in the direction of a division between public and pri-
vate brought with them an emphasis on a social realm that partakes
of both and belongs to neither, which I am calling the intimate; and
the primary discursive form of this realm—coextensive with but not
identical to the eighteenth century’s focus on polite conversation and
sociability—is gossip.5
Habermas’s account of the rise of coffeehouse culture in London
as the origination of a public sphere moderated by rational communi-
cative discourse between socially mixed but situationally equal people
matches in part my own understanding of the development of public
spaces. Where my thinking differs most substantially from his model
is first in its account of the development of privacy, which he links to
the rise of the bourgeois conjugal family and the attendant shifts in
architecture and belletristic conceptions of subjectivity and sentiment,
all tending toward the understanding of selfhood as definitionally
interior. I understand the private to be discursively structured as well
but productive of what he terms the “role of human beings pure and
simple” only insofar as human is understood to mean male.6 Second

and more important, I contest the notion of an exclusively “rational”
account of discourse in the development of the public. At stake for
me in Habermas’s emphasis on rationality (and in his respondents’
emphasis on sentiment) is the functionalist approach to social space
it implies, by which I mean the predictable production of persons by
virtue of the spaces they inhabit.
One way to explain this rather compacted formulation is to look
carefully at Habermas’s explanation of the role the intimate sphere
plays in the development of the public. He argues that the new bour-
geois public embraced the idea of law as “the quintessence of general,
abstract, and permanent norms” in direct contrast with autocratic
monarchical rule because of “the practice of the secrets of state.”7 The
public’s amenability to the rule of law derives in part, as he explains it,
from the normative effects of literary practices and social conventions
emanating from the intimacy of the conjugal home and its empha-
sis on subjective individuation: “As a public they were already under
the implicit law of the parity of all cultivated persons.”8 Habermas
goes on to explain the consequences of this interpenetration of public
and intimate realms in the following terms: “The bourgeois public’s
critical public debate took place in principle without regard to all pre-
existing social and political rank and in accord with universal rules.
These rules, because they remained strictly external to the individu-
als as such, secured space for the development of these individuals’
interiority by literary means. These rules, because universally valid,
secured a space for the individuated person; because they were objec-
tive, they secured a space for what was most subjective; because they
were abstract, for what was most concrete.”9
It’s crucial to note Habermas’s reliance upon the imaginative space
“secured” for the “individuated person,” in contradistinction to the
literal spaces that barred particular persons. He relies here, as in his
assessment of the social function of London’s coffeehouses, upon
the principle of access and equality imagined by the newly develop-
ing bourgeois public. But this principle was simply that: an abstract
norm like the rule of law, certainly, but one whose practice differed
substantially from its theoretical purity. Habermas is clearly aware
of this: he notes, for example, that discussions within coffeehouses
lacked any guarantee of political inconsequentiality and the fact that
women, excluded from the actual space of the coffeehouses, launched
an unsuccessful pamphlet campaign against the vitiating effects of cof-
fee.10 What gets lost in this analysis, however, is the way in which such
principled accessibility, if not extended in practice, results in precisely
the sort of secrecy he imagines such normativity opposing. That is to

say, in the terms of this chapter, where Habermas sees court secrets
and monarchical rule replaced by rational-critical debate and the
rule of law, I see the transformation of court secrets used for politi-
cal leverage into discursive secrecy and revelation—the structure of
gossip—used to negotiate and ultimately collapse those spaces in and
to which access is not permitted.
The question of access is a question of movement across spaces, and
the movement between public and private enacted by gossip is one
prominent method of rendering seemingly exclusive spaces perme-
able. Understanding access as movement—rather than a Habermasian
potentiality of principle—de-spatializes both the public and the pri-
vate. As should be clear by now, intimacy constituted by gossip in this
chapter emphatically does not invoke a Habermasian intimate sphere,
reducible to the domestic, nor does it simply replace “privacy” with
a plausible synonym. Gossip’s intimacy rests in the (usually) dyadic
structure of conversation but stretches across all sorts of arenas: famil-
ial, political, economic, and social. “Intimacy” in the way I use it
describes a relationship between persons that is not in the service of
anything (except, perhaps, the production of still more intimacy—an
economics of self-proliferation that will be discussed later): it is not a
functional, determinate sphere.
Patricia Spacks, in her 1985 book Gossip, notes an “atmosphere of
erotic titillation” present even in gossip of a nonsexual nature.11 This
“implicit voyeurism” stems from our shared “prurient interest in oth-
ers’ privacies, what goes on behind closed doors.”12 Rooting gossip in
prurience, however, as Spacks does, is only one part of the equation
in eighteenth-century conceptions of gossip. Spacks notes three major
versions of gossip: “distilled malice,” “idle talk,” and her favored
category of “‘serious’ [gossip], which exists only as a function of inti-
macy.”13 She decries the evils of the first and the inconsequentiality
of the second but argues that the third category is a beleaguered and
misunderstood one. Gossip’s lack of audience, she argues, relegates
gossip to the status of a purely private form and activity. Its strength
lies in its capacity to forge and reinforce bonds between intimates,
particularly between the “subordinated” and oppressed. Thus she cri-
tiques Kierkegaard’s concern that gossip erases the “vital distinction
between what is private and what is public”14 by responding not to his
fear of erasure but to his emphasis on subject matter rather than its
relational effects. Ultimately, she asserts still more strongly that gossip
is of course a private activity.
While I clearly agree that gossip manufactures intimacy, I’d like

to trouble the public/private distinction Spacks draws and the one
Kierkegaard implicitly endorses in imagining that gossip vitiates a dis-
tinction between the two. Two simple definitions of gossip, matched
on the axis of public and private, could be offered: On the one hand,
gossip makes public information that someone hopes to keep private.
On the other hand, gossip circulates in an open exchange; people
trade “open secrets,” suggesting that gossip is itself in some sense a
public activity that seeks to regulate or comment on private behaviors.
What gossip more crucially does, however, is collapse space: it pro-
poses an intimate sphere that imagines at its most basic an interior of
those who participate in gossiping and an exterior of those who don’t.
People inhabiting this exterior may be privy to the information, but
since they are not currently engaged in the conversation, they are not
a part of the intimacy created by it. This makes gossip not so much
about public or private distinctions—except insofar as it constructs a
momentary privacy between persons and concerns people who par-
ticipate in an external world shared by the discussants.
This may sound like an echo of Kierkegaard, but his understanding
of a collapse between public and private is grounded in a deep dis-
trust of that collapse—as he explains it, “the introspection of silence is
the condition of all educated social intercourse; the exteriorized cari-
cature of inwardness is vulgarity and talkativeness.”15 Thus while we
agree that “public opinion . . . interests itself in the most private con-
cerns” in a way that erodes distinctions we might want to make between
the two, he sees this as a cause for despair, as the loss of an interior
silence, which loss diminishes the human subject’s capacity for reflec-
tion and social engagement.16 While recognizing gossip’s “vulgarity”
and even its potential dangers in terms of damage inflicted or distrac-
tions presented, I nevertheless hope to demonstrate that it produces
temporal and discursive movement across spaces by collapsing them
in a way that allows social engagement for those who might otherwise
not be able to participate in “educated social intercourse.”
This section has argued that the structure of gossip offers a critique
of our understanding of the development of the public and private
spheres. It does so by creating provisional, nonfunctionalist intimacies
that exist in a discursive space shaped by access, time, and (auditory)
range rather than exclusively or even primarily by physical space.
The next section illustrates this capacity for critique by examining the
specific instantiation of gossip as form in early eighteenth-century
periodicals.
Tat tl ing Lik e Men

While the Tatler’s relation to gossip is expressed in its very title, Steele’s
next venture, with Joseph Addison, has a more oblique relationship to
it. It may seem odd, in fact, to characterize the Spectator as a purveyor
of gossip, given that Mr. Spectator himself so vehemently opposes it.17
If the Tatler was formed in part as a response to the billingsgate effu-
sions of Tory Grub Street hacks, the Spectator intended to rise above
the fray of partisanship and of scandal.18 Mr. Spectator claims, after
all, that “it is not [his] design to be a publisher of intrigues and cuck-
oldoms, or to bring little infamous stories out of their present lurking
holes into broad daylight,” and therefore he and the members of his
Spectator Club (composed of equally fictitious men of differing social
and political backgrounds) will “pass over a single foe to charge whole
armies . . . and shall consider the crime as it appears in the species,
not as it is circumstanced in an individual.” He disparages superficial
conversation consisting of attention to “the drapery of the species.”19
Yet the “little infamous stories” come out anyway: not usually the
sordid scandal of intrigues or cuckoldoms, but the stories of visitors
who exhibit strange behaviors (tastes for opera, addiction to supersti-
tion, the disruption of tea shop commerce by “female rakes”) and
the letters from “readers.” The stories about friends are gossipy in
a conventional sense—Mr. Spectator is entrusted with confidences
that he then reveals to others. The letters, printed in the Spectator
and invariably signed with initials or pseudonyms, report on readers’
personal lives: the man who wishes to divorce his wife for excessive
use of makeup; the young man in love with a woman of superior
fortune; “Robin Bridegroom,” who writes to complain of postnuptial
night drumming; the henpecked husband and the wife of the “cot-
quean.”20 Taken together, these stories, whether repeated at a remove
by Mr. Spectator or one of the members of his Spectator Club or
reported directly by a reader, provide readers with access to an inti-
mate realm—that between Mr. Spectator and his interlocutors—and
produce a presumptive community of shared opinion premised upon
the pleasures of that momentary intimacy.21
Why then should we not characterize this aspect of the Spectator as
simply epistolary rather than specifically gossiping? First, and perhaps
counterintuitively, because these epistles read like actual letters: not
the perfect, detailed recall of Richardsonian letter writers like Pamela,
but letters tending not only toward the intimate but also toward the
quotidian—marriage and love but also dancing and flirting. Even
these topics, however, are framed not in general and prescriptive terms
but rather in specific and personal ones: What to do when an amour

at a masquerade becomes a cross-class farce? How do you educate a
country kinswoman who refuses to learn urban coquettish arts? This
specificity of the people behind the letters (who frequently were actual
readers, not just Addisonian personas) makes them read much like
letters to modern-day advice columnists—and like such letters, the
topics they discuss tend toward the sort of behaviors and feelings most
likely to be a subject of gossip.22
Moreover, these letters turn their readers into voyeurs, giving them
the titillation of receiving gossip: the premise is that these letters are
addressed to Mr. Spectator, who in turn publishes them to be read by
his audience, so that each individual reader gets to see the letter over
Mr. Spectator’s shoulder, as it were. In addition to this thematization,
however, the letters position the essay readers inside the text itself.
The letter itself may be a species of gossip—the writer telling the story
of a neighbor—or it may be a personal confession and query. In either
case, though, the letters put a reader in Mr. Spectator’s confidence
and thereby into a gossiping relationship. We don’t just read over
Mr. Spectator’s shoulder—he actively invites us to discover what our
neighbors are doing.
This in-on-the-secret reader is not unmarked, of course: the Tatler
and the Spectator both famously envision audiences divided along
several lines, particularly that of gender. What seems crucial is that
they appeal to men and women simultaneously, which suggests some
overlap at least in their conception of their audience if not in that
audience’s reception of the periodicals. The Tatler, dated inevitably
from spaces characterized by most twentieth- and twenty-first-century
critics as public (the coffeehouses of London) that were, at this junc-
ture, almost entirely male preserves, capitalizes on an insider status
desirable (perhaps) to both men and women. Whether one had failed
to hear the latest while at St. James’s coffeehouse or one simply did
not or could not go there, the Tatler could fill in missing knowledge.
That the former category (those who missed out for some accidental
reason) seems exclusively male does not mean that the latter (those
who did not or could not go) were exclusively female. Not quite
private clubs, coffeehouses were nevertheless also not public spaces
in the sense of providing equal access to all comers.23 Rather, as the
Tatler himself points out, certain information is to be gleaned from
certain venues because particular people frequent those places and
speak primarily (or at least extensively) on issues somehow suited to
that space. Without producing an exhaustive history of how or why,
as the first Tatler points out, Will’s coffeehouse came to be associated
with poetry, the Grecian coffeehouse with learning, St. James’s cof-
feehouse with politics and news, and so forth, we may take Steele at
his word that each location signifies not some massive public opposed
to a smaller private (whether the domestic or the self) but rather a
midway point between the two. That the Tatler was largely read in
the coffeehouses is no surprise, nor that its successor, the Spectator,
was read there as well. But both were read in other spaces as well,
passed from hand to hand and from venue to venue, and the Spectator
addresses this multiplicity of locations in Addison’s reflections on the
paper’s success in Spectator no. 10.
“I shall be ambitious to have it said of me,” writes Mr. Specta-
tor, “that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries,
Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-
Tables and in Coffee-Houses”: a catalogue of spaces that sounds very
much as though it moved us from the private to the public realm.24
It’s worth noting, though, that Mr. Spectator’s syntactically middle
terms are logically middle terms as well: schools and colleges occupy
a space between the private—because of restrictions of access—and
the public—not only because of the sheer volume of persons con-
tained in those spaces but because of their resonances as places of
civic training rather than domestic education. That is to say, one goes
to schools and colleges (as opposed to being educated at home or
not receiving an education at all) for reasons that have everything to
do with the development of the public (social and political) sphere.
Whether those reasons concern the retention of class privilege or
the rising of the middle class, education prepares its recipient for a
social role.25
Mr. Spectator’s very next sentence following this catalogue of
movement, however, seems to move immediately back into the
domestic: “I would therefore in a very particular Manner recommend
these my Speculations to all well regulated Families, that set apart an
Hour in every Morning for Tea and Bread and Butter; and would
earnestly advise them for their Good to order this Paper to be punctu-
ally served up, and to be looked upon as a Part of the Tea Equipage.”
Mr. Spectator’s “therefore” suggests that he thinks this comment fol-
lows logically from the previous one, and his “very particular Manner”
suggests the earnestness with which he urges this logical assertion. Let
us, then, take him at his word (while granting Addison some authorial
jocularity) and imagine that the table in the coffeehouse and the tea
table found in a London home are in fact commensurate. Mr. Specta-
tor here structures intimacy at the location of the table—is it simply
the multiplication of these tables, whether within a coffeehouse or
within houses throughout “London and Westminster,” that gives

them the critical mass to become public?
We might be reminded here of Habermas’s contention that “sub-
jectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already
oriented to an audience (Publikum). The opposite of the intimateness
whose vehicle was the written word was indiscretion and not publicity
as such.”26 The notion of privacy as audience-oriented prior to any
public revelation makes sense, but it does not follow, I would argue,
that “indiscretion” opposes discursive intimacy: rather, it seems that
selectively performed indiscretion helps to create that very intimacy
by proposing an implicit agreement about what counts as discreet and
indiscreet behavior or revelation. Or, pace Patricia Spacks’s understand-
ing of gossip as having no “conceivable audience,” gossip becomes
precisely the counterpart of an audience-oriented subjectivity.27
The question is still vexed, however, because it’s not as though
sheer numbers constituted a public in any sense except that of a read-
ing public, and we might still want to imagine reading as a potentially
private activity. The designation of public then seems to have some-
thing to do with the proximity of others—and, crucially, the proximity
of their conversations: a tea table or coffeehouse differs from a closet
in that one will not be alone. One might read aloud, talk with others,
or overhear their conversations; one might, that is, diffuse the sensa-
tion of intimate reading practices across that numerical public. This
proximity of others gives rise to the exchange of political informa-
tion produced at the site of the coffeehouses and to the exchange of
gossip as well. This is not to equate the practice of tattling with that
of conversation (although the Tatler’s title in fact invites us to raise
the question of their relationship). Rather, Mr. Spectator establishes
a structural parallel between the two: information (whether news or
gossip) exchanged between people over the table.28 Whether that
table has tea or coffee on it, whether it is located in the coffeehouse or
the familial house, becomes moot. Conversational intimacy supplants
physical location. Not that location doesn’t matter—far from it, since
for example, one runs a greater risk of being overheard in a coffee-
house than at one’s breakfast table. What matters about gossip is the
way it distills any location into an intimate relation between people—a
conversationally described space rather than a geographical one.
This has clear ramifications for the construction of what are com-
monly called public and private: if an ostensibly public place can be
conversationally negotiated such that its significance rests in the inti-
macies established and shared there, and if conversations about spaces
make their way into the “private” home, then the terms “public” and
“private” become far less relevant to our understanding of subjec-

tive and social formation. The terms that seem more appropriate here
include the ideas of motion and discursive space, relation and intimacy.
This disruption of any easy opposition of public and private extends
as well to the association of the private with the familial. The rise of
India houses (tea shops catering to women), for example, troubles any
metonymic correlation between tea and domesticity. Even if we were
tempted to imagine the domestic tea table as a sacrosanct sphere of
the family, however, Mr. Spectator’s endorsement of public reading
practices at the domestic table suggests the incursion of a gossiping
model that proposes the potentially private as a space for discus-
sion of the public. This is not simply a case of the public threatening
the private—rather, Mr. Spectator’s formulation (his determinative
“therefore”) suggests that this is a required form of cross-pollination,
perhaps an inescapable one.
The sort of gossip invoked in the Tatler seems to recede with
the advent of the Spectator in favor of a figure whose key function
is observing rather than tattling.29 Mr. Spectator presents himself
as a public figure (“I am frequently seen in most publick Places . . .
There is no Place of general Resort, wherein I do not often make my
Appearance”) who does not interact with that public: “Sometimes I
smoak a Pipe at Child’s, and whilst I seem attentive to nothing but the
Post-Man, over-hear the conversation of every Table in the Room . . .
where-ever I see a Cluster of People I always mix with them, though I
never open my Lips but in my own Club . . . In short, I have acted in
all the Parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend
to preserve in this Paper.”30
What this observing persona proposes, however, seems nothing
less than to act as a gatherer of gossip. Mr. Spectator may never open
his lips anywhere but in his club, but in this club he tells what he has
“over-hear[d]” from “every Table,” and in the paper, he produces in
print precisely the spoken words he refuses to utter. If Mr. Spectator’s
urbanity is premised in part upon his refusal to engage in actual dis-
cussion, undercutting that refusal by printing what he hears produces
a relationship between authorial persona and reader that is structured
like gossip and produces a similar momentary intimacy. If his urbanity
derives from his own relaxed, conversational style, that style neverthe-
less depends on the sense that he is revealing a secret.31
Locating intimacy at the space of the table suggests an intimacy
applicable to conversations held in all sorts of spaces. What Mr. Spec-
tator (or any other unintended auditor) overhears from those tables,
however, is only of interest if it is secret. That is to say, it is entirely
possible to have a conversation meant for only one or a few other

people that others overhear but about which they don’t much care.
But private conversations in public rise (or sink, depending on your
perspective) to the level of gossip when the content of the discus-
sion is one people would like to know about but do not, not simply
because they haven’t yet read the papers, but because the circuit of
gossip has not yet reached them. This is precisely the sort of material
Mr. Spectator proposes to print.
Thus far I have been arguing that the structure of the Spectator’s
essays depends on and mirrors that of gossip, not only because the
letters themselves invite a voyeuristic sense of confidences unwittingly
shared, but because Mr. Spectator positions himself as a gossip who
retails the stories of others. In doing so, I have argued, the Specta-
tor suggests not only that the public and private are not so clearly
distinct from each other but also that the two are, on Mr. Spectator’s
account, mutually implicated: the public is present at the breakfast
table; the private is present at the coffeehouse. My contention, then,
has been that the idea of discursively traversable space this reading of
the Spectator implies nominates a term like “intimacy” as more aptly
descriptive of what is at stake in both social and subject formation in
the eighteenth century.
The rest of this chapter turns to three responses to the Spectator
that take up more directly the relationship of gender to gossip and its
implications for social reproduction. The first two of these, the Female
Tatler and the Female Spectator, quite directly engage Addison’s and
Steele’s ventures, as their titles suggest. The Female Tatler undermines
still further a spatial or geographic understanding of the public and
private “spheres,” while the Female Spectator more closely considers
gossip’s potential both for moral regulation and—more troublingly,
it suggests—for the erosion of social and class structures. The third
response, Ben Franklin’s essays that speak directly to gossip in the
voices of female purveyors of and objects of scandal, takes up both
of these potentials and suggests that gossip’s gender-normativizing
effects—like those of law—may themselves cause the social erosion
they seek to forestall.
Fema l e Tat tl ing, Femal e S pectati ng

The Tatler’s and Spectator’s model of gossip in effect privatizes the
public by making one prominent mode of public discourse look like
a system dependent upon secrecy and intimacy, and it renders the
private public by imagining it as a space that discourse can and should
enter; the Female Tatler’s model of gossip pulls the terms “public”
and “private” out of even that tentative oppositional alignment. The
Female Tatler explodes any lingering notion of a private domestic
realm by turning the familial household into a public space. In so
doing, it performs a double gesture of publicity, making ostensibly
private spaces public and then presenting those redescribed spaces to
a reading public.
The Female Tatler, begun in 1709 and carried on in various guises
only through 1710, was written by one Mrs. Crackenthorpe.32 Until
recently, most scholars attributed authorship of the Female Tatler to
lawyer Thomas Baker.33 Others have suggested the involvement of
Bernard Mandeville. Fidelis Morgan makes a strong case for Delarivier
Manley’s authorship, perhaps in conjunction with Thomas Baker, with
contributions from Mandeville and Susanna Centlivre in the guise of
one or another of the “Ladies” who composed a sort of female ver-
sion of the Spectator or Scriblerian Club.34 The debate about who
might have been behind the figure of Mrs. Crackenthorpe, however,
is interesting only really for the purposes of historical attribution. To
argue that Mrs. Crackenthorpe represents an actual woman’s voice, or
that she is in contrast merely the puppet of actual men, essentializes
authorship—as though knowing the sex of the person behind the per-
sona will tell us how to read certain ideas. What gets lost in this line of
questioning is the fact that Mrs. Crackenthorpe is not simply gendered
female but is a particular (and particularly laughable) character—she is
not an ideal of gender or class or manners and certainly not a transpar-
ent stand-in for her creator(s)’ sex or even sexual politics.
The Female Tatler takes off from the Tatler and the Spectator in
more than just name, as the club composition of authorship sug-
gests. Mrs. Crackenthorpe addresses Isaac Bickerstaff directly in the
inaugural issue, hoping he “will not think I invade his property, by
undertaking a paper of this kind, since tatling was ever adjudg’d pecu-
liar to our sex; my design is not to rival his performance . . . but . . .
I desire leave to prate a little to the town, and try what diversion my
intelligence can give ’em.”35 Her characterization of her writing as
“prating” stresses the inconsequential nature of what she undertakes,
but its direction “to the town” suggests a willingness to command a
space well beyond a proscribed domestic realm. That is, Mrs. Crack-
enthorpe both underscores a gossiper’s lack of desire for particular
utility and proposes it as precisely the model by which to address an
audience.
The days on which the paper appears—“to prevent mistakes,
which may happen by peoples’ enquiring for either of the tatlers, I
shall publish mine the contrary days, viz. Mondays, Wednesdays

and Fridays”—suggests both a demarcation between the appropri-
ate bounds of each paper’s purview, since it would be a “mistake” to
receive one Tatler when you had wanted another, and a reciprocity
between the two: one will serve on the days the other is not available.
The physical space from which Mrs. Crackenthorpe writes, like the
Tatler and the Spectator, is neither public nor private. She writes “from
[her] own apartment, which comprehends, White’s, Will’s, the Gre-
cian, Garraway’s, in Exchange-Alley, and all the India houses within
the Bills of Mortality.” Her apartment can be thus comprehensive
because, as she explains, she has twice a week
a very great assembly of both sexes, from his Grace my Lord Duke to
Mr. Sagathie the spruce Mercer in the City; and from her Grace my
Lady Duchess, to Mrs Top Sail, the sea captain’s wife at Wapping. Not
that my drawing room ever had the least ill character, tho’ a foolish
baronet once call’d it the scandal office. But as I am courteous to all
persons, and strangers have the same respect paid ’em as my former
acquaintances, half the nation visits me, where I have a true history of
the world.36
Crackenthorpe here accomplishes a remarkable shift: the pre-

sumptively private location of the home is instanced here by a lady’s
drawing room, an architectural space designed precisely for the incur-
sion of some portion of the “public” world into the familial realm.
This drawing room in turn is transformed into an emphatically public
space, a governmental office in which half the nation, from tradesfolk
to gentry, brushes elbows. We might initially imagine a Shevelowian
enactment of the private space served up for public scrutiny only to
confirm its private status.
Indeed, the satirical edge presented by the Female Tatler suggests
exactly this, for as a woman who is “intimate with everybody at first
sight,” Phoebe Crackenthorpe seems the model of a woman who fails
to understand the boundaries between public and private, between
intimacy and acquaintanceship. Such a failure suggests in turn that
there are such boundaries, and that they, if not necessarily obvious to
everyone, can be crossed only at the risk of inducing laughter, or the
danger such laughter implies. But Crackenthorpe’s humorous failure
to observe such distinctions is precisely what gives her authority to
tattle—the same authority claimed by the Tatler and the Spectator.
Understanding gossip as a sort of movement helps to illuminate the
source of this authority. Mrs. Crackenthorpe makes a doubly public
move. She first renders a space potentially private entirely public and
then publicly prints accounts of that space. She achieves this transub-
stantiation of geographical spaces—putting coffee- and India houses
inside a drawing room—by understanding those spaces as discursively
formed. That is to say, on this model, coffee- and India houses are
constituted by the conversation available in them, so transferring that
information to another geographical space effects a transformation
that ultimately serves to de-emphasize the geographical in favor of
the discursive. Mrs. Crackenthorpe is able to do this only because she
has access to that information, in the form of persons sharing intimate
conversations, and gains further authority by presenting that informa-
tion to a reading audience.
Gossip as movement is thus one way to define a private that is not
necessarily feminine or domestic and a public not simply understood
as economically or politically driven and not simply constituted by
a given volume of persons. Information moves from post to post,
traveling a circuit of places and spaces (drawing rooms, tea tables, cof-
feehouses) that could only with great reservation be called “private,”
given the enormous susceptibility of those spaces to permeation by
numbers and kinds of people and information.37 The structure of oral
gossip, in the feminized terms proposed in late seventeenth- and early
eighteenth-century conceptions, follows the person of the female
scandalizer, from drawing room to drawing room. As Mrs. Cracken-
thorpe explains, people come in to tell stories and then leave and have
stories told about them: “Seldom any person obliges the company
with a new piece of scandal, but ’tis repaid him with above twenty
more.”38
As these economic terms suggest, gossip is figured as a system serv-
ing primarily to perpetuate itself, not to produce particular results.
Here the exchange of scandal, while it may still produce a sense of
intimacy, serves much more clearly to proliferate still more gossip.
That said, gossip’s economy clearly does have certain effects. One of
these, in the gossip-inflected or thematized periodical essay, might
seem to be the replacement of the person with the printed sheet.
Rather than emphasize the scandalizer herself, whose acquaintance
readers may not have made, or in whose confidence they may not
be, or whose visit they might have missed, the periodical essay carries
equal opportunity and thus normativized gossip into drawing rooms
and tea tables. This uniformity, of course, is an effect of the peri-
odical page’s mass production, and in this sense the essays on those
pages do have universalizing tendencies. As the Tatler and Spectator
demonstrate, however, such essays resist this uniformity by producing
multiple persons and personas. Unlike a novel, in which readers are

usually guided by a continuous narrative and consistent characteriza-
tion, the periodical press staves off some of the massifying effects of
print culture, not simply in virtue of its seriality and range of topics,
but in virtue of the discontinuous entry of particularized persons in
the form of letters. We are meant to imagine that behind the letter
stands not the club or the authorization of the paper itself but a reader
represented in print.
The Female Tatler introduces persons not through letters but
through Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s characteristically direct mode of
address. She writes to specific people, cautioning them that the round
of gossip has already hit upon them as objects. Thus she warns “a
gentleman that frequently reads his Billet-Doux in the Chocolate
House . . . to keep a secretary to prevent his own hand being known,
when he writes to himself” and a “Lady Circumstance at Epsom, who
is a mighty merry, unaffected, hoity-toity creature, always at Roly-
Poly or the play [that she] is desired not to stroddle quite so much,
or laugh quite so loud . . . [by] several Thames-street ladies.”39 In
keeping with earlier disavowals of the very structures these periodicals
invoke, Mrs. Crackenthorpe takes it upon herself to inform “Mrs Clack
of Gossips-hall near Ludgate, who is continually prying into her
neighbors affairs, and buzzing groundless suspicions in every hus-
band’s ear, and suspecting every woman’s chastity, is desired to turn
her optics within herself, and particularly not be so publicly familiar
with Will Whitebread, the B—r, and when she has taken care to stifle
her own shame, she may be as imperiously virtuous as she pleases.”40
Mrs. Crackenthorpe demands an internalization of Mr. Spectator’s
observing eye. That is, however much pleasure her readers derive
from access to these personal revelations, she warns particular read-
ers to take heed of gossip’s policing function. If this marks a moment
of consciously imagined utility for gossip, she nevertheless makes it
clear that such an internalization has not yet been accomplished by
the very fact that she advises objects of gossip that they must mend
their ways. Thus when she warns “a certain fruit woman in Covent
Garden market” that she will “acquaint the quality with some jug-
gling tricks between her and their servants, and the town with some
other of her tricks, which won’t redound much to her reputation”
unless she furnishes Mrs. Crackenthorpe with a suitable dessert for her
upcoming dinner party, the threat of gossip as a deterrent has clearly
not worked.41 In fact, the actual deterrent here is a loss of economic
benefits—it’s not simply that the vendor will have her reputation
sullied but that she will lose business if her dishonesty is revealed.
Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s willingness to be bought off with some appetiz-

ing fruit suggests that the exchange here is literally economic rather
than purely discursively so.
The Female Spectator, published fully thirty years after the final
issues of the Tatler, Spectator, and Female Tatler, avoids such direct
address, favoring instead the epistolary tradition of the earlier periodi-
cals, but the intervening years have changed the stakes dramatically.
In September 1744, the Female Spectator published a letter from
“the First Correspondent the Female Spectator has yet been favour’d
with.”42 This letter marks an effort to shore up the divisions between
public and private, so blurred by the gossiping structure of the ear-
lier periodicals. The editor and her associates—the unnamed widow
of quality, Mira and Euphrosine—step aside to let Sarah Oldfashion
speak her piece on the dangers of public breakfasting, now distracting
her 14-year-old daughter (“a young Creature, over whom Heaven
and Nature has given me sole Authority”) from the proper pursuit of
her education.43
In keeping with the idea of gossip as movement identified in the
Female Tatler, this letter is deeply concerned with the movement of
the private household (the domestic—or is it?—tea table envisioned
by Addison in Spectator no. 10) into the public. The difference is an
important one: Addison encourages the intrusion of the public into
the private; Oldfashion decries the removal of the private into a public
space. She writes to complain of the recent fashion of “public Break-
fasting” in London’s pleasure gardens, an entertainment that has
produced “a total Aversion” on the part of her 14-year-old daughter
to her studies: “Nothing seems worthy her regard but how to appear
in the genteelest Deshabille at Ranelagh.”
Education here is figured as a private activity, as opposed to the
civic training ground Mr. Spectator refers to in mentioning schools
and colleges. The division is clearly a gendered one, but it is one
we can understand in the terms we have been using: the “young
Creature[’s]” education is a private one that has been disturbed by
public movement, whereas the masculine education of the colleges is
both exclusive and civic in nature. What is curious about this letter’s
efforts to delineate distinct and appropriate public and private spaces,
of course, is that it aims to do so in precisely the same tattling mode,
by calling attention to the perceived consequences of gossip. If earlier
writers have kept gossip far removed from notions of its social effects,
Mrs. Oldfashion, by calling attention to its consequences, identifies
gossip as precisely the force that will disrupt the social world.
Far more than simply turning her daughter’s head, Oldfashion

predicts dire consequences for the young ladies of London if such
activities go unchecked: “Convince our young Ladies of the Loss it
[‘gadding eternally to these Publick Places’] is to themselves, how much
it disqualifies them for all the social Duties, renders them neglectful of
what they owe Heaven, and to those who gave them Being, and incapa-
ble of being either good Wives, good Mothers, good Friends, or good
Mistresses; and thereby entails sure Unhappiness on their own future
Days, as well as on all those who shall have any Relation to them.”44
It is not just the young Miss Oldfashion who is endangered: the
young women of an entire social class, all who come in contact with
them (by apparently contagious “unhappiness”) and ultimately,
as their incipient bad motherhood suggests, the very perpetuation
of their class risk annihilation. Oldfashion’s letter partakes of a
version of the public/private split initially perhaps more carefully
delineated than that found in Addison, Steele, or Crackenthorpe.
Writing more than thirty years after the two Tatlers and the Spectator,
we might imagine that an incipient separate spheres ideology is begin-
ning to take grip. What bears analysis here, however, is the fact that
what this gadding about renders young women unfit for is precisely
social duties: their private education, now disregarded, is meant to
make them effective parts of a social world that may be domestic but
on the Female Tatler’s terms would hardly seem private. The conse-
quences of their early behavior, after all, extends to “all those who
shall have any Relation to them,” which here comprises at least par-
ents, husbands, children, friends, and servants.
This circle of people reads in two ways: On the one hand, strictly
as a familial grouping, which suggests a retreat from the public world
of the pleasure gardens into the enclosed space of the household. On
the other hand, the inclusion of “friends” and the suggestion of acting
as a “mistress” who will host social affairs within this space suggest a
lingering sense of the openness of the domestic, of its susceptibility to
“turning public” with the entrance of conversation.
So while this may seem like an instance of the sentimental family
Shevelow sees Steele constructing in his “elevated” address to women,
I’d like to linger over the public consequences of conflating private
activity (eating breakfast) with public spaces (pleasure gardens). What
Mrs. Oldfashion fears is precisely the sort of interpenetration of public
and private practices we see in Crackenthorpe—she fears a perversion
of social duties into her (tongue-firmly-in-cheek) scandalizing social
policing. If a function, though, of the domestic is to inculcate virtue,
then there’s no real sense in which gossip and wifely duties contradict
each other: the ostensible service provided by the Crackenthorpes of

the world (as she claims) is the reforming of morals.
The Female Spectator’s response to Oldfashion is not, of course, an
endorsement of gossip. Neither, however, is it a ringing denunciation,
and this marks a shift in the periodical press’s relationship to both
discursivity and its possible effects. Oldfashion’s “Case,” the female
spectator writes, “is greatly to be commiserated, and must be felt by
all who either are, or have been Mothers.” The dangerous pleasures of
these morning excursions into the public sphere are, she recognizes,
those of gossip: people flock there from “the Vanity every one has of
joining Company, as it were, with their Superiors,” and while there
they will
pretend to discover who likes who; what fine new-married Lady

coquets it with her Husband’s Intimate; what Duke regards his wife
with no more than an enforced Complaisance; and whether the For-
tune, or Person, of the young Heiress is the Object of her obsequious
Follower’s Flame.
This ridiculous desire of being thought to have a Knowledge
of Things, no less out of their Sphere to attain than unprofitable if
acquired, is extremely prevalent in many People, especially among the
little Gentry; and is one of the chief Motives which draw them in such
Crowds to all Places where their Superiors resort.45
What comes across most clearly in these words is a fear of class

mixture or of mobs (the “Crowds”). This is a concern, however,
predicated upon an initial fear of public spaces as arenas in which such
intermixture might take place. As such, it locates gossip in the pub-
lic, rather than the private, realm. Gossip is a matter of affectation
(the “ridiculous desire”), but an affectation apparently developed and
exercised by exposure to public spaces and “Crowds” of one’s “Supe-
riors.” The female Spectator advises against, however, Oldfashion’s
desire to send her daughter to a relative in Cornwall “whence if she
continues her rambling Humour, huge craggy Rocks on one Side, and
no less dread Mines on the other, will be her only Prospect.” Since
such a measure will only render her daughter sick or intractable, the
only solution is one of forbearance. She must by no means “[exert]
Authority.” This amounts, in the terms we have been using, to a relin-
quishment of the private self to a public realm, with gossip the means
of marking that space. The privacy of “craggy Rocks” and “dread
Mines” is not in itself enough to forestall the growth of Oldfashion’s
daughter’s public development. Gossip has already done its work.
What the Female Spectator aims to accomplish, then, is a reposition-

ing of the social function of gossip, as applicable to public morality,
within a more rigid sphere of privacy. We see in this letter the begin-
nings of a movement toward more firmly entrenched notions of
public and private, localized in spaces rather than in movement and
discourse. The Female Spectator still participates in the mode of the
Female Tatler, which complicates any assertion of a complete sepa-
ration between the domestic and the social, but the shift is afoot.46
If motion has served to undermine notions of space as the defining
terms of different spheres, then the Female Spectator here tries to
recast the terms of privacy and publicity, but in so doing must still
acknowledge permeability.
This desire to privatize the public moral function of gossip is taken
up in several of Ben Franklin’s essays, with characteristically egalitarian
results. Where the Female Tatler rendered the ostensibly private dou-
bly public and reveled in the plenitude of gossip’s self-reproduction,
Franklin takes for granted that what matters most are the elasticity of
both gossip and the discursive spaces it creates and gossip’s role in civic
reproduction. And where the Female Spectator sees an alarmingly labile
but still potentially useful policing function for gossip, Franklin suggests
that those victimized by its policing effects can use gossip’s mobility
both to travel class boundaries and to secure a socially reproductive
future.
Fr a nk l in’s S c andal izing L adi es

There is scarce any one Thing so generally spoke against, and at
the same time so universally practis’d, as Censure or Backbiting.
All Divines have condemned it, all Religions have forbid it, all
Writers of Morality have endeavor’d to discountenance it, and
all Men hate it at all Times, except only when they have Occasion
to make use of it. For my part, having frankly declar’d it as my
Opinion, that the general Condemnation it meets with, proceeds
only from a Consciousness in most People that they have highly
incurr’d and deserv’d it, I shall in a very fearless impudent
Manner take upon me to oppose the universal Vogue of Mankind
in all Ages, and say as much in Behalf and Vindication of this
decry’d Virtue, as the usual Vacancy in your Paper will admit.
I have call’d it a Virtue, and shall take the same Method to
prove it such, as we commonly use to demonstrate any other
Action or Habit to be a Virtue, that is, by shewing its Usefulness,
and the great Good it does to Society.
—Benjamin Franklin, “On Censure or Backbiting,” 1732
Every blockhead, ancient and modern, that could handle a pen,

has, I think, taken upon him to cant in the same senseless strain.
If to scandalize be really a crime, what do those puppies mean?
They describe it, they dress it up in the most odious, frightful,
and detestable colors, they represent it as the worst of crimes, and
then roundly and charitably charge the whole race of womankind
with it. Are not they then guilty of what they condemn, at the
same time that they condemn it?
—Benjamin Franklin, “Alice Addertongue,” 173247
These excerpts come from two essays, both published in September

1732, both appearing in the Pennsylvania Gazette, and both written
by Benjamin Franklin. Both essays appear to be about very much the
same thing. The first defends censure as “a Virtue! . . . however ill
People may load it with the opprobrious Names of Calumny, Scandal,
and Detraction,”48 while the second addresses Miss Addertongue’s
entrance “into the Practice of this Virtue,” elsewhere called a “Trade”
or “Business,” and ends by suggesting that “if you would make
your Paper a Vehicle of Scandal, you would double the Number
of your Subscribers.”49 Yet the first emphasizes gossip’s utility as a
deterrent and thereby its socially normativizing effects—the speaker
claims that “when People once become regardless of Censure, they
are arrived to a Pitch of Impudence little inferior to the Contempt of
all Laws humane and divine”—while the second highlights the eco-
nomics of its self-reproduction.50 If, as Miss Addertongue explains,
“Scandal, like other Virtues, is in part its own Reward,” it is also her
“Maxim, that no Trade can subsist without Returns”—it reproduces
itself, as one story begets another.51 The two accounts, then, seem to
limn a distinction between gossip as censure, socially useful for enforc-
ing codes of behavior, and gossip as tattling, where any such utility is
secondary to the pleasure gossipers take in enlarging the “stock” of
scandals in circulation.
These essays appeared in response to “An Essay on Envy, Philosophic
and Political,” which appeared in the American Weekly Mercury in the
last week in August 1732. Franklin’s relationship with the owner of the
Mercury, Andrew Bradford, began before he ever arrived in Philadel-
phia: he met his father, William Bradford, in New York after running
away from Boston. The Bradfords introduced Franklin to Samuel
Keimer, in whose printing house Franklin famously worked. When,
in 1728, this former employer got word that the newly self-employed
Franklin was planning to start up a newspaper—since the only com-
petition would be Bradford’s Mercury, “a paltry thing, wretchedly
manag’d, no way entertaining, and yet . . . profitable to him”—

Keimer tried to beat him to the punch (or to the press) by publishing
proposals for a paper to be called The Pennsylvania Gazette.52 Despite
the paltry, wretched, no-way entertaining nature of the Mercury,
Franklin joined forces with Bradford to thwart Keimer’s plans. The
Gazette went into print in December 1728, but by February 1729,
Franklin was printing his “Busy-Body” essays in the Mercury, merci-
lessly mocking Keimer and his newspaper.53
In the first of these essays, the Busy-Body tells Bradford that he
finds the Mercury “frequently very Dull,” and determines, “out
of Zeal for the Publick Good . . . to erect [him] Self into a Kind of
Censor Morum” as a way of reforming the “Vices and Follies” of the
town (reforming at the same time, of course, the dullness of the paper
itself).54 Keimer took offense, writing that “it requires a great Genius
and much good Nature, to manage with Decency and Humanity the
Way of Writing which the Busy Body would seem to imitate; feigned
and imaginary Characters may excite Vertue and discourage Vice; but
to figure out and apply them by gross Descriptions, has the ill Effect
which I take this Trouble to persuade the Busy Body to avoid.”55
Keimer’s sententiousness apparently found little audience: his
paper dwindled, and he sold it to Franklin within the year. But Frank-
lin himself responded to the charge promptly, replying that he had
“as great an Aversion and Abhorrence from Defamation and Scandal
as any Man, and would with the utmost Care avoid being guilty of
such things.”56
Yet when, not quite four years later, Franklin publishes the “On
Censure” and “Addertongue” essays, he does so in response to an
essay in the very newspaper that held this very protestation against
gossip. Andrew Bradford’s “On Envy” is, indeed, frequently “very
Dull,” tending toward pompous sermonizing and familiar platitudes
about virtue and vice, the degree of innocent pleasure in virtue lost
by those who are consumed in their own envy, and the fact that
“Vice . . . carries its own Punishment . . . [an] Observation [that]
is more eminently verified in this Vice than most others.”57 One can
almost see Franklin’s eyes rolling. His first essay in response, “On
Censure and Backbiting,” simply inverts the logic of Bradford’s piece:
people don’t gossip, as Bradford would have it, because they “have
very little Merit of their own”;58 rather, those who abjure gossip do
so because they know how much they deserve censure. Backbiting is
not a vice but a virtue with socially useful ends. In the second essay,
Alice Addertongue takes this logic one step further: not only is scan-
dalizing a virtue rather than a vice, but it is also “its own Reward.” It
is not the endless misery of the damned (to which Bradford compares
the envious defamer) but an endless source of virtue, figured in self-
perpetuating economic terms.59
This brief history of Franklin’s early career as a scandalizer sug-
gests that the colonial Englishman Ben Franklin both critiqued and
adopted gossip, as both a tool for moral reform and as inconsequen-
tial tattling. What soon becomes striking is the way Franklin starts to
exploit the gendered associations of gossip, not only in the sex of the
scandalizer, but also in the person who is herself the object of gossip.
Franklin’s satirical wit fends off final and assured interpretations, but
what is clear is the extent to which he understands that gossip as mode
and as subject can effect sharp critiques of gendered politics.
When Michael Warner remarks of Silence Dogood, the persona
Franklin adopted in his first (1722) foray into the periodical essay, that
the transparent “ruse” of her authorship “endorses neither author-
ship nor fictionality, but anonymity,” he imagines an anonymity that
paves the way for the universal applicability of her words.60 Likewise,
David Shields writes that the New-England Courant (Franklin’s
brother’s paper, in which the Dogood essays appeared) introduced to
the colonies a humorous “distance” that can “be achieved only at the
cost of surrendering one’s proper name upon entry into print.” For
Shields this is a condition of the developing social realm: “The new
social contract required a universal displacement of participants into
alter egos; each speaker must generalize himself before generalizing
about others.”61
Both of these critics identify anonymity and pseudonymity with
a generalizable universality. But authorship, if masked, is not evacu-
ated in the proliferation of personas and “anonymous” letters of the
early eighteenth century. Franklin’s essay “On Censure or Backbit-
ing” appeared anonymously, while “Alice Addertongue” announces a
satirical persona in its very title. Neither of these can be read as strictly
universalizing efforts. In the first place, Franklin’s placement of an
unsigned essay in the Pennsylvania Gazette can hardly be understood
to be anonymous. As its publisher, his name appeared on the paper,
and by 1732 his readers had had three years to learn to recognize his
style. Alice Addertongue, in the second place, cannot be collapsed
into anonymity either: she is a gendered and socially placed figure,
whose attributes, even if chosen for comic effect, mark her as a partic-
ular rather than a universal person. This observation suggests a point
of entry into discussions of print rationality.
Michael Warner has argued that what marks the republican “culture
of print” is “a set of assumptions developed in the late seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, on the basis of which print could be taken

as normally impersonal.” As he goes on to explain, “normally imper-
sonal” means that the reader “does not simply imagine him- or herself
receiving a direct communication or hearing the voice of the author.
He or she now also incorporates into the meaning of the printed object
an awareness of the potentially limitless others who may also be read-
ing. For that reason, it becomes possible to imagine oneself, in the
act of reading, becoming part of an arena of the national people that
cannot be realized except through such mediating imaginings.”62 This
formulation means, in effect, that what is printed for widespread dis-
semination is, de facto, impersonal and therefore public.
Critics who have explicitly positioned themselves against Warner’s
Habermasian account of print culture, curiously enough, have argued
much the same thing. Thus when Christopher Looby writes of Frank-
lin’s efforts to teach himself to write by translating Spectator essays
into verse and then back into prose (an episode in Franklin’s life I will
return to shortly), he comments,
This rather strict discipline—which really amounted to a self-dissolution

in the language of another—may seem an excessive abnegation, espe-
cially in view of the fact that Franklin’s avowed intent was to become
“Master” of language. But his method was, clearly, to submit himself to
language—to become, as it were, an instrument of a language system
and a discourse that he encountered ready-made; and the discourse he
chose to conform himself to was the prose of Addison and Steele, the
impersonal generality of which exactly met the requirements of Frank-
lin’s desire, which was for an evacuation of selfhood.63
Yet as should be clear from the previous discussion, one can nei-
ther collapse Addison and Steele into one another nor collapse them
into their authorial personas; nor, crucially, can the Tatler’s or the
Spectator’s style be characterized as an “impersonal generality.” They
depend far too heavily on the intimate structure of gossip. Whether
Franklin actually desired “an evacuation of selfhood” (a proposition
very much open to question), he emphatically did not achieve it.
Franklin’s relaxed, conversational style is one explicitly based on
this youthful imitation of the writing of the Spectator.64 And his use
of personas throughout his writing career—from Silence Dogood
to Poor Richard to the Franklin of The Autobiography—places him
squarely in the midst of questions we might ask about the structure of
gossip and the location of persons and personas within the spaces cre-
ated by that mode of communication. Warner has turned his attention
briefly to the question of Franklinian personae. As suggested earlier,

I disagree with Warner’s instrumentalist account of the eighteenth
century in general and of Franklin in particular. I would posit, for
example, that the Franklin who teaches himself to write on the basis of
Spectator essays does not simply “learn a certain rationality . . . directly
from handling textual artifacts,” and certainly not through some
osmotic practice of handling the texts, of seeing with his printer’s
eyes a “picture of printed artifacts . . . structured from the begin-
ning by instrumental objectification” or of imagining that “the link
between texts and thoughts amounts to modeling the act of think-
ing after the manipulation of objects.”65 Franklin’s transformations of
essays into poems and back again suggest instead a generic relation-
ship to language, one that certainly might coexist with learned “print
rationality,” but only very uneasily. I would argue for a less immedi-
ate correspondence between texts read and texts produced. Rather,
Franklin seems curious here to adopt a mode of textual conversation
(akin to the Spectator-like reserve he adopts in literal conversations
by learning to restrain his own opinions) that will be easy and free,
interesting and interested. This is not an adoption premised simply on
mechanistic reproduction of letters and words, as Warner would have
it, but rather the adoption of a discursive model of writing that allows
him to address public matters in a personal way and to render private
instances material to the public.
Thus what I find troubling about Warner’s account of Franklin
is nearly identical to my reservations about Shevelow’s reading of
the “female” periodical press. Warner’s commitment to a technical
reification—at the level of the printing press and at the level of the
burgeoning republic—predisposes him to read Franklin as indeed
a “Representational . . . Man of Letters.” This reading downplays
the possibility of a Franklin interested in literary as well as political
advancements. Put more clearly, attending to Franklin’s generic as
well as instrumental relation to language allows us to see a political
man and writer whose careers are neither separable nor identical. And
noting that the genre upon which Franklin models his prose is one
of gossip helps us to read his satirical reflections not as flat-footed
indictments of particular stances but as works engaged in a double-
movement similar to that the Female Tatler produces.
For present purposes, a quick glance at Warner’s reading of Frank-
lin’s journalism may help clarify both critical reception of Franklin’s
ventriloquism and the ways in which attention to a gossiping model
of periodical communication can unpack that ventriloquism’s satiri-
cal layers. Warner comments on Franklin’s Dogood papers that they
“attempt to enact the translation of print rationality into civic vir-

tue,” in part by “present[ing] themselves as conspicuously written.”66
This assessment dismisses without comment the fact that she claims to
“pass away [her] leisure Hours in Conversation,” which leads her
to “speak . . . by Way of Warning” of her capacity for censure and
reproof.67 This is not to argue that the Dogood letters are in fact
somehow vestigially oral forms but to note that Franklin roots their
printedness in a version of orality that bears its closest resemblance to
gossip.
As noted earlier, Warner goes on to argue for the anonymity of
Dogood’s persona. This contention fails to recognize the subjective
specificity of that persona: Silence Dogood is not simply, as Warner’s
argument suggests, an empty (and thereby eminently available) model
of civic rationality, but a specific figure: her first name belies her quite
vocal avocations (those many leisure hours spent in conversation) and
her letter writing, while her last name suggests the ironic double bind
of this first name. That is to say, it opens to question whether “doing
good” means remaining silent or chiding those “Offences” that come
to one’s attention.68
And finally, it would seem to go without saying, Mrs. Dogood is
a woman. As I hope the earlier portions of this chapter have shown,
choosing a female figure to speak words of civic and moral reproof by
1722 is hardly accidental. Franklin here takes advantage of the specific
charge accruing to female “scandalizing,” such that Dogood serves
not simply as a straightforward model of civic rationality but rather
one whose particular approach to avoiding “Silence” would seem to
threaten the very rational—disinterested, detached, anonymous, and,
above all, purposive—discourse taken to ground the res publica.
Po l ly Bak er
We might turn now, with this in mind, to one of Franklin’s later acts of
female ventriloquism. In the “Speech of Polly Baker” (1747), Frank-
lin writes as a woman charged for the fifth time with bearing a bastard,
and his speaker vindicates out-of-wedlock childrearing in precisely the
civic terms we have been describing. Polly Baker’s speech is clearly not
a form of gossip: she delivers it, after all, in a judicial setting, before a
panel of magistrates, as a defense of her behavior. To the extent that
she attempts to build—and succeeds in building—consensus around
the moral consequences of her actions, she does so through artic-
ulate persuasion rather than the presumption of shared perspective
characteristic of gossip. I introduce it here as a rhetorical offshoot of
the gossiping history I have been tracing because of the way Frank-
lin inflects the speech to incorporate gossiping concerns. The tone
and the subject of the speech are both sensational, full of the sorts of
“juicy” details gossip typically reports. But Franklin is not simply sati-
rizing the vulgarity of such sensationalism. In this essay he recognizes
the limitations of both the policing and the self-reflexive forms of gos-
sip by turning his attention away from the gossipers themselves and
toward an object of scandal and imagines her finding a way to move
past the seemingly massive consensus built by law and gossip together.
Max Hall’s 1960 Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker: The History
of a Literary Deception remains the most detailed (and fascinating)
account of the reception of this essay.69 Hall traces Baker’s appearance
first in British papers and eventually in American ones: it originally
appeared in the General Advertiser on April 15, got picked up by sev-
eral other British papers, and appeared in the Boston Weekly Post-Boy
only by July 20—it never appeared in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette.
The story hardly ends there: Baker’s speech was translated into several
different languages (French almost immediately) and kept popping
up for more than a century afterward. English deists like Peter Annet
celebrated Baker’s reliance upon “Nature, and . . . Nature’s God.”70
French revolutionaries celebrated her willingness to stand up to
arbitrary law on the ground of natural law. Abbé Raynal’s Histoire
Philosophique et Politique included a somewhat embellished version
of Baker’s speech as factual history. As recently as 1917, the circum-
stances of the speech were reproduced as fact in a college sociology
textbook.71 What gave Baker her staying power?
Polly Baker’s speech takes place in front of a court of judicature, a
space in which public laws devolve onto private persons. Baker notes
this distinction when she tells the magistrates that “laws are some-
times unreasonable in themselves”—that is to say, they are unfair
in the abstract—“and others bear too hard on the Subject in par-
ticular Circumstances.”72 Baker’s speech has both public and private
effects, for her speech “influenced the Court to dispense with her
Punishment, and . . . induced one of her Judges to marry her the next
Day—by whom she had fifteen children.”73 She takes aim at the puta-
tive equality of a law that in fact punishes not simply selectively but
according to an enshrined inequality. The law against fornication does
not come down harder on her simply because she is sexually active or
irrepressibly fecund: it weighs more heavily on her because the conse-
quences of her actions are made visible in a way that simply does not
apply to her cofornicator.
I readily Consented to the only Proposal of Marriage that ever was

made me, which was when I was a Virgin; but too easily confiding in
the Person’s Sincerity that made it, I unhappily lost my own Honour,
by trusting to his; for he got me with Child, and then forsook me:
That very Person you all know; he is now become a Magistrate of this
County; and I had hopes he would have appeared this Day on the
Bench, and have endeavored to moderate the Court in my Favour; then
I should have scorn’d to have mention’d it; but I must Complain of it
as unjust and unequal, that my Betrayer and Undoer, the first Cause of
all my Faults and Miscarriages (if they must be deemed such) should
be advanced to Honour and Power, in the same Government that pun-
ishes my Misfortunes with Stripes and Infamy.74
The particular behavior of this magistrate paves the way for her
proposal that all bachelors be compelled “either to Marry, or pay
Double the Fine of Fornication every Year.” If Baker here looks to be
replacing one enshrined legal inequality with another, she nevertheless
attempts to justify herself by explaining that bachelors, by choosing
to remain unmarried, likewise choose to “leave unproduced (which
I think is little better than Murder) Hundreds of their Posterity to
the Thousandth Generation,” thereby replacing the determination
to commit fornication with the determination to get married.75
Baker argues that she “cannot conceive . . . what the Nature of [her]
Offense is,” because she has not impinged upon the public. “I have
brought Five fine Children into the World, at the Risque of my Life; I
have maintained them well by my own Industry, without burthening
the Township, and could have done it better, if it had not been for the
heavy Charges and Fines I have paid. Can it be a Crime (in the Nature
of Things, I mean) to add to the Number of the King’s Subjects, in a
new Country that really wants People?”76 Baker reformulates public
prosecution for private (sexual) crimes as in effect a public service:
the production of subjects for a colonizing monarch. Baker asks the
judges that they not “turn natural and useful Actions into Crimes,”
and thereby argues not simply against an unfair law, or the impropri-
ety of imposing religious punishment through civil means, but against
the power of gossip’s normativizing effects as well.77
This is pointed up still more clearly in an insertion appearing in
the Maryland Gazette version of the speech, variously attributed to
Franklin and to the Gazette’s editor, Jonas Green:78
Reflect a little on the horrid Consequences of this Law in Particu-

lar: What Numbers of Procur’d Abortions! and how many distress’d
Mothers have been driven, by the Terror of Punishment and public
Shame, to imbrue, contrary to Nature, their own trembling Hands in

the Blood of their helpless Offspring! Nature would have induc’d them
to nurse it up with a Parent’s Fondness. ’Tis the Law therefore, ’tis the
Law itself that is guilty of all these Barbarities and Murders. Repeal it
then, Gentlemen; let it be expung’d for ever from your Books.79
Franklin/Green here introduces the specter of “public Shame” (a

force to which Polly herself has seemed almost impervious) as work-
ing in tandem with the courts to produce abortion and infanticide.80
Shame seems to drop out, however, in Baker’s accusation of the law’s
complicity in these “Barbarities and Murders.” Presumably, shame
cedes the rhetorical floor to the law because it will require a shift in
legal mores to effect a shift in social and moral standards.
Baker concludes her speech by redescribing then-criminal activity as
“the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s
God, Increase and multiply: A Duty, from the steady Performance
of which nothing has ever been able to deter me; but for it’s [sic]
Sake, I have hazarded the Loss of the public Esteem, and frequently
incurr’d public Disgrace and Punishment; and therefore ought, in my
humble Opinion, instead of a Whipping, to have a Statue erected to
my Memory.”81
Baker thus proposes her activities not only as beneficial to the
country but as civic benefits opposed to the perceived utility of both
the law and the “public Esteem” that helps enforce it. In so doing,
Baker opens the question of how competing models of social utility
should be recognized. If readers are meant to laugh at Baker’s under-
standing of how British subjects are produced, they are also meant to
see the logical plausibility of her argument—a plausibility neither the
law nor gossip is equipped to recognize. Franklin poses this opposi-
tion in order to critique a censuring model that imagines it can have
visible public effects—since Polly has not been cowed by the threat of
punishment or of shame—and to critique a self-reflexive model that
imagines that gossip has no consequences. Polly Baker’s punishment
is in some sense an effect of the reflexive model of gossip, since the
intimacy gossip creates in its presumption of shared standards depends
on the exclusion of those who violate those standards.
That Franklin outlines this double critique in a gossiping manner
only complicates the satire. If gossip is not an effective social deter-
rent and yet has consequences that seem to disable alternate models
of social cohesion, why continue to mobilize gossip? Another way to
put this might be to ask where in the framework of Franklin’s prag-
matic moral system one could locate his response to bastardy. We can
imagine Franklin’s satire going in (at least) two directions. On the one
hand, he might be critiquing Polly’s assertion of private acts as pub-
lic service, thus reinforcing a proprietary division between the public
and the private. On the other hand, he might be critiquing the state’s
hypocritical relationship to gendered conceptions of privacy: Polly is
penalized, while the men who impregnate her get off both literally
and legally. I propose that Franklin does both. He deploys gossip as
a way to reference the permeability of perceived boundaries. Polly’s
expressed inability to “conceive” of her wrongdoing is positioned with
her demonstrated ability to conceive persons, and the laughter this
engenders comes from the alignment of the sexual with the discursive.
Not simply the hero of mechanistic republican rationality, Franklin
here, by ventriloquizing an object of gossip in a way that keeps in play
the concerns about gossip raised earlier, proposes a conflicted model
of the country, with all its internal confusions about the status of pri-
vate persons and public women, sexual acts and civic reproduction.
Gossip creates provisional moments of intimacy that serve both
to police and to challenge the borders between the instrumental
and the incidental, the public and the private, the rational and the
nonrational, the known and the secret. It takes such boundaries seri-
ously insofar as it depends on standards of appropriateness and seeks
to regulate them through censure. But gossip also gets its charge
from tackling the inappropriate and thus pushes at the boundaries of
acceptable conduct. More important, it establishes the permeability of
social divisions both by occupying a middle ground between appar-
ently oppositionally constitutive social realms that thereby mediates
and occasionally transcends those oppositions and by emphasizing the
discursive mobility of social space.
Though gossip is characterized repeatedly as a distinctively femi-
nine vice, its gendering emblematizes this paradoxical capacity to reify
norms and to challenge them—often at the same time. British literary
periodicals of the early eighteenth century used gossip’s association
with women for humor: in attributing this mode to “the Fair Sex,” the
Tatler and the Spectator managed to appeal to one apparently inviolate
social distinction (that between the sexes) to carve out space within
which to more seriously explore the contours of other social distinc-
tions. In the hands of writers like Franklin and the author(s) of the
Female Tatler (and, to a lesser extent, the Female Spectator), gossip’s
ascription to women became a tool with which to challenge the very
gender distinctions upon which that ascription would seem to rely.
Chapter 2
4
“Regul ar Love,” Incest, and
Intimacy in The Power of Sympathy
and The Coquet te
“The words Mother Country . . . are only sounds without

meaning.”
—A Son of Liberty, “A Discourse at the
Dedication of the Tree of Liberty,” 17681
B en Franklin’s Polly Baker essay, I have suggested, connects sexual

acts to civil reproduction in a way that problematizes the presump-
tive normativity of marriage as the locus of both social and biological
reproduction. Early American essay writing shifted from the affable,
discursive sociability of such Franklinian occasional essays to the far
more heated tone of political pamphlets.2 But while Thomas Paine’s
writings are not generally known for having a Franklinian light touch,
his Common Sense extends the division between the familial and the
social that we have traced in Franklin’s writing, and in a way that has
repercussions not only for political essay writing but for early national
novels as well. In doing so, Paine draws from a widely used, even
hackneyed, repertoire of images shared by many Revolutionary and
early national era essayists. In such writings, kinship shifts its ground
from earlier models defined through blood relation or through axes of
power radiating through a central male figurehead to become increas-
ingly understood as affective filiation or even an effect of physical
proximity—a shift that might be described shorthand as one from
parents to partners.3
K i nship Vio l ent and Viol ated

Trish Loughran has perceptively argued that “the Painite myth of
mass diffusion” secures an imagined consensus about the Revolu-
tion.4 By putting aside Paine’s self-reported (and self-aggrandizing)
publication and circulation statistics, we can see the more fragmented
nature of both public opinion and the populace before the Revolu-
tion and come to understand the pamphlet as “one of many founding
documents whose goal was to repress the dispersed conditions of its
own production—a text whose primary political and rhetorical task
was to fantasize . . . an original unity that could be translated across
a proliferating set of locales.”5 Loughran does so in part to return us
to both the materiality of texts and the materiality of those who pro-
duced them, as a counterweight to notions of “republicanism’s invest-
ment in abstraction and to print’s presumed utility in procuring such
abstraction through acts of textual disembodiment.”6 The story of
such disembodiment is mapped onto a pamphlet at times very much
concerned with figuring bodies.
Paine famously invokes metaphors of familial intimacy gone horri-
bly awry to characterize England in the third section of Common Sense.
Before dismissing the longstanding metaphor of Britain as the mother
country, he imagines what it would mean to literalize it: “But Britain
is the parent country, say some. Then the more shame upon her con-
duct. Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war
upon their families.”7 The image offers the potentially nurturing view
of Britain as mother only to invert the direction of nurture: she does
not feed the colonies but feeds on them. If the cannibalizing mother
is an obvious enough yoking of opposites, fracturing the imagined
wholeness of either imperial or maternal embrace, it also depends on
a proximate intimacy the pamphlet is elsewhere at efforts to avoid.8
Paine will shortly explain that the very distance between England and
the colonies (not to mention the difference in their relative sizes)
argues against England’s political right to America; here, however,
Britain is close enough to touch—close enough to ingest the fragile
limbs of a helpless (if outsized) infant.
The notional image of a parent-child relation is dismissed, but even
as Paine’s argument places the countries further and further away (not
merely geographically different, but cosmically so: “In no instance
hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as
England and America, with respect to each other, reverses the com-
mon order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems:
England to Europe, America to itself”), metaphors that bind them ever
“Regular Love,” Incest, and Intimacy 47
more closely continue to proliferate. He asks his readers, “Bring the

doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell
me whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the
power that hath carried fire and sword into your land?” The echo
here of the language of marriage vows—to love, honor, and obey—is
deliberate and repeated in the lines that follow, in which he warns
the reader that “your future connection with Britain, whom you can
neither love nor honour, will be forced and unnatural.” The reader
has been positioned as a wife (she is, after all, the one doing the serv-
ing), one whose relation to her husband is tinged with violence (it is
“forced”) and perversion.
Such perversion recurs in the series of images Paine develops and
poses as rhetorical questions to those who would retain allegiance to
Britain a few paragraphs later: “Can ye restore to us the time that is
past? Can ye give to prostitution its former innocence? Neither can
ye reconcile Britain and America. The last cord is now broken . . .
There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be
nature if she did. As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mis-
tress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.” The first two
are temporal impossibilities: of course the time cannot be restored and
neither, of course (the sexual and moral logic of the time dictates), can
prostitution regain “innocence.”9 The third impossibility, however, is
one attributed to “nature,” and it is one of ethics: the lover cannot
forgive, because nature will not allow it. The “unnatural” relationship
with England here finds its fullest expression in a series of images not
obviously related but piled up in virtue of their “natural” impossibil-
ity. The first violates the laws of temporal progression. The second
suggests a similar temporal impossibility but couches it in an image
that blends sexual immorality (prostitution) with sexual purity (the
prostitute was once “innocent”). The third violates no law of phys-
ics but is lined up with the first two as though it did, drawing on its
parallel with the sexual violence of the second image. Here, however,
the sexual purity of the female body is not at issue: we don’t know
whether the “mistress” forgives her “ravisher,” or whether such for-
giveness is likewise interdicted by nature. We also, apparently, do not
care, because we are America: no longer the wife of an overbearing
England but the (presumptively male) lover of some other “mistress.”
And England is now neither mother nor husband but a man who has
kidnapped and defiled America’s beloved. The outrage here comes
from the violation of intimate ties and from the intimate nature of that
violence.10 England, metaphorized as a rapist, has in one sense come
as close to America as she had when imagined as a mother devouring

her child: taking a body and making it her own.
There are obvious historical reasons why Paine would invite the
reader to identify with the lover rather than the mistress—not least of
which is the presumptively male identity of his readers—but it bears
noting that Paine is not always thus shy about asking his audience to
identify with the feminine role, as when he positions his readers as
England’s wife. And it bears noting, as well, how this series of images
has worked to telescope England’s relationship to America. In mov-
ing from the mother who takes our body into her own to the husband
subjecting his wife to “forced and unnatural love” to the lover who
inserts his body into that of America’s beloved, the danger posed by
Britain moves metaphorically from one that threatens our own body
with immediate mastication and absorption to one that threatens
another’s body. Where the infant cannot escape the mother’s jaws, the
lover can retaliate against the ravisher. The removal accomplished here,
though—from our body to someone else’s body—comes at the cost
of and through the medium of extraordinary intimacy—not that of
mother and child but that of lover and beloved.
This distancing, though, is insufficient. We are not at the distance
of different planetary systems but at the distance of bodies, and bodies
to which we are close enough to embrace, to ravish, to consume. The
point of all this, I take it, is to establish, at the level of metaphor, that
even as the colonies move toward independence, they face a threat
that is quite close to home—located in the family itself. That is the
subject of the following pages.
In the rest of this chapter, I turn to two of the most popular novels
of the early republic, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy
and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, to examine the ways in
which writers worked through their inheritance of the disarticulation
between the familial and the social illustrated in Franklin’s and Paine’s
essays. These novels dramatize this disjuncture by trying to imagine
a narrative space for people who fail to reproduce appropriately—
particularly, in these two novels, those who produce bastards and
those who refuse marriage. A model of intimacy favored by the eigh-
teenth century—the heterosexual familial model—comes under attack
even as it is posited, and that attack is not external but an intransi-
gent internal one. The very structure of attachment itself threatens to
dissolve intimacy as the necessary social glue that reproduces further
possibilities of attachment.
These two novels serve in some didactic sense to bolster intimacy as
a realm of romantic but nonsexual affection. That is, read as morality
tales, they argue for the safety and necessity of married love untainted
by illicit sexuality.11 In a much more important sense, however, they
use their didactic function as a backdrop against which to play out
questions about the status of intimacy. As Cathy Davidson argues in
her seminal Revolution and the Word, it is precisely in the “disjunc-
tion” between a conventional reading of The Coquette as a didactic
text illustrating the dangers of not marrying and a more radical read-
ing that recognizes that the novel depicts marriage as a peculiarly
unpalatable state that the novel’s “contradictory nature” emerges and
“flourishes.”12
Later critics have tended to read these novels and ones like them
as political allegories, as when Sharon Harris argues that Foster mobi-
lizes epistolarity as a way of satirizing the maxim-producing political
systems and language of “Franklin’s America,”13 when Anne Dalke
argues that Brown’s flirtation with incest stands in as a longing for a
“clearly defined and clearly responsible social structure,”14 or when
Nancy Armstrong argues that Charlotte Temple—a novel contempo-
rary with The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette—is an explicitly
American novel for the way it works to “conceal the gap that emerged
between the household and the family in the New World by repre-
senting one as a perfect substitute for the other”—a substitution that
necessarily requires a return to England as the scene in which family
and household map seamlessly.15
More recent criticism has attempted to bring the insights of politi-
cal readings to bear on a reinvestment in the status of these novels
as “sentimental.” Thus Julia Stern follows Jane Tompkins in arguing
that sentimental novels “contemplate the possibility that the power of
genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democ-
racy” and that “sensationalism and self-conscious theatricality mark
such works as essentially political.”16 Stern falters, however, when she
attempts to locate the political work being done not simply within
the heart of the reader but within the very “unconscious” of narra-
tive itself.17 Elizabeth Barnes opens up the range of locatable political
work from textual unconscious to intertextual reciprocity: she argues
that sentimental literature followed contemporary political and phil-
osophical writings in ensuring that “sociopolitical issues are cast as
family dramas, a maneuver that ultimately renders public policy an
essentially private matter.”18 Implicit in my argument is the sense that
novels do not have an unconscious, that the family is not “essentially
private,” and that the logical difficulty that gives rise to either of these
assertions is precisely the same as that which dogs an understanding
of what intimacy means.
The relevant term for earlier critics, from Leslie Fiedler through
the Jane Tompkins/Ann Douglas debates through Nancy Armstrong,
was “sentiment”; more recent work has sought to specify the realm
and effects of sentiment in the idea of “sympathy.” As Barnes points
out, however, “sympathy is both the expression of familiarity and the
vehicle through which familiarity is created.”19 Choosing “intimacy”
as the central term for my own discussion, then, seems to me less a
trivial semantic point than a way of reorienting the kinds of questions
we might ask about the work of sympathy. Is it something within us
(that inmost part of us, the intimus) or is it something between per-
sons (the expression of the self to others, the intimare)? It is virtually
impossible to separate these two ideas and thus virtually impossible
to separate the political from what Barnes calls the “essentially pri-
vate.”20 If I seem at this point to be rehashing the old feminist slogan
“The personal is political,” I do so with good reason, as these novels
engage the explicitly political questions of nation formation with an
eye toward social cohesion and reproduction and do so largely by
asking what relation the familial has to the social and whether the inti-
mate can ever be private (deepest, inmost) when it is imagined as that
which creates and reproduces the social (public, political).
These questions are framed in the novels in sensational and voy-
euristic terms as flirtation and seduction. Key among the ways in
which intimacy figures in these novels is the trope of family relation
and filial duty, particularly as troubled by incest and by its intersec-
tion with social custom: where and how can one draw a line between
familial and sexual intimacy? What repercussions does this apparently
quite unstable line have for other conceptions of communities? This
chapter will argue for these novels’ central engagement with questions
of how one might understand intimacy: questions that can be read at
individual, social, and national levels simultaneously.
Elizabeth Barnes argues that, “in holding up the family as a model
for sociopolitical union, sentimental rhetoric conflates the boundaries
between familial and social ties. The result is a confusion of familial
and erotic attachment: one learns to love those to whom one already
feels related . . . Rather than challenging national values, incest and
seduction become the unspoken champions of a sentimental politics
designed to make familial feeling the precondition for inclusion in the
public community.”21 While I hope I have made it clear that I dis-
agree with Barnes’s sense that the familial is somehow removed from
or inviolable to “the public community,” she quite rightly identifies
the way in which modeling the state upon the family (a longstanding
philosophical conceit) posed some tricky categorical problems for the
new American nation. The one I’d like to highlight is the notion of
familiarity, and to get there we should start by considering habit, or
custom.
Fa mil iar ity and Famil iali ty

The eighteenth-century relationships among civility, habit, custom,
and intimacy are articulated most clearly by David Hume and Adam
Smith. In the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751),
Hume writes that
the eternal contrarieties, in company, of men’s pride and self-conceit,

have introduced the rules of Good Manners or Politeness, in order to
facilitate the intercourse of minds, and an undisturbed commerce and
conversation. Among well-bred people, a mutual deference is affected;
contempt of others disguised; authorities concealed; attention given
to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained,
without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for vic-
tory, and without any airs of superiority. These attentions and regards
are immediately agreeable to others, abstracted from any consideration
of utility or beneficial tendencies: they conciliate affection, promote
esteem, and extremely enhance the merit of the person who regulates
his behavior by them.22
Affectation, disguise, and concealment: these are the means by which

social ease is imagined to function.
This eminently pragmatic position respecting the forces that bind
conversational communities together is echoed in Adam Smith’s The
Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), where he explains that “every man
feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those
of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter
the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations. The former
may be said to be the substance; the latter the shadow.”23 Thus, he
deduces, “what is called affection, is in reality nothing but habitual
sympathy.” He qualifies even the notion of “habitual sympathy”—
sympathy grounded in everyday interaction with a person, as by living
in the same house—by explaining first that where real affections are
missing, “respect for the general rule [that is, the custom of, say,
familial affection] will frequently, in some measure, supply their place,
and produce something which, though not altogether the same, may
bear, however, a very considerable resemblance to those affections.”24
He further qualifies this notion by claiming that “it is only . . . with
the good and the virtuous, that the general rule has even this slender
authority.”25 And even the goodness and virtue of these people, a cur-
sory reading of Smith or Hume will tell us, may be one dictated by
custom and habit.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments thus develops an account of sym-
pathy that suggests that love is a habit, a force of custom. Notions of
civility, custom, sympathy, sentiment, and social intercourse are impli-
cated with each other in the philosophical (and literary) discourse of
the day. I’d like to focus on notions of custom and shared conviction
that emerge out of this discourse. As we shall see in examining The
Power of Sympathy and The Coquette, these terms are invoked repeat-
edly, as subject or as mode, in ways that shed some light on forms
of intimacy—forms perhaps not strictly separable from sentiment and
sympathy but certainly worth exploring in their own right without
being collapsed immediately into them.
The Power o f Sympat hy

William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) proposes to
address an explicitly American audience: the dedication page of the
first edition hails “the Young Ladies of United Columbia,” to whom
“these Volumes, Intended to represent the specious Causes, and to
Expose the fatal Consequences of SEDUCTION; To inspire the
Female Mind With a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote
the Economy of Human Life, Are Inscribed.”26 More crucial for my
purposes than this audience’s ostensible Americanness, however, is its
sex: Brown imagines an audience of young women in need of inspira-
tion and moral guidance. Specifically, the determination to “promote
the economy of human life” suggests that these young women must
be educated in the contractual exchanges that lead to and make up
marital relations, with its literal and figurative reproductions of human
life.27 That the best way to inculcate such lessons is explicitly linked
with the promotion of “self-complacency” suggests that the novel
wants to achieve its aims by conveying the sense that the way things
are is the way they should be or, more precisely, that there is a way
that things should be and that adhering to this model of behavior will
produce satisfaction.28 The novel proposes to provide just that sense,
by way of epistolary exchanges among (primarily) five young people.
A young man named Harrington falls in love with a young woman
named Harriot who is far below him socially but whose moral and
intellectual qualities recommend her to his attentions. Harrington,
abandoning his earlier plans to seduce her, determines to marry her
and extols her virtues in letters to his worthy friend Worthy. Har-
rington’s sister Myra, long “interested” by Harriot’s capacity to remain
virtuous despite her degraded position as companion to the dissipated
Mrs. Francis, befriends Harriot. Harrington’s courtship of Harriot
follows apace, despite his father’s insistence that he not marry pre-
cipitously, and is averted only when Harriot and Harrington discover
that they are in fact half siblings. The recently widowed Mrs. Holmes,
the fifth and most eminently didactic letter writer in the novel (and the
most complacent), tells Myra the tragic tale of Maria Fawcet, seduced
by a young and profligate Harrington Sr., abandoned after his marriage
to a more socially equal woman and killed, shortly after giving birth to
Harriot, by the wasting away that seems inevitably to follow abandon-
ment in eighteenth-century novels. This revelation results in tragedy:
Harriot dies a convenient death precipitated by shock and horror; Har-
rington, maddened by grief at her loss, kills himself.
Seduction, bastardy, incest, suicide: this is the plot that “the young
ladies of united Columbia” will read in order to learn “complacency.”
The cautionary sermons given by the Reverend James Fordyce in mid-
century England about the dangers of novel reading simply because
novels represent vice seem warranted here. How are we (assuming
“we” are virginal and morally upstanding young women) meant to see
the promotion of the economy of human life in a tale rife with such
immoral contents?
Moreover, it’s not simply immorality that might unsettle Brown’s
readers; the novel’s philosophical orientation likewise directly under-
mines the frontispiece’s claims. The threat of incest in this novel is
one commenced by illicit sexual activity but ultimately entrenched
by the fact of its secrecy: since Harrington Sr. and Maria’s affair is
not exposed to public knowledge, Harriot and Harrington cannot
realize that they share a father. “Why did my father love Maria—or
rather, why did I love their Harriot?” Harrington writes in a letter
to Worthy, “Curse on this tyrant custom that dooms such helpless
children to oblivion or infamy!”29 What comes in for critique here
is not the fact that his father had an extramarital affair, nor even that
it killed the woman he debauched, but the “custom” of failing to
acknowledge illegitimate children. Harrington has evolved over the
course of the novel from a man “not so much of a republican to for-
mally wed any person of this [Harriot’s lower] class” to a defender
of the “democratical . . . kind of government”: were he “a Lycurgus
no distinction of rank should be found in [his] commonwealth.”30
One reading of this development would argue for a political analogy
moving from (paternally adopted) monarchically governed colony to
(independently instituted) “democratical” republic. But Harrington’s

development is not simply a political one: we do not know what politi-
cal positions he supports, but we do know that he is now willing to
marry across class lines: his political convictions are in fact strictly per-
sonal ones. Thus when he curses “tyrant custom,” he critiques less
a political position than a social one, enforced less by law than by
custom. If this seems an obvious point, it’s worth stressing in light of
the critical work that has been performed to make the novel largely
political in its allegorical dimensions and in light of Brown’s efforts to
instill “complacency” in the (heaving) bosoms of his readers. Being
satisfied with the way things are means at least in part a subscrip-
tion to the power of custom—launching a critique of the force that
obscures the repercussions of actions seems eminently antithetical to
the novel’s stated purpose.
“Custom” is enshrined, over the course of the novel, in social
discussion: the ways people imagine appropriate behavior within a
community and then talk about it. I’ll look momentarily at one aspect
of that discussion—the gossip that circulates around bad acts and the
ways in which people use secrecy in an effort to avoid the castigation
not of law or religion but of idle tongues. Before doing so, however,
it seems worth attending to the language in which Harrington decries
custom’s effect of obscuring family relations. He laments his lack of
knowledge through any means: “Had I known her to have been my
sister, my love would have been regular—I should have loved her as
a sister—I should have marked her beauty—I should have delighted in
protecting it. I should have observed her growing virtues—I should
have been happy in cherishing their growth.”31 The word “regular”
seems striking here, referring as it most obviously does to nonsexual
fraternal affection, but then going on to suggest that “regularity” in
familial love crucially includes “protecting” a sister’s beauty—that is,
keeping it within the family and away from the threat of inappropriate
or ill-intentioned suitors (suitors very much, in fact, like the earlier
Harrington himself, who vowed to possess Harriot without benefit of
marriage). At the very moment Harrington describes a “regular” and
nonincestuous love, he reinvokes the specter of incest by suggesting
that his sister’s “beauty” and “virtues” need to be kept from external
threats by being located safely within the bosom of the protecting
family. That is to say, keeping the sister “protected” within the fam-
ily means that familial (and by extension, social) reproduction could
only be affected by a sort of appropriate incest. What the dimension
of such a form of reproduction might be is left undescribed, but
it’s worth noting that the alternative to unwitting incest (marriage
across class lines) appears to be known but acceptable incest: mar-

riage within class lines that extends the family within which virtue is
to be protected. One way of explaining this is to recall Myra’s inter-
est in Harriot. “I have an affection for [Harriot],” Myra writes to
Mrs. Holmes, “which comes from the heart—an affection which I do
not pretend to account for—Her dependence on Mrs. Francis hurts
me—I do not think this lady is the gentle, complaisant being, that she
appears to be in company—To behold so fine a girl in so disagreeable
a situation, might at first attract my commiseration and esteem, and a
more intimate knowledge of her virtues might have ripened them
into love. Certain it is, however, that whom I admire as a friend I
could love as a SISTER.”32
Myra’s sisterly affection for Harriot is striking, of course, in light of
the fact that they are sisters. Given the map of “appropriate incest” I
have tried to sketch earlier, however, this passage seems still more strik-
ing for the way it swiftly collapses “commiseration,” “esteem,” and
“intimate knowledge of . . . virtues” into a familial relation. That is, if
affection is so easily assimilable into an imagined family connection—
which then turns out to be an actual one—where does one draw the
line between friendship and family, or, as Harrington’s desire for a
“regular” love marks, between sexual and familial attachment?33
The revelation of Harrington and Harriot’s near relation and the
dangers attendant upon seduction generally are foreshadowed in ear-
lier passages in the novel. Mrs. Holmes tells the story of Elizabeth
Whitman, another victim of seduction (upon whose life The Coquette
is based), and Worthy writes to Myra of another Maria (not Harriot’s
mother) who, carried off by a ruffian days before her marriage, is
consigned to madness by her fiancé’s suicide.34 The most significant
of these foreshadowings, however, is one grounded (like the Eliza-
beth Whitman story) in contemporary scandal—incest as a theme is
introduced through the mode of gossip, an intersection that will bear
some examination.
Sarah Wentworth Apthorp, grande dame of early American letters
(and once thought to be the author of The Power of Sympathy), mar-
ried Perez Morton in 1781. Perez began an affair with Sarah’s sister,
Fanny Apthorp, at some point during the 1780s, and Fanny eventu-
ally bore Perez’s child (in 1787 or 1788). When the sisters’ father
learned of the affair, he demanded a confrontation with (and public
accusation of) Perez, which Fanny strenuously tried to avoid, arguing
that it would make the matter public and only add to her and her fam-
ily’s shame. Relentless, Apthorp insisted on the meeting, in response
to which insistence Fanny killed herself and effectively publicized
the whole affair. Brown reproduces this scandal with the thinnest of
pseudonymous veneers.35
Harriot, visiting friends in the countryside, learns that their fam-
ily has been struck by tragedy: Mrs. Martin’s sister, Ophelia, has just
killed herself, after bearing Mrs. Martin’s husband’s illegitimate child,
to avoid the meeting between her father and her seducer—her sis-
ter’s husband—which would “publish [the family’s] disgrace.”36 “The
breath of rumor” reports that Ophelia had convinced herself that
Martin would divorce her sister and marry her, but only after herepu-
diates her does she recognize the “danger” she’s in, which, combined
with her father’s anger, persuades her to poison herself.37 This episode,
though apparently of minor importance to the text itself, nevertheless
forms the frontispiece of the first (1789) edition (it depicts the scene
of Ophelia’s death and her parents’ discovery and belated repentance
and is titled with Ophelia’s last words: “O Fatal! Fatal Poison!”).
Part of what presumably makes this episode relevant is the direct
parallel it presents with the larger plot of the novel, since Ophelia and
Martin’s relations are deemed to be incestuous.38 The story’s cen-
trality lies equally, however, in what seems different about the two
incestuous pairings: the first is a consciously committed crime, a sin
that results in excessively harsh but in some sense merited punish-
ment, the latter is a narrowly averted disaster, caused by their father’s
moral failing rather than their own. The novel’s relationship results
in the destruction of two moral paragons whose innocence is not
merely sexual but is also constituted by a lack of knowledge about
those paternal failings. In part Ophelia and Martin stand as a warning,
in part as a moral counterpoint, with the critique directed less toward
the actors than toward “tyrant custom.”
Another aspect of the Morton family story’s significance has to
do with its contemporary currency: what enabled the pseudonymous
literary critics Antonia and Civil Spy to exchange letters concerning
The Power of Sympathy’s facticity in the Massachusetts Centinel was pre-
cisely the fact that both knew certain events recounted in the novel
had a claim for historical truth.39 Sarah Wentworth Morton’s public
literary status granted a juicy scandal an extra edge—the feeling one
somehow knew one of the participants, if only indirectly and via her
poetry. This sense of access, of personal knowledge, I would suggest,
lends itself to a feeling of intimacy—a connection to the wife betrayed
by her husband and sister, to the character who relays the story (itself
told in the voyeuristically charged epistolary form), and to the author
knowledgeable enough to use the resource of fresh scandal.
The novel itself produces an account of the requirements of read-

ing and its relationship to conversation. Mrs. Holmes writes to Myra,
advising her of the discussion on female education recently held at her
house, and maintains that “constant application [to reading] becomes
labour—it sours the temper—gives an air of thoughtfulness, and fre-
quently of absence. By immoderate reading we hoard up opinions and
become insensibly attached to them; this miserly conduct sinks us to
affectation, and disgustful pedantry; conversation only can remedy
this dangerous evil, strengthen the judgment, and make reading really
useful. They mutually depend upon, and assist each other.”40
Mrs. Holmes here does not advocate attention to the sordid details
of public scandal, but she does suggest the ways that conversation
is imagined as a requisite to not only social interaction but educa-
tion as well. Thus reading The Power of Sympathy will, if we follow
Mrs. Holmes’s advice, require a discussion of it as well, and discussing
the novel at least in part requires some engagement with the scandal
of the day. Gossip introduces incest in the novel at the level of struc-
ture; the novel goes on to suggest (through the Morton story and its
parallel to Harriot and Harrington) that gossip can expose and thereby
perhaps prevent incest. If Ophelia and Morton had been exposed ear-
lier, the logic implies, the relationship might not have gone so far, and
certainly if Harrington Sr. had acknowledged his affair, Harrington
and Harriot would only have felt “regular” love for each other and
thereby avoided tragic endings.
Yet gossip, when it occurs in the novel, is deemed “a strange piece
of folly.”41 A certain Miss P. overhears “a lady and gentleman . . .
engaged in conversation concerning” her and hears the phrase
“mechanick’s daughter” used, she thinks, disparagingly.42 Harrington
relates this incident to Worthy (clearly after he has become a thor-
oughgoing republican) to demonstrate the invidious effects of class
distinction. It serves another purpose as well, however. The problem
with the lady and the gentleman in part stems from their repugnant
understanding of social hierarchy (although it’s not in fact clear that
they meant the reference to be a negative one), but it stems equally
from their failure to note that they might be overheard—that is,
they have neither constrained their conversation to an appropriately
secluded place nor lowered their voices. Their failure, on the terms set
by Hume and Smith, is a failure of appropriate subterfuge. In inad-
equately disguising their true feelings, they have failed to observe the
rules of etiquette that allow for ease of conversation. They likewise
have failed to keep an intimate relation sufficiently private—a valoriza-
tion of secrecy the novel elsewhere strives to undo. Of course, if they
are indeed antidemocratic in social or political perspective, then they

need have no interest in the social comfort of a mere “mechanick’s
daughter”—which seems to be the point.
Thus if Brown via Harrington criticizes hierarchically inflected social
distinctions, he does so by noting a particular mode—gossip—which,
when deployed by those who believe themselves socially empowered,
need not be a whispered conference but may rather be a full-voiced
conversation, even in the presence of its object. This critique inter-
sects uneasily with Mrs. Holmes’s advocacy of educationally beneficial
conversation. If it is clear that she means one should converse about
books, she nevertheless does not exclude (as other moralists have
before her) the less erudite but certainly educational mode of gossip.
If gossip is, according to Harrington, what crass upper-class people do
to affirm their social status, in contrast with the high-minded conver-
sation of republican daughters, this distinction is made in a novel that
capitalizes on both the possible moral utility and the more obvious
audience-building salaciousness of current scandal.
More important, though, this lengthy digression on gossip sug-
gests Brown’s circling around the question of how the family or the
polity can be mediated by intimacy. That is, the novel in part relies on
the sense of instant intimacy gossip can provide (knowing a secret and
being willing to share it suggests some presumptive assessment about
the relation between the persons engaged in telling and hearing) but
suggests at the same time that such exchanges are “folly,” at least when
practiced too publicly, and thus lend themselves to hurting others
(whether a mechanic’s daughter or an Ophelia who fears revelation)
but then again suggests that failures of public revelation are perhaps
more harmful (leading to the deaths of Harrington and Harriot). It
also links the notion of intimacy as a communicative affective relation
with that of intimacy as illicit sexual activity, to the extent that what
comes in for censure is not the fact of extramarital sex but the fact of
its secrecy—precisely the intimacy that marks it as illicit. Harrington’s
move from rakish federalist to burgeoning republican suggests the
political implications of intimacy: he inherits his snobbery from his
father and seems about to reproduce his moral failure by seducing
Harriot. His shift toward a more “democratical” view aligns him with
the mechanic’s daughter against publicized intimacy but also subjects
him to the ill effects of his father’s secret intimacies. Brown asks, in
effect, how the custom of affection for family members can work as
a viable model for the political or social realm when affection seems
to require intimacy, but it remains unclear how and when intimacy
may in fact be private (shared only between two persons). Given the
tragic outcome of the novel and its deep concern with incest, Brown
suggests that patterns of both political inheritance and rebellion are
incompatible with an understanding of the family as a private entity—
that secrecy even under the auspices of intimacy leads to destruction.
The Coquet te
Fickleness and inconstancy, he said, was characteristic of a free
people; and in framing a Constitution for them, it was, perhaps,
the most difficult thing to correct this spirit, and guard against
the evil effects of it—he was persuaded it could not be altogether
prevented without destroying their freedom.
—Melancton Smith, “Speech in the New York
Ratifying Convention,” June 20, 178843
Like The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette traces a marriage plot with
no marriage and draws components of its narrative from a celebratedly
tragic scandal. Elizabeth Whitman, according to Brown’s footnote in
The Power of Sympathy (which borrows heavily from the Massachusetts
Centinel’s 1788 account of her life), was a young woman
of a reputable family in Connecticut. In her youth she was admired for

beauty and good sense. She was a great reader of novels and romances,
and having imbibed her ideas of the characters of men, from those fal-
lacious sources, became vain and coquetish, and rejected several offers
of marriage, in expectation of one more agreeable to her fanciful idea.
Disappointed in her Fairy hope, and finding her train of admirers less
solicitous for the honour of her hand, in proportion as the roses of
youth decayed, she was the more easily persuaded to relinquish that sta-
bility which is the honour and happiness of the sex. The consequences
of her amour becoming visible, she acquainted her lover of her situa-
tion . . . she wandered alone and friendless, and at length repaired to
the Bell-Tavern, in Danvers, where she was delivered of a lifeless child,
and in about a fortnight after (in July, 1788), died of a puerperal fever,
aged about 35 years.44
Eliza Wharton, Foster’s protagonist, follows the same trajectory:

she sees the first solid and stolid preacher who seeks her hand die
in her mother’s house—a release from the bonds of imminent mat-
rimony and an escape from her “paternal roof” that fills her with
“pleasure.”45 She rejects the next preacher who proposes to her, one
Mr. Boyer, turning instead to the far more dashing and temperamen-
tally suited Major Sanford. As we should expect by now, her affections
are misplaced: Sanford flirts, he pursues, he withdraws only to pursue

again, and finally succeeds in divesting Wharton of her virginity with-
out benefit of marriage. Inevitably pregnant, Eliza removes to a tavern
in which to bear her child away from those who know her and dies in
childbirth.
The Coquette is composed largely of letters between women, and
those letters both mark intimate relations and record the failure of
that intimacy to provide any actual useful advice or support for Eliza.
She first meets Major Sanford while staying with Mrs. Richman, when
he sends her a card asking if he may escort her to a ball. Eliza hesitates
not a moment in showing the letter to her (temporary) moral guard-
ian and asks at the same time for guidance respecting his reputation
and her behavior. “I have not much acquaintance with this gentleman,
madam,” she tells Mrs. Richman, “but I suppose his character suffi-
ciently respectable to warrant an affirmative answer.”46 Mrs. Richman
advises her poorly, however. Rather than tell her what she knows of his
reputation and suspects of his character, as any good moralist would
do, she replies, “He is a gay man, my dear, to say no more, and such
are the companions we wish, when we join a party avowedly formed
for pleasure.” If Eliza is meant to hear something in Mrs. Richman’s
“to say no more” or in her restriction of Major Sanford to parties
of pleasure, Richman is nevertheless not explicit in this warning and
assents to Eliza’s outing with a man she knows to be a consummate
game player.47
Even the stolid and eminently respectable clergyman Boyer,
however, plays games, arranging with the Richmans to drop by unan-
nounced just as they go out to pass a quiet afternoon with Eliza.
This lines up with Hume’s version of sociability, in which deceit and
concealment are not simply regrettable excesses of but are logically
necessary to easy and polite social interaction. Within the logic of the
novel, however, Mr. Boyer’s and the Richmans’ innocent deceit func-
tions not exactly as a critique of such social relations but to call into
question the culpability of Eliza and even of Sanford’s actions over the
course of the novel.
To put this another way, The Coquette is concerned to show that the
danger that threatens socially legitimated heterosexual reproduction—
which in turn secures the very idea of social legitimacy and thus the
social order—is a danger internal to the structures of civility and
innocent deception that sustain the social world. The predations of
rakes and the equivocations of coquettes only lay bare the “compla-
cency” in the “bosom” of intimate relations that actually endangers
the community.
Eliza’s “coquettishness” (she is the first to introduce the term with

respect to herself, in Letter II) is deemed a “natural” attribute. She is
by her own admission “naturally cheerful, volatile, and unreflecting”
and has, according to Boyer and the Richmans, a “natural disposition
for gaiety.”48 Even Sanford, who proposes to “avenge [his] sex, by
retaliating the mischiefs, she meditates against us,” nevertheless fears
to “abuse her credulity and good nature.”49 If her coquetry derives
from “natural”—that is, innate—sources, then her eventual downfall
can be read in one light as the triumph of instinct over reason, of dis-
position over social breeding. Given, however, that this very breeding
requires a certain duplicity and flirtation, it seems remarkably unclear
that Foster means to critique her heroine’s “natural” attributes so
much as to suggest that the social world in which she finds herself is
one that fails to distinguish adequately between the innocent machi-
nations of a lovelorn suitor and the ill intentions of a dissipated rake,
the earnest desire of a young woman to “enjoy that freedom which
[she] so highly prize[s] . . . to gratify [her] natural disposition in a
participation of those pleasures which youth and innocence afford”
and the calculations of a coquette.50
Eliza’s flirtations are explicitly not in the service of some greater
end: the force of her “natural disposition,” I think, is to suggest its
contrast with the deliberately misleading actions of a woman play-
ing the marriage market. This is where, for example, I disagree
with Grantland Rice’s understanding of flirtation as elucidated in
his “Authorial Coquetry and the Early American Novel”: “By call-
ing attention to her own power to choose or rebuke a suitor, and by
foregrounding this power by alternatively flattering and chastising,
surrendering and vanquishing, the coquette concealed her internal
resolve and thus prevented her audience from exercising a dominion
over her interiority. In other words, the coquette performed behind
a veil of unaccountability and inscrutability in an effort to sustain her
social value, freedom, and power.”51
Eliza lacks precisely the “internal resolve” Rice imagines to be at
work in coquetry. Or rather, if she has such internal resolve, which I
take to mean a fixed object of desire to the attainment of which her
actions do not always correspond, then it is one about which she is
equally in the dark. She avowedly wants to retain her social freedom—
but this is hardly secret. She announces in her first letter that she
“wish[es] for no other connection than that of friendship.”52
Throughout the novel, she maintains her desire to remain unmar-
ried, an unusual (although not singular) position for the heroine of
a late eighteenth-century novel. When Boyer declares himself to her,
by “soliciting an interest in [her] favor; or, if he might be allowed the

term, affection,” she responds by saying, “I believe you must substi-
tute some more indifferent epithet for the present,” and he settles
upon “esteem, or friendship.”53 She is explicit even with her suit-
ors, then, about her desire to remain unattached. The difficulty her
“coquetry” presents then seems less a function, as Rice would have it,
of her having a particular desire and acting in a way that obscures
it than in her friends’ failure to advise her on an appropriate course
of action given her desire to remain single. That is, her friends can-
not conceive of a form of behavior that does not involve accepting
marriage. Thus when Eliza writes to her friend Lucy Freeman about
Boyer’s intimations, she does so “without a single observation on the
subject, until I know your opinion.”54 Where Mrs. Richman had pri-
vately complained that she felt Eliza was too hasty in her acceptance
of Sanford’s invitation, not allowing herself to be informed of his
character (although, as we have noted, Mrs. Richman hardly availed
herself of the opportunity to do so), Lucy chastises her for defer-
ring to someone with greater knowledge: “And so you wish to have
my opinion before you know the state of your own.” Mrs. Richman
misunderstands Eliza’s request for guidance and so does Lucy by sug-
gesting that her failure to express a judgment is “playing a little too
much with [her] patience.” If Lucy is right to suspect that Eliza pre-
fers Sanford to Boyer, her comments on the matter are hardly helpful:
unable to conceive that Eliza, at this juncture, has no desire to marry
either, she claims not seek to “influence [her] judgment” but then
proceeds to do exactly that by suggesting the impropriety of “forming
a connection with a man of that character.”55 The bonds of friendship
and guardianship are not adequate to counsel a woman who does
not want to relinquish friendship for the “circumscrib[ed] . . . enjoy-
ments” of marriage.56
Intimacy fails in the arena of female friendship, and it is likewise
exploited over the course of the novel as the site of repression against
which republican values of liberty and determination must oppose
themselves. This shows up clearly in the parallel drawn between Eliza
and Sanford. This in part seems counterintuitive, since they occupy
(somewhat uneasily) the generic sentimental roles of innocent betrayed
and vile seducer, and in part seems obvious, since they are each oth-
er’s counterparts: the male rake and the female flirt. Their points
of similarity, however, are quite specifically located on a continuum of
tastes, manners, and principles that, I hope to suggest, mirror certain
crucial and cherished republican values. In embodying hypertrophied
versions of such principles and desires, they become not simply unfit
for but dangerous to that young republic.
There are of course some minor points of similarity between Eliza
and Sanford—most comically, perhaps, their joint perception of the
estimable Mrs. Richman as “rather prudish” but also in their adap-
tive conversational style, their attention to manners and appearances,
and their love of a good time. When they appear in public together
at a dance, the “general subject of speculation” among those who
see them is “the brilliance of their appearance, the levity of their
manners, and the contrast of their characters,”57 but this seems to
be a “contrast” founded only in appearance and reputation, for what
most strongly constitutes their characters in a moral sense is a deep
attachment and commitment to their own freedoms, particularly their
liberty to choose their own partners for their own reasons.
Eliza and Sanford’s attentions to matters of manners and appear-
ances, I want to stress, are not the source of their downfall, nor are
they the markings of particularly superficial characters: they are values
shared by others in the novel.58 Indeed, in referring to what we might
expect to categorize as Sanford’s moral failings, Lucy Freeman asks,
“Can a woman of refinement and delicacy enjoy the society of a man,
whose mind has been corrupted, whose taste has been vitiated, and
who has contracted a depravity both of sentiment and manners, which
no degree of repentance can wholly efface?”59
Lucy’s concern here has quite clearly less to do with something like
morals or philosophy than with Humean appearances, with “senti-
ment and manners.” That both Eliza and Sanford are subject to a level
of “volatility” or frivolity not approved by those who surround them
goes without saying. What I mean to highlight here is that the origins
of that levity—a concern more for appearance than substance—are by
no means unique to them and in fact constitute something like the
social framework by which passions are kept in check.
Eliza’s desire for freedom is made clear early and often, as when
she tells Mrs. Richman, “Let me . . . enjoy that freedom which I so
highly prize”—a freedom she understands both as a liberation from
“those shackles . . . [of] parental authority,” which would have caused
her to “sacrifice [her] own happiness,” and as “the opportunity to
gratify . . . [her] natural disposition.”60 Most often, however, this lib-
erty will be understood as the right of determination—making her
own choice about whom to marry. This is a freedom constrained
by certain external forces: she wants both to follow her own fancy
and to follow the reasoned advice of friends and family to achieve
that “tranquillity and rational happiness” they imagine their advice
will secure for her.61 The desire to adhere to the wishes of those who
counsel her is consistently in conflict with her desire to follow her
own fancy, and this echoes the friction between competing notions
of freedom and of happiness enshrined in a vision like the one articu-
lated by her mother, who argues that all relationships are “dependent
situation[s].” Mrs. Wharton asks rhetorically, “Are we not all links in
the great chain of society . . . each upheld by others, throughout the
confederated whole?” Yet, as she goes on to argue, “our greater or
lesser happiness must be derived from ourselves”—a formulation that
makes it clear that dependency and self-sufficiency are going to come
into conflict.62 If the “tranquillity” connubial relations are supposed
to confer echoes the “domestic tranquillity” of the Constitution’s pre-
amble, the “rational happiness” appended to it looks like a concerned
revision of that pursuit of happiness inscribed in the Declaration. If
“life,” in the framework of this novel, is going to come to be super-
seded by external perceptions of that life, which I take it is the point
of Julia Granby’s assertion that “not only the life, but what was still
dearer, the reputation and virtue of the unfortunate Eliza”63 has been
lost, then notions of liberty and happiness are going to have to be
reformulated in a similar manner, relying upon a rationality that looks
very much like community standards—like the politesse admired and
advocated by each of the characters of The Coquette.
Sanford’s freedoms may appear to be coded as implicitly sexual,
so that he is more in the practice of taking liberties than of exercising
his own, but he too defines his freedom in terms of choosing whom
he will marry. Thus he does not pursue a match with Miss Laurence,
who, he tells Deighton, has “no soul.” And while he comes to love
Eliza, he will not marry her either, because she does not have the for-
tune he requires. The logic of sentiment may make it difficult to see,
but in making these choices, Sanford is acting on a consistent princi-
ple: his particular conception of his liberty. His marriage to Nancy is a
compromise born of “dire necessity,” but one he is willing to make in
part because it allows him those things he desires: wealth and Eliza.64
Sanford comments that he is “independent of their [Eliza’s friends]
censure or esteem, and mean[s] to act accordingly,”65 and it is this
threat that Eliza’s friends recognize consistently but don’t quite know
how to address. The aptly named Mrs. Richman and Miss Freeman
(freedom, property, and maleness being requisite to citizenship)
comment extensively on the question of whether rakes can be accom-
modated in a republic, and their answer is inevitably a resounding no.
“A man of vicious character cannot be a good member of society,”
says Miss Freeman, and Mrs. Richman admonishes Eliza that while
she may think it is “possible for [such a man] to reform; to become
a valuable member of society,” this is but a delusion of her “charity,”
which is out of place in the schema she proposes, in which “reason
must be our guide, if we would expect durable happiness.”66 Sympa-
thy cannot—must not—extend to embrace intimacy (or intimacies)
with those deemed outside the moral dictates of society. This is part
of how intimacy functions to produce the social world, not simply by
embracing those near to us, but by excluding those the republic can-
not tolerate.
Eliza echoes Sanford’s words a few letters later, when she tells him
that “as to the praise or censure of the populace, I hope always to
enjoy that approbation of conscience, which will render me superior
to both.”67 The problem, as Sanford’s case illustrates, is that if one
is “superior” to the “praise or censure” of one’s community, then
there is no way to ensure that the community will continue as such.
That is to say, if one version of republicanism suggests the necessity of
freedom of conscience, the anxiety Foster maps here has to do with
a concern about the ways in which individual conscience comes into
conflict with the goals of the community, which are less the “pursuit”
allegorized in the idea of seduction than the ideas of stability and con-
tinuity enshrined in marriage and its reproduction of the family and
thus the nation. This, I would argue, is ultimately why Eliza must die,
and why Sanford must “fly [his] country”:68 there is no way that the
republic can sustain members so much in pursuit of their own liberties
that they rise above the normalizing reproaches of the community, as
codified in intimate exchanges.
If Foster’s novel in one sense subscribes to the notions of reason
presented within it, it seems in another sense to fall victim to its own
rhetorical excess, for while Eliza’s friends consistently counsel recourse
to reason, to calmer passions, the novel’s climactic letters announce
themselves as testimonials that will “rend every nerve of sympathizing
pity, which will rack the breast of sensibility, and unspeakably distress
[a reader’s] benevolent heart.”69 Understanding flirtation to mean
not a fixed principle disguised in its presentation but a level of internal
ambiguity that is expressed in alternately positive and negative terms,
we can see that Foster’s novel does indeed flirt with its audience. It
attempts to extend a community of intimacy, constituted in the rela-
tion between (presumed) narrator and reader, but does so through a
vehicle that condemns both the efficacy of intimate female communi-
ties and the safety, pleasure, and tranquility of marriage as a model
of intimacy. Cutting out those members who seem opposed to the

moral order of the nation, Foster suggests, will ultimately be prob-
lematic, not simply because, once outside the bounds of society, they
have no obligation to sustain it, to concern themselves with matters
of “union” and “tranquillity,” but because their very opposition to a
moral order stems from an adherence to a shared philosophical value
of freedom.
One of the most frequently cited passages in The Coquette is Eliza’s
assertion that “marriage is the tomb of friendship.”70 Almost never
cited but equally important to this line of discussion is the blissfully
wedded Mrs. Richman’s response to Eliza: “It is the glory of the mar-
riage state, she rejoined, to refine, by circumscribing our enjoyments.
Here we can repose in safety . . . True, we cannot always pay that
attention to former associates, which we may wish; but the little com-
munity we superintend is quite as important an object; and certainly
renders us more beneficial to the public. True benevolence, though it
may change its objects, is not limited by time or place.”71 The “safety”
Mrs. Richman finds in marriage suggests the dangers of being single
reads as strikingly as the “danger” in which Ophelia finds herself only
after she is pregnant with her sister’s husband’s child. The “danger”
of maidenhood might seem to be that of seduction, but Ophelia’s
recognition of her “danger” years after her seduction suggests another
angle. It might refer to a moral danger (the damage to her soul),
but again, the belated recognition speaks to something else. A more
rationalist account of these novels would suggest following Mrs. Rich-
man’s understanding of the “public” benefits deriving from conjugal
“benevolence” and thus argue that the danger of remaining unwed
is a social danger—a failure to reproduce not in any literal biological
sense (since each of the victims of seduction seems profoundly fertile)
but in a social sense. The danger might then seem to be the threaten-
ing collapse of the familial production of social beings; a refusal to
enter into socially sanctioned connections and to produce legitimate
citizens the consequence of which (however distant) might be the dis-
solution of the state or community.
Brown’s flirtation with incest seems to support such a reading, but
it does so in a curious way: by locating the threat of social disruption
within the family’s reproduction of itself. I would suggest, then, that
the “danger” of seduction stands in for the “danger” of single status,
less as a threat to the individual, or even to the community, than as a
threat located within the individual’s adherence to the very social stan-
dards that seek to reproduce community—that is, the very intimacy of
the family (in Brown) or of friendships (in Foster) is the very engine
by which the dissolution of the social is threatened. I would contend,
then, that the sensationalist and sentimental nature of these narratives
emerge as an effort to highlight this internal threat and the struggle to
reimagine intimacy in a way that does not threaten itself.
Chapter 3
4
Incommensurate Equivalences
G e nre , Repres entatio n, and Equ i t y i n
Cl ara Howard and Jane Talbot
The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy are tragedies in part—the

logic of the sentimental novel would have it—because they do not
end with weddings. Their vision of a social future is one unsecured by
the contractual bonds of marriage. Charles Brockden Brown’s nov-
els don’t generally end with marriages: Edgar Huntly does not wed
Mary Waldegrave; while Clara Wieland does regain the trust of Henry
Pleyel and marries him, Wieland has taken such pains to eroticize her
relation to her brother that Clara and Pleyel’s marriage seems itself
potentially incestuous; Arthur Mervyn marries not the young woman
who has seemed narratively destined to be his bride but instead a
woman introduced only toward the end of the novel; Constantia may
still feel “romantic passion” for Sophia Courtland, but Sophia is mar-
ried to another, and Constantia kills Ormond when he tries to rape
her.1 Brown’s last two complete novels, however, adapt the structure
and style of sentimental novels to critique the model of social repro-
duction instantiated in contract. In so doing, Brown challenges one
standard account of post-Revolutionary faith in the universalizing—
and thus equalizing—powers of abstraction. His turn to equity as one
way of rethinking relation follows directly upon the concerns of the
earlier novels with class difference and liberty.
G enre, L aw, and S entimental Expectati ons

The most widely remembered dicta of the American late eighteenth
century have in common a pithy optimism in the equalizing powers
of abstraction: “No taxation without representation.” “All men are
created equal.” “In America, the law is king.” If various lines of politi-
cal, historical, and literary criticism have taken issue with their pith,
their optimism, and their misplaced confidence in an abstraction that
requires ignoring the embodied particularities of actual persons, the
phrases themselves remain resonant because they seem to contain
the possibilities of their own improvement. We can increase the num-
ber and kinds of people represented; we can redefine what we mean by
men; we can specify what manner of legal equality governs. And these
redefinitions are made possible by vesting authority—definitional and
interpretive power—in the people. In this sense, then, to confront the
law is simply to confront one’s own power, one’s own authoritative
consent.
This, at least, is one strain of thinking about the abstract notions of
justice invoked at the origins of American governance. Charles Brock-
den Brown’s later novels, Clara Howard and Jane Talbot (both 1801),
articulate another account: one that strives to disassociate the law from
the people it governs. Though trained as a lawyer, Brown disavowed
the law as “a scheme of jargon and obscurity” sedulously furthered by
“the coiners of iniquitous subtleties and plotters against the majesty of
truth.”2 Yet as many of his readers have noted, Brown’s writings remain
steeped in legal language. The “forensic rhetoric” Laura Korobkin
identifies in Clara Wieland’s narration of Wieland, “a novel obsessed
with law, saturated with the vocabulary of evidence, testimony, proof,
inference, corroboration, and judgment,” will be familiar to read-
ers of Brown’s other novels and his magazine writing.3 This rhetoric,
though, is not just the residue of too many late nights with Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England—it carries through his writings
because so much of that work manifests an ongoing interest in the law
and its relation to the people.4 Brown remains fascinated by several
closely related questions about the nature of obligation, intention, and
representation—questions that lend themselves as easily to novelistic
and philosophical investigations as to legal ones. In a work like Alcuin
(1798), this interest displays itself as a reasonably straightforward cri-
tique of any system that presents itself as treating all persons equally
when it manifestly does not. In Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, how-
ever, this critique becomes more sophisticated. These novels no longer
take issue with outright legal inequality; rather, they question the very
Incommensurate Equivalences 71
premise of equality under the law. Brown’s lifelong interest in delibera-

tive processes and their narrative analogues emerges in these novels as
a fierce critique of contractual models of consent and obligation and,
by extension, offers access to one strand of early and ongoing dissent
from such models. These novels suggest that, to the extent one can
map human relationships onto legal ones, those relationships are better
described through analogies to equity rather than contract.
Reading Brown’s novels through the lens offered by his legal train-
ing, early and incomplete though it was, offers a way to historicize his
language and the ideas of interpretation and legal construction with
which he would have been familiar. My point here and elsewhere in
this chapter is never to insist that Brown is thinking in precise legal
terms—the youthful legal sophistry I’ll address shortly should sug-
gest that he had little patience with such detail. What I do mean to
emphasize, however, is that the legal language he learned during his
apprenticeship gave him a particular vocabulary with which to discuss
relationships and that his training means we may want to pay more
attention to the specifically legal connotations of that vocabulary than
we might with another author.
This legal language, particularly that concerning representation,
interpretation, contract, and consent, emerges most fully in Brown’s
most overtly courtship- and marriage-oriented novels, and with good
reason. These novels inhabit a genre that depends on the normative
contractual relation of marriage for its telos and bring their narratives
instead only to the verge of the contract, highlighting the promises
and negotiations that precede marriage rather than the ceremony
itself.5 This approach allows Brown to explore noncontractual, or
precontractual, agreements and the social realms best suited for such
engagements—engagements that depend so strongly on intentions
and their successful interpretation. They strip away other concerns
to focus on how one might ensure, without introducing the institu-
tion of law, that two or more people share the same standards for
determining equitable agreements. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot
seek to understand the processes by which people come to make—
and keep—promises. In so doing, these tales indict the sentimental
novel as a vehicle for cultural influence, but not in the gendered and
aesthetic terms in which the genre has been censured. Rather, they
repudiate the social values enshrined in novels of both sentiment and
seduction that imagine the culminating event of human affection to
be contractual.
Clara Howard and Jane Talbot are not strictly sentimental nov-
els. But how, exactly, one might describe the generic shift they effect
nevertheless remains difficult. The novels are certainly formally dis-

tinct from Brown’s earlier ones: they are epistolary (and the epistles
are ones to which the addressees actually reply, unlike the monologic
letter form of a novel like Edgar Huntly), and they are invested in the
teleology of the marriage plot, or at least in the predictable audience
expectations of closure (marriage or death) such plots produce.6 On
the other hand, the term most frequently applied to these novels—
“sentimental”—doesn’t accurately describe the aims of his narrative.
The novels are largely uninterested in producing emotional responses
in their readers. While there are some breathless descriptions of the
physiological states brought on by emotion, no narrational intru-
sions or set pieces of sympathetic feeling (the maiden made mad by
rejection, the oppressed slave who serves as an occasion for the com-
fortably seated observer’s tears) prompt the reader to respond in kind.
The language of duty and obligation far outweighs the language of
sighs, tears, and blushes. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot use some
of the devices of sentimental texts (exclamation marks and vows to
heaven are particularly abused), but they rely about as heavily on these
conventions as do Brown’s major novels. Though both novels would
seem to have “happy” endings (no one is seduced, gets pregnant,
becomes seriously suicidal, or dies in childbirth), both also refuse nar-
rative inclusion of the marriages with which their generic identification
suggests they should end. They refuse this, I argue, because they are
skeptical about the idea that marriage could really be a happy ending.
Brown’s apparent change of genre in these works represents his inter-
est in identifying the limitations of the contractual logic underlying
the sentimental novel.
The difficulty of classifying these works is amplified by confla-
tions of eighteenth- with nineteenth-century modes of sentiment, of
domestic writing with sentimental writing, of colloquial with criti-
cal understandings of the word sentiment, and of sentiment with its
sibilant kin: sympathy, seduction, and sensibility. In “The Differ-
ence between History and Romance,” published the year before
Clara Howard and Jane Talbot, Brown undertook to clarify a similar
conflation of terms, noting that romance and history are “not very
clearly distinguished”: we may want to reduce them to the opposi-
tion between fiction and nonfiction, or between fabrication and truth,
but these distinctions collapse under close inspection. Instead, Brown
insists, we should understand history to enumerate facts, actions, and
sensory experiences and understand romance to deal with motives,
causes, intentions, and probabilities. All writers, he suggests, must use
both modes. If history is equivalent to “truth,” then it can report only
direct sensory experience. “Useful narratives,” on the other hand,

will link causes and effects: “Curiosity is not content with noting and
recording the actions of men. It likewise seeks to know the motives by
which the agent is impelled to the performance of these actions; but
motives are modifications of thought which cannot be subjected to
the senses . . . They are merely topics of conjecture.”7 And the realm
of conjecture, the realm of interpreting motives, intentions, desires,
and beliefs, is that which Clara Howard and Jane Talbot occupy.
As motive and tendency depend on plausibility and probability, so
too do narrative expectations. That is, if genre is, as Lauren Berlant
suggests, “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation . . . [that]
promise[s] that the persons transacting with it will experience the
pleasure of encountering what they expected,” then it is continually
constituted and reconstituted by a text’s consistency with the actions
and intentions that readers expect of the kind of text they are reading.8
Genre in this sense is created not simply through formal conventions
but through the reader’s expectation and the writer’s satisfaction of
those conventions. It is the function of Brown’s last completed novels
to tweak such narrative expectations.
Clara Howard, for example, opens as though it were a tale of seduc-
tion. Our hero, Philip, mourns the absent Mary, who, he imagines, is
living out her own seduction narrative: “Perhaps—horrid thought!—
she may have become vile, polluted; and how shall I endure to meet her
in that condition? . . . if she dreaded not my censure, if she despaired
not of my acquiescence in her schemes, why conceal from me her
flight?”9 “She does not live with Sedley,” he continues, reassuring
himself. “At least, she does not live with him as his wife. Impossible
that Mary Wilmot should be allied to any man by a different tie! It is
sacrilege so much as to whisper to one’s heart the surmise. Yet have I
not written it? Have I not several times pondered on it? What has so
often suggested these frightful images?”10 Philip revels in the usually
titillating glut of horror and fascination at imagined sexual indiscre-
tions and violations of moral codes—we are securely in the realm of
Charlotte Temple or The Coquette. Or so we think. We are wrenched
out of the framework of this genre almost immediately, as we dis-
cover that the woman thus bemoaned is not the woman he loves but
rather the woman he has constrained himself to marry. And though
the novel toys with the question of Mary’s integrity for a while, she
proves to be as pure and morally upright a creature as one could wish,
vying with Clara to see who can be more self-sacrificing. The poles
of the seduction novel are inverted: the lost woman is only literally,
not figuratively, lost; the man occupying the structural position of
her seducer is in fact an earnest and legitimate suitor; the characters

outside the imagined seduction narrative, rather than those within it,
are the ones who have been misled by appearances. This destabiliza-
tion of generic expectation early in the story suggests that the novel is
concerned in part with the power of narrative expectation shaped by
(apparent) generic form.
The novel thus implies at the outset that certain expected promises
will remain unfulfilled, an intimation the plot certainly bears out. This
contrasts strongly with the way Brown imagined promissory obliga-
tion in his youth. Though this earlier perspective on contract was
articulated at least a decade before he wrote Clara Howard and Jane
Talbot (probably in the late 1780s), and perhaps speciously (since it
violates the basic understanding of contract law he would have had
to have mastered during his legal apprenticeship), it bears comment
because it is an early formulation of a question Brown was to pursue
throughout his literary career: what is the nature of obligation?
Brown’s initial answer to this question was absolute. As a young
law student, he offered his newly founded law club a defense of
extorted promises: “If the party intended deception at the time when
this obligation was entered into, in consequence of compulsion, and
if this is justifiable in morals, it furnishes a plea for the absolution of
all contracts whatever. We can scarcely conceive of an instance where
promises are made without some sort of compulsion.”11 That is,
to nullify a private contract because consent was compelled—given
under duress—would be as much as to dissolve the notion of con-
tract itself. Contracts are predicated on implicit force; promises are a
consequence of coercion. This is more than to say that people make
promises under the weight of historical determinism. Rather, Brown
posits individuals who know they are being compelled but insists that
such compulsion never excuses them from holding up their end of the
(compelled) obligation.
The understanding of contract Brown evinces here seems counter-
intuitive for at least two reasons. First, from the notion that promises
are often extorted, Brown deduces not that extortionate means of
producing “agreement” should be illegal but rather that all prom-
ises, no matter the conditions under which they are made, must be
inviolable—a determination that certainly runs counter to actual con-
tract law. Second, he treats rhetoric as a kind of force. When you
persuade another person, on Brown’s terms, you exercise power over
him because you compel him to assent to the logic of your position.
His elucidation of contractual obligation suggests that we really are
forced by the force of an argument.
If Brown’s inelastic understanding of contract demonstrates the

wisdom of his decision to renounce legal practice, it nevertheless
remains more than just a young man’s desire for irrefragable ethical
certainty. His account radicalizes the inequality of contract. A contract
is usually understood as an accurate register of individual intention—at
a given time, two people agree that two actions or objects are of com-
mensurate value and intend to exchange such actions or objects.12
Contract is thus also premised on the presumption that both parties
are structurally, or situationally, equal. Of course, there are differences
between contracting parties, this logic runs, but those differences are
negligible for the purposes of contract: what really matters is that the
two parties are understood to be equal in the eyes of the law. This is
what makes it possible to believe that contracts are formal and imper-
sonal instruments: the law can adjudicate contractual disagreements,
because it has formal components by which to define a contract, and
those components do not depend on the particular identities of the
parties involved.
Brown rejects this claim of contractual equality outright. Because
force—whether physical or persuasive—marks contractual relationships,
such agreements contain profound and varying inequality. This in turn
means that consideration—the requirement that one receive something
of equivalent value for the thing given away—becomes meaningless.
Compensatory consideration can’t be adequately determined by the law
because it presumes there is no meaningful initial inequality between
the two parties. The law assumes, that is, that contracting parties are
able to share a sense of what seems commensurate, of what seems fair.
It further assumes, then, that contract accurately attests to each party’s
intention at a given moment. For Brown, the presence of force in con-
tract means that virtually every contracting party acts with significant
moderation of, or compromise to, the will. Imagining that a con-
tract between individuals can act as an adequate register of intention,
on this account, is at best a misapprehension and at worst a cynical
bolstering of the power of the more forceful party in a contractual
arrangement under the guise of presumed equality of will.
Conceptions of contract were changing at the end of the eigh-
teenth century, however. An emerging market economy shifted late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century juridical thinking from a
title theory of contractual exchange (in which contracts were under-
stood simply to transfer title in property) to a will theory of contract
(in which contracts are understood to create expectations). The “equi-
table conception of contract”—contracts enforced not with an eye
toward the agreed-upon value of items exchanged but rather in line
with the perceived reasonableness of the contract’s terms—shifted in

response to the rise of speculation in stocks and commodities markets,
as expectation damages first became prevalent in the 1790s.13 Thus
jurists attended less to the intention of the promisor and more to the
expectations of the promisee. Brown’s insistence on intention sug-
gests an analogy between a reader’s narrative expectations produced
by familiar genres and a contracting party’s expectations produced by
agreements, and his invocation of equity in texts like Clara Howard,
Jane Talbot, and his 1798 dialogue on women’s rights, Alcuin, sug-
gests that he was trying to think about will and intention in ways
that have less to do with formal standards (of law, of value) than with
broader conceptions of justice.14
The title speaker of Alcuin suggests that the position of those
compelled to “consent to be ruled by another” is made less oner-
ous because the other party doesn’t necessarily have to enforce his
contractual rights: Alcuin renders the potential inequality of contract
moot by appealing not to law but to equity as an extralegal term and
as a corollary to any insistence that compelled contracts be fulfilled.
Speaking of the “sphere of discretion allotted to each man, which
political authority must not violate”—that is, speaking of individ-
ual practices rather than broadly political ones—he says, “The chief
purpose of the wise is to make men their own governors, to persuade
them to practise the rules of equity without legal constraint . . . We
need not complain of the injustice of laws, if we refrain, or do not find
it needful to appeal to them . . . It matters not what power the law
gives me over the property or persons of others, if I do not chuse to
avail myself of the privilege.”15
Brown draws on his legal training when he puts these words in
Alcuin’s mouth: equity does mean something like extralegal fairness.
Historically, there were two venues for handling crimes in England:
a court of law and a court of equity or chancery. The court of law
adjudicated cases according to the provisions of common law. Courts
of equity, which generally could not award financial damages, handed
down injunctions to impel or prohibit behavior, such as commanding
specific performance of a contract. The standards for determining jus-
tice varied between the two as well: where courts of law had statutes
to consult, courts of equity accounted for what seemed basically fair
by invalidating agreements that would “shock the conscience” of the
king. The American legal system adhered fairly closely to the British
model in its inception, but as equity came more and more to govern
property disputes, the fluidity of equity law was seen as a barrier to
coherent precedent, and the lack of jury made the judge’s discretion
seem absolute. The late nineteenth century saw legal reforms that
effectively combined common law and equity. Nevertheless, American
law to this day distinguishes clearly between remedies in law (in cases
where there are specific legal guidelines and financial damages would
actually be compensatory) and those in equity (where the law does
not specify a judgment or money would not compensate).
Brown became interested in equity as offering an alternative to
thinking about social relations contractually. And to exploit the pos-
sibilities of this alternative, he narrowed the scope of interpretation
in order to increase its power. Writing as a judge in a moot court
case, Brown explained that even though the reasoning in a case had
to be based on statutes, nevertheless “in the application of the gen-
eral rules there laid down to particular cases, a judgment must be
directed by certain laws of construction, universally laid down and
established. If [a jurist’s] decisions be made conformably to these
rules, it matters not whether his interpretation be sanctioned or not
by positive authority . . . It is sufficient that I have shown the propriety
of acting independent of any precise authority: or even in contradic-
tion to it, when authorised by the known and established rules of
construction.”16 Even in a case in which the statutory application
is unmistakable, a case where no precedent exists to extenuate that
application, or a case where precedent in fact demands that applica-
tion, equity can trump written law. Those “universally laid down and
established” interpretive rules, meant to ensure consistent applica-
tion of the law, dictate their own supersedure by an appeal to equity.
Brown divested the law of its authority, only to relocate that authority
in the presumptively normative process of interpretation. If this looks
like a version of the celebratory investment of interpretive power in
the people mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it bears noting
that it is not the jurist interpreting who has authority; rather, it is the
“rules of construction” that have full power.17
Modeling social relations along the lines of something like equity
rather than contract might give us a more flexible way to imagine
those relations, insofar as it strips power from both parties, but it is not
without its problems, key among which is the question of who actu-
ally determines what counts as equitable and who “authorise[s] . . .
the known and established rules of construction.” If Brown rejected,
over the course of his career, a version of sociality that expresses itself
as contractual reciprocity, he nevertheless remained interested in what
will back up promises if not a legal apparatus. If we are not bound to
each other by explicit legal codification but rather by something that
appears more subjective, how can we ensure that our respective senses
of reciprocal obligation overlap?
Alcuin’s respondent, Mrs. Carter, articulates this line of reason-
ing in her critique of Alcuin’s account of equity. She notes that his
deferral to equity and its concomitant restraint of contractual privilege
commits him to the notion that “it matters not by whom power is
possessed.” The location and form of power matter to her consid-
erably. Their conversation here concerns political legitimation rather
than private action, but the two realms—as their easy shifts in and out
of the language of public and private law indicate—share important
parallels. So in the arena of public politics, she has already explained
that her Federalism extends as far as a preference for the constitution,
for “union and confederacy” rather than “war and dissension,” but
that more vested political allegiances are rendered impossible by that
same union’s legislative position on women. She explains, “While I
am conscious of being an intelligent and moral being; while I see
myself denied, in so many cases, the exercise of my own discretion;
incapable of separate property; subject, in all periods of my life, to the
will of another, on whose bounty I am made to depend for food, rai-
ment, and shelter; . . .—what though politicians say I am nothing, it is
impossible I should assent to their opinion, as long as I am conscious
of willing and moving.”18
Mrs. Carter distinguishes here between her political opinion (tepid
support for the central document of Federalism) and the allegiance of
her will. She may embrace certain tenets of political conviction, but she
rejects the legislative apparatus produced by such a system because it
does not recognize her capacity to will. It subjects her “discretion”—
that is, her ability to distinguish and discriminate and thus to form an
opinion—to that of another, thereby compromising and ultimately
denying her economic and moral sovereignty. In the face of such an
erasure, specific political opinions fall away in favor of a more cen-
tral moral conviction of the autonomy of the will. Opinion offers
Mrs. Carter a choice between political parties; will marks the agency
that allows her to make multiple and layered determinations about
her own behavior. Her opinion may favor one party over another, but
both fall short in terms of recognizing her individual—political, civil,
moral—agency. When Alcuin insists, then, in response to Mrs. Carter’s
concern about the location of political power, that she “distinguish
between power and the exercise of power, and see that the importance
of the first is derived wholly from the consideration of the last,” he in
effect insists that she suspend political concerns in favor of social ones,
that she prefer interpersonal equity to legal equality.19 These claims are
echoed in their discussion of marriage law: Mrs. Carter objects to the

“present system” of marriage on the grounds that it enslaves women
to men, requiring “submission on her part to the will of her husband”
and simultaneously stripping her of property. Alcuin insists that she
overstates the case, noting that the law requires that married women
be provided for by their husbands and maintaining that even “if law
were silent, custom would enforce this claim. The husband is in reality
nothing but a steward.”20 This stewardship, as a kind of representa-
tional authority, is taken up in Clara Howard, where the implicit claim
of husbandly self-abnegation is more explicitly depicted.
Alcuin’s claim that affection and custom should trump formal
equality is one way to articulate the principle that underlay eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century arguments against women’s suffrage—they
didn’t need the vote because their views would be represented by their
husbands.21 Clara Howard imagines how such representation might
work, highlighting both the relation of will to representation and the
legal status that demonstrates will: the capacity to make contracts.
Women of course occupied the unique position of being able to have
(as femes sole), not have (as femes covert), and have again (as widows)
legal status entitling them to enter into contractual relations. And this
is why his last two completed novels focus on marriage negotiations;
he wants to isolate the contractual moment in which a woman freely
intends to relinquish her civil status.
C l ar a H oward’s Will
Clara Howard and Jane Talbot can be summarized in similar ways:
both novels are epistolary; in both novels the primary characters are
a man and a woman who want to marry each other; in both nov-
els there is an obstacle to the marriage; in both novels that obstacle
comes in the form of a person to whom one character is somehow
obliged and who does not want the man and woman to marry; and
in both novels the obstacle finally disappears. The obstacle to mar-
riage does not, moreover, go away because our lovers recognize the
supremacy of their attachment to each other above other, competing
claims for affection. In Clara Howard, Philip Stanley, the male pro-
tagonist, discovers that he loves Clara after he has already proposed
to another woman, Mary, and the bulk of the novel sees both young
women rejecting Philip because they feel he ought to honor his com-
mitment to the other. In Jane Talbot, it is Jane’s adoptive mother,
Mrs. Fielder, who stands in the way, threatening to disown her if she
marries the rakish Henry Colden, and Jane spends the majority of
the novel alternately promising Colden that she will marry him and
promising Mrs. Fielder that she will not.
Within these similarities, however, the novels tend to different
aspects of the problem of representing intentions. While Clara How-
ard asks whether one person can exercise another’s will, Jane Talbot
asks whether we can recognize our own intentions—let alone trans-
mit them to someone else. Brown routes these explorations through
family—whether defined through marriage, biology, or (informal)
adoption—and the property such families may share or fight over.
Both novels are particularly fascinated by the potential overlaps
between “horizontal” family relationships—siblings and spouses. This
flirtation with incest is a common trope in early American fiction (as
seen in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Ira and Isa-
bella, Rowson’s Lucy Temple, and the like), serving in at least one
sense (as Elizabeth Barnes has argued) as a register of the anxieties of
misidentification produced by democratic social leveling.22 Brown’s
novels reorient this trope, though: they are concerned less with the
erasure of familiar lines of hierarchy across multiple social classes than
with more limited—dyadic and familial—relationships structured in
part by property and marked by individual deliberation, argument,
persuasion, agreement, and intention.
At the outset of Clara Howard, young Philip finds himself taken
under the wing of an Englishman, Mr. Howard. Philip describes Mr.
Howard as “a sort of divinity to me,—the substitute and representa-
tive of Heaven, in my eyes, and for my good.”23 Philip’s phrasing is
striking here, because substitute and representative are mutually exclu-
sive categories. While both can be glossed as “standing in for,” there’s
a substantial difference between representing heaven—as an angel or
other divine messenger, for example—and replacing heaven by being
an acceptable alternative to it. This is one of the central problems
of the novel: the difficulty of understanding what it might mean to
represent something or someone else or to represent someone else’s
beliefs. Thought of in these terms, Philip’s invocation of Mr. Howard
as “substitute and representative” looks like a moment of represen-
tational confusion in which it is not clear whether “standing in for”
means “acting as though one were” or “acting on behalf of.”
A similar sort of representational confusion seems at work in
Mr. Howard’s eventual response to Philip’s love, when he returns
from England with a wife, daughter, and fortune. Philip is not just
like the son Mr. Howard never had; Mr. Howard makes him into that
son: “You are the son, not of my instincts, but of my affections and
my reason. Formerly I gave you my advice, my instructions, and my
company, only because I had nothing more to give. Now I am rich,

and will take care that you shall never be again exposed to the chances
of poverty . . . You, who will share my labor, shall partake liberally of
the profit. For this end I mean to admit you as an inseparable member
of my family, and to place you, in every respect, on the footing of my
son.”24 Philip is understood to be a chosen son rather than a mere acci-
dent of “instincts” or even, the tone of this passage suggests, a relation
produced by law, as they would be related if Mr. Howard formally
adopted Philip, or as they will be related once Philip marries Clara,
Mr. Howard’s daughter. What bears emphasizing here is, first, that
Mr. Howard insists on a noncontractual relationship and, second, that
he ultimately wants to make Philip a son and a son-in-law, as though
conflating those categories were not incestuous or as though one or
the other were not enough to constitute relation. With the substitute/
representative conflation, and the simultaneity of son and son-in-law,
we begin to see a signature move of Brown’s last two novels: making
the incommensurate equivalent. The equivalence of concepts that are
demonstrably not comparable—are, in fact, mutually exclusive—sets
up a way to think about the problem of contract isolated in Brown’s
earlier writing—how do we adjudicate the value of objects or actions,
and how do we know that two things are equivalent? The structure of
contract suggests that the sense of the contracting parties will largely
guide the determination of value; Brown’s critique of contractual rela-
tion, however, suggests that one party is always forced to agree to an
incommensurate equivalence. That is to say, both parties can assess
value, but at least one of them is compelled to over- or undervalue the
thing or action being exchanged.
In Philip’s case, being both Mr. Howard’s son and his son-in-law
has tangible, valuable benefits: Mr. Howard explains that he stands
to receive real property. He is integrated not only into Howard’s
family but also into Howard’s business (“share my labor”), so that it
becomes difficult to say if the “profit” he stands to receive is an inheri-
tance or a salary. Crucially, though, while Mr. Howard offers both to
hire Philip and to adopt him into the family through marriage, neither
(contractual) relationship is effected within the narrative of the novel.
We never see Philip working (all he produces, apparently, are letters),
and Philip and Clara’s wedding is still to come when the novel ends.
Clara’s reasons for her choice of husband further underscore a
quasi-incestuous conception of marriage as an incommensurate equiv-
alency. This is how Mr. Howard explains Clara’s decision-making
process in selecting a spouse:
“She estimates the characters of others, not by the specious but delusive
considerations of fortune or birth, but by the intrinsic qualities of heart
and head. In her marriage choice, which yet remains to be made, she
will forget ancestry and patrimony, and think only of the morals and
understanding of the object. Hitherto her affections have been wholly
free, but”—here Mr. Howard fixed his eyes, with much intenseness and
significance, on my countenance—“her parents will neither be grieved
nor surprised if, after a residence of some time under the same roof with
her brother Philip, she should no longer be able to boast her freedom
in that respect.”25
Clara’s estimations (a nicely economic word) are as enlightened and

republican as one could wish—not swayed by lineage but by merit.
And, the logic of the novel suggests, Clara’s criteria need not be eco-
nomic precisely because transforming her “brother Philip” into her
husband obviates the need for any economic exchange whatsoever:
Clara stands to inherit what is already hers only because it comes
through Philip, her father’s son.
Moreover, though Mr. Howard values Clara’s capacity for judg-
ment because it is not clouded by attention to property or rank, it
is precisely property, possession, and power that are at the heart of
Philip and Clara’s relationship. This is demonstrated in a lengthy pas-
sage where Philip imagines what it will be like to be married to Clara,
or rather, as soon becomes clear, wondering what it will be like to have
access to Clara’s property.
And are, indeed, these privations forever at an end? Is the harder test of
wisdom, the true use of riches, now to be imposed upon me? It is; Clara
Howard and all that she inherits will be mine. I ought to tremble for
the consequences of exposure to such temptations; and if I stood alone
I should tremble; but, in reality, whatever is yours, or your father’s gift,
is not mine. Your power over it shall be unlimited and uncontrolled
by me; and this, not more from the equity of your claim to the sole
power, than from the absolute rectitude with which that power will be
exercised by you . . .
Ah, my divine friend, I will be no more than your agent, your almo-
ner; one whose aid may make charity less toilsome to you . . .
They tell us that ambition is natural to man; that no possession is so
pleasing as power and command. I do not find it so. I would fain be a
universal benefactor. The power that office or riches confers is requisite
to this end; but power in infirm hands is productive only of mischief.
I, who know my own frailty, am therefore undesirous of power: so far
from wishing to rule others, it is my glory and my boast to submit
to one whom I deem unerring and divine. Clara’s will is my law; her
pleasure the science that I study; her smiles the reward, next to an
approving God, my soul prizes most dearly.26
On the one hand, Philip seems to grant Clara possession of her own
property, in direct contradiction of the laws of coverture, which will
assign her property to him once they are married. On the other hand,
Clara’s ownership is restricted in a way that makes her look more like
a conduit for money than someone who actually owns anything—that
is, money comes to her, only to pass out of her and be transformed
into charity. But these ruminations also empty out Philip—he disdains
power, and yet he will become the means by which the power of doing
good is exercised.
Money, then, allows Clara to wield her power by letting Philip
wield her power. Clara herself never comes in contact with the
money—it, like she, is owned by Philip (“Clara Howard and all she
inherits”). Philip wants to act as her “agent” and then revises his
terms: her “almoner.” He becomes a representative in an explicitly
extralegal setting, which then seems rendered legalistic—“Clara’s will
is my law”—but he invokes the most local and personal law, not one
with any pretensions to universalizing formalism, and one more akin
to religious than to civil law, since Clara is “unerring and divine.” Like
Alcuin, Philip wants his interlocutor to ignore the legal facts—Philip
will own and control Clara’s property—and to focus instead on the
social and affective relations that will, he argues, govern those legal
facts: while he acts it will be her will that directs those actions; while he
exercises power it will be her power that he exercises. He will use her
money not to buy anything—a form of (contractual) exchange—but
rather to effect charity, thus keeping her property from entering into
an economy of exchange. Philip repudiates “power and command,”
claiming to be too weak to exercise it. This claim puts him in the odd
position of suggesting that one can voluntarily assign one’s will to
someone else—a position that becomes remarkably less odd when we
consider that this is precisely what the marriage contract requires of
Clara. As the first legal treatise published in America explained, since
“the law contemplates the husband and wife as being but one person,
it allows them to have but one will, which is placed in the husband.”27
Though the statement suggests that this singular “will” should be that
of the husband, Philip takes seriously the idea that the will “placed in”
him as a husband might be either his or Clara’s. Being able to assign
one’s will to someone else means, in this novel’s terms, that exercising
power doesn’t necessarily entail having power.
Philip and Clara’s arrangement has produced some puzzlement

in critics. Donald Ringe understates the case when he says that “the
implication is strong that she expects him to conform to her views”28—
what she wants is to make their views identical:
While I love thee and cherish thee as a wife, I shall assume some of the
prerogatives of an elder sister, and put my circumspection and fore-
thought in the balance against thy headlong confidence. I revere thy
genius and thy knowledge. With the improvements of time, very far
wilt thou surpass the humble Clara; but in moral discernment much art
thou still deficient; here I claim to be more than equal. But the distance
shall not subsist long. Our modes of judging and our maxims shall be
the same; and this resemblance shall be purchased at the cost of all my
patience, my skill, and my love.29
The resemblance Clara wishes to “purchase”—which she is, in fact,

buying from her husband in agreeing to marry him—is a kind of rep-
resentation. As such, it might remind us of the difficulty Philip had
earlier with the difference between “substitute and representative,” or
the way in which he imagines representing Clara’s charitable interests,
without admitting to exerting power in doing so. We are back to the
question of whether representing someone means “acting as though
one were” that person or “acting on behalf of that” person: Philip
imagines the latter as his distributive role, while Clara exacts the for-
mer as the price of their marriage. Moreover, achieving this identity of
views is worth the expense (the “cost”) of all her patience, skill, and
love. Clara here gives priority to agreement in outlook over affection
itself and those things requisite to maintaining affection.
Clara’s insistence on identity of moral views takes on added
meaning in light of the novel’s publication date. Clara Howard was
published in June 1801; Thomas Jefferson had been inaugurated
only a few months before, on March 4, 1801. Brown had written
something like an embryonic draft of Clara Howard as early as the
late 1780s—during the contentious debates over ratification—but he
wrote and published the novel in full at the moment when political
power passed from the Federalists to the Republicans.
Federalists urged a paternalistic form of representation—one in
which a political representative could “substitute” his will for the
will of the people he ostensibly represented—in order to stave off
the perceived threat of encroaching Jacobinism. (Think of Alexan-
der Hamilton, declaring in the New York ratifying convention of
1788 that “no idea is more erroneous than” the notion that a large
population requires an equivalently large representative body, because

“only such interests are proper to be represented, as are involved in
the powers of the General Government,” and reminding his auditors
that “there are certain conjunctures, when it may be necessary and
proper to disregard the opinions which the majority have formed.”)30
In contrast, antifederalists urged a more transparent mode of repre-
sentation. (Think of Melancton Smith, also in the New York ratifying
convention, insisting that “individuals entering into society became
one body, and that body ought to be animated by one mind,” or
arguing, under the guise of the “Federal Farmer,” that “a full and
equal representation . . . is [one] that . . . possesses the same interests,
feelings, opinions and views the people themselves would were they
all assembled.”)31
Without insisting too much on a direct correlation between the
broader political realm and the novel’s world of domestic delibera-
tion (without, that is, confusing the social contract with the marriage
contract), these models of representation could be glossed as “sub-
stitutive” and “representative” (in keeping with Philip Stanley’s
discussion of Mr. Howard), and, taken together, they limn the two
versions of marital representation outlined in Clara Howard: a substi-
tutive model, in which the husband’s will usurps the will of the wife,
or a representative model, in which the husband transparently repre-
sents the will of the wife.
The focus of Clara Howard and Jane Talbot on representation
within marital relations—relations structured by both property and
sex—adds an intriguing wrinkle to the political discussions of the mate-
rial sources of the opinions to be represented. When James Madison,
in Federalist no. 10, for example, describes the ways to avoid faction,
he suggests that one way to stamp out its causes would be to “giv[e]
to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same
interests.” Madison dismisses this as a plausible possibility by explain-
ing the origin of different interests, which he identifies as originating
in “the possession of different degrees and kinds of property”—since
different people have different property, he argues, their interests will
likewise develop in varied directions. Brown, however, uses Clara and
Philip’s relationship to posit an instance in which two people will
be similarly interested in the care and disposal of identical property,
and he has Clara follow Madison’s logic, so that this shared property
interest will coincide with their having identical “modes of judging
and maxims.”
When Melancton Smith argued that only by becoming “one body”
could sufficiently transparent representation be effected, he invoked
a metaphor equally apposite to marriage—specifically, to the bibli-

cal injunction that husband and wife become “one flesh.” Clara and
Philip, when they marry, will indeed become “one body,” “animated
by one mind.” And both Clara and Philip insist that this mind will be
Clara’s—it will be her “will,” her “moral discernment” that governs
the marital body. When their wills are united, however, one of them
will be in the position Mrs. Carter had insisted was untenable in her
discussion with Alcuin: that which renders conviction moot, because
the very structure of the system denies the conviction holder’s exis-
tence. And if literary critics have been wont to agree with the happy
couple in seeing this erased position as one inhabited by Philip, we
would do well to remember that, with marriage, Clara’s civil identity
is about to disappear.
Clara has in effect insisted on transparent representation of her will
as a condition of her entry into a marriage contract that will divest
her of her capacity to enter into other contracts. If Philip can claim to
exercise power without actually having it, Clara’s apparent inversion
of this formula—having power without exercising it—doesn’t exactly
make her “powerful,” largely because neither she nor her power can
be legally recognized.32
This is where the equitable, rather than contractual, conception of
marriage breaks down. Despite Brown’s best efforts as a teen jurist,
equity cannot always supersede statute. Or, as Jane Talbot puts it in
a letter to Henry Colden, “Already in the sight of Heaven, at the
tribunal of my own conscience, am I thy wife; but somewhat more is
requisite to make the compact universally acknowledged.”33 Though
Jane Talbot still focuses on questions of equity and contract, it empha-
sizes the role of evidence in attesting to the intention that is supposed
to be represented in contract. Even if intentions could be transparently
rather than substitutively represented, and even if that representation
could be recognized in law, Brown’s next novel reveals, it is remark-
ably difficult to understand what an intention is, give evidence of it,
or even recognize the self that (apparently) formed it.
Jane Tal bot’s Witne ss

Jane Talbot, published six months after Clara Howard, revisits the
relationship between property and opinion. The couple we first see
arguing over property are biological brother and sister: a nice twist on
James Madison’s location of opinion in property in Federalist no. 10,
since, as might be expected, two children who stand to inherit from
the same family don’t necessarily share any convictions, political or
otherwise, and their shared interest in identical property may actu-

ally generate differences of opinion. Before the novel can ask whether
ties of family might be sufficient to secure opinion, will, or intention,
however, it must first establish what “family” means.
The family in Jane Talbot, as in Clara Howard, can expand its
parameters through informal adoption. When Jane is five, her mother
dies, whereupon she is promptly taken in by her mother’s estranged
childhood companion, Mrs. Fielder, despite the fact that Jane’s father
is alive and well. She thus appears simply to have acquired a new par-
ent and a second fortune. The situation is a bit more complicated,
however: it is not just the case that Jane’s brother, Frank, is profligate
and convinces his doting father to engage in speculations with and
ultimately lose all his money and property, although this does hap-
pen.34 Rather, it is clear from the beginning that while Jane expects a
competency from her “mother,” she is apprehensive that, not being
blood kin, she may forfeit it. “My mother’s fortune was indeed large
and permanent, but my claim to it was merely through her volun-
tary favour, of which a thousand accidents might bereave me,” she
explains, and worries what will happen when her brother intimates
that Mrs. Fielder might remarry.35
Likewise, though her father has promised her half of his estate, it
is meant to go not directly to Jane but to Risberg, a man who not
only is her cousin but has been instructed, as Philip Stanley was by
Mr. Howard, “to regard himself as entitled to all the privileges of a
son.”36 The novel thus flirts with a marital trajectory that might end in
a structurally incestuous union like that between Clara and Philip. It
quickly disposes of this possibility, however: when the family fortune
(being drained by Jane’s brother) can no longer support the extra
son/son-in-law figure, Risberg is cut off. If informal adoption is the
norm, so too is the anxiety—and the fact—that such relations cannot
provide security in the event of financial loss or disagreement. With
a few opening strokes, Brown highlights the ways in which family
and financial security intertwine and the contingency of claims not
grounded in law or (lineal) biology.
In this novel the capacity of biological family members to make,
understand, and debate claims is subject to interpretive pressures
over and above any financial ones. Family disagreements can never be
resolved by argument in Jane Talbot. When Frank asks Jane for a loan
that she knows he will squander and not repay, she replies, “I do not
imagine, brother, that any good will result from our discussing the
subject. Education, or sex if you please, has made a difference in our
judgments, which argument will never reconcile.”37 The family, then,
does not secure even the grounds for similarity of thinking, for those
grounds can be superseded by stronger differences, like education or
sex. Similar thinking cannot be achieved even through the exchange
of ideas, by “discussing the subject.” This impossibility at first seems a
product of that dissimilar education, or of Jane’s refusal to exercise the
“judgment” she says differs from Frank’s. The novel suggests, though,
that such disagreements will not admit of resolution precisely because
the disputants are related: when Frank offers “the common proofs of
having received [her] money . . . my note, bond, what you please,”
Jane responds, “My brother’s bond will be of no use to me; I shall
never go to law with my brother.” Pushed further, she repeats, “It
was not possible for time or argument to bring us to the same way of
thinking on” the question.38 If arguments cannot be made, disagree-
ment can never be adjudicated. And in this instance, it appears, there
are no other ways to ensure either agreement or financial security.
As in Clara Howard, there is substantial difficulty in imagining what
might suffice to bring two people to agree with each other—family
relation, interest in the same property, affective attachment, reasoned
argument—but here Clara’s option of simply enforcing identity of
position (one flesh, one will) is unavailable.
The novel moves from families produced by informal adoption
or blood to those produced through marriage. Jane marries a sta-
ble, responsible man (Talbot) but falls in love with the ne’er-do-well
Henry Colden—onetime proponent of Godwinian radicalism and,
like so many of Brown’s male characters, congenitally unemployed—
while her husband is at sea. Their love is chaste; Talbot dies at sea;
Jane attempts to convert Henry to the light of rational religion. The
novel itself acts as a record of Jane’s vacillations between her sense of
duty to her adoptive mother, who is implacably opposed to Colden,
and her love for the man whose conversion she is effecting.
In this respect, then, the novel can be read as a detailing of the
pull of argument on the mind of a thoughtful but susceptible young
woman. Many readers have, quite reasonably, found themselves frus-
trated by Jane’s apparent wishy-washiness or by the apparent financial
interests that motivate her (she will lose an inheritance from Mrs.
Fielder if she marries Colden; Colden does not—and claims to be
unable to—work). In view of Clara Howard’s focus on promises and
exchanges of will and money, though, the back-and-forth of marital
and familial negotiation takes on a different cast. The letters enact
the process of deliberation: Jane’s attempt to form an intention and
stick to it in the face of the competing and equally weighted claims of
love and duty.39 Given Brown’s treatment of Philip’s alienation of will

in Clara Howard, we should not be surprised to find Jane continu-
ally announcing the usurpability of her will. She refers to her earlier
relationship with Mrs. Fielder by reporting that she was “always wont
to be obsequious to the very turn of her eye, and to make her will
not only the regulator of my actions, but the criterion of my under-
standing.” And with Colden the situation is more extreme. “So easily
swayed am I by one who is lord of my affections! No will, no reason
have I of my own,” she writes to Colden. She ends her letter by plead-
ing with him: “Decide and act for me . . . Let me lose all separate
feelings, all separate existence, and let me know no principle of action
but the decision of your judgment, no motive or desire but to please,
to gratify you.”40
Her renunciation of will, however, fails—repeatedly—and this dif-
ficulty in choosing between Mrs. Fielder and Henry Colden seems
emblematic of Brown’s working through the problem of trying to
treat opinion and will as commodities (which would, after all, merely
instantiate another version of contract), as they are in Clara Howard.
In Jane Talbot, then, his interest shifts toward how one can mark and
record opinion and intention in a way that holds people responsible
for those intentions.
This focus on methods of recording intention turns the novel
toward evidentiary standards familiar from the enforcement of con-
tract. Key among these are the idea of witnessing—having someone
else attest to the fact that this person in fact made this agreement—
and the evidentiary heft of writing, particularly when that writing is
demonstrably the handwriting of a particular person.
When Mrs. Fielder writes to Jane of Colden’s lack of religious
conviction, “How easy is the verbal assent,—the equivocating
accent,—the hesitating air!” she articulates a common understanding
of spoken language as lending itself more easily to duplicity, in part at
least because it does not produce the sort of physical evidence a writ-
ten document does.41 Early in the novel, writing seems to function as
evidence, as accurate representation. It serves as an antidote to gossip
and as a testament to Jane’s character: it is a form of proof. As time
passes, however, writing loses its pretensions to evidentiary capacity.
Mrs. Fielder relies on Colden’s letters to his youthful friend Thomp-
son to represent Colden’s beliefs accurately, as she explains to Jane,
These letters showed Colden as the advocate of suicide; a scoffer at

promises; the despiser of revelation, of Providence, and a future state;
an opponent of marriage, and as one who denied (shocking!) that any

thing but mere habit and positive law stood in the way of marriage, nay,
of intercourse without marriage, between brother and sister, parent and
child! You may readily believe that I did not credit such things on slight
evidence. I did not rely on Thompson’s mere words, solemn and unaf-
fected as these were; nothing but Colden’s handwriting could in such
a case, be credited.42
Mrs. Fielder does not merely distinguish between spoken and

written language but attends in particular to those marks that per-
sonalize and distinguish writing. Handwriting, she imagines, can act
as evidence. And indeed it is evidence: evidence that Colden wrote
the letter. But she misconstrues handwriting’s evidentiary function
by imagining that it reliably demonstrates a continuing state of mind
rather than merely identifies the author: Colden has long since rejected
these Godwinian propositions.
These propositions are themselves deeply implicated in questions
of evidence and the function of the law. The letters seem to attest to
Colden’s disbelief in promises, and promises occupy the same sort
of murky territory as Brown’s conception of equity—not formalized
with enforceable rules, but commitments that good sense and com-
mon morality behoove one to honor. So, too, the letters go on to
align habit with positive law in contradistinction to natural law, which
might be another way of thinking about equity. And it is in these
murky, unregulated areas that we find incest—the generic feint of both
the sentimental and the gothic novel. If siblings compete for property
because they have separate wills but cannot persuade through argu-
ment (like Jane and Frank), whereas husband and wife have identical
views and identical property not because they share it but because
they have only one will, one owner (like Clara and Philip), then Clara
Howard’s and Jane Talbot’s initial mapping of marriage onto sibling
relations attempts to transform division of property into identity
of wills.
It makes a perverse kind of sense, then, that Mrs. Fielder’s recitation
of the letters’ contents, with its cascade of ever-worsening violations of
social, religious, and legal norms, culminates not simply with incest
but with extramarital incest. Without marriage, the legal authoriza-
tion that transforms siblings’ competing intentions into husband and
wife’s identical intentions is removed.
Colden’s letters claim that we avoid incest only through habit
and law. That this claim is made in the middle of a demonstration of
evidence that fails to attest to what it seems to verify raises some ques-
tions about the law’s reliance on evidence. That the letter’s author
disavows its contents only makes the status of those contents trickier
to grasp. Colden’s lines to Jane on the subject of the damning letter
are themselves an exercise in genre recognition: “Would to heaven I
had not yielded to your urgency! The indecorum of compliance stared
me in the face at the time. Too easily I yielded to the enchantments
of those eyes, and the pleadings of that melting voice. The charms of
your conversation; the midnight hour whose security was heightened
by the storm that raged without; so perfectly screened from every
interruption; and the subject we had been talking on, so affecting
and attractive to me, and so far from being exhausted, and you so
pathetically earnest in entreaty, so absolutely forbidding my depar-
ture.”43 At this moment Colden sounds less like the hardened seducer
Mrs. Fielder (and the letter) accuses him of being than like the
breathless, repentant seductee. It sounds as though Jane’s verbal blan-
dishments resulted in his defloration.
Like Clara Howard’s initial distortion of narrative expectation,
Jane Talbot here seems to shift genre. Not simply the identification of
evidence (whether this thing accurately attests to this specific action
or belief) but the effects of such evidence on identity itself become
unstable. And if here the only identity in question is that of the novel’s
genre, the characters themselves soon begin to doubt their own sense
of self. For, strangely, Colden, too, is shaken by the appearance of the
Godwinian letter, despite his rejection of its contents. “There is such
an irresistible crowd of evidence in favour of the accusation! When I
first read Mrs. Fielder’s letter, the consciousness of my innocence gave
me courage; but the longer I reflect upon the subject, the more deeply
I despond. My own errors will always be powerful pleaders against
me at the bar of this austere judge.”44 This writing disturbs his own
self-awareness: he knows himself to be innocent but feels himself to
be guilty. He feels, in fact, the very guilt Mrs. Fielder thinks his letter
demonstrates.
And soon even the circumscribed evidentiary status of handwrit-
ing is undermined when Mrs. Fielder presents Jane with a letter
that, though undeniably in Jane’s handwriting, she did not write in
its entirety. The final paragraph, suggesting an illicit union between
Jane and Colden while Jane was still married, is forged by a woman
besotted with Jane’s former husband. The forgery is good enough to
fool not only Mrs. Fielder but Jane herself—even though she knows
she did not write the damning paragraph. Writing here not only fails
to represent the thought of the speaker but also undermines that

speaker’s capacity to recognize her own identity and intention. Jane’s
conviction of her own innocence is rattled by the forgery:
All of it appeared, on the first perusal, to be mine. Even the last mysteri-
ous paragraph was acknowledged by my senses. In the first confusion
of my mind, I knew not what to believe or to reject; my thoughts were
wandering, and my repeated efforts had no influence in recalling them
to order. Methinks I then felt as I should have felt if the charge had
been true. I shuddered as if to look back would only furnish me with
proofs of a guilt of which I had not hitherto been conscious,—proofs
that had merely escaped remembrance, or had failed to produce their
due effect, from some infatuation of mind.45
Jane’s empirical observation of the letter falls short as a method of

analysis: she can see only what is on the page, and what she sees mis-
leads her. This incongruity—accurate perception that nevertheless
does not yield accurate identification—impairs her ability to think
rationally. She experiences a brief vertigo of character; she is dissoci-
ated from what she thinks she knows is her own identity. She inhabits,
for a moment, the position of someone whose sense of self becomes
unmoored from the ways identity is usually anchored—memory or
characteristic responses to particular actions or impressions.
If we cannot represent ourselves to ourselves accurately, and we
cannot recognize our identity when it is reproduced for us by others,
how can we be sure of the claims we make to and on others? Philip
and Colden retreat from the world of economic exchange into what
seem to be purely private, domestic relations. But the affectionate
realm to which they retreat, like the interpretively flexible conception
of equity Brown was testing, sits squarely in the realm of the legal.
The words that end the novel, in Jane’s final letter to Colden, attest
to this brief distance between affect and law, but they also seek to col-
lapse that distance, and this is Brown’s tour-de-force moment: instead
of moving relationships into a realm not structured by contract, he
simply shut down the institutional force of contract’s requirements: “I
can write no more; but must not conclude till I have offered thee the
tenderest, most fervent vows of a heart that ever was and always will
be thine own. Witness, Jane Talbot.”46
This is a deceptively simple end to the novel. On the one hand,
all questions of possession are put to rest: her heart has always been
his and will continue so in perpetuity. On the other hand, such assur-
ances are given as vows—a word that denotes a civil relationship that
is not necessarily binding, unless supported by evidence, such as a

witness. Jane’s vows have been subject to revocation before, and thus
this word might suggest that the novel cannot end, that there is no
final determination beside which to stand and on which to base a last-
ing promise or contract.47 The pull of generic convention, however,
directs readers to imagine the completed marriage ceremony and a
happily-ever-after ending, even though such a conclusion underscores
not the particular decision—to wed or not to wed—but rather the
process by which such a decision can be secured, somewhere between
a promise and a contract.
What I want to highlight here is the strange formality of Jane’s
closing word. This formality does not simply make Jane’s love letter
read like a legally binding document, nor does it invoke the witness
whose attestation would authorize her vows. Jane acts as her own wit-
ness: she imagines the way around the lack of security provided by a
promise is to internalize the function of the third party who would
attest to her free intention in assenting to this agreement.
It’s at this juncture that we might return to the early work on con-
tract with which this chapter began, because it was precisely Brown’s
claim that there is no such thing as a free intention. For Brown, the
notion of equality before the law was tantamount to the idea of abso-
lute identity before the law. Contract both highlights and enacts this
problem: if contracts are always compelled, then they always make
incommensurate elements equivalent to each other, because the law
fails to recognize fully the inherent inequality between the two par-
ties. Brown radicalized contractual inequality by stressing the fact
of force and making that force expansive enough to encompass not
only physical but also rhetorical or persuasive compulsion. He thus
highlighted the difficulty of consideration as an element of contract.
Equity operates in situations where money can’t compensate; Brown’s
point was that virtually all social relations are noncompensatory in this
sense. However much contractual logic suggests that a person’s will
or intention be treated as a commodity that can be exchanged, that
logic is, for Brown, ultimately not persuasive. If we cannot depend on
consideration to make a contract balanced, then we must turn away
from consideration and start thinking in terms of equity, start think-
ing in terms of fairness rather than presumed equality. Contemporary
political debates about representation, for Brown, only reinforced
this point. Grounding suffrage in property ownership and then attrib-
uting political opinion to differences in “kinds” and “degrees” of
property means not simply that the propertyless are left out but that
the possibility of their having property in their own opinions—however
repugnant such commodification of conviction may have been to

Brown—is likewise erased.
But discussions of representation also point up the significant
limitations of imagining social relations equitably rather than contrac-
tually. In Clara Howard the only way Brown could imagine relations
operating under equity required that the law’s normative function be
replaced with an enforced identity of moral judgment—analogous to
precisely the problem he identified with contract, which presumes and
enforces identity of bargaining position. If Jane Talbot manages to
do away with this coercive sameness, it does so at the expense of self-
recognition. While Colden and Jane do eventually manage to assert
their sense of themselves against the handwriting that accuses them,
Jane’s final gesture, making herself into the witness of her own vows,
suggests that she still has trouble distinguishing herself from others,
insofar as she conflates herself with others. Jane tries to remove the
possibility of misrepresentation (being mistaken for an adulteress, for
example, or for an advocate of incest) by being the witness who veri-
fies her own assertions. In doing so, she depends on a sense of self
that can accommodate multiple—and mutually exclusive—positions
simultaneously. She has not resolved the incommensurate equivalence
of contract but merely internalized it instead. Brown’s early posi-
tion on contract and his late novels suggest that it is only by thus
internalizing legal functions that people can make, recognize, and
honor intentions and promises—their own and those of others—even
though to do so risks the very identity that moves them to seek rela-
tion in the first place.
Arthur Merv y n’s Obl igati ons

This chapter has focused on some of Brown’s less-studied works, but
the analysis offered here might provide some new angles of approach
to his more canonical writings. We might conceive of Edgar Huntly’s
interest in somnambulism as a way of figuring agency without inten-
tion. We might think of the Clara-Theodore relationship in Wieland
as another deliberate muddying of the boundary between apparently
incommensurable horizontal family relations—siblings and spouses—
and of Carwin’s biloquism and Theodore’s aural hallucinations as
efforts to describe a will exterior to the self, rather than a self that
internalizes another’s will. With respect to Ormond, we might think
of Constantia’s affection for and admiration of both Martinette and
Sophia as one way of conceiving a romantic attachment free from com-
peting property interests, or in which “one flesh” is not constituted
by ecclesiastical fiat asserting absolute identity but rather describes

merely a similarity of flesh—as female—that nevertheless permits the
coexistence of two distinct wills.
Arthur Mervyn foregrounds most of the hallmarks of Brown’s fic-
tion and at least three that warrant renewed scrutiny in the terms
established in this chapter: uncertainty about identity grounded in
appearance; motives and obligations; and the legitimacy of claims
both financial and emotional. The novel repeatedly figures a favor-
ite trope of Brown’s: the difficulty of distinguishing originals from
copies. Thus Welbeck counterfeits both his identity and the money
that secures it. Mervyn looks exactly like Clavering, to whom he is
unrelated—so much so that when he sees a miniature of Clavering,
he initially “imagine[s him]self to have been the original from which
it had been drawn.”48 When dressed up, Mervyn can “scarce recog-
nize any lineaments of [his] own.”49 This is much the same confusion
of identity experienced by Jane and Colden in their reactions to the
letters that appear to incriminate them. Questions about the extent
to which appearances dictate identity—and, in turn, obligation—run
throughout the novel.
Arthur Mervyn’s concern with claims and obligations begins in its
preface, which maintains that the yellow fever has offered unparalleled
opportunities for “the moral observer” to examine “the influence
of human passions and motives,” and goes on to explain that these
motives are aroused through vivid images: “Men only require to
be made acquainted with distress for their compassion and their char-
ity to be awakened. He that depicts, in lively colours, the evils of
disease and poverty, performs an eminent service to the sufferers, by
calling forth benevolence in those who are able to afford relief; and he
who portrays examples of disinterestedness and intrepidity confers on
virtue the notoriety and homage that are due to it, and rouses in the
spectators the spirit of salutary emulation.”50 As in Clara Howard and
Jane Talbot, motives, benevolence, and disinterest are bound up with
duty and obligation but in ways that complicate the idea of “moral”
obligation. Thus, for example, Dr. Stevens describes his initial view of
Mervyn as one that commands a “powerful and sudden . . . claim to
[his] affection and succor,” but it’s hard to see how Mervyn’s “manlike
beauty” establishes sufficient grounds for such a sense of obligation.
Mervyn’s sense of duty—though often called into question by other
characters—is similarly whimsical, grounded in appearance, and stead-
fast. He insists, for example, that he must return in person the money
stolen by Welbeck to its rightful owners. Stevens questions his desire
to travel to Baltimore when he could just as easily mail the money to

the two families, but Mervyn answers, a bit glibly, “Why not?”51
The answer seems obvious: he has little money and must bor-
row from Stevens even to make the trip. And yet make the trip he
does, and he returns the money to both Watson’s widow and the
unpleasant Maurice family, about whose daughters Mervyn confesses
“disappointment” that “there was nothing highly prepossessing in the
countenance of either.”52 This disappointment suggests that Mervyn
had hoped to find the young women attractive in some way—whether
as members of the deserving poor and thus appropriate recipients
of his magnanimity or as potential wives. If the latter, then such an
imagined marriage would mirror Clara Howard and Philip Stanley’s
economic relationship, insofar as Mervyn would thereby be effectively
giving money to himself.
Only after he has returned the bills—and after he has heard that
there is one Maurice daughter who is quite admirable (and presum-
ably correspondingly attractive)—do we learn that a reward has been
offered for the return of the money. To a critic invested in demon-
strating Mervyn’s duplicity (as many critics have been), this would
seem to be a moment of willed omission on the part of Mervyn as a
narrator: of course Mervyn refuses to give a reason for going to Balti-
more in person, because his reason is the reward.53 We might note also
that the reward enables Mervyn to get some of the money back, with-
out necessitating marriage to one of the unprepossessing sisters.54 But
even if we accept that Mervyn is sincere when he says that the reward
had “escaped [his] attention,” the discussion of it that he has with
Williams (Watson’s brother-in-law) remains surprising in its account
of the ethics of claims.55
Williams asks whether Mervyn has any “scruple” about taking the
reward money, a question Mervyn dismisses incredulously by saying
that such a refusal would be a “strange . . . punctilio.”56 Williams
suggests that some might see it as being “bribed to do [one’s] duty,”
but Mervyn rejects this idea out of hand, pointing out that, since he
returned the money without knowing about the reward, he certainly
cannot be said to have been bribed. The implication, then, is that
Mervyn becomes entitled to the legal reward only by having acted
without knowing about it; desert depends on either ignorance or lack
of desire. The lawyer for the Maurice family explains that the contract
dictating the terms of the reward is “explicit” in its demand that the
reward be paid by the person to whom the missing money was given.
There is, in the stipulations of this contract, a “strange . . . punctilio”
indeed, in its insistence that only the hands of the recipient may dole
out the reward money: no representative is authorized to intervene.

And yet, when Mervyn begins to leave the lawyer’s offices, Hemmings
(the lawyer) explains that “to be sure, in the utmost strictness of the
terms of our promise, the reward was to be paid by the person who
received the papers; but it must be owned that your claim, at any rate,
is equitable”—and he pays Mervyn out of money entrusted to him by
the deceased Mr. Maurice.
On the terms laid out by this chapter’s reading of Clara Howard
and Jane Talbot, the entire exchange looks like one in which Mervyn’s
claim to the reward is secured by his ignorance of it, while the Mau-
rices’ claim to the letter of the law is reduced by their poor manners
(and their lack of prepossession), and in which the lawyer offers an
equitable arrangement in lieu of the “explicit” contract dictating the
disbursement of the award and perhaps that implied potential contrac-
tual relationship suggested by Mervyn’s interest in the appearance of
the Maurice daughters.
Chapter 4
4
Sisters in Ar ms
I nce st, Mis cegenatio n, and Sacr i f i ce i n
C ath ar i ne M ar ia Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie
I n Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827), Catharine

Maria Sedgwick prefaces the chapters of her novel with epigraphs,
each of which comments, more or less obliquely, on the action or
theme that follows. Sedgwick draws on As You Like It, for example,
as she reveals that her own cross-dressing Roslin is in fact a Rosalind,
who braves peril for love; she quotes Roger Williams on the parity of
Europeans’ and Native Americans’ intelligence as her characters dis-
cuss the relative capabilities of different racial groups; and she excerpts
passages from Comus to introduce chapters treating brother-sister
relationships. An evocative set of lines from William Cullen Bryant’s
“Monument Mountain” introduces the seventh chapter of the first
volume, ending with the words “There is a tale about these gray old
rocks, / A sad tradition.” The “sad tradition” is not divulged, but
anyone familiar with Bryant’s poem (as many of Sedgwick’s readers
would have been) knows that it is one “of unhappy love”: an Indian
maiden throws herself off “the old precipice” because the “morality of
[her] stern trib[e]” deems her love for her cousin “incestuous.”1 If we
are thus prepared by the epigraph to expect that chapter 7 will be full
of monumental splendor and unhappy love, we are perhaps less pre-
pared to see “the old precipice” transformed into the “sacrifice rock—
their [the Indians’] holy of holies.” At that site, Mononotto raises
his hatchet to kill Everell Fletcher, son of the man who has enslaved
his children, but when the chief’s daughter, Magawisca, interposes
to save the hapless young white man, the descending blade cannot
be stopped, and it severs her arm. We are even less prepared to have
the plummeting Indian maiden, who died for a love she could not
consummate, replaced by Magawisca’s “lopped quivering member[,]
dropped over the precipice” for a love “stronger than death.” At that
moment, Everell throws “his arms around her, and press[es] her to his
heart, as he would a sister that had redeemed his life with her own.”2
In her preface to Hope Leslie, Sedgwick announced that, while she
brought certain historical figures into her story, her intent was “to
illustrate not the history, but the character of the times.”3 Attempting
to specify the ethos of Pequod War–era Massachusetts that Sedgwick
wanted to convey, critics have focused their attention on narrative.
Despite their differences in emphasis and approach and their occasion-
ally contradictory conclusions, scholars who have pursued this line of
inquiry share the assumption that Sedgwick deploys, combines, and
juxtaposes specific narrative forms (domestic novels, Puritan histori-
cal accounts, romance plots, captivity or frontier narratives, etc.) to
achieve some sort of goal: a way out of social conventions, a broader
view of national belonging, a space for women’s public activities, or a
particular account of history (progressive, dialogic, relativistic, poly-
vocal, etc.).4 Sedgwick’s interest in capturing the spirit of a particular
time and place is not, however, related simply to narrative or to his-
tory; she also explores character as both temperament and fictional
figure and binds her tale’s characters together in a variety of inter-
secting and overlapping networks, to re-create the atmosphere of a
war-weary, seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those
relational networks play out, moreover, in sexual, racial, national, and
familial terms, and the connections among them have not been fully
explored in criticism of the novel.
Only in recent years have scholars begun investigating the more
localized and specific contexts (families, tribes, towns, regions) within
which Sedgwick positioned her characters, thereby questioning earlier
critics’ too-easy acceptance of her accounts of Native American history
as well as their assumptions about her views concerning political par-
ticipation and relations between the sexes.5 What seems to have gone
unremarked in all these discussions, though, is the extent of Sedg-
wick’s interest in incest. That interest links Hope Leslie with many of
the most influential novels of the early republic (William Hill Brown’s
The Power of Sympathy [1789] and Ira and Isabella [1807], Susanna
Rowson’s Charlotte’s Daughter [1828], and Sally Wood’s Julia and
the Illuminated Baron [1800] are but a few examples) and with a
good deal of the writing about race (nonfiction as well as fiction)
in the second half of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
Sisters in Arms 101
centuries. Tracing some of the early influences on this literature helps

set the cultural frame within which Sedgwick placed her novel, and
her personal encounters with and writing about family, race, and,
more remotely, incest suggest that even as she was projecting her own
experience onto the historical moment she was hoping to illuminate,
that experience underscores her era’s ambivalent positions on how
selves are constituted.
Ea r ly Ac c o unts o f I nces t
The biblical prohibition against incest is most explicit, although also
curiously tautological, in the book of Leviticus. “The nakedness of thy
father, or the nakedness of thy mother, shalt thou not uncover,” Levit-
icus instructs; “she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her naked-
ness . . . The nakedness of thy father’s wife’s daughter, begotten of thy
father, she is thy sister, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness” (Lev.
18:7, 11). The interdiction is visual and potentially tactile (uncov-
ering someone else’s nakedness) but not precisely sexual, except by
implication.6 Through various permutations of relation (“thy father’s
sister” is “thy father’s near kinswoman”; “thy daughter in law” is “thy
son’s wife”), the prohibition is repeated, but no rationale is offered
beyond the declaration, “I am the LORD” (Lev. 18:6). Finally, after
the degrees of proscription have been exhausted, the speaker warns
that any violation of them will be seen as an “abomination” and, more
interesting, a “confusion.”7 Leviticus is renowned for its prohibitions
against homosexuality and bestiality, but it also bars mixing cotton
and wool or different kinds of seeds. And so the injunction against
incest seems less concerned with familial sexual contact than with the
more general “confusion” of established categories. This is an account
of the incest taboo without desire—without, really, any sexuality at all.
Eighteenth-century accounts of incest, by contrast, seem positively
prurient. Sidestepping the matter of categorical infringement, this
period’s legal and moral theorists of the family worried that within its
confines, sexual desire could easily fester and threaten to erupt.8 Thus
when Adam Smith issued his Lectures on Jurisprudence in 1763, he
seemed convinced that without sufficient moral restraint, sexual desire
would direct itself toward those most near—our family members. Sib-
lings in particular were at risk: “Marriage of brothers and sisters is
in most countries prohibited. The constant intercourse betwixt them
who generally are bred up together, and the many opportunities as
well as the great incitements this connection would give them, made
it absolutely necessary to put an insuperable barr [sic] to their union.
There could be no other means to prevent their corruption in such a

near and close connection.”9
The inevitability of sexual contact is predicated, simply, on physical
proximity. Closeness allows for “great incitement” to sexual attrac-
tion, even—especially—with family members. For those acquainted
with his work, Smith’s statement is consistent with his larger views.
Four years earlier, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he had
propounded a premise about sympathy in which he suggested that
we love that with which we are most familiar. By extension, then, we
would love those with whom we live—members of our families—and,
even further, we would desire those with whom we live—members of
our families. If it seems surprising that Smith would shift so rapidly
from a largely chaste explanation of why we feel most keenly for those
whose situations we recognize to the presumption that, to paraphrase
the axiom, familiarity breeds attempt, we should note that he is hardly
alone in making this leap. The slippage between identifying those to
whom we are emotionally close and those with whom we are physi-
cally close with those to whom we are sexually attracted is repeated at
length in other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of incest.
Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Legislation (1802) patiently explains,
“If there were not an insurmountable barrier between near relatives
called to live together in the greatest intimacy, this contact, continual
opportunities, friendship itself and its innocent caresses, might kin-
dle fatal passions.”10 Smith and Bentham’s insistence on the absolute
need for an “insurmountable barrier,” an “insuperable barr,” under-
scores the presumption that, absent such a prohibition, sexual contact
between family members is inevitable.
Which raises an obvious question: if theorists believed that sexual
desire for one’s family was so instinctive, so powerful, so natural, what
exactly did they imagine was wrong with it? What makes those pas-
sions “fatal”? Or, to invert the question, how did theorists account for
the apparently instinctive shudder induced by the thought of incest?
Logically, Smith and Bentham would seem constrained to conclude
that the incest taboo is a construction of law, not of nature. Bentham
wrestled with the riddle:
“Nature,” it is said, “is repugnant to such alliances; therefore they are

forbidden.”
This argument alone can never furnish a satisfactory reason for
prohibiting any action whatever. If the repugnance be real, the law
is useless. Why forbid what nobody wishes to do? If in fact there be
no repugnance, the reason is at an end; vulgar morality would have
Sisters in Arms 103
nothing more to say in favor of prohibiting the acts in question, since

its whole argument is founded upon natural disgust, is overturned by
the contrary supposition.11
Bentham finds his position causally impoverished: neither natural

antipathy nor natural attraction explains the incest taboo. So why is
incest prohibited? He concludes, rather lamely, that family members
in fact are not, after all, at risk of being attracted to each other, thereby
directly contradicting his earlier assertion about the self-evident need
for an “insurmountable barrier.” In order to feel sexual attraction,
he explains, potential lovers must experience “a certain degree of
surprise, a sudden effect of novelty,” and that fresh perspective is
one never afforded to family members, particularly children raised
together: “Individuals accustomed to see each other and know each
other, from an age which is neither capable of conceiving the desire,
nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end of
life; and this inclination finds no determinate epoch whence to begin.
Their affections have taken another course, like a river which has dug
its bed, and which does not change it. Nature then agrees sufficiently
well with the principle of utility.”12
Nature doesn’t simply agree with utility, though; it enforces it and
materializes it: nature is utility’s metonym. Desire can be channeled,
can be made to carve out a path, and thus directed, it will remain
fixed. Having reached this comforting conclusion, Bentham must
nevertheless once again account for the existence of a taboo that pro-
hibits what does not take place. And so he backpedals, now doubting
nature’s efficacy, conceding that there may be some “circumstances
in which the inclination may spring up, and in which an alliance will
become an object of desire, if it is not prohibited by the laws, and
branded by public opinion.”13 He leaves the precise nature of such
circumstances unspecified. Why law and opinion must collaborate to
indict the behavior remains equally unclear. Bentham’s tortuous wran-
gling results in a confident assertion that incest must be prevented
accompanied by a looming uncertainty about whether and how incest
could even occur, let alone why it should be prohibited. In fairness
to Bentham, a similar indecision dominates most accounts of the
origin of the incest taboo, even those produced right up through
the last century.
Many discussions of incest in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies focused less on sexual relationships between biological kin than
on those between legally and theologically bound relatives, frequently
centering on whether a man could marry his deceased wife’s sister.14
The question was occasioned by the historical difficulties of inter-

preting the apparent inconsistencies of biblical incest prohibitions.15
Moreover, while the Bible offered instances of patriarchs marrying
their sisters-in-law (not to mention biological kin), suggesting that
doing likewise might be acceptable, it also introduced the Pauline
marriage, whereby husband and wife became one flesh. Taken liter-
ally, the sisters and brothers of one’s spouse thereby became not one’s
in-laws but one’s biological siblings, who would thenceforward be off
limits as marital partners.
The fierce debate that surrounded the question of whether spiri-
tual siblings should be treated, like biological siblings, as maritally
proscribed indicates the imprecision of incest’s definition. In an era
before early anthropologists and naturalists such as Samuel George
Morton, Edward Burnett Tylor, and Charles Darwin detailed the
biological dimensions of kinship, kin relations were understood in
spiritual, legal, and affinal, in addition to consanguineous, terms.
Viewing incest within these broader vocabularies returns us to Sedg-
wick’s authorial moment and to Hope Leslie, where the incestuous
relations are legal and spiritual rather than biological. But of course
blood ties also factored into early nineteenth-century understandings
of incest, and it is this connection to blood that binds incest to race.
The intersection of the intrafamilial with the interracial has a long and
complicated history. The Levitical purity laws, including the proscrip-
tion against incest, were designed to mark and maintain a distinction
between ethnic groups (the Hebrews and the Canaanites). More than
two thousand years later, Claude Lévi-Strauss observed, with some
degree of surprise, that “incest proper . . . even combines in some coun-
tries with its direct opposite, inter-racial sexual relations, an extreme
form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducements to honor and
collective vengeance.”16 He articulates here one common view of the
relationship between incest and miscegenation: because one is endoga-
mous, the other exogamous, they are diametrically opposed.
Although such an understanding of endogamy and exogamy is
accurate in a strictly theoretical sense, incest and miscegenation can,
of course, be committed in one act, as a particularly powerful legacy of
American slavery has made all too obvious. Both incest and miscege-
nation are sexual crossings of categorical boundaries, and both index
anxieties about blood purity. In the oft-quoted words of one mid-
nineteenth-century white supremacist, “The same law which forbids
consanguineous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both
are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest.”17
Sisters in Arms 105
Intermarriage between Native and Anglo Americans has been,

until recently, less fully explored than that between Anglo and African
Americans, largely because slavery has foregrounded black-and-white
relationships in the American racial imaginary but also, in part,
because Europeans racially categorized Native Americans even more
inconsistently over the course of the colonial and early national peri-
ods than they did whites and blacks.18 In 1643, for example, Roger
Williams opined that the Narragansett “are tawnie, by the Sunne and
their anoyntings, yet they are born white . . . Nature knowes no dif-
ference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies &c.,”
he insisted, “God having of one blood made all mankind, Acts 17. and
all by nature being children of wrath, Ephes. 2.”19 Williams—whose A
Key into the Language of America was widely read and from whose
writings Sedgwick extracted epigraphs to preface four of Hope Les-
lie’s chapters—refused to draw any racial distinctions between Native
Americans and Europeans.
But Williams’s views on Indians, as on so many issues, were out of
line with the majority. Early American laws regulating race grouped
Native Americans with African Americans when protecting Anglo
American purity; among the earliest, a 1691 Virginia act identifies
“negroes, mulattoes, and Indians” as a single category of men that
“English, or other white[,] women” should shun.20 Giving some
sense of the historical periodization of how views variously altered and
looped back around, Nancy Cott notes that while in 1820 Jedidiah
Morse proposed that white men marry Native American women as
a way to civilize the tribes—a proposal that equates civilization with
whiteness and then suggests that Indians can achieve both—“official
views on the desirability of Indian-white marriage gave way to greater
racial differentiation and distaste later in the nineteenth century.”21
My brief adumbration of the shifting status of native people in the
American racial taxonomy suggests the ways in which images of Indi-
ans could be mobilized for multiple—even conflicting—ideological
purposes, starkly rendered in Lucy Maddox’s apt expression “civiliza-
tion or extinction.”22 In particular, the “disappearing Indian” motif so
popular in literary works of the early republic—like Philip Freneau’s
“Indian Burying Ground,” Jefferson’s iteration of Logan’s Speech,
and Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales—has been widely understood as a
glorification of supposed Indian qualities to which the newly founded
United States could lay claim; Indians themselves were mourned as
having supposedly disappeared even as actual native people stubbornly
refused to recede into the misty forests of memory and were, eventu-
ally, forcibly removed. Native Americans’ imagined “disappearance”
(in contrast to their actual removal) allowed authentic American-

ness to be romanticized as simultaneously white and native even as
contemporaneous racial hierarchies based on skin color and ethnic
origin were preserved. Similarly using the figure of the Indian for such
apparently contradictory purposes, Catharine Sedgwick’s representa-
tion of interracial pairings in Hope Leslie serves to celebrate and erase
“Indianness” in the same gesture.
I have discussed incest at length (and Anglo-Native miscegenation
more briefly) in order to stress how different early understandings of
these phenomena are from the more recent accounts with which we
are familiar. Early nineteenth-century explorations contain no psycho-
analytic assertions of repressed incestuous desires (though Bentham’s
waffling certainly anticipates this line of thought). Nor do they hint
at the finding, propounded by anthropologists and cultural linguists,
that the incest taboo and the development of language are somehow
primally connected. Nor, until the last century, was the application
of the various claims about incest to literary analysis even possible.
I do not mean to imply that the insights of such later developments
cannot or should not be brought to bear on a text published in 1827,
but I do want to guard against anachronism by carefully marking the
boundaries of conceptualization within which an author in the first
half of the nineteenth century would likely have been confined. I trace
the complexity of such a conceptualization, particularly as mediated
by race and character, in the next section, which reviews Sedgwick’s
writing about a woman she thought of as a member of her family,
despite the absence of blood or marriage ties; about racial character;
and about families riven by incest.
Rac e and Char ac ter

Elizabeth Freeman, a slave woman, sought and won her freedom in
1781, helping to pave the way for the Supreme Judicial Court to abol-
ish slavery in the state of Massachusetts (1783). Becoming a longtime
servant to the Sedgwick family after she was freed, Freeman was more
than a historical figure for Catharine Sedgwick: she was, in all likeli-
hood, the woman most responsible for raising her. In an essay titled
“Slavery in New England” (1853), the mature author imagines her
father, Theodore Sedgwick, pausing over the life-altering question
Freeman posed to him. As Catharine puts it, Freeman asked, “I heard
that paper read yesterday, that says, ‘all men are born equal[’] and that
every man has a right to freedom. I am not a dumb critter; won’t the
law give me my freedom?”23 Theodore Sedgwick, a practicing lawyer,
Sisters in Arms 107
agreed with Freeman that the provision of the 1780 Massachusetts

constitution mandating equal rights was universal. He took her case
to court. Although the argument he presented to the court was lim-
ited to Freeman and another slave on the same estate, its constitu-
tional grounding offered a precedent for further freedom suits.24
Considered far more than a servant in the Sedgwicks’ household,
Freeman became, in Catharine Sedgwick’s words, “Mumbet—
‘Mother’—my nurse—my faithful friend—she who first received me
into her arms.”25 Her influence on the young Catharine—whose
father’s political career kept him from home in, variously, Boston,
Philadelphia, and Washington and whose mother’s growing insanity
kept her at a psychological distance—lasted far longer than Freeman’s
26 years of employment.
In a posthumously published autobiography, written in 1853,
Sedgwick reflected upon Elizabeth Freeman’s character and its effect
upon her, taking the opportunity to outline her sense of character for-
mation: “Mumbet . . . though absolutely perfect in service, was never
servile. Her judgment and will were never subordinated by mere
authority . . . The people who surround us in our childhood, whose
atmosphere infolds us, as it were, have more to do with the forma-
tion of our characters than all our didactic and preceptive education.
Mumbet had a clear and nice perception of justice, and a stern love
of it, an uncompromising honesty in word and deed, and conduct of
high intelligence, that made her the unconscious moral teacher of the
children she so tenderly nursed.” Sedgwick went on to explain that
in these respects, “she was a remarkable exception to the general
character of her race. Injustice and oppression have confounded their
moral sense, cheated as they have been of their liberty, defrauded at
wholesale of their time and strength, what wonder that they allow
themselves petty reprisals—a sort of predatory warfare in the house-
holds of their masters and employers—for, though they now among
us be free, they retain the vices of a degraded and subject people.”26
The passages are striking for the way in which they conceptualize
character: character is a set of singular qualities expressed or inhabited
by a person; it is also those shared qualities that constitute and define a
group. More important, character is described as molded and formed
by outside forces, so even when a group is classified as a “race,”
inclusion in that group is a consequence of circumstances—here, deg-
radation and subjection—that produce a particular “racial” character.
However, as Mumbet exemplifies, that “racial” identity is not strictly
binding; individual character can trump the larger character of one’s
race. This notion of differentiation within a more general similarity
exhibits a certain commonsense obviousness: the fundamental prin-

ciple of categorization is that it groups by shared characteristics things
that might otherwise be dissimilar. It also possesses a certain logical
impossibility, though: if injustice and oppression define the charac-
ter of Mumbet’s race, and Mumbet suffered injustice and oppression,
how could her character deviate from that of her race? Sedgwick never
resolves this question. Her language, however, is instructive.
In her autobiography, Sedgwick privileges the effects of proximity
over those of effort. Freeman is “the unconscious moral teacher”—
and it is precisely that unconsciousness, far in excess of any “didac-
tic and preceptive” lessons, that allows her characteristics (justice,
honesty, intelligence) to form the characters of those in her charge.
Ultimately privileging proximity not just over effort but over
consanguinity as well,27 Sedgwick writes about Freeman more fre-
quently than her own mother, calling the servant “Mumbet,” an
affectionate nickname, linked to the racially marked “Mammy,” which
indicates no blood relation, as well as “Mother,” which embodies a
biological relation.
There is in Sedgwick’s writing on race and character much of the
usual early nineteenth-century inconsistency about race and other
modes of categorization. At once innate and learned, grounded in
skin color but then again in individual personal qualities, racial classifi-
cation eludes the more clear-cut, “biology”-based versions of racialism
prevalent in the postbellum nineteenth century. In one sense, charac-
ter seems more central than race in Sedgwick’s fictional and actual
worlds. But in another, as “Slavery in New England” demonstrates,
both race and character serve as categorical counterweights to incest.
Featuring a sketch of “Mum-Bett’s character[, which] was com-
posed of few but strong elements,” the piece directs the reader’s
attention to some of the “characteristic stor[ies] of the days of her
servitude.”28 The first story recounts how Mrs. A. (Hannah Ashley),
Freeman’s mistress, raises a poker just pulled from the fire to strike
Elizabeth’s younger sister. Freeman interposes, and the poker strikes
her arm rather than her sister’s head. Throughout her days, Free-
man wears the scar as a sign of her defiance; whenever anyone asks
her how her arm came to be thus disfigured, she replies, “Ask mis-
sis.”29 Readers of Hope Leslie will recognize a parallel between the
biographical account of Freeman’s rebellion and the dramatic scene
in which Pequod princess Magawisca loses her arm to save her friend
Everell from being beheaded by her father. In life, Freeman is injured
in defense of her sister, both of whom are African American, against
the tyranny of her white mistress; in Sedgwick’s fiction, the Native
Sisters in Arms 109
American Magawisca becomes figured as white Everell’s sister by vir-

tue of defending him from her father’s vengeance—a transformation
in familial relation and race to which I will return in the penultimate
section of this chapter.
In the second story in “Slavery in New England,” a girl in trouble—
“girls in trouble,” Sedgwick parenthetically informs her readers, “is a
definite rustic phrase, indicating but one species of trouble”—arrives
at the Ashleys’ Sheffield, Massachusetts, home. The “characteris-
tic” element of the story lies in Freeman’s insistence that the young
woman be allowed into the house. She argues against her mistress,
who Sedgwick figures as the very “type of punishment,” that it is
“lawful, and stands to reason beside” that the girl have access to make
a complaint to Colonel Ashley.30 Thus Freeman rejects not only her
mistress’s authority but her typicality, her categorical standing-in for
punishment, against which she poses the elements of law and rea-
son, without which punishment is capricious rather than just. In other
words, Freeman responds to her mistress’s categorical positioning
(punishment) with other abstract categories (law, reason), a rejoinder
motivated by her character, which is immune to the “merely” categor-
ical, a character that rejects the predetermined relationship between
master and slave as well as that between “the general character of her
race” and her own “judgment and will.”
Regarding the specifics of the girl’s plight, the narrator solemnly
intones, “We cannot, and it is not needful for our purpose that we
should, go into the particulars of the wretched girl’s story.” Still, the
narrator does not forbear offering a gloss on its underlying circum-
stances, a gloss that is gripping indeed: “It was stamped in horrors; in
homely rustic life, a repetition of the crime of the Cenci tragedy.”31
As readers of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s play will recall, the Cenci tragedy
ends not with a tearful pregnant girl telling an upstanding citizen and
representative of justice about the abuse she has sustained but rather
with Beatrice’s murder of her rapist father and her subsequent execu-
tion at the hands of a corrupt ecclesiastical court.
Who exactly this “girl in trouble” might have been is difficult to
trace, though one candidate does emerge from Sedgwick’s expe-
rience (if not Freeman’s). The story of the Beatrice figure roughly
parallels that of 13-year-old Betsy Wheeler, whose father Ephraim is
distinguished for being “the only known example of the conviction
and execution of a father for the rape of his daughter in early Amer-
ica.”32 Sedgwick’s relationship to the case is fairly direct: when her
father returned from Washington after the Federalists were ousted
from power in the 1800 election, he was awarded a magistracy in his
hometown of Stockbridge; he was one of the three judges who heard

the Wheeler case. There is one small chronological problem, how-
ever: the Wheeler case was tried in 1805, more than twenty years after
Freeman left the Ashley estate and entered the Sedgwick household.
That two daughters might have been raped by their fathers in Berk-
shire County during a quarter century is by all means possible, but the
lack of any documentary record suggests that Sedgwick’s vignette is a
historically displaced retelling of the Wheeler case.33
In their microhistory The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, historians
Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard Brown report that “when she
grew up to become an author,” Catharine Sedgwick wrote a short
story about the Wheeler case but altered the facts somewhat: “She
told her readers it was the story of a father’s murder of his daughter.
For her often youthful audience the less salacious, but more horrific,
crime of filicide was more acceptable than that of incest-rape . . .
[T]he fictional villain Daniel Prime . . . was driven by greed, a central
concern of Sedgwick’s middle-class readers. To enhance her readers’
ability to identify with the characters, and in keeping with their tastes,
the author elevated the social status of her protagonists, who were
not the poorest laborers, but members of Berkshire’s yeoman class.”34
The Browns are right to single out “Daniel Prime” as one retelling
of the Wheelers’ story, one whose moral is apparently spelled out in its
epigraph: “Beware of covetousness.”35 Replacing a father who rapes
his daughter with one who murders her for her money seems to be
scant concession to the tender sensibilities of the author’s audience,
however. And rewriting a story in which the victim survives and the
perpetrator is executed with one in which the daughter dies and her
murderous father does not also seems cold comfort.
“Daniel Prime” centers on two families: the Primes and the Dor-
sets. John Dorset’s daughter, aptly named Submit, marries Daniel,
son of the Dorsets’ neighbor Rube Prime. Considering them to be
“careless” and “rack-rent,” Dorset loathes all the Primes, though he
initially respects Daniel’s un-Prime-like thriftiness. This grudging
acceptance collapses, however, and when Submit and Daniel marry,
Dorset disowns his daughter. He is saddened but resigned; the nar-
rator notes that he felt especially melancholy “when he was alone,
walking over those fine fruitful fields, whose transmission to his pos-
terity he had so often contemplated as a sort of self-perpetuation.”
Meanwhile, Daniel’s desire for Dorset’s thriving farm grows, and
when Daniel and Submit have a daughter, Sibyl, they use her to try
to win back Dorset’s affections. The strategy works, to some extent.
Dorset says he will raise Sybil if her parents will “sign a quitclaim to
Sisters in Arms 111
her,” promising to have nothing to do with her. He assures them that

he will rear her so that “she’ll not quit [him] for any rascal on earth.”36
Sibyl, rather than the potentially inheritable farm, thus becomes the
piece of property exchanged. Dorset’s land is not “transmitted to his
posterity”; instead, his posterity is transmitted to him, and she will
not, Dorset insists, repay his love by marrying and having that hus-
band inherit his property.
Sibyl does eventually decide to marry, but she chooses a man of
whom Dorset approves. Dorset dies and leaves everything to his
granddaughter, but the wedding has yet to take place. Daniel under-
stands that “‘if Sibyl died a minor, and without issue of her body, [he
would be] her heir.’”37 The story moves quickly and inevitably to its
conclusion. Daniel assaults and murders his daughter. His son wit-
nesses the murder and reports his father to Colonel Ashley. Daniel is
sentenced to death, but Ashley’s sympathy for the son’s grief moves
him, and he appeals that the sentence be commuted to banishment,
which it is.
Daniel Prime’s problem is the intractability of one predominant
character trait, his avarice, the defining power of which only intensifies
over time. As the narrator explains, “There was no change in Daniel
Prime but a gradual deepening of the lines of his character; or, rather,
the one line, the channel to which everything tended, wore deeper and
deeper.”38 This sense of character as something that is carved recurs in
Hope Leslie, as we shall see shortly. It is also familiar from Bentham’s
image of the “river which has dug its bed.” I want to suggest that this
similarity is not entirely coincidental: both images bespeak a sense of
character as potentially externally imposed (it is worn into a single bed
or channel) but also as fixed and unchanging. According to this anal-
ogy, desires—whether for persons or property—cannot be redirected
without great effort. This unchanging model of character seems to be
at work in the allegorical names of the characters in “Daniel Prime.”
Submit, Rube, and Sibyl seem defined by their names and subject to
the same “sordid election” that fates Submit to be Daniel’s wife.39 So,
too, does it seem to be at work in the name given to the girl in Sedg-
wick’s retelling in “Slavery in New England.”
In “Slavery in New England,” published a decade and a half after
“Daniel Prime,” the girl who seeks entry to the Ashleys’ home is
referred to as Tamor, a name that apparently alludes to one of three
biblical Tamars. In 2 Samuel 13, Tamar (King David’s daughter) is
raped by her half-brother Amnon, and in 2 Samuel 14:27, David’s son
Absalom, full brother of Tamar, avenges her by having Amnon mur-
dered and, later, names his own daughter Tamar. In Genesis 38, Tamar
is the wife of Judah’s son, Er, whom God slays; she is next married to
Er’s brother Onan, whom God slays; and thereafter Judah tells her
to wait to be married to his youngest son, Shelah, lest God slay him,
too, before he comes of age. When Tamar realizes that Shelah is of
age but Judah has still not married her to him, she disguises herself as
a whore, sleeps with Judah, and becomes pregnant with twins. Judah
seeks to shame her when he learns of her pregnancy; when he discov-
ers that he himself is the father, he declares that “she hath been more
righteous than I; because that I gave her not to Shelah my son” (Gen.
38:26). In this version of the Tamar story, she is shuffled between
brothers and her father-in-law, but the spiritually incestuous act she
commits in seducing her father-in-law is ultimately justified by Judah’s
failure to ensure that she retains a legitimate role within his family
through levirate marriage. The Tamar of Genesis, then, suggests a
less passive female model of incestuous interaction than the norm, as
does the invocation of Beatrice Cenci in Sedgwick’s relation of Tamor
Graham’s tale. The name highlights as well the complex legal, social,
and spiritual dimensions of incest. And in its oblique reference to levi-
rate marriage, it underscores the effect of incestuous ties on property
claims: the notion of “keeping it in the family” becomes sexualized, as
the referent for “it” glides effortlessly between property and sex.
Sedgwick illustrates Freeman’s character by recounting the ways in
which she stands up for younger women against the violence or deni-
als of her mistress. That one of these accounts seems unlikely to have
involved Freeman in the manner or to the extent described suggests
either a conflation of or complementarity between the two stories.40
The relationship between them becomes even more intriguing when
we consider that Ephraim Wheeler’s wife was apparently a free African
American, which would make the first case of capital incest in America
a case of interracial rape as well.41
The biographical sketches of one of the first African American
women to be judicially freed in the state of Massachusetts and the
story of the first early American girl to successfully prosecute her father
for rape are thus intertwined in a way that complicates notions of race
and family. They are so not least because they come to us focused
through the relationship between Catharine Sedgwick and the woman
she called her “Mother.”42 Armed with this understanding, readers
of Hope Leslie will recognize Sedgwick’s hallmark juxtaposition of
race and family.
Returning to Freeman for a moment, we might ask what Sedg-
wick’s biographical accounts tell us about her subject’s character. In
both incidents, Freeman resists her mistress (herself more “type” than
Sisters in Arms 113
character, more category than person), interposing herself—physically,

when necessary—between unjust authority and the innocent upon
whom it would devolve. Hope Leslie captures and conveys these char-
acter traits, fashioning from them an ethic of interposition—that
is, a willingness to sacrifice that can overcome categorical boundaries,
whether those categories be law, race, or incest.
C o u s ins, Parents, and Chi ldren

Hope Leslie opens with the thwarting of a nominally incestuous rela-
tionship. Young William Fletcher, who is named for his uncle rather
than his father, is in love with Alice Fletcher, the uncle’s daughter. Sir
William fully supports their union: “possessing the common ambition
of transmitting his name with his wealth, he selected his nephew as
the future husband of his daughter Alice.”43 Although the dependent
clause is meant to signify Sir William’s interest in perpetuating the
family name, given his own inability to produce a son to carry it on
patrilineally, the phrasing also draws attention to the fact that Sir Wil-
liam has hit upon a happy solution to his problem: having Alice marry
his nephew and namesake will be the next best thing to having had a
son whom he would have called William. Sir William’s strategy might
even suggest, to those of a psychoanalytic bent, that he himself wants
to marry his daughter—at least insofar as that would enable him to
maintain the family name. To carry the notion a bit further, we might
propose that Sir William imagines young William as a nominal stand-
in either for himself or for the son he does not have, thus suggesting
that Alice has at least a semantic choice between marrying her father
or her brother.
The two children are well matched, and, the narrator observes,
“nature and opportunity soon indissolubly linked their hearts
together.”44 The marriage is scuttled, however, because young Wil-
liam defies his royalist uncle and refuses to give up his freedom-loving
Puritanical ways. “Liberty, what is it!” fumes Sir William, “Daughter
of disloyalty and mother of all misrule,” a locution that neatly per-
forms a matrilineal history of mob violence against which to posit his
own desire for an orderly patrilineal perpetuation.45 Sir William forces
Alice (“in the imbecility of utter despair”46) to marry the nominally
unmoored Sir Charles,47 elsewhere called Sir Walter48 Leslie, while
William departs for America as planned with John Winthrop, whose
conveniently orphaned ward Martha he later marries. Although an
originary incestuous relationship is forestalled here, it will come back
with a vengeance in the next generation.
After her father and her husband die, Alice (Fletcher) Leslie set out
for America with her two daughters, Alice and Mary, but she herself
dies during the passage, leaving a letter commending the girls to Wil-
liam Fletcher’s care. Thus Alice’s children become William’s children,
not through a literally or even nominally incestuous marriage but
through the legal mechanism of a will, which transmits in this case not
fortune or property but persons—and notably one person who bears
her mother’s Christian name. That Alice’s name is repeated in her
daughter’s suggests not simply repetition but interchangeability—one
generation standing in for another. As the narrator explains, young
Alice “seemed instinctively to return the love that beamed in the first
glance that Mr. Fletcher cast on her—in that brief eager glance he saw
the living and beautiful image of her mother . . . and he could almost
believe the spirit of the mother was transferred to the bosom of the
child.”49 The “preference inspired by this resemblance” prompts Wil-
liam to send Alice’s sister Mary (along with her aunt and the Indian
attendant Governor Winthrop has assigned to her—Oneco, son of
Pequod chief Mononotto and brother of Magawisca) to his wife in
western Massachusetts while he stays behind in Boston with Alice
and her tutor. Before the two girls are separated, John Cotton bap-
tizes them, and “in commemoration of the christian graces of their
mother,” their names are changed to Hope and Faith.50 If this ensures
that Alice/Hope is no longer a nominal stand-in for her mother
and thus a potential object of her new legal father’s amorous affec-
tions, the very change remarks upon the similarities of mother and
daughter (Alice Fletcher had hope, now Alice Leslie is Hope—William
Fletcher’s hope for love—though the addition of her last name would
seem to negate that optimism) and infuses young Hope even more
fully with the “christian graces” of her mother.
When Hope next appears in the narrative, she is being carried on
a litter, as befits her status as Fletcher’s “favourite.”51 This innocuous
locution resonates when we discover a few pages later that Oneco, too,
has a “little favourite”:52 Faith Leslie, who will ultimately leave her
sister and adoptive family to marry Oneco and live with the Pequods
(she will, in fact, disappear from the book—no longer able to speak
English and refusing to be represented in it—and into the wilderness
to become one of the Indians who are, as Sedgwick’s epigraph to
the novel announces, “departed—gone”). The idea of a “favourite”
thus becomes sexually and romantically charged—and, even between
Faith and Oneco, incestuously complicated. Faith, we learn, receives
food from him “as passively as the young bird takes food from its
mother,”53 which links youth with passivity, maternity with agency,
Sisters in Arms 115
Oneco with feminized parental caretaking, and parental surrogacy

with romantic love.54
I am particularly interested in the ways in which the parentally
incestuous implication intersects with sibling incest and with race. It
bears repeating, for example, that Oneco is feminized throughout the
novel—Mononotto is less interested in his son’s than in his daugh-
ter’s leadership capabilities—although not desexualized. Moreover,
his feminization is not generic; he is maternalized. Perhaps Sedgwick
was striving toward a version of the noble savage (rendered here as
the loving savage), but her representation entails a commitment to
incestuous imagery across lines of race. If it seems too programmatic
to pin this commitment on Sedgwick’s portrayals of Oneco and Faith,
who are admittedly not the most fully realized characters in the novel,
then the scene with which I opened this chapter, a scene between two
of the plot’s central figures, may help us deepen our investigation.
B rother s and S isters

It is the era of the Pequod Wars, and tensions are high between the
Indians and the colonists. Mononotto has made gestures toward
peace, but his son Samoset has been beheaded by the English and
his children Magawisca and Oneco have been taken from him to be
servants in the Springfield home of the Fletchers. Despite the adults’
hostilities, Oneco and Faith as well as the Fletchers’ son Everell and
Magawisca have developed deep affinities while living together. Oneco
and Faith’s shared sympathies eventuate in marriage, and Everell and
Magawisca’s strike many as destined for the same fate. As the Fletcher
family’s servant Digby reflects years later, “I viewed you as good as
mated with Magawisca.”55 Everell’s mother, writing to her husband
that their son “doth greatly affect the company of the Pequod girl,
Magawisca,” worries that “innocent and safe as the intercourse of
these children now is, it is for thee to decide whether it be not most
wise to remove the maiden from our dwelling. Two young plants
that have sprung up in close neighbourhood, may be separated while
young; but if disjoined after their fibers are all intertwined, one, or
perchance both, may perish.”56
The ease of Everell and Magawisca’s affection for each other recalls
the ease of Fletcher’s earlier love for his cousin Alice, likewise “the
companion of his childhood,” with whom “nature and opportunity
soon indissolubly linked their hearts together.” (It likewise recalls the
dangers Smith and Bentham identify in relationships between “them
who generally are bred up together.”) Magawisca and Everell have

had their hearts thus linked, in the same naturalizing way.
The interposition of Magawisca’s arm between Everell’s neck and
her father’s vengeful hatchet marks the moment of transformation
in their relationship from potential mate to sibling. And henceforth,
“interposition” becomes a crucial term in the novel, appearing virtu-
ally every time someone rescues someone else from a stringent law
or the prosecution of such. Thus when Hope frees Nelema, an aging
Indian healer whom the Puritans have imprisoned as a witch, her act
is considered an “unlawful interposition.”57 Opposing the “stern jus-
tice” of her Puritan patriarchs, she is viewed as a “rash and lawless
girl, who had dared to interpose between justice and its victim.”58 In
the context of the novel, the act of interposition almost always flouts
the legal code, as when “Everell Fletcher’s interposition” in helping
Magawisca escape from a colonial jail is described as “unlawful and
undecorous.”59
The act of mediation, as Sedgwick construes it, is opposed to the
law—but only to positive law, for when Hope Leslie intervenes on
the behalf of others, she does so in accordance with the laws inscribed
in her heart. And the laws in her heart are divine, which links her
moral character to Magawisca’s. The arm interposed between bodies,
the person interposed between an enactor of violence and its intended
recipient, and the act interposed between subject and law: Sedgwick
emphasizes this state of in-betweenness, which possesses a wondrous
power to transform.
A boy and girl of different races become like siblings by virtue
of the girl’s sacrificial act of heroism, a transformative moment all
the more profound for having been mapped against a backdrop of
incestuous despair. References to incest proliferate in the chapter,
beginning with the epigraph from Bryant’s poem. For readers in the
early republic (as for us today), the scene also implicitly recalls John
Smith’s infamous account of how Pocahontas saved him in a similar
situation, which calls to mind one of history’s most infamous mis-
cegenous couples, Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Everell’s relationship
with Magawisca, then, as the poem and the description of his feelings
intimate, is both potentially incestuous and, as the historical allusion
and the fact of the two participants’ races indicate, potentially mis-
cegenous.60 Such a formulation—a simultaneously incestuous and
interracial relationship—would seem logically impossible in view
of later nineteenth-century accounts of race and purity and early
anthropology’s opposition between exogamy and endogamy, and yet
Sedgwick lays the groundwork for such a relationship in Hope Leslie.
Sisters in Arms 117
With Magawisca’s interposition, Sedgwick rewrites Elizabeth Free-

man’s defiance of her mistress as a daughter’s defiance of her father.
But as Magawisca intervenes to save the boy she has seemed up to that
point destined to marry, she becomes a sister, a sister dead to him by
virtue of having “redeemed his life with her own.” Magawisca’s arm
is thus metonymically imagined as her life; the relation of father and
daughter is analogized, however distantly, to that of master and slave;
and a potential romance is moved into the realm of the familial, where
it is marked as off-limits. To be sure, the image of the arm raised in
violence meeting the arm raised in protection is a compelling one,
powerful enough to warrant repeating. But why Sedgwick endows it
with the capacity to alter human relationships is rather less obvious. I
want to suggest that in deploying the image, and the act of interposi-
tion it signifies, Sedgwick reimagines what it means to be related to
another human being. Race and family connections are not sufficient;
rather, it is willing sacrifice that draws two people into relation.
Consider how Martha Fletcher describes Magawisca in a letter to
her husband: “She hath, though a child in years, that in her mien that
doth bring to mind the lofty Judith, and the gracious Esther. When I
once said this to Everell, he replied, ‘Oh, mother! is she not more like
the gentle and tender Ruth?’”61 To save the Israelites, Judith beguiles
Holofernes, enters his tent, and beheads him as he sleeps; Esther
risks her husband’s wrath (he is known for killing people who interrupt
him uninvited) and convinces him to spare the Jews. Both women, in
short, stare down extraordinary danger to protect their people.
Ruth, on the other hand, famously leaves her people. After her
husband dies, she refuses to rejoin the Moabites and instead insists on
accompanying her mother-in-law, Naomi, to Judah. “Intreat me not
to leave thee,” Ruth begs Naomi, “or to return from following after
thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will
lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where
thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to
me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me” (Ruth 1:16–
17). Ruth’s sacrifice is different from Magawisca’s, though it is still a
sacrifice—she unites herself with a new people because in marriage she
becomes a member of a new family—one not defined by blood. So in
a sense both Everell and Martha Fletcher are right—Magawisca risks
her life, but she does so not to save her people but to save a boy who
then becomes her brother.
Hope Leslie (who will become Magawisca’s sister, too) demon-
strates the same capacity for sacrifice. In the seven years that intervene
between chapter 7—in which Magawisca loses her arm—and chapter 8,
Hope has taken the place Magawisca once held in Everell’s heart.
During that time, as William Fletcher later recalls, Hope and Ever-
ell’s “affections, as if instinct with their parents’ feelings, mingled in
natural union.”62 When Hope writes to Everell, this affection shines
through the letter’s tone and its subscription, “thy loving friend and
sister”63—which, of course, she legally is, having been adopted by Wil-
liam Fletcher.
Hope’s letter quotes different lines from the same Bryant poem
that introduced chapter 7. Hope describes climbing Mt. Holioke,
which serves as a foil for the mountain upon which Everell nearly lost
his life seven years previously. This second mountain may be taken to
signify Anglo superiority, for it becomes a place from which to survey
the spread of “civilization” (with Holioke, for whom the mountain is
later named, and Everell’s father “noting the sites for future villages,
already marked out for them by clusters of Indian huts”64), a place
where the remnants of Indian sacrifices that Hope notices will give
way to an “incense” rising from “christian hearts.”65 The two uses of
Bryant’s poem suggest at least two parallels.
In chapter 7, the poem highlights the contrast between the sacrifice
made by Magawisca—a sacrifice of self, like that committed by the
Indian maiden in the poem—and the sacrifice her father sought (the
sacrifice of another person). When Hope’s letter invokes “Monument
Mountain” in chapter 8 (as a footnote, so that it is unclear whether
the addition is Hope’s or the narrator’s), it does so in the context of
Hope’s asking “if an acceptable service might not have been offered
there.”66 In Hope’s view, the “relicts of Indian sacrifices” that she
sees on the mountaintop signify a spiritual affinity between Christians
and native peoples insofar as they share the impulse “to worship on
high places.”67 Mr. Holioke—exemplar of Puritan piety—explains to
her that praying there would be “worship to an unknown God”—but
when they descend, the “christening” of the mountain that she has
jocularly suggested, and for which she has been reproved, seems to
have been efficacious: the mountain does indeed begin to be called
“Mount Holioke.”68 The suggestion, then, is that Indians may offer
“acceptable” sacrifices, and young white women’s worship may be
acceptable when prompted by “heathen” instincts.69
The poem’s double invocation underscores a second parallel. The
epigraph to chapter 7 helped underscore the incestuous implications
of Magawisca and Everell’s affection for one another; when applied in
chapter 8, the poem may obliquely serve the same function, remind-
ing us that if Hope and Everell seem made for each other, it is in part
because they actually have been—by their parents’ affections, by being
Sisters in Arms 119
raised together as siblings, and by the fact that they are, in the eyes of
the law, sister and brother.
“Law,” however, determines familial relationships beyond that
between Hope and Everell, albeit in a markedly different—nearly
opposite—manner. Hope and Magawisca, as more than one critic has
noted, parallel each other throughout the novel: both are “fearless,”
both are noble, and both are sisters—legal or biological—of Faith.70
But most important, both are inspired by the same faith: the convic-
tion that God has inscribed his laws on their hearts, and therefore they
may freely circumvent colonial laws when their consciences dictate
that they should. Magawisca, who has been accused of conspiring to
launch an intertribal attack against English settlements, proclaims to
the magistrates, “I am your prisoner, and ye may slay me, but I deny
your right to judge me. My people have never passed under your
yoke—not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority.”71
When she is admonished as a heretic and reminded that the Bible
“contains the only revelation of a future world—the only rule for the
present life,” she responds, “I know . . . that it contains your rule,
and it may be needful for thy mixed race; but the Great Spirit hath
written his laws on the hearts of his original children, and we need it
[the Bible] not,”72 thereby refuting both civil and ecclesiastical law in a
single gesture. Hope likewise flouts civil law, helping both Nelema and
Magawisca escape prison, and she does so because “what is difficult
duty to others, hath ever seemed impulse in her”; she is a “rash and
lawless girl” in the eyes of the magistrates, one who takes “counsel
only from her own heart.”73 Sedgwick privileges—over the category of
“law”—the promptings of the heart, which manifest the soul through
character. And, it bears noting, that character having been inscribed
by God, it is as externally imposed and unvarying as the instances of
character found in Bentham, “Daniel Prime,” and Sedgwick’s writings
about Elizabeth Freeman.
The doubling of Hope and Magawisca raises the question of
whether a distinction can be drawn between incest and miscegena-
tion, which prompts us to rethink our belief that we know who our
people are, whether in racial or ancestral terms. Destabilizing such
comfortable categorizations, Sedgwick suggests over the course of
Hope Leslie that recognizing another as one of “our own” necessar-
ily entails a relationship of giving. In framing a relationship between
Magawisca and Everell in which endogamy and exogamy are equiv-
alent—a radical enough claim—she then displaces both quantitative
categories (one drop of blood, prohibited degrees of kinship) as
models of connection and replaces them with the qualitative values of

generosity and sacrifice.
Sedgwick may appear to back away from this position toward
the end of the novel: Hope’s distaste for her sister’s Indian dress,
let alone her marriage to Oneco, suggests that she resists her white
sister becoming an Indian.74 She eventually comes to terms with the
alliance, however, and in so doing she reinforces the notion of cho-
sen and contingent, nominal and proximate family: “There had been
nothing in the intercourse of the sisters to excite Hope’s affections.
Faith had been spiritless, woebegone—a soulless body—and had
repelled, with sullen indifference, all Hope’s efforts to win her love.
Indeed, she looked upon the attentions of her English friends but as a
continuation of the unjust force by which they had severed her from
all she held dear.”75
To be sure, the “natural” affections presumed to be attached to
family are absent from this episode. Hope’s affections are not excited
by Faith because Faith seems to lack a soul, precisely that source of
internal conscience that unites Hope and Magawisca as sisters. But
the rest of the novel suggests that family is flexible enough to make
sisters of two women of different races and to render mere biological
relation not only insufficient as a determinant of sisterhood but, in
fact, irrelevant.
The unjust force Faith resents is rejected as well by Magawisca,
and here the terms of even spiritual or characterological family prove
incapable of binding her to Hope and Everell. “And why not now,
Magawisca, regard me as your brother?” Everell asks—a familial over-
ture Magawisca categorically rejects:
“It cannot be—it cannot be,” replied Magawisca, the persuasions of

those she loved, not, for a moment, overcoming her deep invincible
sense of the wrongs her injured race had sustained. “My people have
been spoiled—we cannot take as a gift that which is our own—the law
of vengeance is written on our hearts—you say you have a written rule
of forgiveness—it may be better—if ye would be guided by it—it is not
for us—the Indian and the white man can no more mingle, and become
one, than day and night.”76
Any fantasy that Everell—or the reader—might have harbored that

racial distinctions can be erased or forgotten (as Everell once imagined,
as he confided to Digby, “I might have loved [Magawisca]—might
have forgotten that nature had put barriers between us”) is here
destroyed—or so it would seem.77 Hope’s sister and Magawisca’s
Sisters in Arms 121
brother are married—rendering the two women legal, as well as

spiritual, sisters. The assimilative process has begun, though not,
as Everell and Hope would have it, by drawing the Indian princess
into their (civilized and civilizing) Boston home but by drawing the
English colonists into the wilderness. The terms of sacrifice have
shifted considerably. The “law” inscribed in Magawisca’s heart is no
longer divine conscience but vengeance, and at this moment, her filial
relationship with Hope and Everell seems to be at an end.
But Magawisca’s rejection is not the novel’s last word. That is given
to the “perpendicular”78 “pattern maiden of the commonwealth,”79 a
very nearly incorporeal being, Esther Downing. Esther, Hope’s friend
and John Winthrop’s niece, had thought herself in love with Ever-
ell, and Everell had thought himself constrained to marry her. The
marriage, however, is averted. Whereas the biblical Esther saves her
people by marrying a king without divulging that she is Jewish, this
Esther “illustrate[s] a truth, which, if more generally received by her
sex, might save a vast deal of misery: that marriage is not essential to
the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman. Indeed,
those who saw on how wide a sphere her kindness shone, how many
were made better and happier by her disinterested devotion, might
have rejoiced that she did not ‘Give to a party what was meant for
mankind.’”80
This is a remarkable endorsement of female bachelorhood, one
inconceivable in a novel like The Coquette. Sedgwick’s undoing of
prescriptive social relationships ends neither with race nor with sib-
lings but with that which was understood to be the very unit of social
reproduction itself: heterosexual marriage. When categories—of
who counts as your sibling or who’s excluded from your (racialized)
family—are emptied of their explanatory power, the notion of “fam-
ily” becomes so expansive that it means at best only “human.”
L iberty, E qual ity— and

Espec ial ly Fr ater ni ty
Scholars who have focused on earlier American literature, particularly
novels of the 1790s, have located incest as a crucial term in the affec-
tive structuring of American fiction and, in turn, of the American pol-
ity. Julia Stern has suggested that incest undoes fixed understandings
of identity. It does so, however, at the cost of maintaining the family
as “the exclusive and ultimately the fatal arena for exchange, which is
directed solely inside its perimeters, a destructive and infinitely regres-
sive form of reflection in which the self collapses into its mirror image.
There, any semblance of the exterior life or public world, much less
of the nation, ceases to exist.”81 Elizabeth Barnes, on the other hand,
argues that “seduction and incest actually epitomize the political and
narrative strategies popularly constructing national identity.” Rather
than viewing incestuous narratives as “a manifestation of cultural anxi-
eties,” as critics like Stern might, Barnes suggests that they are “the
logical outcome of American culture’s most cherished ideals.” Mod-
eling the political on the familial ensures attachment as “one learns
to love those to whom one already feels related,” but in the pro-
cess it confuses familial connection with sexual attraction.82 The logic
of Barnes’s position is quite persuasive, and I think largely correct,
though it does not fully account for the decoupling of familiarity and
familiality that occurs in a novel like The Power of Sympathy.
The thematic replication of incest in early American writing strikes
me, however, as neither wholly apocalyptic nor wholly explicable as a
representation of excessive sentimental attachment to the familiar. To
rephrase my concern in terms of Barnes’s argument, if the seduction
novels of the late eighteenth century show that “in American fiction,
husbands and fathers become inextricably connected, resulting in an
ethos of seductive paternalism that characterizes republican culture,”
then Hope Leslie, written some thirty years later, begins to subvert
that ethos by shifting the incestuous relationship from a parental one
to one between siblings, which produces a perhaps more egalitarian
relationship, but one that still replicates the blurring of categorical
boundaries.83 Foremost in the differences I might note between Sedg-
wick’s approach to incest and the models Barnes and Stern propose is
the way in which she displaces the family rather than centralizing it,
in part through her exultation of an unmarried status, of singleness
without singularity. Nonetheless, many of Sedgwick’s concerns fol-
low directly from questions raised in the early national period. That
is, if earlier novels like The Power of Sympathy explore questions about
democracy and federalist elitism through the lens of the incestuous
family, and others, like The Coquette, point to the limitations of family
to maintain civic or social continuity, Hope Leslie asks what, exactly,
the family is, how it is connected to race, why it so often goes hand in
hand with understanding the origins of the state, and whether mar-
riage is necessary to constitute it.
That so many of these questions remain unresolved, complicated,
or only halfheartedly pursued speaks both to Sedgwick’s personal
ambivalence and to the larger ambivalence of her culture. For much
of the novel, for example, she seems to be laying out a claim that
Americans are united by character: one that Magawisca and Hope
Sisters in Arms 123
embody, one that Elizabeth Freeman somehow manages to possess

despite the “character of her race,” and one that seems predestined
(God has written his commands in our hearts) yet toward which we
can strive. The idiom in which this unity is represented is, more often
than not, that of the family. If we are all siblings, the novel suggests,
then in America we need not be consumed with matters of prop-
erty, like those that beset Daniel Prime and Sir William Fletcher the
elder—or, closer to home, like those that lead to Indian removal.
On the one hand, as siblings, we all have a common claim to the
land. On the other hand—in terms of primogeniture—white Chris-
tians hold the more legitimate title because they are, according to
then-prevalent theories of racial development, more mature than the
“children of the forest” are. Sedgwick’s novel both justifies Anglo
intrusion and redefines it as a kind of sharing between people equally
willing (apparently) to sacrifice themselves for others. Ultimately,
though, she backs away from her more radically egalitarian assertions:
Everell does not marry Magawisca but marries Hope instead; whereas
Esther’s decision not to marry is celebrated, Magawisca’s marital
prospects never arise except in relation to the now safely unavailable
Everell; and Faith and Oneco recede entirely from narrative view.
That narrative foregrounds many conventions of both the histori-
cal novel and the romance—family lines and relations, marriages, love
requited and unrequited, major historical figures—but Hope Leslie
is content, finally, with none of them. It ultimately downplays the
marital union that underwrites novelistic forms like the romance,
positing instead a structurally incestuous family of siblings connected
through a joint ethic of sacrifice. Rather than understanding the unit
of social reproduction to be the (heterosexually procreative) dyad or
the autonomous individual of Enlightenment thinking (or even the
rugged one of the later nineteenth century), Sedgwick maintains
the centrality of chosen, affective relationships and relationally con-
stituted subjects to perpetuating the social world. And she does so by
theorizing miscegenation and incest—exogamy and endogamy—not
as mutually exclusive but as identical. She achieves that dramatic con-
flation by highlighting repeated acts of interposition that underscore
an ethic of feminized sacrifice, which, although staged in “early times
in the Massachusetts,” invokes those eighteenth-century rational (and
perhaps self-interested) discourses of civic benevolence and sympathy
intended to underwrite the social, economic, and political structures
of a new republic.
Chapter 5
4
“Mangled and Bleeding” Facts
Prosl avery Novels and the
Tem po rality o f Sentim ent
I n December 1896, Eunice Beecher contributed to The Ladies’ Home

Journal an article recalling her husband’s development and activities
as an abolitionist under the title “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in
Plymouth Pulpit.” Eager to make New Yorkers viscerally aware of the
realities of slavery, Henry Ward Beecher had presented fugitive slaves
in his church, taking on the persona of an auctioneer, and encouraged
the bidding that would purchase those slaves’ freedom. Such displays—
and the visual depictions of them that followed—insisted that the
price of freedom was transformation yet again into a commodity to be
consumed by white viewers and purchasers.1 Mrs. Beecher calls this an
“object lesson in Southern slavery” offered by her husband, and it is
precisely an “object” lesson insofar as it indicates a principle through
the material object of a person’s body. She explains that her husband’s
congregation stood in need of such lessons because “the majority of
the people of New York and Brooklyn were Southern sympathizers.
Of the realities of slavery they knew nothing; they regarded it senti-
mentally as a patriarchal institution that had come down from Biblical
times, and that gave the Southern people ample leisure to develop
into charming ladies and eloquent politicians. Mr. Beecher came to
open the eyes and arouse the consciences of these sentimentalists.”2
The sentimentalists imagined here indulge themselves not in the
weeping sorrow of melodrama but in the complacent conviction
that the cultural refinements of charm and eloquence are predi-
cated on racial distinction. Or, to put it another way, Mrs. Beecher
initially describes “sentimentality” in a way entirely familiar to her

late nineteenth-century audience—whereby emotion rests passively in
concepts like refinement in a way that obscures moral obligation to
actual people—but alien to the very kind of sentimentality her husband
had depended upon to rally his congregation to antislavery—whereby
emotion is grounded in an imagined body whose similarity to one’s
own becomes the grounds for recognizing a kind of universal equality.
The latter sort of effusion of fellow feeling is demonstrated in her own
description of auditors’ reactions to her husband’s words: “The con-
gregation was wrought up to the very highest pitch. Tears of pity and
indignation streamed from eyes unused to weeping. Women became
hysterical; men were almost beside themselves.”3 The auditors’ bodies
are engaged—even, in the case of the men, pushed to the very edge of
embodiment, almost projecting selves beyond bodily bounds.
The culminating moment of one such “sale” contains an image that
powerfully links the ideas of spectacle, sentiment, embodiment, and—
one focus of this chapter—vows: “The scene was again one of intense
enthusiasm. Rain never fell faster than the tears of the congregation.
The pretty child, the daughter of a white father, was bought and over-
bought. Rose Terry—afterward Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, the famous
authoress—threw a valuable ring into the basket, and Mr. Beecher
picked it out and put it upon Pinky’s finger, saying, ‘Remember—
with this ring I do wed thee to freedom.’”4
Take a moment to imagine the scene: As Beecher’s recent biogra-
pher, Debby Applegate, notes, Plymouth Church had been redesigned
to Beecher’s specifications after a fire, including removing the pulpit
and replacing it with a low stage.5 Now Beecher, one of the most
prominent speakers of his day, notoriously attractive to women, stands
on that stage, with a light-skinned nine-year-old girl (“too fair and
beautiful for her own good,” comments Mrs. Beecher), reciting one
half of a marriage vow. That this vow marries the little girl to “free-
dom” is in some sense irrelevant to the spectacle: Beecher has all the
ingredients for a wedding (a couple, a ring, and the utterance of
the words “I do” and “wed” in a church) and both visually and verbally
appears more the bridegroom than the minister. Here, the senti-
ment Beecher wishes to evoke in his audience is a complex one—he
has followed the spectacle of the imaginary auction block with
the spectacle of the imaginary wedding ceremony: how were his con-
gregants expected to understand these two performances’ relation to
each other?
One answer might be found—curiously enough—in the proslav-
ery novels written in response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the decade
“Mangled and Bleeding” Facts 127
before Pinky’s “freedom-marriage.” The language of fidelity turned

to again and again by defenders of Southern slavery found its ultimate
expression in the language of vows. They did so in a context of vari-
able embodiment for white and black characters, such that more often
than not, what seemed to be exchanging vows were two abstractions
rather than two—even fictional—persons.6
Sentiment and Tempo r ali ty

The proslavery novel is one logical endpoint of the tradition of the
sentimental novel, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is another. For Stowe, as for earlier sentimentalists, sympathy is sup-
posed to be universalizing: our capacity to feel for others borders on
a kind of emotional or spiritual equality. Think of Laurence Sterne’s
Yorick and his feeling for the grisette; of Richardson’s Pamela, who
declares that her “soul is of equal value with the soul of a princess,
though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave”; of William
Hill Brown’s Harrington’s recognition that he “[has] a soul” when
he sees a slave woman whipped; and, of course, of Stowe’s own direct
injunctions to her readers to feel for her characters, separated from
loved ones, on the basis of those readers’ own experience as members
of a family.7 But that sympathy mostly makes the sympathizer feel supe-
rior: the grisette may be sexually alluring, but she is not a social equal;
Pamela must be trained to her position; Harrington feels for the slave
but does nothing except congratulate himself for that feeling; Stowe’s
black characters are always touched by the brush of her genteel, feel-
ing racism. For proslavery writers like Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary
Eastman, and Baynard Rush Hall, sentiment transfers to the hero. In
such novels, sentiment is a capacity for feeling that motivates action,
but that action is circumscribed; it never enters a system of exchange
that might recognize slavery as the transactional economic system it is
but rather restricts itself to the bonds of family and charity, natural-
izing and domesticating the peculiar institution. Like Sedgwick’s writ-
ings and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these novels suggest that familial feeling
links slaves and masters, and they celebrate feminine self-sacrifice as
an act that engenders such intimate connection and lends women
domestic power.
In her study of the Domestic Novelists of the Old South, Elizabeth
Moss observes that discussion of the domestic novel has centered
on Northern writers and has assumed continuities between region-
ally distinct works on the basis of their authorship by and address to
women. She notes that where the Northern domestic novel has its
roots in a reformist impulse that emerged with the rise of urbanization

and industrialization in the North in the 1820s and 1830s, the South-
ern domestic novel originates in the plantation novels. These disparate
origins, she contends, help to explain the differences between North-
ern and Southern domestic novels. Key among these differences is the
conservatism of the Southern authors, who see their goal as consoli-
dating the power of planter-class white women as members of a social
elite rather than advocating a feminized reformist ethos. They address
women not as women but as part of a class.8 They nevertheless, Moss
argues, “had a specifically feminine agenda,” one that calls them to
defend the slaveholding South and the paternalism that sustains it,
even as they carve out space for women’s “moral autonomy” within
that paternalistic framework.9
The proslavery novel can be read as a version of the domestic novel
in which the household that creates the domestic space is inhabited
by a patriarchal, rather than a republican, family.10 Thus in contrast
to antislavery writings, which used the term “family” to describe bio-
logical and contractual relationships (as with the inevitable trope of
slavery separating husbands from wives and parents from children, in
an effort to produce a sympathetic response grounded in a reader’s
own experience of such legal and biological relationships), defend-
ers of slavery returned to a much earlier understanding of the word
family, whereby it referred to all those making up a household. This
patriarchal family, because it is organized hierarchically, imagines only
one member to be capable of acting as a person, and in that person
all roles are conflated: master, husband, father—an agent free to act
and to compel others to act.11 While proslavery novelists wanted to
demonstrate their modernity and cultural power, they did so in the
service of an institution they themselves defended in part based on its
antiquity.
The view that Southern patriarchalism differs substantially from
Northern liberalism has been challenged as being overblown: Larry
Tise and David Ericson, for example, have argued that proslavery
rhetoric is firmly within the tradition of Enlightenment liberalism.12
Whatever philosophical similarities between the two there might
be, however, certainly contemporaries perceived a stark difference
between patriarchal and liberal sociopolitical models and located that
difference in part along regional borders. Never mind that proslav-
ery Southerners understood themselves to be the standard bearers of
Revolutionary liberty enshrined in the Constitution or that the most
ardent antislavery agitators might actually have agreed with them,
insofar as they saw the founding political documents as profoundly
unliberal (as with Garrison’s declaration that the Constitution was

a “covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell”). Proslavery
advocates recognized that their persuasive measures needed to be
exercised on cultural as well as political grounds, not least because
Southern politicians feared losing the sectional power that enabled
them to secure legal protections for slavery. Lacking a significant
infrastructure for widespread cultural production (limited publish-
ing outlets, few skilled engravers), politics seemed to some the best
means to respond to increasing antislavery sentiment. But limitations
on slavery during western expansion threatened Southerners’ political
representation, and proslavery writers in the North and South rec-
ognized that changing popular sentiment required cultural as well as
political persuasion. Responding to the appeals made in slave narra-
tives, autobiographies, and the fictional writings of both black and
white antislavery authors required opening a cultural front.13 When
writers sought to popularize proslavery through fiction, they turned
to themes and genres that would have intranational appeal precisely to
win over readers in the North. To do so, these writers sought to take
advantage of Northern publishing abilities (by my count, more than
75 percent of anti-Tom novels were published in the North, and
roughly 20 percent of them by the Philadelphia firm Lippincott alone)
and national forms—specifically, the sentimental novel.
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has explained that when “popu-
lar eighteenth-century dramas of seduction, incest, and marital
uncertainty give way, in the nineteenth century, to the domestic,
sentimental novel,” the focus of the sentimental novel shifted from
“creating the family [to] preserving its fixed form.”14 In these novels,
“domestic privacy is a foregone conclusion”; more important, Dillon
emphasizes, the novels’ interests have moved from “the social work
of contracting a bond between husband and wife” to a naturalized,
“non-negotiable” biological relationship between mother and child.15
Dillon notes as well that this “increased closure of the sentimental
family tends to coincide with a racial whitening of the family.”16 This
trajectory seems an accurate description of the shift from eighteenth-
to nineteenth-century sentimental novels, and yet proslavery novels
returned to the model of the eighteenth century in several significant
ways—in their focus on matrimony; in their characterization of their
heroines as largely helpless, ethereal damsels in distress; and in their
insistence that biological relations are in fact negotiable.17
As earlier chapters in this book have suggested, the categories of
both sentiment and marriage are positioned precariously between
the individual and the institutional, such that promises and loyalty,
rather than law and contract, become the crucial elements for nego-
tiating agreement. Proslavery writers exploited the idea that slaves
might occupy a similarly structurally indeterminate position—midway
between property and person, family member and possession, a being
purchased through contract but with and to whom no contractual
relations could be established. Proslavery novels thus frequently
enacted a double-promise model: the promise of a fulfilled contract
through marriage to a white (Northern) woman and the promise
of loyal servitude from the slave. Elizabeth Moss and others have
pointed out how many such texts offer a kind of quasi-feminist
conception of women’s capacities, located in their power over both
slaves and husbands, and suggest that the kind of moral suasion over
families advocated by Stowe becomes still greater in a slave society
both because it gives women larger “families” to guide (one char-
acter noted that “a planter’s wife has little occasion for romance . . .
her duties are too many . . . After all, a hundred servants are like so
many children to look after”) and because it shelters women from the
market-driven world in which such feminine power might be lost.18
This chapter expands such observations by noting the parallel between
the promises offered to women (usually in the form of marriage)
and the promises made to and by slaves.
Fac ts, Bo dies, and Abstr acti ons

And this was slavery! That heart must be torpid—that sensibility
obtuse, which could experience such a display of unbought
affection, without emotion. This devotion disarms slavery of
half its gorgons dire, and leaves us the gratifying consolation,
that its abstract vice is softened into gentleness by the humanity
of its practice. Laws are . . . the heartless creations of policy,
necessity, and faction, and take their pride of place from the
darkest passions of human nature. Power and obedience are the
necessary components of their being; penalty and punishment
the active spirit of their existence. Fully armed, they spring
into the conflict of virtue and depravity, and bear an iron front,
independent of season, time and circumstance. Policy may rivet
their fetters, yet they fall inoperative and harmless beneath the
silent force of that gigantic lever of society—public opinion.19
—Julia Henderson, Lionel Granby, 1835
Julia Henderson’s Lionel Granby, published serially in the South-

ern Literary Messenger in 1835, invokes the idea of “abstract vice”
operating within a world of surprisingly active abstractions, where

laws not only are endowed with the “active spirit” that makes them
seem alive but are even granted armor and helm to do battle, only to
be crushed beneath yet another abstraction—public opinion—figured
as a lever. This oscillation between what has physical form and what
does not, what (or who) has a body and what (or who) does not, and
what counts as fact and what as imagination recurs throughout pro-
slavery writings of all genres.
William Grayson’s introduction to his proslavery poem, “The
Hireling and the Slave,” for example, explains that “with these people
[antislavery writers] the cruelty of slavery is an affair of tropes and
figures. But they have dealt so long in metaphorical fetters and pris-
ons, that they have brought themselves to believe that the Negroes
work in chains and live in dungeons.”20 Grayson also explains that he
has opted to present his arguments in verse to provide “some variety
to the poetic forms that are almost universally prevalent. The poetry
of the day is, for the most part, subtile and transcendental in its char-
acter. Every sentiment, reflection, or description is wrought into
elaborate modes of expression from remote and fanciful analogies.”
In contrast, Grayson offers one of the “older and homelier forms” of
poetry to cleanse a literary palate grown stale on excess metaphor.21
Even in the realm of form, it seems, abstraction takes on the physical-
ity of “beef and pudding.”22
I begin with these works because they insist upon several of the ele-
ments this section will touch upon: the idea that slavery is only cruel
when considered in the abstract, while a complex relation between the
abstract and the concrete, the institutional and the intimate, mediates
and ultimately ameliorates slavery’s injustices; that affection is nec-
essarily severed from the marketplace (it is “unbought”); that social
custom and reputation, as well as vows and promises, ensure good
slaveholding where the law cannot. Let us address these elements in
turn as they appear in three proslavery novels: Caroline Lee Hentz’s
The Planter’s Northern Bride (1852), Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’
Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (1852), and Baynard Rush Hall’s
Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop (1852).
In Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride (1852),
Eulalia Hastings, daughter of an irascible abolitionist, meets the
Southern plantation owner Russell Moreland as he travels near her
Northern home. The two fall in love, eventually marry despite Eula-
lia’s father’s protestations, and remove to the South, where Eulalia
comes to understand—from experiencing it firsthand—that slavery is
a benevolent institution. The reader learns of a slave, convinced to
escape by duplicitous abolitionists, seeking out her servitude again,

and sees Moreland put down a rebellion—fostered again by a duplici-
tous white man—on his own plantation. Before the novel even gets
fully under way, however, Hentz provides a complex set of images and
ideas about abstraction and embodiment that recur throughout the
novel and that suggest that enslavement cannot harm people because
slavery does not involve bodies at all.
Eulalia’s singing voice (as her name suggests) is hypnotic: when
Moreland first hears that voice—“sweet and soft and feminine beyond
expression”—in the church choir, the narrator explains that “other
voices sang, and their notes died away; but hers kept rolling and war-
bling round the arching walls of the church, till the house was filled
with their melody, and Moreland kept looking up, almost expecting
to see them forming into something visible, as well as audible, into
silvery or crystal rings, sparkling and glittering on the eye.”23 Sound
threatens to become visible and tangible here. But when Moreland
explains to the aged widow he and Eulalia visit that she has been mis-
led by antislavery writings, he does so by saying, “The clanking chains
of which you speak are mere figures of speech. You hear instead merry
voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil”
(51). Moreland transforms an audible object (those clanking chains)
into “mere” sound in the form of rhetoric. He likewise replaces that
sound with another, more mellifluous one and transports the aged
woman to an imagined South where she can hear the “voices” of
laboring slaves without having to actually see their bodies. This cover-
ing over of embodied slavery in proslavery novels makes perfect sense
from one perspective: it would be extremely difficult to defend slavery
while actually depicting people performing labor.
So narrative depictions shift away from bodies altogether. Early
in The Planter’s Northern Bride, Hentz replaces the physical bodies
lacerated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with abstractions for which we are
supposed to experience sympathetic engagement. Thus, for example,
Moreland describes Mr. Hasting’s antislavery writings as “calculated
to give an impression of extreme candour and philanthropy. There
was much truth in them, but the true was so ingeniously woven with
what was false, none but the most experienced eye could detect the
tinselry from the gold. There were facts, too, but so distorted, so
wrenched from their connexion with other extenuating facts, that
they presented a mangled and bleeding mass of fragments, instead
of a solid body of truth.”24 And thus he describes his experience with
“some” Northerners: “I have also met with those whose vocation it
seemed to trample on our rights, to tread upon them as they would
grapes in the winepress, though blood instead of purple juice gushed

up beneath their feet.”25
These abstractions belong not only to slave owners; Moreland’s
slave Albert, when overworked by a Northern woman, finds that his
“wounded aristocracy . . . had never bled so copiously before.”26
At the same time that facts, rights, and aristocratic sensibilities
are endowed with nerves and vasculature, however, Hentz is equally
focused on turning black character’s bodies into inert matter. Consider
Eulalia’s reflections upon Nat the Giant, the runaway slave Mr. Hast-
ings put up and toward whom Eulalia feels an instinctive antipathy.
He is initially characterized, in terms almost exclusively physical, as
“one of the most repulsive objects”: he is “gigantic in stature, black
as ebony with coarse and brutal features, and manners corresponding
to his appearance.”27 Nat’s body looms over the early pages of the
novel—he is an “object,” but one whose grotesqueness is so empha-
sized that he seems less human than monumental. Nat dies on board
the steamer that carries the newly married Morelands down South,
and Eulalia reflects that evening: “That large, black, dripping form,
with glazed, half-opened eyes, and mouth through which the ghastly
ivory gleamed, seemed lying before her, huge, cold, and still. Was it
not an evil omen that it should thus meet her on the very first step of
her watery way? . . . She tried to rid herself of the hideous image that
haunted her couch. There it lay—a black, gigantic barrier between
her and the fair, flowery land to which her bridegroom’s hand was
leading her.”28
Hentz has emphasized Nat’s massive size, his looming presence,
his blackness, all making him a figure thoroughly embodied but also
thoroughly invulnerable to human weakness. In death, however, Nat
becomes an “it” and ultimately a “barrier”: his body becomes an
object, but one that is almost immediately abstracted into metaphor.
Eulalia’s removal to the South (she gets past that barrier) helps her
to fulfill the function served by many Northern white heroines of pro-
slavery novels: to unite the republic through intersectional marriage,
seeking to bind a riven union through the marriage of Northerner
to Southerner. Eulalia’s task is, it seems, still larger: she is to be “a
golden link of union between the divided interests of humanity”—an
enormous task indeed, given her constantly invoked “delicacy.”29 This
delicacy is a trait shared by white heroines in proslavery novels regard-
less of regional origin.
Others, like Alice Weston in Aunt Phillis’ Cabin (1852), are South-
erners themselves, and their marriage to fellow Southerners helps to
cement familial connections (Alice marries her cousin). She, too, is
delicate: so ethereal as to be almost disembodied. Alice falls ill for a

good chunk of the novel not simply because she thinks she loves the
wrong man but because she is overwhelmed by the effort of trying to
do her mother’s bidding: “With her hand now pressed on her brow,
now thrown on the pillow, she slept. Her mind, overtaxed, tried even
in sleep to release itself of its burden. The wish to please, and the
effort to do right, was too much for her sensitive frame.”30 Despite
the implication that she is willful, the illness, in part, seems designed
to show the reader the necessity of submission to a mother’s will. Her
illness is a struggle with her willfulness, during which her body regis-
ters the supposed ugliness of her lack of feminine pliancy: “There was
a startling light from the depths of her blue eyes; their natural softness
of expression gone. The crimson glow had flushed into a hectic; the
hot breath from her parted lips was drying away their moisture.”31
When young Alice recovers, ready to love and marry the appropriate
man, as selected by her uncle and mother, her physical characteris-
tics are finally described with a loving detail and attention they have
not previously received, as though her body has become worthy of
representation through its suppression of desire—but even here she
remains “delicat[e], . . . pure and childlike” (214, 215).
The ethereal qualities attributed to these heroines stand in stark
contrast to the ways that criticisms of Stowe’s novel clung to the
physicality of objects as a shorthand for their facticity, as when Mary
Eastman carefully explains, in her “Concluding Remarks” to Aunt
Phillis’ Cabin,
Now I am convinced that Mrs. Stowe must have a credulous mind; and
was imposed upon. She never could have conceived such things with
all her talent; the very conception implies a refinement of cruelty. She
gives, however, a mysterious description of a certain “place way out by
the quarters, where you can see a black blasted tree, and the ground
all covered with black ashes.” It is afterward intimated that this was
the scene of a negro burned alive. Reader, you may depend, it was a
mistake; that’s just the way a tree appears when it has been struck by
lightning.32
Eastman insists that Stowe has made a “mistake,” which may seem
an odd claim to make about a work of fiction, no matter how rooted
in fact it may be, but makes sense within the framework of embodi-
ment and abstraction at work in proslavery texts. Eastman, like Hentz
and Grayson, works to correct what she perceives as a failure to ade-
quately distinguish fact from fiction, abstraction from practice, idea
from embodiment. Here, confronted with an apparently real feature

of a physical landscape, she calls upon her readers to “depend” on her
account of the tree’s burning as a more plausible one, then encour-
ages the reader to verify this for him- or herself—“Next time you pass
one, look at it”—and then once again asks the reader to trust her:
“It was not, take my word for it, some poor negro, ‘tied to a tree,
with a slow fire lit under him.’”33 The rapid shifts back and forth
between invoking experiential and empirical facticity and the calls for
the reader to “depend” upon Eastman and to “take [her] word for it”
model the shifts in authorial tone as proslavery writers sought to reas-
sure readers that what had been presented in works like Uncle Tom’s
Cabin was fiction masquerading as fact, the test of which would be
not only plausibility but trust.34 This trust and its violation is evoked
over and over again in proslavery novels, as apparently faithful slaves
are seduced away by fundamentally misguided and self-serving abo-
litionists. And to underscore the relations of trust that these writers
want to suggest underlie slavery, the novels take care to sever any con-
nection of slavery to economics.
U nbo ught Af f ec tio n s

Defenders of slavery often pointed out that servitude in the South
was better than wage slavery in the North and in England. George
Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All! (1857)
and Henry Hammond’s “Mudsill” speech (1858) most famously
make this argument in the realm of political economy, but writers
took up the claim in poetry and fiction as well, notably in Grayson’s
poem The Hireling and the Slave and in novels like Lucien B. Chase’s
English Serfdom and American Slavery; or, Ourselves as Others See Us
(1854) and Ebenezer Starnes’s epistolary The Slaveholder Abroad, or
Billy Buck’s Visit with His Master, to England (1860). Even works that
did not make this contrast the center of their plot, however, almost
invariably included a comparison between degraded free workers—
white or black—in the North and contented slaves in the South.
The narrator of The Planter’s Northern Bride, for example, says of
Northern seamstresses, “You may say that this mode of existence is
voluntary on their part; that they are free, and freedom is sufficient
of itself to enrich the most abject and miserable of human beings. It
is false. They are not free . . . They must work or starve; work or die;
work or sell themselves to the demon of temptation. Freedom! God of
the white man, as well as the black, if this is freedom, give us bondage
and chains instead.”35
More often than not, though, these sentiments are put into the
mouths of slaves themselves, as when Buck refuses the offer of a job
as a hod carrier in England, saying to the man who offers it, “‘Us
slaves in Georgy, Marster, has got a plenty, an to spar. An then our
marsters has to tote all our cares an troubles . . . Our marsters is bound
to do it; an ef we git’s sick, we’s nursed, Marster, at our marster’s
expense,’” or when Crissy, in The Planter’s Northern Bride, responds
to an offer of freedom by saying, “‘Don’t want to be free, Miss Ilda;
heap rather live with you and Mars. Richard. Don’t know how to take
care of myself, no how,’” or when the inevitable Aunt Phillis or Dilsy
or Dinah—an aged and revered slave—testifies on her deathbed to
her gratitude to her master and contentedness with her enslavement.36
To sustain the notion that relations between master and slave are
predicated on mutual affection and trust, and that this relationship
ensures that slaves are taken care of rather than mistreated, proslavery
writers describe plantations that, for the most part, function outside
of a system of exchange. Moreland, for example, will not buy or sell
slaves, and the money he distributes with sovereign largesse seems to
simply jingle its way out of his pockets, without having been acquired
from any sort of work or exchange. (The one transaction that does
take place, of course, is that of marriage—a point to which I will
return later.) As Robert Hunt has pointed out, Moreland’s plantation
provides for all the needs of all the slaves who work on it, and they are
apparently the only ones served by the plantation: there is no outside
world of exchange.37
In contrast, both the white working-class inhabitants of Eulalia’s
Northern hometown and the free black workers of Cincinnati toil
endlessly. When the Irish cook Judy points out that she receives wages
for her work and asks Crissy “to show [her] the blessed copper” she
received, Crissy says, “I wouldn’t touch a copper, leave ’em to poor
folks . . . I got a heap of money at home—all in silver,—more than
you’ll ever lay by, I ’spect. We don’t have no coppers where we come
from. We ’spises them.”38 For Crissy, the value of money lies not in its
fungibility but in its ability to be hoarded.
In Hentz’s novel, all these wage workers are female. Their lack
of political protection doubles their economic vulnerability, nicely
underscoring Hentz’s protofeminist claims that slavery enables white
women to exercise greater power with greater security. With these
workers, as elsewhere in the novel, slavery and femininity are paral-
leled: white women and slaves both stay within the family and do not
enter into a system of exchange. In one of the novel’s most intriguing
twists, we learn that Moreland’s first wife, Claudia, had performed in
the street for money as a child and was actually sold by her parents
to a benevolent white Southern woman—the “taint” ascribed to her
seems at least in part to stem from her having been morally sullied by
her exposure to the market.
In novels where slaves are bought, the purchases demonstrate the
proper exercise of benevolence and charity. In Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, for
example, Mr. Weston learns from his slave Bacchus that several run-
aways have been caught. Bacchus blames the abolitionists for seducing
the slaves away and then reports his conversation with a Northern
abolitionist: even though the owner of one of the fugitives has offered
to “sell him to any Abolitioner who’ll take him to the great Norrud,
and have him teached,” the Northern man refuses to buy a slave.39 In
contrast, Mr. Weston goes to visit the slaves and learns of a woman
among them who says that she escaped only because she wanted to
be able to buy her husband, to save him from being sold—a threat
he faces because he drinks. Her efforts to free her husband from the
slavery of liquor—not her efforts to free herself from actual slavery—
warrant a benevolent response: Weston buys her and sets her free.40
A similarly “deserving” slave, the Frank Freeman of the title, is
bought in Baynard Rush Hall’s Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop (1852)
by the Reverend Edward Leamington, despite the fact that Leaming-
ton has “vowed to God never to buy or sell a human being.”41 Hall’s
novel is notable for being significantly less racist—though this is not
saying much—than other novels supportive of slavery. While it takes
issue with “amalgamationists” on the basis of the ideas that blacks
and whites smell differently, Hall does not make the argument that
black people are marked for slavery by the curse of Ham, nor that
slaves are contented with their lot, asserting instead that the desire for
liberty is natural. He makes clear that Freeman would not be the hero
of an abolitionist novel because he is too black (he is not “as light as
Mr. George Harris” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and maintains that “sav-
ing his color, he was on a par with the whites generally, and spite of
certain philosophers, Frank—Negro Frank—was better in all respects
than some white men.”42
L aw, P ro mise, and Reputati on

Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop may not seem like a proslavery novel,
given its author’s and its characters’ uneasy ambivalence about slavery.
The novel articulates the position of many—Northerners and South-
erners alike—who recognized that slavery was a moral ill but main-
tained that still worse evils would follow immediate emancipation.
Despite this ambivalence, though, several elements of Frank Free-

man’s Barber Shop are familiar from other proslavery novels—we have
the apparently obedient slave, the decoying away of the slave by mali-
cious abolitionists (here participants in “indignation meetings”), the
fomenting of a slave rebellion by a pretended preacher, the regret of
the slave, and (in a twist on the standard proslavery insistence that
whites and blacks could never coexist in anything other than a master-
slave relationship) the promise of colonization. We even have, in the
white characters’ plot, a divorced first wife who mysteriously reap-
pears. Most of all, though, what the novel features are vows, and those
vows—like those uttered by Henry Beecher—have everything to do
with securing racial identity within a logic of marital relation.
Edward Leamington, a Northern white minister, has come South
for his health (and, like Moreland, to escape memories of his former
wife); he has married and settled in the South but remains in frail
health. As a Northern man, he is ambivalent about slavery, seeing, on
the one hand, the “natural and invincible love of liberty” that renders
slavery a violation of God’s law and, on the other hand, fearing the
consequences of unlicensed liberty that might lead to uprisings and
massacre. He has vowed never to engage in the slave trade but is
confronted with a dilemma when he learns that Frank Freeman is to
be sold away from his mother and friends because he is suspected of
having played a role in a slave rebellion (when he in fact warned the
white citizens of the imminent uprising).
In a scene surprisingly reminiscent of that between Senator and
Mrs. Bird in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—when Mary Bird convinces her hus-
band that when he violates the fugitive slave act he has just voted for,
his “heart is better than [his] head”—Mary Leamington persuades
her husband that he can break his promise never to buy a slave.43 She
explains, “No vow can bind you if it prevents help to a sufferer,” and
that, in this instance, “My woman’s heart feels you may venture; and my
heart, I know, is here better than your logic.”44 In a neat inversion of
the wifely suasion of sentimental novels, here Mary’s affective wisdom
works to legitimate the choice to buy a slave rather than to help one
escape. Reassured, Leamington spends all his money—and a good bit
of his uncle’s, too—to buy Freeman, whom he promises will be freed
when Leamington dies. When Freeman expresses his gratitude and his
determination to pay him back by saying, “‘Master! I will work like
a thousand men to repay you! I will never’—,” Leamington cuts him
off with an odd interjection: “‘I will not hear a vow! Pray, but do not
vow! The heart, Frank, is deceitful above all things, and DESPERATELY
WICKED!’”45 Leamington, newly vow-shy, cautions Freeman not to risk

violating an oath to God.
There are a couple of ways of reading this novel’s concern with
vows. In one sense, Freeman’s running away might seem a conse-
quence of the vow Leamington broke in buying him. The “desperately
wicked” and “deceitful” heart Leamington warns Freeman about
would then seem to undermine his wife’s reliance on her own heart in
helping him to decide to break his vow. On the other hand, the warn-
ing seems to point less to the duplicity of either of the Leamingtons’
hearts than to the weakness of Freeman’s and the treachery of the
abolitionists’ hearts.
Something of this ambivalence about whether the problem of
vows lies in the making of them or the breaking of them recurs in the
moment when Freeman commits himself to leaving the Leamingtons
for freedom by saying, “‘I will be a slave no more.’”46 The narrator
explains that “Frank had, indeed, in an impassioned moment, spoken
himself into freedom; and he felt that he could not and dared not
recall his words; yet no sooner had they been uttered, with some-
thing like the solemnity of a vow, than he felt again—Alone and
Desolate!”47 The image of a man speaking himself into freedom is
powerful—but also remarkably abstract. It is as though the uttered
words had functioned as a kind of illocutionary act, and—oddly, for a
novel where so much of the plot is driven by the sale and purchase of
this one man—in performing what they say, those words have neatly
sidestepped the entire question of economics.
This is not a celebratory moment of embracing the “natural and
invincible” desire for freedom—it is a painful one, which Freeman
experiences as one of loss. He “burst[s] into tears,” exclaiming, “Oh!
Dear Master Edward . . . after all, do I serve thee thus!”48 When the
wily abolitionist Dr. Sharpinton interjects that, because of Freeman’s
warning about the slave revolt, Leamington “owes [him] the lives of
his nearest relatives,” Frank responds in the following manner: “‘I
owe him a thousand!’ fiercely cried the half-insulted negro, ‘we deal
not as debtor and creditor’ . . . ‘And, poor dear master! your small
property, lessened by my redemption, is still less from want of my
services—but God is my witness—alas! I vowed before, and I broke
my vow—but may He help me, and that shall be paid back, twice over,
if I starve till the ransom be thus repaid.’”49
These words help to explain what it means for Freeman to have “spo-
ken himself into freedom.” The shift from identifying what he “owes”
to Leamington in terms of lives saved, to insisting that they do not have
an economic relationship to each other, to swearing that he will repay
Leamington’s loss of property—that is, loss of himself—marks the shift

from familial, affectional relations grounded in loyalty and benevolence
to those of the marketplace. Hall suggests that grounding a proslavery
argument in the affectional rhetoric of the patriarchal family is disin-
genuous: like Stowe’s Augustine St. Clair and George Fitzhugh, Hall
shifts the language from one of morality and emotion to one of money
and property.
Those affectionate relations are found in the hackneyed “dying
negress” scene of proslavery novels. In Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, the title
figure is stern, righteous, and beloved, and she functions as a counter
to her buffoonish, tippling husband (the aptly named Bacchus) and
ultimately as the justificatory mouthpiece for the blessings of slavery.
Aunt Phillis’s death scene reassures the patriarch (Weston) that slav-
ery is justified, that she has been happy, that she wants her children
to remain enslaved: it enables Weston to be magnanimous despite the
apparently self-evident acceptability of slavery. In Frank Freeman’s
Barber Shop, Aunt Dinah’s death serves to remind the reader that
slavery has saved the “poor blind hethun” African: Dinah, more than
a hundred years old, tells Leamington the story of her childhood in
Africa, her falling in love with a prince, and the prince’s death fighting
the slavers who capture them both, but she ends by saying, “‘I’s had
much big sorrow, dear massa! But me glad for all dat—’case here I
find Jesus, and ’de lite affliction work out to de ’ternal glory!’”50
In The Planter’s Northern Bride, Aunt Dilsy’s death serves a
somewhat different function. While most of the dying “aunts” have
protracted deathbed scenes, their funerals generally warrant only a half
sentence or so. Dilsy’s funeral, in contrast, serves as a set piece—an
almost in-text tableau vivant. Her funeral becomes the occasion for
Moreland to extract a promise from and make a promise to his slaves.
Asking them, over Aunt Dilsy’s grave, whether they believed her
dying words expressing her gratitude toward Moreland and asking
them whether they would welcome freedom without God or without
a master (to which, of course, they respond with a no), he goes on to
exhort them: “Then . . . let us make a new covenant together, and let
this grave be a witness between us all, that we do it in sincerity and
truth. I call upon you all to renew your promises of fidelity and obedi-
ence. I pledge myself anew to watch over your best interests for time
and eternity. If I ever forget my vow, if I ever become unjust, unkind,
or tyrannical, you may lead me to this clay-cold bed and remind me
of my broken faith.”51
Striking, here, is the term “covenant”—which scripturally sug-
gests an agreement made between God and another entity rather than
between people—and the marital language of the vows exchanged (all

that’s missing is love). The ascription of godlike stature to Moreland is
not accidental; I take this to be the force of positing freedom without
a master as being like freedom without God.52 If Moreland is meant to
be a divine figure, then we might attend more closely to the language
of purchase in which Dilsy understands her imminent death: “My
Hebenly Massa has bought me wid his own precious blood.”53 The
two “massas” are assimilated to each other (though apparently God
is more willing to get His hands dirty with exchange than is the pure
and purely sufficient Moreland). Hentz’s novel suggests that there is
ultimately only one purchaser of humans, and His divine economics
are beyond human comprehension. His representatives (or are they
substitutes?) need not buy slaves, this logic suggests, because they are
simply tending them as stewards.
The “covenant” made between Moreland and his slaves, moreover,
highlights the parallel between the master-slave relation and the rela-
tion between both husband and wife and parent and child: the slaves
promise their “fidelity and obedience,” while Moreland promises his
care and protection. In case we miss the connection, Hentz asserts
Moreland’s ownership of Eulalia, too, when she describes his saying
“my Eulalia” as a moment of “inexpressible grace and tenderness in
the manner in which he thus expressed his ownership” and has Eula-
lia consider that it is “the great law of God, which makes the child a
mother’s almost life-bought property.”54
Given the analogy being drawn in the novel between ownership
and family, it becomes less surprising that Moreland does not stop
short at marrying Eulalia: he seems positively profligate with his vows,
giving them to Eula, to his slaves, and even to Betsy, the free white
servant who works in the Hastings’ house in the North. The context
in which Moreland recalls that he has “plighted [his] vows to Betsy” is
one seeking to establish her as part of Eulalia’s family, when Moreland
promises that Eulalia’s whole family will visit them in the South, and
she asks if this includes Betsy.55 Fittingly, for a man who considers his
slaves as “members of his family, dependants on his care,” Moreland
replies enthusiastically that of course she is included.56 Betsy declines
the invitation, however, and does so, the narrative explains, because
she knows her place as a servant. Her wages, the novel implies, keep
her from being fully a member of the family in the way that “inher-
ited” slaves are.
With all relations collapsing into ones of family, and all family rela-
tions collapsing into ones of ownership, the novel remains insistent
that buying and selling has no place in either connection. Slaves are
not bought or sold because they are family; family is not bought or
sold because it is already owned. The sanctity of the familial, isolated
and protected from the impurity of the market, is inviolate.
And this, of course, is what literary critics have taken sentimental
novels to do: to establish a private realm marked by femininity and
intimacy against which a masculine external world of commerce
and social and political exchange can define itself. It is with this in
mind that we might return to the striking scene of the mock auction
with which this chapter began and to the modes of sentiment invoked
by Eunice Beecher in describing it.
Recall that in the scene Beecher recreates for The Ladies’ Home Jour-
nal (1896), she describes an audience initially swayed by a distanced
and aestheticized sentiment, like the one found in late eighteenth-
century sentimental novels (The Man of Feeling, Sentimental Journey,
The Power of Sympathy) with their passively feeling characters. This is
the version she expects her late nineteenth-century audience to under-
stand: a sentimentality that does not call for action because it does not
seem to be about anything more than abstractions—passive, floating,
disembodied heroines and the feelings they inspire in others.
But the version of sentiment she describes her husband performing
at Plymouth Church in 1860 is quite different: one that serves as an
“object lesson” precisely because it produces an actual “object” in the
form of a human body to which to attach those feelings. Reverend
Beecher exploits the titillation of the slave auction and purchase to
(he hopes) demonstrate a larger point, but it is—clearly—a dangerous
exploitation. The gesture toward marriage he makes with the ring on
Pinky’s finger seeks to ameliorate that danger: the congregation is not
buying a human being, they’re buying freedom, and the girl they are
not buying is vowing to marry it. Wedding a person to an abstrac-
tion, seeking physicality as a function of proof, performing ownership
through the ties of marriage and family—these are all the moves of the
proslavery novel and of the sentimental novel at its most active and
politically potent moment.
Notes
I ntro duc tio n

1. For the Anglo-American development of these ideas, see especially
Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagi-
nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Bernard
Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1967
enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1992); Stanley Elkins and
Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine
Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. 462–552; Gordon S. Wood,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).
2. I’m thinking here of Slavoj Žižek’s work on the “specter” of the Carte-
sian subject in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontol-
ogy (London: Verso, 1999); Kyoo Lee’s work illustrating the centrality
of embodiment to Descartes in “Cogito Interruptus: The Epistolary
Body in the Elisabeth-Descartes Correspondence, 22 June 1645–3
November 1645,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism
1, no. 2 (2011): 173–94; Carol Gilligan’s work on gender differences
in perceptions of justice in In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory
and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Martha Nussbaum’s claims giving priority to perceptive par-
ticularity in ethical concepts in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy
and Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1992); Sara Rud-
dick’s challenge to the gendering and familial location of the maternal
“instinct” in Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (London:
Women’s Press, 1990); Lisa Duggan’s exploration of neoliberalism’s
division of politics and identity in The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberal-
ism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon,
2004); and Sandra Jane Fairbanks’s Kantian Moral Theory and the
Destruction of the Self (Boulder: Westview, 2000), which defends Kan-
tian formalism from critics who claim that it destroys subjective agency
and the capacity for relation.
3. “Print rationality” is Michael Warner’s term in The Letters of the Repub-
lic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); other significant
144 Notes
works on print culture include Grantland Rice, The Transformation of

Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the
Early United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). For work
on sympathy and sentiment in the early American novel, see especially
Cindy Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century
American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Other important works on sympathy include Elizabeth Barnes, States of
Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1997); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies:
Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press, 1998); Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men,
Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-
American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Julia
Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American
Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For work on oral-
ity in the early American context, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Inde-
pendence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Christopher Looby, Voicing
America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); David Shields, Civil
Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1997). For the public, see Warner, Fliegelman,
and Ellison; for the private see Barnes and Stern; and for a the convinc-
ing claim that the early American public sphere defined itself in relation
to and depended upon representations of femininity, see Elizabeth Mad-
dock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Liter-
ary Public Sphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
This is obviously a reductive summary. It bears noting, for exam-
ple, that the difference between spoken and written language, for
their theorists, has more to do with degrees of integrity (attaching an
identifiable, “authentic” self to a text) than with locating a model of
the intimate—though I will argue that their work certainly paves the
way for such a recognition of the interdependence of intimacy and
integrity—and Burgett and Ellison understand their projects to attempt
an integration of the reason-sentiment divide. Nevertheless, this précis
does, I think, suggest the most visible distinctions to mark the field
in recent years: criticism that suggests that print culture sponsored a
sort of cultural rationality tends to imagine union as a confederation
of autonomous individuals, while criticism that attends to sentimental
narrative elements has suggested that individuals are represented as
always already at least susceptible to relation with others and thus only
recognizable in those relations.
Notes 145
It is my sense that the gendering of these theoretically abstract

conceptions comes from a couple of different sources: first, from the
cultural expectations reflected in the source material—if it is the case
that men are thought to feel more than we realized (Burgett, Crain,
Ellison), it is nevertheless the case that women are largely not imagined
to reason in quite the same way or to the same degree as men (with,
of course, some contemporary exceptions—notably, for this project,
Charles Brockden Brown); second, from an inheritance of the femi-
nist side in the canon wars, whereby projects of reclamation sought to
read women’s novels simply because they were women’s novels. While
we have long since begun positioning those novels within the canon
and understanding men’s and women’s novels both as equally likely
to prove revolutionary or reactionary, many arguments are still con-
strained by the framework in which they find themselves—still some-
what defensively—asserting that the books should be read at all, rather
than having the luxury to assume their relevance and go from there.
4. In doing so this project follows the path laid out by Wai Chee Dimock
in Residues of Justice: Literature, Law Philosophy (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), Dimock argues for the development of a
conception of justice and equality under the law that moves from,
in her elegant redaction of Pocock, “commensurate but unequal” to
“unequal but commensurate” (45). “The idea of equality itself had
been redefined” during the transition between eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, she explains, “from a republican to a liberal idea, from
civic participation to personal entitlement, from a question of political
rationality to a question of individual parity” (44).
5. In trying to think through intimacy as an analytical category, I have
been aided immensely by Niklas Luhmann’s magisterial Love as Pas-
sion: The Codification of Intimacy, Cultural Memory in the Present
Series, 1982 (Reprint, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Luhmann maps out the systematicity of intimacy—in effect, having a
mass of people imagine that their intimate lives are private and unique
to them demonstrates precisely that what they experience as personal is
in fact a structured system.
6. Another one of the etymological synonyms is “to publish,” which has
the happy consequence of suggesting, at least semantically, the extent
to which intimacy is connected to printing and publication.
7. I should make it clear though that, contra work like that collected in
Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2000),
I do not think of intimacy as being necessarily sexual or romantic in
meaning. The term seems useful precisely because of its accommoda-
tive flexibility and simultaneous precision, covering friendship, family
relations, and acquaintanceship, as well as explicitly sexual relations,
depending on its particular context and deployment. That said, it’s
146 Notes
not as though—as the second and fourth chapters of this book make
clear—familial intimacy is necessarily distinct from sexual intimacy.
8. And in doing so I draw as well upon recent scholarship on periodicals—
work that foregrounds the importance of understanding how encoun-
ters that vary in time, space, and textual context shape readers’ reactions
to the materials they read. See especially work by Jared Gardner and
Mark Kamrath.
9. For this perspective, see Crain, American Sympathy; Ellison, Cato’s
Tears; Stern, The Plight of Feeling; Weinstein, Family, Kinship, and
Sympathy; Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Cha-
pel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Nicole Eustace,
Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American
Revolution, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Cul-
ture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
10. For this perspective, see Barnes, States of Sympathy; Andrew Burstein,
Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-
Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Christopher Castiglia, Inte-
rior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy
in the Antebellum United States New Americanists (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008); Dillon, The Gender of Freedom; Jay Fliegel-
man, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patri-
archal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1982); Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Post-
revolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Sandra
Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American
Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Eric Slauter,
The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Warner, Letters.
11. Particularly helpful in shaping my thinking has been the work of Eliza-
beth Barnes, Cathy Davidson, and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon.
12. Although I do not discuss other earlier American essayists in this
project, it is my sense that the preeminent essay writers of early
America—Thomas Paine; William Cobbett; James Madison, John
Jay, and Alexander Hamilton in the form of Publius; and Publius’s
respondents—also register certain concerns and fascinations related to
intimacy, albeit with very different emphases. So, for example, with
the explicitly political Federalist Papers, these essays, though addressed
“To the People of New York State,” do not imagine women as an
audience, nor do they engage in the satirical whimsy for which Frank-
lin’s writings are noted. They do, however, partake of a similar line of
debate about the relation between intimacy and integrity and presage
the uncertainties and paradoxes that novels written shortly thereafter
will pick up. That is, where the Federalist Papers argue for union in part
on the basis of fellow-feeling, they also point out, for example, that
Notes 147
“it has . . . become a sort of axiom in politics that vicinity, or nearness

of situation, constitutes nations natural enemies” (Federalist no. 6)—
the pitfalls of trying to find a balance between proximity without too
much proximity get figured in novels of the period, more often than
not, as incest. The central question of the essays—whether to adopt
a constitution that forms a solid union rather than retain the relative
autonomy of states guaranteed under the Articles of Confederation or
divide into separate republics—goes precisely to the balance between
integration and autonomy best suited for governance. And while these
essays, and the results of constitutional ratification, come out on the
side of integration, novels written in the next decade become uneasy
about the social burdens placed upon such an integrativist model.
13. Publius [John Jay], “Federalist No. 2,” in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E.
Cooke, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
14. Benjamin Franklin, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” in Franklin:
Writings, ed. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 306.
15. I’m indebted here again to Lauren Berlant for her The Queen of Amer-
ica Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997) and to Berlant and Warner for their joint
essay “Sex in Public” (reprinted in Berlant, Intimacy, 311–30), which,
in disarticulating intimacy from the private, highlights again the cen-
trality of a familial narrative to heteronormative culture.
16. See Karen Weiser’s dissertation, “‘Self-begot, Self-rais’d’: Elective
Orphanhood in American Novels, 1790–1852” (Unpublished diss.,
CUNY Graduate Center, 2013).
C hapter 1
1. Richard Steele, Tatler, no. 1, April 12, 1709. Quotations from the
Tatler refer to the three-volume edition edited by Donald F. Bond
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1987) but will be cited here by issue number
and date. In certain forms, where the content of the information was
similar to gossip and sheer idle speculation, the Tatler and Spectator
exercised their scorn. This orientation, as I hope to show, did not
preclude their adoption of gossip’s structure. The Tatler’s originary
persona, Isaac Bickerstaff—identical with Jonathan Swift’s astrolo-
gizing philomath, coroner of pseudo-astrologer Partridge and sati-
rizer of quasi-journalistic fluff masquerading as news in contemporary
almanacs—himself suggests the complicated links between the peri-
odical press and the structure of gossip with which this chapter will be
concerned. That is, Steele invokes a figure Swift had used to satirize a
(well-known) contemporary and thereby references a group of people
who are known to each other and to their readers. While Steele obvi-
ously does this through print, it is emphatically not anonymous; this
148 Notes
mode does not lack personal particularity—an argument I will extend

later in this chapter. It’s worth noting, in light of this chapter’s interest
in Ben Franklin’s adaptation of gossip as a style, that his Poor Richard’s
Almanac (1732–58) produces precisely the same Bickerstaffian joke at
the expense of American astrologer Titan Leeds, predicting his death
in the inaugural issue and thereafter lamenting his refusal to remain
dead. And finally, I should note here that I am indebted to Edward
White for the conceit of my title, which I have happily pillaged from his
fascinating essay, “Urbane Bifocals: The Federalist Sociology of Frank-
lin’s Autobiography,” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999):
1–33. Where White attends to the critical division between Franklin’s
exemplarity and his exceptionalism by focusing on Franklin’s Federalist
co-optation of “practical collectives” in the form of his utopian “Party
for Virtue,” I want to focus on the myopic blur produced by Franklin’s
satirical embrace of the structure of gossip as a model for writing.
2. See, for example, Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The
Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Rout-
ledge, 1989).
3. See, for example, Kierkegaard’s comments, discussed later in this
chapter.
4. Dillon’s The Gender of Freedom explores the ways in which women
have been central to the understandings of the public sphere through
their very exclusion from it.
5. I address the exclusivity of the public in this chapter. For the structure of
families, the exhaustive studies remain Philip Aries, Centuries of Child-
hood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York:
Knopf, 1962), and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in
England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), though both
of them have received much criticism and nuancing; see, for example,
Jean E. Hunter and Paul T. Mason, The American Family: Historical
Perspectives (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1991), for a col-
lection of essays that reorients the history of the family away from anal-
yses of independent structure and focuses instead on that structure’s
relation to and impact on other social forms. Also see Naomi Tad-
mor’s essay “The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-
Century England,” Past and Present 151 (1996): 111–40—she notes
that Johnson’s Dictionary defines “family” as “those who live in the
same house.” For sociability and polite conversation, see in particular
Anthony Ashley Cooper’s [Lord Shaftesbury] Characteristics of Men,
Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein, Cambridge Texts
in the History of Philosophy (1711; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000) and Philip Stanhope’s [Earl of Chesterfield]
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, ed. with an introduction by David Roberts
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). This is an abridgment of the
Notes 149
eight volume Letters, the complete text of which is available at http://

etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/chesterfield/letters/complete.html.
6. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere:
An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger
and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 56. Joan
Landes has offered a similar critique of Habermas’s implicit equation
of the universal with masculinity. See her essay “The Public and the
Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminism, the Public
and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 135–63, and her introduction to the same volume, especially
page 7.
7. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 53; Habermas, Structural
Transformation, 52.
8. Ibid., 54.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 33, 257n11.
11. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), 11.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 4, 5.
14. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Present Age,” in Roger Poole and Henrik
Stangerup, eds., A Kierkegaard Reader: Texts & Narratives (London:
Fourth Estate, 1989).
15. Kierkegaard, “The Present Age,” 228.
16. Ibid.
17. See, for example, Spectator, 16, 34, 348, and passim. Quotations from
the Spectator refer to the five-volume Bond edition (Oxford: Claren-
don, 1965) but, as with the Tatler, will be cited by issue number and
date.
18. Indeed, so far from wishing to suggest any partisan position on the
news of the day, the Tatler famously dropped its “news section” in
favor of the occasional essays for which it became known, and the Spec-
tator never had a news section at all.
19. Spectator, no. 16, March 19, 1710 (OS) / 1711(NS); Spectator, no. 15,
March 17, 1710 (OS) / 1711 (NS).
20. Spectator, no. 41, April 17, 1711; Spectator, no. 304, February 18,
1711 (OS) / 1712 (NS); Spectator, no. 364, April 28, 1712; Specta-
tor, no. 482, September 12, 1712. According to Angus Ross, editor
of Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, letters accounted for
roughly 11 percent of the Tatler but climbed to 25 percent in the Spec-
tator; Selections (London: Penguin, 1982), 25.
21. The club itself is an instance of such an intimate realm and of the rep-
lication of that intimacy in the journal itself. Mr. Spectator is careful
to note that the political views and professions of each member are
balanced by those of another, so that there are both Tory and Whig,
150 Notes
lawyer and clergyman, a captain and a dandy. These different people are
brought together, the conceit would have it, because they are friends—
not family members, not business partners, not political operatives, but
persons about whom Mr. Spectator can say, as he does of the law-
yer, “No one ever took him for a Fool, but none, except his intimate
Friends, know he has a great deal of Wit” (Spectator, no. 2, March 2,
1711). This affectionate knowledge extends to the Spectator’s readers
insofar as they are now aware—like only his intimate friends—that he
has wit.
22. This sort of advice-seeking letter would have been familiar to
eighteenth-century readers from Defoe’s Review and Dunton’s Athe-
nian Mercury. See George A. Starr’s Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1970) for an examination of this sort of
moral advising.
23. I recognize that this formulation suggests that the public is defined
as equally accessible to all—as Jürgen Habermas explains it, “Every-
one had to be able to participate. Wherever the public established itself
institutionally as a stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself
with the public but at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece” (Struc-
tural Transformation, 37, emphasis in original). My point, as I hope
the previous section has made clear, is that the coffeehouses were open
to all in neither practice nor principle, since they excluded women, and
further that the sort of self-selection involved in participating at the
coffeehouses rendered them de facto—if not in principle—exclusive. I
will return to a more extended discussion of the Habermasian public
sphere in the next section.
24. Spectator, no. 10, March 12, 1711.
25. That one might desire an education for reasons of private interest or
investment does not, as I see it, negate the role of educational institu-
tions as producers of public subjects.
26. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 49.
27. Spacks, Gossip, 3.
28. It can be difficult, especially for a twenty-first-century reader, to dis-
tinguish between news and gossip. A useful (though far from exclusive
or exhaustive) eighteenth-century distinction might be made between
news as referring to institutions and gossip as referring to individual
persons.
29. The first sentence of Spectator, no. 1, begins “I have observed . . .”
(March 1, 1711).
30. Spectator, no. 1.
31. See Scott Black’s “Social and Literary Form in the Spectator,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 1 (1999): 21–42, for an excellent
discussion of Addison’s introduction of “the structure of politeness” as
“an indigenous form with which to explain the modern city to itself”
Notes 151
(22). See also his analysis of Montaigne’s essays, and contemporary

commentary on them, as compared with the Spectator, in which he
convincingly argues for the conversational basis of essay writing.
32. The Female Tatler overlapped only for a month with the Spectator,
which began on March 1, 1710 (old style), while the last extant issue
of the Female Tatler is dated March 31, 1710.
33. See, for example, Angus Ross’s introduction to Selections from The
Tatler and The Spectator, 25.
34. See Fidelis Morgan’s introduction to The Female Tatler (London: J. M.
Dent, 1992), vii–ix.
35. Female Tatler, no. 1, July 8, 1709. In Fidelis Morgan, The Female
Tatler, 1.
36. Ibid., 1–2.
37. Ibid., 2. Here I am indebted to Bernhard Siegert’s fascinating if not
always convincing book Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal
System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), which, as its title
suggests, traces connections between the technologies for transmitting
letters and developments in German literature.
38. It seems worth emphasizing here that Crackenthorpe’s scandalizer is
male—this lends credence to an argument that she does not necessar-
ily “reappropriate” gossip as a feminine trait but rather imagines it as
a system of exchange transcending gender and used in the service of
circulation.
39. Female Tatler, no. 82, January 13, 1710 (OS) / 1711 (NS); Female
Tatler, no. 20, August 19, 1709. In Morgan, Female Tatler, 167; Mor-
gan, Female Tatler, 48.
40. Ibid., 48.
41. Female Tatler, no. 24, August 29, 1709. In Fidelis Morgan, Female
Tatler, 61.
42. Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, ed. Gabrielle M. Firmager
(1744–46; repr., London: Bristol Classical, 1993), 42.
43. Female Spectator vol. 1, no. 5. In Haywood, The Female Spectator, 43,
44.
44. Ibid., 44.
45. Ibid.
46. Feminist scholars of the novel have traced a movement in eighteenth-
century women’s writing from open discussions of sexuality and female
desire to more coded and “feminized” expressions of domestically
limited economic desire. This analysis seems basically right (think, for
example, of the Eliza Haywood’s 1720s novels of amorous intrigue
as opposed to her 1751 History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless to Fanny
Burney’s later-century marriage plots or to Austen’s early nineteenth-
century economic affections). We might, then, expect to see a similar
progression in the periodical literature of the time, with, for example,
152 Notes
a bawdier Female Tatler (1710s) and a more refined Female Spectator

(1740s). While this is the shift I am tracing here, the discursive struc-
ture of the periodical, unconstrained by the demands of plot closure
and resolution, lends itself to a multiplicity of positions on matters of
sexuality and desire as well as other concerns.
47. Franklin, “On Censure or Backbiting,” (The Pennsylvania Gazette,
September 7, 1732) and “Alice Addertongue,” (The Pennsylvania
Gazette, September 12, 1732) in Franklin: Writings, 192, 196.
48. Franklin, “On Censure,” 195.
49. Franklin, “Addertongue,” 197; Franklin, “Addertongue,” 98, 99,
200.
50. Franklin, “On Censure,” 193.
51. Franklin, “Addertongue,” 197, 198, emphases in original.
52. Franklin tells the story in The Autobiography, in Franklin: Writings,
1326, 1363–64. Quotation from 1363.
53. Walter Isaacson’s biography, Benjamin Franklin: A Life (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2003), notes that the “Busy-Body” essays “add[ed]
gossip columnist to the list of Franklin’s American firsts” (62).
54. “Busy-Body,” no. 1, February 4, 1728 (OS) / 1729 (NS), in Franklin:
Writings, 92.
55. Samuel Keimer, “Hue and Cry after the Busy-Body,” The Universal
Instructor in All Arts and Sciences: And Pennsylvania Gazette, Febru-
ary 25, 1729, Accessible Archives, www.accessible.com.
56. “Busy-Body,” no. 5, March 4, 1728–29, in Franklin: Writings, 110.
57. American Weekly Mercury, August 24–31, 1732.
58. Ibid.
59. Addertongue’s economy is a weaker one than Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s
(perhaps chastened by the experience of the South Sea Bubble): where
she repaid each story told with “above twenty” more, Alice can only
assure her scandalizers the exchange of “two or a better” (“Adder-
tongue,” in Franklin: Writings, 198).
60. Warner, Letters, 84.
61. Shields, Civil Tongues, 267.
62. Warner, Letters, xiii, emphasis in original.
63. Looby, Voicing America, 117. Betsy Erkkila’s essay, “Franklin and the
Revolutionary Body,” ELH 67 (2000), 717–41, represents a substan-
tial change in direction: she focuses attention on the struggle between
his “Inclinations” and his “Reason” recorded in the early sections of
The Autobiography and argues that this tension exemplifies “the fluid,
discontinuous, and split nature of Franklin’s written ‘performances’
of himself” (728). Joseph Chaves argues that Franklin was obliged to
moderate between his trade and his literacy: he was, in Chaves’s words,
“laboring, polite, and lettered,” and this suggests that his “ability to
contain contradictory opinions within the bounds of an aggregate,
Notes 153
impersonal persona springs from . . . The imperative for printers to

be . . . ‘complaisant’ to all customers” (“‘A Most Exquisite Mechanic’:
Labor and Leisure, Printing and Authorship in the Periodical Essays of
Benjamin Franklin,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 96,
no. 4 (2002): 521–30). While I disagree with the characterization of
these personae as “impersonal,” Chaves’s attention to the demands of
audience as customers as well as readers is salubrious.
64. Recounted in The Autobiography, Franklin: Writings, 1319–20.
65. Warner, Letters, 79.
66. Ibid., 82.
67. “Silence Dogood,” no. 2, in Franklin: Writings, 8.
68. Ibid.
69. Few critics other than Hall have addressed Polly Baker’s speech
extensively. Marcello Maestro, in “Benjamin Franklin and the Penal
Laws,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36, no. 3 (1975): 551–62, sees
Polly Baker as Franklin’s initial foray into increasingly urgent calls for
the reform of penal laws, while J. A. Leo Lemay’s 1976 essay, “The
Text, Rhetorical Strategies, and Themes of ‘The Speech of Miss Polly
Baker,’” argues for Franklin’s authorship of the “aesthetically better
text” of the Maryland Gazette’s August 11, 1747 “corrected” edition
of the speech; J. A. Leo Lemay, ed., The Oldest Revolutionary: Essays on
Ben Franklin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976),
91–92.
70. “Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” in Franklin: Writings, 308.
71. Max Hall, Benjamin Franklin & Polly Baker: The History of a Liter-
ary Deception (1960; repr., Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1990). For the speech’s publication history, see 16–24 and 137–54;
for Baker’s deistic adherents, see 49–57; for her revolutionary import
among the French and Raynal’s incorporation of the speech into the
Histoire, see 58–75.
72. “Polly Baker,” 306.
73. I follow here the text of the Gentleman’s Magazine and New Haven
Gazette and of the Parton (1864) and Smyth (1905–7) editions of
Franklin’s writings. Compare Franklin: Writings, 306, which, follow-
ing the Maryland Gazette edition, omits mention of Polly and the
judge’s future progeny.
74. “Polly Baker,” 306–7.
75. Ibid., 308.
76. Ibid., 306.
77. Ibid., 307.
78. J. A. Leo Lemay, as editor of the Library of America edition of Frank-
lin’s writings, prints this version (as noted in note 69, his 1976 essay on
Polly Baker argues for this version’s authenticity). Much of the scholar-
ship on Franklin’s writings, however, assumes the Maryland Gazette
154 Notes
elaboration to be the work of the Gazette’s editor, Jonas Green. Lemay

argues for the speech’s internal coherence and stylistic similarity to
Franklin’s other writings, contending in part that since the addition
is reminiscent of Swift’s Modest Proposal, and since all versions of the
speech end with the exhortation not to fine Polly but to erect a statue
in her honor, itself a reference to the Proposal, the addition must be
Franklin’s own. To decide otherwise, he claims, “is implicitly to argue
that Green had the literary genius of Franklin” (100). It seems equally
plausible to say that determining otherwise is explicitly to argue that
many an eighteenth-century newspaper editor had read Jonathan Swift
and would recognize an allusion to him without too much difficulty.
Thus I side with Hall in deeming the General Advertiser edition to be
the authentic one, but whether the addition is Green’s or Franklin’s,
the inserted passage certainly underscores the stakes of the satire.
79. Franklin: Writings, 307–8.
80. See Isabel V. Hall’s Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany,
1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 111–16, 280–85,
for contemporaneous legal arguments in Germany about infanticide as
a consequence of juridical enforcement of a sexual double standard.
81. “Polly Baker,” 308.
C hapter 2
1. “A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty,” in American
Political Writing during the Founding Era: 1760–1805, ed. Charles
S. Hyneman and Donald Lutz (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983),
1:105, emphasis in original.
2. An examination of the broad range of political essay writing available
in the years leading up to the Revolution and the subsequent debates
about the form of the new American government is beyond the pur-
view of this chapter. The best introduction to these texts remains
Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Frank
Luther Mott’s exhaustive histories of writing in periodicals (A History
of American Magazines and American Journalism) help to provide a
broader context for the material production of those texts, and Hyne-
man and Lutz’s American Political Writing during the Founding Era
collects a rich range of political positions and essayistic styles. More
recent literary critical attention to magazine and newspaper writing—
particularly in the work of Jared Gardner—has proven salutary for
weaving together the material, historical, ideological, and rhetorical
elements of such essays.
3. See in particular, of course, Fliegelman’s Prodigals and Pilgrims, which
remains the most comprehensive and powerful exposition of this trans-
formation. Ivy Schweitzer has argued persuasively that the relevant term
Notes 155
of proximal affection is not filial but friendly: she explores the classical
models of friendship at work in early America, showing how the ethics
of sameness and difference, of the friend as “another self” and of the
effort to reach beyond the self, come to inflect writings ranging from
John Winthrop to Catharine Sedgwick. Perfecting Friendship: Politics
and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2006).
4. Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S.
Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 36.
5. Ibid., 58.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine: Collected Writings,
ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 22–23.
8. I do not mean to suggest that narrative inconsistency is a rarity in
Common Sense; as Robert Ferguson observes, contradiction is one
of the primary characteristics of the pamphlet, helping to explain its
endurance as a touchstone for Americans of all political persuasions.
See Robert A. Ferguson, “The Commonalities of Common Sense,” Wil-
liam and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 57, no. 3 (July 2000): 465–
504. Rather, I mean to point out what is emphasized in this particular
deviation.
9. Paine’s wording here is interesting, though: he refers not to an individ-
ual prostitute, whose morally besmirched body cannot be returned to
virginal purity, but to prostitution in general. What exactly an “inno-
cent prostitution” would have looked like is not entirely clear.
10. This discussion leaves aside, for the moment, the longstanding figura-
tion of the New World as a feminized body ripe for exploration, one
that simultaneously encourages and punishes those who penetrate her
and leaves aside as well the equally longstanding understanding of
women as possessions, such that sexual assault is understood as a prop-
erty crime committed by one man against another. For the Americas as
nurturing mother/docile virgin, see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the
Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); for the land-
scape as simultaneously sexually enticing and threatening, see Rebecca
Faery Blevins, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the
Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1999).
11. Even in a novel like Samuel Relf’s Infidelity, or, The Victims of Senti-
ment (Philadelphia: W. W. Woodward, 1797)—which, as the title sug-
gests, is quite interested in extramarital affections—extramarital desire
leads to murder and madness.
156 Notes
12. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 141, 148.
13. Sharon M. Harris, “Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette: Critiqu-
ing Franklin’s America,” in Redefining the Political Novel: American
Women Writers, 1797–1901, ed. Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: Univer-
sity of Tennessee Press, 1995), 1–22.
14. Anne Dalke, “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the
Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 23, no. 2 (1988):
189.
15. Nancy Armstrong, “Why Daughters Die: The Racial Logic of Amer-
ican Sentimentalism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7, no. 2 (1994): 9.
In related contexts, Fliegelman has argued that in the early American
novel, the family models the state (Prodigals and Pilgrims), and Shirley
Samuels expands upon this claim to argue that the state figured “much
of its political identity through the language of heterosexual and patri-
archal family relations” (Romances of the Republic: Women, the Fam-
ily, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation [New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996], 19).
16. Stern, The Plight of Feeling, 2.
17. Ibid., 31.
18. Barnes, States of Sympathy, 2.
19. Ibid., 2.
20. There’s a long and complicated history here, both among eighteenth-
century philosophical theories of sentiment and sympathy and in the
efforts of twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars to wrestle with
the implications of such texts, of their literary counterparts, and of lived
experience, in the way that we think about the relationship between
privacy and sentiment. To trace very quickly the origins of some of this
multifariousness, we might look at the opening paragraphs of Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), where he describes sympa-
thy as at once explicitly physiological and internal (“our senses . . . never
did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person”) and also some-
how intersubjective (we “chang[e] places in fancy with the sufferer”—
whereby, presumably we have left ourselves in order to “enter as it were
into his body” through the faculty of imagination) and also exterior to
other persons and physiological imaginings altogether (“Sympathy . . .
denote[s] our fellow feeling with any passion whatever”; Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Mac-
Fie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 9, 10). Smith’s readers have
tended to resolve these tensions into one or another position without
carefully attending to the counterweight of the other. We might also
look at the centrality of the Habermasian public sphere to mid- and
later twentieth-century conceptions of eighteenth-century discourse
and its affective register (or apparent lack thereof) and the effect of
Notes 157
influential feminist critiques of Habermas—Seyla Benhabib, Nancy

Fraser, Joan Landes, Mary P. Ryan—to get some sense of the ways
in which notions of privacy and sentiment have been intertwined and
variously emphasized over the years.
21. Barnes, States of Sympathy, 3.
22. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Enqui-
ries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles
of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd ed. Revised by P. H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 261.
23. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 219.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 221.
26. William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy: Or, the Triumph of Nature,
Founded in Truth, ed. Carla Mulford (1789; repr., New York: Pen-
guin Books, 1996), 5. Some critics have made much of The Power of
Sympathy’s status as the “first American novel”; see, for example, Rich-
ard Walser’s 1982 essay on “Boston’s Reception of the First Ameri-
can Novel,” Early American Literature, 17 (1982): 65–74, or Dalke’s
essay “Original Vice,” 188.
27. Bryan Waterman rightly notes the idea of political economy invoked
here and convincingly suggests the way that scandal served local pur-
poses as much as notional ones. See his “‘Heaven Defend Us from
Such Fathers’: Perez Morton and the Politics of Seduction,” in Atlan-
tic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Toni Bowers and Tita
Chico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 49–64.
28. There is an older sense of complacency, available at the time, as
complaisance—the willingness and desire to please. Self-satisfaction
seems more accurate a reading here, but being eager to please (one-
self?) does not seem off-track either.
29. Brown, The Power of Sympathy, 92.
30. Ibid., 11, 34.
31. Ibid., 92.
32. Ibid., 47–48.
33. We might keep in mind here the eighteenth-century nomenclature of
the family, which substituted “friend” for “parent” almost seamlessly,
and the tradition that continues today of understanding one’s sibling’s
spouse to be one’s sibling as well—making any marriage look at least
discursively incestuous. We might also think about the explicitly con-
tractual model of marriage prior to the advent of the companionate
marriage, in which alliances were formed on the basis of consolidating
property and keeping it within the family (at the distance of, say, a first
cousin). If the companionate marriage, based in principle upon notions
of affection rather than those of ownership, is painted as the freely cho-
sen, affectively rich inverse of the patriarchal marriage, in this context it
158 Notes
looks more and more like a replication of precisely the same economic
model of partnership, particularly when we consider that the affec-
tions were understood to be bestowed on those one knew best: family
members. Thus the companionate marriage seems to reproduce both
the economic and incestuous functions of the patriarchal marriage in a
way that remains with us today.
34. This Maria bears a striking resemblance to the Maria of Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768; repr., London: Penguin,
1967), down to her white robe and flowing brown hair. As such, she
is a stand-in for images of sentiment that proliferated over the course
of the eighteenth century. It is, of course, significant, however, that
Brown changes the precipitating event of her madness. Sterne’s Maria
is made mad by her lover’s abandonment (brought on, according to
Tristram Shandy, “by the intrigues of the curate of the parish”); The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–67; repr., London: Pen-
guin, 1967), 600. Brown’s Maria loses her lover not through clerical
intrigue but rather through outright sexual theft. Parish fathers have
been replaced by unknown “ruffians,” though, as the rest of the novel
indicates, biological fathers are never far distant.
35. For an explanation of just how far this story spread, in how many
guises, and for what purposes, see again Waterman, “‘Heaven Defend
Us.’”
36. Brown, The Power of Sympathy, 39. Ophelia’s name is one of many
Shakespearean references in these novels, all of which seem partial to
Hamlet, that melodrama of inaction and self-conscious theatricality.
Jonathan Kramnick has commented on Charlotte Lennox’s 1753–54
critique of Shakespeare on the grounds of implausibility—a critique
that he notes “revers[es] the sequence of cultural causality” (49) by
arguing for the greater believability of Shakespeare’s source material
and that, in so doing, launches a defense of the novel in contradis-
tinction to Shakespearian poetics. The issue of theatricality is deeply
implicated in early national writings—one of the most famous early
American pieces is itself a play commenting on the propriety of both
class and national intermixture (Royall Tyler’s The Contrast); Susanna
Rowson, author of Charlotte Temple, was a playwright and actress long
before she was a novelist; both The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette
include letters reflecting—none too favorably—on the status of the
American theater as an educational tool for young women; and the
novel’s position with respect to flirtation and seduction frequently
critiques both for their self-conscious staginess. As Charles Shattuck
notes in his Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to
Edwin Booth (Amherst: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), the period
between the peace of 1783 and the War of 1812 was one short on
Shakespearean theatrical production, in part because of audience desire
Notes 159
for contemporary works unavailable during the Revolution and in part

because of puritanical bans on plays. In Philadelphia, for example, a
ban was in effect until 1789, which meant that “the actors had to
resort to the old dodge of billing plays as ‘Moral Lectures’” (16). Thus
Hamlet was advertised as a lesson in “Filial Piety”—a denomination
that suggests an easy relation between Hamlet (and Lear, which was
billed as a lecture on “The Crime of Filial Ingratitude”) and concerns
about appropriate familial relations—and concerns about incest.
38. See the discussion of wives’ sisters in Chapter 4.
39. Civil Spy’s argument held in part that the events alleged concerning
the Martin family were said to take place in Rhode Island rather than
Boston and thus were not “founded in truth” as the frontispiece prom-
ised. It bears noting that Rhode Island did not ratify the Constitution
until May 1790; thus Rhode Island was not part of the union when
Brown was writing. The relocation of apparently widely known facts
from one of the earliest adapters to a state not yet federally governed
suggests, perhaps, that a relationship is being posited between families
without appropriate familial feeling and governments without appro-
priate federal governance. There’s an argument to be made here that
this suggests a patriarchal model of government, with the federal gov-
ernment as head of the family of states, indicating that the father has
lost control of his family as Ophelia’s father lost control over her. I
am skeptical of such a reading, however, since the focus isn’t really on
the father, except insofar as he exercises excessive paternal authority,
resulting in his daughter’s death. Rhode Island’s history as a corporate
chartered colony made it a state peculiarly independent of unionizing
efforts. As Gordon Wood explains, while the other states were writ-
ing up and adopting new state constitutions in 1776, “Rhode Island
and Connecticut were already republics in fact, and thus they simply
confined themselves to eliminating all mention of royal authority in
their charters”; Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History
(New York: Modern Library, 2002), 65–66. Rhode Island’s political
status thus indicates a reluctance to obey authority that Brown may
have been trying to tap in his retelling of the Apthorp/Morton affair.
41. Ibid., 32.
42. Ibid., 33.
43. Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist, vol. 1 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 152.
44. Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Whar-
ton; A Novel; Founded on Fact (by a Lady of Massachusetts), ed. Cathy
N. Davidson, Early American Women Writers Series (1797; repr., New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 23.
160 Notes
45. Ibid., 5.
46. Foster, Coquette, 14.
47. Ibid. It bears noting here that virtually all of The Coquette’s critics have
accepted the assessment the novel offers of Eliza’s behavior—that she
does not heed the advice of her friends. Even a cursory examination,
however, of this “advice” suggests that in fact her friends provide her
with very little information to which to attend in the first place.
48. Ibid., 7, 16.
49. Ibid., 18, 23.
50. Ibid., 13.
51. Rice, Transformation, 168.
52. Foster, Coquette, 6.
53. Ibid., 25.
54. Ibid., 26.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 24.
57. Ibid., 54.
58. Laura Korobkin has persuasively argued that Eliza’s desires are not for
liberty but for luxury and that the novel instructs its readers not in the
value of marriage but the value of republican simplicity. The social con-
text in which she seeks such excess, however, does not seem to be one
well adapted to curb or correct her desires, and this is the point I’d like
to emphasize. See Laura Korobkin, “‘Can Your Volatile Daughter Ever
Acquire Your Wisdom?’: Luxury and False Ideals in The Coquette,”
Early American Literature 41, no. 1 (2006): 79–107.
59. Foster, Coquette, 57, emphasis added.
60. Ibid., 13.
61. Ibid., 53.
62. Ibid., 41, emphases added.
63. Ibid., 163, emphasis added.
64. Ibid., 115.
65. Ibid., 35.
66. Ibid., 31, 35, 51.
67. Ibid., 50.
68. Ibid., 165.
69. Ibid., 141.
70. Ibid., 24.
71. Ibid., 24–25.
Chapter 3
1. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, ed. Mary
Chapman (1799; repr., Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1999),
246. Chris Roulston identifies the relationship between Sophia
Notes 161
Courtland, Constantia Dudley, and Ormond as an instance of the

“threesome”—a heterosexual couple and a female friend—that enabled
eighteenth-century novels to “reimagin[e] the experience of married
life without questioning its foundations”; Narrating Marriage in
Eighteenth-Century England and France (Surry: Ashgate, 2010), 187.
2. Charles Brockden Brown, “A Series of Original Letters: Letter V,”
Weekly Magazine of Original Essays, Fugitive Pieces, and Interesting
Intelligence, May 5, 1798, 10; Brown, “A Series of Original Letters:
Letter III,” Weekly Magazine, April 28, 1798, 391. (Though these
pieces are fictional, their general tone reflects the tenor of much of
Brown’s writing on the law.) Brown’s legal training is difficult to
reconstruct. He apprenticed for six years (1787–92) under Alexander
Wilcocks, but records establishing what he might actually have read
or worked on are scarce. For discussions of the influence of Brown’s
legal training on his writing, see especially Robert Ferguson, Law and
Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984). For general studies of legal education and practice in the
early republic, see Lawrence M. Friedman, History of American Law
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005); Kermit L. Hall, Magic Mirror:
Law in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Richard B. Mor-
ris, Studies in the History of American Law, with Special Reference to the
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1930).
3. Laura Hanft Korobkin, “Murder by Madman: Criminal Responsibil-
ity, Law, and Judgment in Wieland,” American Literature 72, no. 4
(December 2000): 726, 725.
4. I do not disagree with Robert Ferguson’s observation that “Brown’s
repeated theme is the inability of law to control or even to define
behavior.” In some ways, this chapter could be taken as an extension of
that claim. My interest, however, lies less with Brown’s concerns about
behavior than with his perennial fascinations with motives for, inten-
tions about, and analyses of behavior: deliberation rather than action.
Ferguson, Law and Letters, 139.
5. Michelle Burnham’s essay on the “anticipatory” nature of Clara How-
ard seems consonant with this reading: the novel is always tending
toward a futurity promised but not delivered. Michelle Burnham,
“Epistolarity, Anticipation, and Revolution in Clara Howard,” in
Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in
the Early Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath, and Stephen
Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).
6. Karen Weyler suggests that American readers’ and writers’ embrace of
the epistolary mode after it had gone out of fashion in England was
162 Notes
an ideological persistence: epistolary novels illustrate the self-reflection

that so many American novels emphasized, and they do so in a way
that ensures that “the individual’s conduct is constantly mirrored and
scrutinized.” This insistence, I would add, highlights the influence
of the Puritan tradition of spiritual autobiography and, in Brown’s
case, is consonant with both a Quaker insistence on consistent self-
examination and a “Woldwinite” emphasis on the importance of rea-
sonable reflection, open to varying opinions and to change over time,
in effecting sustained social change. Karen Weyler, Intricate Relations:
Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814 (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 2004), 32. For the Woldwinite writers,
see Philip Barnard and Steven Shapiro’s excellent introductions to their
editions of Edgar Huntly and Arthur Mervyn (Indianapolis: Hackett,
2006, 2008), and Steven Shapiro’s The Culture and Commerce of the
Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), esp. 211–29. Shapiro
(227) describes how Brown habitually placed his characters in emo-
tionally fraught or life-threatening situations and then, at the height
of tension, had them “break into moments of forensic contempla-
tion of the event’s cause and pathways of potential action”—a habit
designed, Shapiro argues, first to involve the reader and then, once
hooked, to ask that reader to think about how he or she would act
under similar circumstances. This reading suggests at least one reason
for Brown to have written novels in an epistolary and sentimental vein:
he relied on generic forms to encourage his readers’ own processes of
self-reflection.
7. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference between History and
Romance,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, ed. Alfred Weber and Wolf-
gang Schäfer (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 85, 84.
8. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of
Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008), 4.
9. Charles Brockden Brown, Clara Howard in a Series of Letters (1801;
repr., Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1963), 289.
10. Ibid., 290, emphasis in original.
11. Paul Allen, The Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1814; repr., Delmar,
NY: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), 14.
12. Powell’s Essay upon Contracts (1790), the first legal treatise devoted
exclusively to contract law, puts it this way: “Law always regards the
intentions of the parties, and will apply the words [of an instrument] to
that which, in common presumption, may be taken to be their intent:
And the agreement of the minds of the parties is the only thing the
law respects in contracts.” John Joseph Powell, Essay upon the Law of
Notes 163
Contracts and Agreements, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson and T. Whiel-

don, 1790), 1:244.
13. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 160–210. This, Hor-
witz’s first book, has been challenged, repeatedly and convincingly,
but it remains the text with which historians of eighteenth-century law
must contend. His assertion that the way jurists and lawyers conceived
of contract changed during the late eighteenth century—and that this
change coincided with a discussion of how far equity’s purview might
extend—nevertheless remains a reasonably uncontroversial claim.
14. Scholars who have examined Brown’s legal writing grow understand-
ably exasperated by such sweeping deferrals of statutory to equitable
authority: Robert Ferguson grouses that those of Brown’s “legal exer-
cises that remain to us read more like daydreams; they resort melodra-
matically to issues of equity over the letter of the law.” Such deferrals
nevertheless make a kind of biographical sense. Raised as a Quaker,
Brown was used to having a Dissenter’s relation to various modes of
civil and religious authority; challenging statutory primacy through
recourse to equity would seem entirely reasonable to one raised with
the idea that inward revelation could supersede scripture. They also
indicate a consistent theoretical sensibility, one that privileges intention
and interpretation over the precise letter of the law.
15. Charles Brockden Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798; repr., Albany,
NY: NCUP, 1995), 65, 66. Alcuin and Mrs. Carter speak initially more
of a social contract than of a private contract; Mrs. Carter defends the
right of women to vote. Alcuin, however, responds, “May not marriage
be said to take away both the liberty and the property of women? at
least, does it not bereave them of that independent judgment which it is
just to demand from a voter?” (68–69). Though she does point out that
some married women do own property, Mrs. Carter does not dispute
Alcuin’s central propositions, arguing instead that at least women “who
are indisputably single, affluent, and independent” (69) ought to be able
to vote. Their conversation shifts, that is, from the despotic rule of a
government to the despotic rule of a husband. Alcuin’s insistence that
people should be governed by equity rather than by statutory law, in the
context of their entire conversation, effectively suggests that women may
be contractually compelled to obey their husbands but that this compul-
sion is bearable because those husbands will act under rules of equity,
not under the terms of the marriage contract.
16. Brown, quoted in Allen, Life of Charles Brockden Brown, 34–35.
17. The case on which Brown delivered this decision is pertinent to the late
novels—especially Jane Talbot—as well. The imaginary case involves
a woman who, thinking herself widowed, acquired and disposed of
property, including leaving it to others in her will, but whose husband
reappeared after her death. Brown was asked to decide whether her
164 Notes
devises (her willing of the property to others) were legitimate. Drawing

liberally on Blackstone’s discussion of equity courts, and noting that
even courts of law are required to interpret the meaning rather than
merely the letter of the law, he observed that meaning must reside in
the intention of the lawmakers, and thus while the case is within the
letter of the law, it is out of the equity of the law.
18. Brown, Alcuin, 66; Brown, Alcuin, 62–63.
19. Ibid., 66.
20. Ibid., 93.
21. Ariela Dubler’s article “Exceptions to the General Rule: Unmarried
Women and the ‘Constitution of the Family,’” Theoretical Inquiries in
Law 4 (2003): 797–816, explores the way this notion of “virtual repre-
sentation” (808) contributed to the social invisibility of single women.
22. Barnes, States of Sympathy. Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds has pointed
out that the apparently “incestuous” relationship between Theodore
and Clara Wieland seems more a function of economics than erot-
ics: “Sustained by the wealth of previous generations, they are secured
from any risky, free-market exchange beyond the estate, exchanges
of either kinship or finance.” Her reading of Brown’s major novels
as dramatizing a late eighteenth-century shift from a land-based to a
credit-based economy suggests a way to read Clara Howard and Jane
Talbot as seeking to suture these models together: both Philip Stan-
ley and Henry Colden seek to “inherit” from vaguely parental figures
(Mr. Howard and Mrs. Fielder), not through an actual inheritance (a
vertical economic relation) but by marrying those figures’ heiresses
(a horizontal relation). Elizabeth Jane Wall Hinds, Private Property:
Charles Brockden Brown’s Gendered Economics of Virtue (Newark: Uni-
versity of Delaware Press, 1997), 105.
23. Brown, Clara Howard, 316.
24. Ibid., 327.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 360–61.
27. Zephaniah Swift, A System of the Laws of the State of Connecticut (Wind-
ham, CT: John Byrne, 1795), 194.
28. Donald Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown, rev. ed. (Boston: Twayne,
1991), 97.
29. Brown, Clara Howard, 409.
30. Alexander Hamilton, Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C.
Syrett et al., 26 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–
79), 1:412.
31. Storing, The Complete Anti-Federalist, 2:230, 6:153.
32. This is where I part ways with Bruce Burgett’s reading of Clara How-
ard. His insistence on the liberatory possibilities of Clara’s “ungen-
dered sentimental citizenship” causes him to elide the difference
Notes 165
between inverted gender roles and ungendered roles. In his account,

the novel both valorizes Clara’s abstract, “sexually indifferent” reason
and stages a “battle of the sexes” between her (traditionally mascu-
line) reason and Edward Hartley’s (Philip Stanley; traditionally femi-
nine) sentiment. Maintaining both positions leads Burgett to strip
certain categories of gender when it is crucial—to the novel and to
the larger world within which it was produced—that these categories
be gendered. Most tellingly, he argues that Clara, by virtue of being
a “wealthy, lettered, and unmarried woman” is “publicly powerful”—
indeed, that her power extends to “social and political privilege.” But
surely any idea of “citizenship” Clara represents does not encompass
political privilege: however “ungendered” that citizenship might be,
and however normatively masculine her reason might be, she still
wouldn’t have been able to, for example, vote. Burgett, Sentimental
Bodies, 117, 118, 127, 128, 132.
33. Charles Brockden Brown, Jane Talbot: A Novel (1801; repr., Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1963), 181.
34. If Horwitz’s claim that “speculation” helped transform jurists’ under-
standing of contract is correct, then Frank’s form of gambling becomes
quite pertinent. Jennifer Baker has argued that many eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Americans saw debt and speculation as socially use-
ful, even valuable, because they helped solidify the networks of trust
and reputation that knit communities together. Jennifer J. Baker, Secur-
ing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making
of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
Jane’s tone of horror at Frank’s activities and the way that Frank bleeds
the family dry suggest a less optimistic view, perhaps to be accounted
for by Brown’s having recently joined his family’s always faltering mer-
cantile business.
35. Brown, Jane Talbot, 22.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Ibid., 17.
38. Ibid., 30, 31.
39. In this respect, I am in complete agreement with Frank Shuffleton’s
essay on the deliberative quality of Jane Talbot’s epistolarity. His claim
that “Brown’s democratic lessons emerge not out of the content, the
‘moral,’ of his fiction, but out of the act of reading itself and the con-
tinuous judgments it simultaneously necessitates and problematizes”
seems to me a succinct way to formulate the novel’s structural relation
to democratic determination. Frank Shuffleton, “Juries of the Com-
mon Reader: Crime and Judgment in the Novels of Charles Brockden
Brown,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics and
Sexuality in the Early Republic, ed. Philip Barnard, Mark L. Kamrath,
166 Notes
and Stephen Shapiro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004),

89.
40. Brown, Jane Talbot, 93, 132.
41. Ibid., 132.
42. Ibid., 70.
43. Ibid., 140.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 81–82.
47. Jared Gardner’s reading of the end of Clara Howard points in a simi-
lar direction: he argues that “it is as if Brown is experimenting with a
novel that would refuse all judgments.” Jared Gardner, “The Literary
Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel,” English
Literary History 67 (2000): 764, emphasis in original.
48. Ibid., 67.
49. Ibid., 51.
50. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year
1793, ed. Sydney J. Krause and S. W. Reid, rev. ed. (Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press, 2002), 3.
51. Ibid., 353.
52. Ibid., 378.
53. See Russo for an example of this reading of the novel as an indictment
of Mervyn’s character.
54. The adjective “prepossessing” offers some legal and economic conno-
tations: what is it that the girls did not possess before Mervyn arrived?
55. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 386.
56. Ibid., 387.
C hapter 4
1. William Cullen Bryant, “Monument Mountain,” in The Poetical Works
of William Cullen Bryant, Roslyn ed. (1903; repr., New York: AMS,
1969), 63–66. Quotations from lines 50, 96, 60, and 61. Originally
published in United States Literary Gazette, September 15, 1824.
2. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Mas-
sachusetts, ed. Mary Kelley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1987), 91, 93, 94; Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 93.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. See, for example, Michael Bell, “History and Romance Convention
in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” American Quarterly 22 (Sum-
mer 1970): 213–21; Christopher Castiliglia, Bound and Determined:
Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Row-
landson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
Sandra Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney’s Sketch of
Notes 167
Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” in Redefining the

Political Novel: American Women Writers: 1797–1901, ed. Sharon M.
Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995): 43–65; Mary
Kelley, introduction to Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts,
ed. Mary Kelley (1827; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1987); Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White: Reading
“Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1992); and Philip Gould, “Catharine Sedgwick’s ‘Recital’
of the Pequod War,” American Literature 66 (December 1994):
641–62.
5. Scholars challenging the widespread critical view that the novel
endorses equality include Jeffrey Insko, “Anachronistic Imaginings:
Hope Leslie’s Challenge to Historicism,” American Literary History 16
(Summer 2004): 179–207; Maureen Tuthill, “Land and the Narra-
tive Site in Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” ATQ 19 (June 2005): 95–113;
and Karen Woods Weierman, One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Mar-
riage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 63–78. On the novel’s
implications for citizenship, see Shirley Samuels, “Women, Blood, and
Contract,” American Literary History 20 (Spring/Summer 2008):
57–75; Maria Karafilis, “Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie: The
Crisis between Ethical Political Action and US Literary Nationalism in
the New Republic,” ATQ 12 (December 1998): 327–44. On the rela-
tions between the sexes, see Judith Fetterley, “‘My Sister! My Sister!’:
The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” American Litera-
ture 70 (September 1998): 491–516; Samuels, “Women, Blood, and
Contract.”
6. Leviticus 18 does not mention sexual desire, but because the prohibi-
tion in effect precludes sexual contact, it is striking that, for a pre-
sumably male audience, the father is listed first. One interpretation
is that the father’s “nakedness” exposes his weakness, with the prohi-
bition thus being against sons usurping their fathers’ powers—a sort
of biblical précis of Totem and Taboo. Such an interpretation fails to
explain why a list of exclusively female relatives follows, however. On
the mutually constitutive categories of incest and kinship, see David
Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1984); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship
between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)
and “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?,” Differences: A Jour-
nal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15 (Spring 2002): 14–44; and Petar
Ramadanovic, “The Non-Meaning of Incest or, How Natural Culture
Is,” Postmodern Culture 20 (January 2010), accessed through Project
Muse, March 12, 2013.
168 Notes
7. “Abomination” is how the King James Version of the Bible (from

which all biblical verses in this essay are quoted) translates the Hebrew
word “tow’ebah.” “Tow’ebah” refers to ritual uncleanness—the per-
formance of the customs of another culture (in Leviticus, the perfor-
mance by Hebrews of Canaanite practices), participation in which
blurs the boundaries between tribes or ethnic groups.
8. My discussion of eighteenth-century accounts of incest is limited to
those of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham, the former because of the
consonance between his influential Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)
and his understanding of incest as an effect of proximity, the latter
because of his impact on early American legal philosophy. For a brief but
wider-ranging discussion, see Alfred Owen Aldridge, “The Meaning of
Incest from Hutcheson to Gibbon,” Ethics 61 (July 1951): 309–13.
As Aldridge makes clear, the stakes of eighteenth-century philosophical
discussions of incest remain clearly rooted in the question of whether
the taboo is natural (either a natural aversion [Hutcheson] or a natu-
ral desire [Paley]) or a matter of custom (Mandeville, Bolingbroke).
Bentham and Smith, who both view the taboo as natural, suggest that
a single cause—familiarity—induces two opposed effects: desire and
repugnance.
9. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
1982), 164.
10. Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation, trans. from the French of Eti-
enne Dumont by Richard Hildreth (Boston: Weeks Jordan, 1840),
257. A Swiss “disciple” of Bentham’s published the first version of the
book, translated from Bentham’s incomplete manuscript but in (some)
collaboration with him, and Bentham never went back to revise his
work; therefore, the French version is considered to be the one that
most nearly reflects Bentham’s views.
11. Ibid., 259.
12. Ibid., 259–60.
13. Ibid., 260.
14. I am grateful to Randy Trumbach for pushing me to consider the
implications of this fact.
15. See Brian Connolly, “‘Every Family Become a School of Abominable
Impurity’: Incest and Theology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the
Early Republic 30 (Fall 2010): 413–42, for a discussion of the cultural
and political anxieties elaborated in public discussions of the “marriage
question.” As he points out, this debate “leads us into a world where
the meaning of incest and its prohibition was never clear, forcing a
reconceptualization of incest” (414). On the difficulties of reading the
Levitical incest prohibitions, see Calum Carmichael, Law, Legend, and
Incest in the Bible: Leviticus, 18–20 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997); Jonathan Ziskind, “The Missing Daughter in Leviticus XVIII,”
Notes 169
Vetus Testamentum 46 (January 1996): 125–30; and Stephen Bigger,

“Family Laws of Leviticus in Their Setting,” Journal of Biblical Litera-
ture 98 (June 1979): 187–203. For a discussion of the ways in which
debates over incest exceeded Levitican interpretations, see Randolph
Trumbach, “Kindred and Patrilineage,” in The Rise of the Egalitar-
ian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-
Century England (New York: Academic, 1978), 13–33.
16. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James
Harle Bell and John Richard Von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham, rev.
ed. (Boston: Beacon, 1971), 10.
17. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (Phila-
delphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 240. Werner Sollors (in Neither
Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Litera-
ture [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997]) locates an
initial pairing of incest and miscegenation in the biblical story of Ham,
which, as he shows, is carried forward in twentieth-century literary
representations of interracial sexual relations. See especially chap. 10,
“Incest and Miscegenation” (285–335), in which he traces a relation-
ship between the two through pro- and antislavery literature of the
Americas. Similarly, Sander Gilman points out (in The Case of Sigmund
Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle [Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993]) that by the end of the nineteenth
century, the understanding of Blutschande had shifted from blood
pollution through incest to racial pollution through miscegenation
(169–215). Elise Lemire argues (in “Miscegenation”: Making Race in
America [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002]) that
race became a sexual category during the early national and antebellum
eras, at which point it became all the easier to associate miscegenation
with incest.
18. See, for example, Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and
Mulattoes in the United States (1980; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1995); Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations:
Race in the Making of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 1993); Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism:
Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) as well as his Neither Black
nor White; Lemire, “Miscegenation”; Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court
I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Robert S. Levine, Dislocating
Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary
Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Scholars have recently begun to attend more directly to Native-
Anglo interracial relations, as exemplified in such books as Betsy Erk-
kila, Mixed Blood and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature
170 Notes
from the Revolution to the Culture Wars (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Andrew Frank, Creeks and Southerners:
Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2005); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race
and the Unmaking of an American Family (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006); and Weierman, One Nation, One Blood.
19. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (Bedford, MA:
Applewood Books, 1997), 52, 53.
20. An Act for Suppressing Outlying Slaves, Act XVI (April 1691), in The
Statutes at Large, Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from
the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, vol. 3, ed. William
Waller Hening (Philadelphia: Thomas Desilver, 1823), 86.
21. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 27.
22. Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 15–50.
23. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” Bentley’s Mis-
cellany 34 (1853): 421.
24. Freeman’s case was Brom and Bett v. John Ashley (1781), Supreme
Judicial Court of Massachusetts case no. 159966. In a nuanced read-
ing of the several trials of the late eighteenth century that are variously
supposed to have ended slavery in Massachusetts, Elaine MacEacheren
argues that the process of abolition in Massachusetts was a gradual one,
with each case, and the 1780 constitution, contributing a local compo-
nent to the larger argument. See her “Emancipation of Slavery in Mas-
sachusetts: A Reexamination 1770–1790,” Journal of Negro History 55
(October 1970): 289–306. See as well Emily Blanck, “Seventeen
Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom
in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75 (March 2002): 24–51;
A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race and the Ameri-
can Legal Process (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 91–98;
James M. Rosenthal, “Free Soil in Berkshire County, 1781,” New Eng-
land Quarterly 10 (December 1937): 781–85; and Arthur Zilversmit,
“Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachu-
setts,” William and Mary Quarterly 25 (October 1968): 614–24, for
discussions of the 1783 Quok Walker case, which is largely viewed to
have ended slavery in Massachusetts, in relation to Freeman’s case.
25. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobi-
ography and Journal of Catherine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary Kelley
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 25.
26. Ibid., 70.
Notes 171
27. The gesture is reminiscent of eighteenth-century incest theorists, who

distinguish “innocent caresses” of familial “friendship” from the “nov-
elty” necessary to produce desire.
28. Sedgwick, “Slavery in New England,” 421; Sedgwick, “Slavery in New
England,” 419.
29. Ibid., 418. Hannah Ashley was the wife of Colonel John Ashley, Free-
man’s slave master and a politically and economically powerful man in
eighteenth-century western Massachusetts.
30. Ibid., 419; Ibid., 418, 419.
31. Ibid., 420.
32. Irene Q. Brown and Richard Brown, “Tales from the Vault: Incest in
the Archives,” Common-Place 1, no. 1 (September 2000), http://www
.common-place.org/vol-01/no-01/tales.
33. I’ve spent a fair amount of time tracing court records in Berkshire and
Hampshire Counties between the mid-1750s (when Elizabeth Free-
man would have been about ten) and 1781 (when Brom and Bett v.
Ashley was decided), to no avail, although it turns out that such incest
cases were not as rare as one might imagine. Consider, for example,
The Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey (1815), which report Bailey’s hus-
band’s violence and his sexual assault of their daughter (reprinted in
Anne Taves, Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England:
The Memoirs of Abigail Abbott Bailey [Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1989]). See also note 40.
34. Irene Q. Brown and Richard Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler:
A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 2003), 282, 283.
35. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, “Daniel Prime,” in Tales and Sketches: Sec-
ond Series (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1844), 215.
36. Ibid., 219, 223, 228, 229.
37. Ibid., 234–35.
38. Ibid., 231.
39. Ibid., 220.
40. Although I have treated the sexualized narratives of “Daniel Prime”
and “Slavery in New England” as thinly veiled accounts of the Wheeler
case, several elements suggest that the two relations may well refer
to different cases. Unresolved questions include the quarter-century
gap between the last possible year Freeman could have been work-
ing for the Ashleys (1781) and the year Betsy Wheeler reported her
rape (1805); Tamor Graham’s apparent pregnancy, when no evidence
suggests that Betsy Wheeler was pregnant by her father; the fact that
Tamor reports the crime against her to John Ashley, while Wheeler
reports her assault to Justice Walker; the fact that Wheeler’s case is
tried in Berkshire County, whereas Tamor’s case, there being no venue
for capital cases in Berkshire County, was tried in Hampshire County
172 Notes
(a Superior Court of Judicature did not sit in the Berkshires until the
county was formally organized in 1761, indicating that the case would
have been tried prior to 1761).
41. On the intersection of race and rape in the early republic, see Sharon
Block, “Rape and Race in Colonial Newspapers, 1728–1776,” Jour-
nalism History 27 (Winter 2001/2002): 146–56, and Rape and Sex-
ual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 163–209; Daniel A. Cohen, “Social Injustice, Sexual
Violence, Spiritual Transcendence: Interracial Rape in Early American
Crime Literature, 1767–1817,” William and Mary Quarterly 56 (July
1999): 481–526.
42. Sedgwick, Power of Her Sympathy, 125–26.
43. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 7.
44. Ibid., 9.
45. Ibid., 8.
46. Ibid., 13.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., 199.
49. Ibid., 29.
50. Ibid., 29.
51. Ibid., 69.
52. Ibid., 76, 83.
53. Ibid., 76.
54. That a member of similar age is made a parent to the other indicates
the collapse of the particularity of generation; that Oneco becomes a
mother indicates the mutability of gender. Sedgwick is not always con-
sistent about these meldings, but the novel tends to favor the blurring
of generational boundaries, as suggested by William Fletcher’s rela-
tionship with Hope.
56. Ibid., 31, 33.
57. Ibid., 120.
58. Ibid., 121.
59. Ibid., 342.
60. See, in this context, Gary Dyer, “The Transatlantic Pocahontas,”
Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30 (December 2008): 301–22, which
argues in part that Hope Leslie retells the Pocahontas story in part as a
way of repositioning Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe in America.
62. Ibid., 152.
63. Ibid., 115.
64. Ibid., 100.
65. Ibid., 101.
66. Ibid.
Notes 173
67. Ibid., 100.

68. Ibid., 101.
69. Ibid.
70. See, for example, Kelley’s introduction—“Hope and Magawisca . . .
serve as doubles, as sisters of the soul” (xxii)—as well as Zagarell’s
“Expanding America” and Fetterly’s “‘My Sister! My Sister!’”
72. Ibid., 287.
73. Ibid., 153; Ibid., 121; Ibid., 120.
74. The novel consistently conflates dress and identity, so that “when, at
a second glance, [Hope] saw [Faith] in her savage attire, fondly lean-
ing on Oneco’s shoulder, her heart died within her; a sickening feel-
ing came over her, an unthought of revolting of nature” (227). Dress
overcomes the power of “nature” (here, the sibling relationship) to
produce revulsion. See Quentin Miller, “‘A Tyrannically Democratic
Force’: The Symbolic and Cultural Function of Clothing in Catharine
Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” Legacy 19 (2002): 121–36, and Gus-
tavus Stadler, “Magawisca’s Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in
Hope Leslie,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12 (1999): 41–56.
75. Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, 338–39.
76. Ibid., 330.
77. Ibid., 214.
78. Ibid., 114.
79. Ibid., 272.
80. Ibid., 349–50. Sedgwick is paraphrasing line 31 of Oliver Goldsmith’s
“Retaliation” (1774).
81. Stern, The Plight of Feeling, 29.
82. Barnes, States of Sympathy, 3, 74.
83. Ibid., 42.
C hapter 5
1. Jason Stupp observes of such displays that “while claiming to celebrate
freedom, the performances simultaneously reinforced white superiority
and situated white spectators as moral redeemers who could participate
in the horrors of slavery without endangering their religious beliefs”
(72). Stupp, “Slavery and the Theatre of History: Ritual Performance
on the Auction Block,” Theatre Journal 63 (2011). See also Heather
S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861:
Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
2. Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher [Eunice], “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in
Plymouth Pulpit,” Ladies’ Home Journal 14, no. 1 (December 1896): 5–6,
http://search.proquest.com/docview/137006159?accountid=147304.
174 Notes
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 6.
5. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of
Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Three Leaves, 2006).
6. See Nancy Bentley’s “Marriage as Treason: Polygamy, Nation, and
The Novel,” in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald Pease and
Robyn Wiegman, New Americanists (Durham: Duke University Press,
2002), 341–70, for a fascinating account of another limit-case struc-
turing American identity against imaginatively troubling marriages.
She argues that “the defeat of polygamy . . . made good on sentimen-
talists’ critique of patriarchal familialism and ushered in measurable
advances for women” (343). While I would argue that the domestic
novel, as this chapter indicates, is hardly incompatible with patriarchal
familialism, her essay details with precision and care the ways in which
racialized and sexualized bodies produced a language of bondage that
threatened to undermine a notion treasured by domestic writers: the
importance of women’s consent.
7. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey; Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue
Rewarded (Manchester: Russell and Allen: 1811), 138; Brown, The
Power of Sympathy.
8. Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists of the Old South: Defenders of South-
ern Culture, Southern Literary Studies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1992), 18–22.
9. Ibid., 22, 23.
10. In such novels, the land, rather than the house, would come to repre-
sent the domestic.
11. This oversimplifies patriarchalism significantly. Blackstone, for example,
actually insists the relationships—and the power dynamics that struc-
ture them—must be different. And Aristotle certainly says as much in
the Republic, too: the family as basis for the state doesn’t condense all
relationships to the same relationship. But this condensation is pre-
cisely what happens in the anti-Tom novels and seems grounded in the
idea that a single figure hinges the varied relationships and constituent
powers.
12. Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America,
1701–1840 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); David Eric-
son, The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in
Antebellum America (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
13. See Russ Castronovo’s “Incidents in the Life of a White Woman:
Economies of Race and Gender in the Antebellum Nation,” American
Literary History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 239–65, for a clear-sighted
argument about the ways in which proslavery novels rewrote the tropes
of slave narratives as narratives about white women.
14. Dillon, The Gender of Freedom, 197.
Notes 175
15. Ibid., 197, 207, emphasis in original.

16. Ibid., 225.
17. See Cindy Weinstein’s observation that Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern
Bride insists that “the biological family isn’t all it’s cracked up to be” in
Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Lit-
erature, 67.
18. Mary H. Eastman, Aunt Phillis’ Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (Phila-
delphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1852), 256.
19. Julia Henderson, “Lionel Granby, Chapters II–III,” Southern Literary
Messenger 1, no. 10 (June 1835): 542–43.
20. William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, and Other
Poems (Charleston, SC: McCarter, 1856): v. Not for nothing do the
proslavery novels linger over the inevitably “neat” or “tidy” cabins of
the slaves, pointing to the domestic hominess of slave quarters.
21. Ibid., xiv.
22. Ibid., xv.
23. Caroline Lee Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride (Philadelphia: T. B.
Peterson & Brothers, 1854), 34.
24. Ibid., 78.
25. Ibid., 87.
26. Ibid., 90.
27. Ibid., 41.
28. Ibid., 188.
29. Ibid., 136. “Delicate” is one of the words most commonly used to
describe Eulalia. On intersectional marriage plots, see especially Carme
Manuel Cuenca, “An Angel in the Plantation: The Economics of Slav-
ery and the Politics of Literary Domesticity in Caroline Lee Hentz’s
The Planter’s Northern Bride,” Mississippi Quarterly 51 (1997/1998):
87–105. For an excellent discussion that firmly situates the proslav-
ery novel in the sentimental tradition, see Sarah Mesle’s dissertation,
“Sentimental Literature in Proslavery America” (PhD diss., North-
western University, 2009); I am grateful to her for allowing me to read
her unpublished chapter, “Women, Race, and Slavery in the Novels
of Caroline Lee Hentz,” which argues that white female characters
in Hentz’s works act to secure racial difference by serving as a coun-
terweight to mixed race characters who might otherwise destabilize
rigid racial hierarchies and that these mixed race characters in turn
affirm whiteness as a distinct racial category through their sentimental
response to whiteness as an idea.
30. Eastman, Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, 144–45.
31. Ibid., 160.
32. Ibid., 267–68.
33. Ibid., 268.
176 Notes
34. Eastman’s comments here seem deliberately obtuse: she is generaliz-

ing from a specific instance in the very way she (and other apologists)
accuse Northerners of doing (i.e., when slavery defenders concede that
some violence may occur but it is infrequent and discouraged, and
Northerners are taking such stories and making them out to be regular
occurrences).
35. Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride, 240.
36. Ebenezer Starnes, The Slaveholder Abroad; or, Billy Buck’s Visit, with
His Master, to England: A Series of Letters From Dr. Pleasant Jones to
Major Joseph Jones, of Georgia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1860),
314; Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride, 250.
37. Robert Hunt, “A Domesticated Slavery: Political Economy in Caro-
line Hentz’s Fiction,” Southern Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1996): 29. Rob-
ert Criswell’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Contrasted with Buckingham Hall
(1852) makes explicit the idea that such home production should be
extended beyond individual plantations to encompass the entire South.
38. Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride, 261.
39. Eastman, Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, 221.
40. It’s worth noting here Cordell’s observation that both anti- and pro-
slavery novels adopted the language of temperance novels: it seems
clear that Sarah’s moral worth depends in large part on her sobriety
and her desire to save her husband from the demon alcohol. See Ryan
Cordell, “‘Enslaving You, Body and Soul’: The Uses of Temperance
in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and ‘Anti-Tom’ Fiction,” Studies in American
Fiction 36, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 3–26.
41. Baynard Rush Hall, Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop (New York: Charles
Scribner, 1852), 41.
42. Ibid., 280; Ibid., 41.
43. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin
(1852; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 92.
44. Hall, Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop, 44.
46. Ibid., 235.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 235–36.
50. Ibid., 118, 119.
51. Hentz, The Planter’s Northern Bride, 355–56.
52. And it certainly helps to explain Eulalia’s continual figuration as the
Madonna—culminating in a scene in which a minister holds her infant
up and says, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed be thy off-
spring” (ibid., 402).
53. Ibid., 350.
Notes 177
54. Ibid., 305, 369. Though she does seem to dismiss this formulation
when she decides that Claudia’s daughter with Moreland is “mine”—
asserting the property rights of the father over the child rather than
those of the mother. Note also that while the novel unequivocally
describes marriage as the ownership of a woman by a man, it neverthe-
less describes Moreland’s divorce from Claudia as his “legal emancipa-
tion from these unhallowed bonds” (376).
55. Ibid., 302.
56. Ibid., 396.
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Index
abolitionism, 125, 128, 129, 131, as “habitual sympathy,” 51

132, 169n17 and intimacy, 9, 48, 58
See also proslavery writing; slavery and representation, 79
abortion, 42–43 and slavery, 131, 135–40
abstraction African Americans. See race; slavery
in Brown, Charles Brockden, 69, Alcuin (Brown), 70, 76, 78–79,
70 163n15
equality and, 70 Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 168n8
gender and, 145n3 “Alice Addertongue” (Franklin), 35,
in Habermas, 18–19 36–37, 152n59
marriage and, 142 American Weekly Mercury, 35–36
in Paine, 46 anonymity, 37, 40, 147n1
public and, 16–17, 18 See also pseudonyms
slavery and, 127, 130–34 Antonia (literary critic), 56
subjectivity and, 16 appearance, 51, 63, 95–97
access Applegate, Debby, 126
coffeehouse culture and, 18–19 Apthorp, Fanny, 55–56
gossip and, 17, 18–19 Apthorp, Sarah Wentworth, 55–56
intimacy and, 56 aristocracy, 3, 133
public and, 150n23 Armstrong, Nancy, 49, 50
space and, 19 Arthur Mervyn (Brown), 95–97,
Addison, Joseph, 21, 38, 150n31 162n6
See also Spectator (Steele and Ashley, Hannah, 109, 171n29,
Addison) 171n40
adoption, 79, 80, 81, 87, 88, 114 Ashley, John, 109, 171n29, 171n40
Adventures of Jonathan Corncob, As You Like It (Shakespeare), 99
Loyal American Refugee attachment
(Corncob), 1 in The Coquette, 63
affectation, 33, 51, 57 family and, 50, 55, 122
affection gossip and, 15
and children, 115–16, 118–20 incest and, 122
and custom, 58, 79 intimacy and, 3, 48
and family, 7, 54–55, 58, 118–20 marriage and, 79
198 Index
attachment (continued ) See also Alcuin (Brown); Arthur

in Ormond, 94 Mervyn (Brown); Clara
in Power of Sympathy, 55 Howard (Brown); Edgar
Aunt Phillis’ Cabin (Eastman), 133– Huntly (Brown); Jane Talbot
35, 137, 140, 176n34 (Brown); Ormond (Brown)
“Authorial Coquetry and the Early Brown, Irene Quenzler, 110
American Novel” (Rice), 61 Brown, Richard, 110
Autobiography of Ben Franklin, The Brown, William Hill, 1, 48
(Franklin), 38–39 See also Power of Sympathy, The
autonomy, 3, 8, 9, 78, 123, 128, (Brown)
144n3, 147n12 Bryant, William Cullen, 99, 116,
118
Baker, Thomas, 27 Burgett, Bruce, 144n3, 164n32
Barnes, Elizabeth, 49, 50–51, 80, Burnham, Michelle, 161n5
122, 144n3 “Busy-Body” essays (Franklin), 36
bastardy, 40, 43–44, 48, 53
Beecher, Eunice, 125–26, 142 Cannibals All! (Fitzhugh), 135
Beecher, Henry Ward, 125, 126 categorical boundaries, 104, 113,
122
Benjamin Franklin and Polly Baker:
Cenci, Beatrice, 112
The History of a Literary
Centlivre, Susanna, 27
Deception (Hall), 41
character, 63, 100, 106–9, 111,
Bentham, Jeremy, 102–3, 168n8,
112–13, 116, 119, 122–23,
168n10
166n53
Bentley, Nancy, 174n6
Charlotte’s Daughter (Rowson), 100
Berlant, Lauren, 73, 145n7, 147n15
Charlotte Temple (Rowson), 1, 49,
Bible
73, 158n36
in Hope Leslie, 119
Chase, Lucien B., 135
incest in, 101, 104, 111–12, Chaves, Joseph, 152n63
167n6, 168n7, 169n17 childhood, 107
marriage in, 104 children
Tamar in, 111–12 and death, 1, 11
Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 41 as future political subjects, 40–43
boundaries illegitimate, 53
categorical, 104, 113, 122 and incest, 103
gossip and, 14, 16, 44 as interchangeable with their
incest and, 104 parents, 58, 113–16
between public and private, 28, and ownership, 141
44 separated from parents in slavery,
Bradford, Andrew, 35–36 128
Bradford, William, 35 slaves as, 130, 141
Brom and Bett v. John Ashley civility. See politeness
(Massachusetts), 170n24 Civil Spy (literary critic), 56, 159n39
Brown, Charles Brockden, 1, 69, Clara Howard (Brown), 70–86
70–94, 162n6 “anticipatory” nature of, 161n5
Index 199
Brown’s earlier novels v., 71–72 intimacy in, 60, 62–63

as epistolary, 72 marriage and, 49
equity in, 76 marriage in, 61–62, 66, 160n58
freedom in, 82 Cordell, Ryan, 176n40
gender in, 86, 164n32 Cott, Nancy, 105
genre in, 73–74 court of equity, 76
identity in, 86, 88 court of judicature, 41–42
judgments and, 166n47 court of law, 76
law in, 70–71 covenant, 140–41
marriage in, 79, 81
See also contracts; vows
moral views in, 84
Criswell, Robert, 176n37
narrative in, 73–74
custom, 51–55, 79
political context and, 84–85
affection and, 58
property in, 82–83
class mixture, 33, 54–55, 57, 80 incest and, 50, 90, 168n8
Cobbett, William, 146n12 love as, 52
coffeehouse culture, 14, 17–19, 22– in Power of Sympathy, 53–55
24, 26, 150n23 slavery and, 131
Common Sense (Paine), 8, 45, 46,
155n8 Dalke, Anne, 49
complacency, 52, 53, 54, 60, “Daniel Prime” (Sedgwick), 110–
157n28 11, 171n40
complaisance, 157n28 Darwin, Charles, 104
concealment, 51, 60 Davidson, Cathy, 49
Constitution, US, 3, 128–29, death
146n12 in childbirth, 1
contracts, 74–76, 92, 93–94, in Power of Sympathy, 53, 56
157n33, 162n12 of slave “aunt,” 136, 140–41
See also covenant; promises; vows Dictionary of the English Language,
conversation A (Johnson), 15
in Franklin, 39 “Difference between History and
gender and, 14 Romance, The” (Brown), 72
gossip and, 13, 14, 16, 19
Dimock, Wai Chee, 145n4
intimacy and, 24, 25–26
“Discourse at the Dedication of the
in Power of Sympathy, 57–58
Tree of Liberty, A” (Sons of
private and, 24–25
public and, 24–25 Liberty), 45
Cooke, Rose Terry, 126 discursive space, 13–14, 20, 25, 34
Coquette, The (Foster), 48, 59–67 Domestic Novelists of the Old South
attachment in, 63 (Moss), 127–28
autonomy in, 9 domestic novels, 100, 127–28,
flirtation in, 65–66 174n6
freedom in, 61, 63–64 Douglas, Ann, 50
incest in, 66–67 drawing room, 28–29
infant death in, 1 dress, in Hope Leslie, 120, 173n74
200 Index
Eastman, Mary, 127, 133–35, 137, Ericson, David, 128

140, 176n34 Erkkila, Betsy, 152n63
economics “Essay on Envy, Philosophic and
divine, 141 Political, An” (American
of gossip, 29, 35 Weekly Mercury), 35–36
market economy, 75 Essay Upon Contracts (Powell),
of marriage, 82–83, 96, 157n33, 162n12
164n22 estimation, 82
and slavery, relationship obscured, evidence, 90, 91
127, 135–37, 139
and women, 136 family
Edgar Huntly (Brown), 72, 94, as analogical device, 2
162n6 attachment and, 50, 55, 122
education in Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, 141–42
gender and, 31 custom and, 54–55
in Jane Talbot, 87–88 disagreements within, 87–88
in Power of Sympathy, 57 in Hope Leslie, 122
private and, 23, 31 incest and, 50, 101–2
public and, 23, 150n25 in Jane Talbot, 87–88
space and, 23 law and, 18, 119
in Spectator, 31 marriage and, 88, 133–34,
England, relationship with, 46–48 157n33
English Serfdom and American nonbiological, 104
Slavery; or, Ourselves as Others ownership and, 141–42
See Us (Chase), 135 in Plato, 174n11
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of private and, 59
Morals (Hume), 51 relationship with England and,
epigraphs, in Hope Leslie, 99 46–48
epistolary mode, 161n6 representation and, 7
in Clara Howard, 72 shifts in thinking on, 45
in The Coquette, 49 state and, 50–51, 156n15
in Female Spectator, 31 See also children; marriage;
in Jane Talbot, 72, 86, 165n39 parents; siblings
in Power of Sympathy, 52, 56 Federalist Papers, 8, 85, 86–87,
in Spectator, 21–22 146n12
equity Federalists, 3, 84–85
abstraction and, 70 Female Spectator, 26, 31, 33–34, 44,
in Alcuin, 76, 78–79 152n46
contracts and, 75, 93–94 Female Tatler, 26–34, 39, 44,
in Jane Talbot, 76, 90 151n32, 151n38, 152n46
law and, 76–77, 93–94, 145n4, femininity
164n17 gossip and, 14, 44, 151n38
in Power of Sympathy, 127 justice and, 3
property and, 76 of New World, 155n10
representation and, 94 private and, 29
social relations and, 77–78 sacrifice and, 127
Index 201
sentimentality and, 142 mutability of, 172n54

slavery and, 136 New World and, 155n10
speech and, 8 Power of Sympathy and, 52
See also gender; women private and, 17
Ferguson, Robert, 155n8, 161n4, public and, 17
163n14 relationship with England and,
Fiedler, Leslie, 50 47
Fitzhugh, George, 135 Tatler and, 22
Fliegelman, Jay, 7, 154n3, 156n15 See also femininity; women
flirtation, 21, 50, 61, 65–66, General Advertiser, 41
158n36 Genesis, 111–12
Fordyce, James, 53 See also Bible
fornication, 41–43 genre
Foster, Hannah Webster. See in Clara Howard, 73–74
Coquette, The (Foster) creation of, 73
Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop (Hall), in Jane Talbot, 91
137–40 narrative and, 76
Franklin, Ben, 5, 34–44, 148n1 proslavery poetry and, 131
fraternity, 121–23 Gilman, Sander, 169n17
freedom gossip, 5–6
in Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, 141 access and, 17, 18–19
in Clara Howard, 82 affectation and, 33
in The Coquette, 61, 63–64 attachment and, 15
marriage and, 126 boundaries and, 14, 16, 44
slavery and, 106–7, 135–36, conversation and, 13, 14, 16, 19
139–41 defined, 15, 20
slavery auction performances and, etymology of, 15
125, 173n1 femininity and, 14, 44, 151n38
See also liberty in Franklin, 34, 35, 36–37, 40–
Freeman, Elizabeth, 106–9, 112– 44, 148n1
13, 117, 119, 171n40 gender and, 14, 44
Freneau, Philip, 105 intimacy and, 13, 19–20, 44, 58
in Kierkegaard, 19, 20
Gardner, Jared, 166n47 as movement, 28–29
Garrison, William Lloyd, 129 news v., 150n28
gender in Power of Sympathy, 57–58
abstraction and, 145n3 private and, 14, 16–20
autonomy and, 3, 8 public and, 14, 16–20
in Clara Howard, 86, 164n32 self-perpetuation of, 29
conversation and, 14 space and, 13–14, 20
education and, 31 in Spacks, 19
Female Tatler and, 27, 151n38 in Spectator, 21–26
in Franklin, 37 subjectivity and, 24
gossip and, 14, 44 value of, 13
in Hope Leslie, 114–15, 172n54 voyeurism and, 22
justice and, 3 Gossip (Spacks), 19
202 Index
Grayson, William, 131, 135 husband

Green, Jonas, 42–43 England as, 47
as family representative, 79,
Habermas, Jürgen, 16–19, 24, 83–85
150n23, 156n20 and gossip, 30
habit. See custom as governed by wives, 130
Hall, Baynard Rush, 127, 137–40 and paternalism, 122, 141
Hall, Max, 41 as steward, 79, 83
Hamilton, Alexander, 84–85, See also marriage; wife
146n12
Hamlet (Shakespeare), 158n36 identity
Hammond, Henry, 135 in Arthur Mervyn, 95
handwriting, 90, 91–92 in Clara Howard, 86, 88
Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, The dress and, 120, 173n74
(Brown and Brown), 110 in Hope Leslie, 120, 173n74
Harris, Sharon, 49 incest and, 121–22
Haywood, Eliza, 151n46 in Jane Talbot, 91–92
Hentz, Caroline Lee, 127, 131–33, marriage and, 174n6
135–37, 140, 175n29 in Paine, 48
Hinds, Elizabeth Jane Wall, 164n22 racial, 107, 138
“Hireling and the Slave, The” state and, 156n15
(Grayson), 131, 135 incest
history, 72–73 American culture and, 122
History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless among nonbiological relatives,
(Haywood), 151n46 103–4
Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the “appropriate,” 54–55
Massachusetts (Sedgwick), attachment and, 122
99–123 in Bentham, 102–3
Bible in, 119 in Bible, 101, 104, 111–12,
character in, 111 167n6, 168n7, 169n17
dress in, 120, 173n74 boundaries and, 104
epigraphs in, 99 in The Coquette, 66–67
family in, 122 custom and, 50, 168n8
gender in, 114–15, 172n54 early accounts of, 101–6
incest in, 100–104, 106, 108, eighteenth-century accounts of,
112, 113–16, 118–20, 122 101–2
interposition in, 116 family and, 50, 101–2
law in, 116, 119, 121 in Hope Leslie, 100–104, 106,
marriage in, 123 108, 112, 113–16, 118–20,
mediation in, 116 122
miscegenation in, 119–20 identity and, 121–22
race in, 116–17, 120–21 in Jane Talbot, 90
sacrifice in, 117, 118 law and, 90–91
siblings in, 115–21 in Lévi-Strauss, 104
Hume, David, 51 miscegenation and, 119–20
Index 203
in Power of Sympathy, 49, 53, 54– sexual connotations of, 5, 145n7

55, 100 space and, 25–26
prosecution of, 109–10 sympathy and, 50
in Smith, Adam, 101–2 Ira and Isabella, or, The Natural
India houses, 25, 28–29 Children (Brown), 1, 8, 100
“Indian Burial Ground” (Freneau),
105 Jacobinism, 84
infanticide, 43, 154n80 Jane Talbot (Brown), 70, 86–94
Infidelity, or, The Victims of Brown’s earlier novels v., 71–72
Sentiment (Relf), 155n11 education in, 87–88
inheritance, 81–83 as epistolary, 72, 165n39
intention equity in, 76, 90
in Brown, 161n4, 163n14, family in, 87–88
164n17 genre in, 91
in Clara Howard, 83 identity in, 91–92
and contract, 74–76, 93, 162n12 incest in, 90
and identity, 86, 92, 94 intention in, 89
in Jane Talbot, 80, 86, 88, 89–90, law in, 70–71
92–93 marriage in, 79–80, 88
and representation, 80, 83, 86, property in, 85–86
88–90, 93–94 representation in, 92
See also will writing in, 89–90, 91–92
interposition, 10, 113, 116, 117, Jay, John, 8, 146n12
123 Jefferson, Thomas, 84
intimacy Johnson, Samuel, 15
access and, 56 Julia and the Illuminated Baron
attachment and, 3, 48 (Wood), 100
choice of term, 4 justice, 3, 70, 76, 107, 116, 145n4
conversation and, 24, 25–26
in The Coquette, 60, 62–63 Keimer, Samuel, 35, 36
defined, 2–3 Key into the Language of America, A
etymology of, 4, 145n6 (Williams), 105
female friendship and, 62–63 Kierkegaard, Søren, 19, 20
gossip and, 13, 19–20, 44, 58 kinship. See family
in Habermas, 18 Korobkin, Laura, 70, 160n58
heterosexual familial model of, 48 Kramnick, Jonathan, 158n36
law and, 18
location and, 24 Ladies’ Home Journal, The, 125–26,
nonsexual affection and, 48–49 142
in Paine, 46 law
in Power of Sympathy, 58–59 in Alcuin, 163n15
print culture and, 144n3 in Bentham, 102–3
private and, 24–25, 145n5 in Brown, Charles Brockden,
public and, 24–25 70–71, 74, 161n2, 161n4,
sentimentality and, 142 163n14
204 Index
law (continued) attachment and, 79

contract, 74–76, 93, 162n12 in Aunt Phillis’ Cabin, 133
equity and, 76–77, 93–94, in Bible, 104
145n4, 164n17 in Clara Howard, 79, 81
evidence and, 90 class and, 54–55
family and, 18, 119 contract and, 157n33
in Hope Leslie, 116, 119, 121 and The Coquette, 49
incest and, 90–91 in The Coquette, 61–62, 66,
intimacy and, 18 160n58
natural, 9–10, 41, 90
as economic exchange, 52, 82–
slavery and, 131, 138
83, 96, 157n33, 164n22,
Lectures on Jurisprudence (Smith),
166n54
101–2
family and, 88, 133–34, 157n33
Leeds, Titan, 148n1
legal system, American v. British, freedom and, 126
76–77 in Hope Leslie, 123
Lemire, Elise, 169n17 identity and, 174n6
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 104 in Jane Talbot, 79–80, 88
Leviticus, 101, 167n6, 168n15 patriarchy and, 157n33, 158n33
See also Bible in The Planter’s Northern Bride,
liberalism, 6, 7, 128–29 141, 177n54
liberty, 121–23, 128 polygamous, 174n6
See also freedom representation and, 83–84, 85–86
London coffeehouse culture, 14, slavery and, 127, 130
17–19, 22–24, 26, 150n23 stewardship and, 79
Looby, Christopher, 38 “threesome” and, 161n1
Loughran, Trish, 46 See also family; miscegenation
love. See affection; attachment; Maryland Gazette, 42–43
intimacy; sentiment Massachusetts Centinel, 56, 59
Lucinda, or the Mountain Mourner mediation, in Hope Leslie, 116
(Manvil), 1 Mesle, Sarah, 175n29
Lucy Temple (Rowson), 1
miscegenation, 104–6, 116, 119–
Luhmann, Niklas, 145n5
20, 169nn17–18
See also marriage; race
Mackenzie, Henry, 142
“Monument Mountain” (Bryant),
Maddox, Lucy, 105
Madison, James, 85, 86–87, 146n12 99, 116, 118
Mandeville, Bernard, 27 Morgan, Fidelis, 27
Manley, Delarivier, 27 Morse, Jedidiah, 105
Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie), Morton, Perez, 55–56
142 Morton, Samuel George, 104
Manvil, P. D., 1 Morton, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp,
marriage 55–56
abstraction and, 142 Moss, Elizabeth, 127–28
in Alcuin, 163n15 “Mudsill” speech (Hammond), 135
Index 205
narrative, 48, 72–74, 76, 91, 100, mothers and mother-country,

122 45–46
Native Americans, miscegenation sale away from, 128, 137
and, 104–6, 169n18 sins of, visited on children, 56
natural law, 9–10, 41, 90 See also children; family; marriage
New-England Currant, 37 patriarchalism, 10, 104, 125, 128–
New World, 155n10 29, 140, 156n15, 157n33,
novels 158n33, 174n11
domestic, 100, 127–28, 129, Pennsylvania Gazette, 35, 36, 41
174n6 Pequod War, 100, 115
plantation, 128 plantation novels, 128
proslavery, 127–42, 175n20, Planter’s Northern Bride, The
175n29, 176n40 (Hentz), 131–33, 135–37,
sentimental, 49, 69, 71–72, 90, 140, 175n29, 177n54
127, 129, 139, 142 Plato, 174n11
vice and, 53 Pocahontas, 116
See also writing poetry, proslavery, 131
politeness, 60, 63–64, 150n31
obligation, in Arthur Mervyn,
in Hume, 51
95–96
polygamy, 174n6
“On Censure or Backbiting”
See also marriage
(Franklin), 34, 36, 37
Poor Richard’s Almanac (Franklin),
Ormond (Brown), 94–95
148n1
ownership, family and, 141–42
Powell, John Joseph, 162n12
Oxford English Dictionary (OED),
Power of Her Sympathy, The: The
15
Autobiography and Journal
Paine, Thomas, 45, 46–48, 146n12, of Catherine Maria Sedgwick
155n8, 155n9 (Sedgwick), 107–8
Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded Power of Sympathy, The (Brown), 48,
(Richardson), 127 52–59
parents conversation in, 57–58
adoptive, 87 custom in, 53–55
and authority, 63 education in, 57
and child relationship, parallel to equality in, 127
master-slave and husband- gender and, 52
wife relationships, 10, 128, gossip in, 57–58
141 incest in, 49, 53, 54–55, 100
as hierarchical political model, intimacy in, 58–59
45, 122 sentimentality in, 142
in Hope Leslie, 113–15, 118 Shakespeare and, 158n36
and incest, 90, 101, 109–10, 112 print culture, 30, 37–38, 144n3
as interchangeable with their “print rationality,” 3, 40, 143n3
children, 56, 113–16, private
172n54 conversation and, 24–25
206 Index
private (continued ) Puritanism, 116, 162n6

domesticity and, 17, 25, 27, 29,
32, 92 Quakers, 162n6, 163n14
education and, 31
family and, 59 race
femininity and, 29 domestic novels and, 128
gender and, 17 in Hope Leslie, 116–17, 120–21
gossip and, 14, 16–20, 19 identity and, 107, 138
in Habermas, 16–17 miscegenation and, 104–6, 116,
intimacy and, 24–25, 145n5 169nn17–18
schools and, 23 in Sedgwick, 107–9, 112
sentimentality and, 142 See also slavery
subjectivity and, 24 rape
as term, 4 incest and, 109–10
Prodigals and Pilgrims: The in Ormond (Brown), 69
American Revolution against relationship with England and,
Patriarchal Authority 47–48
(Fliegelman), 7, 154n3 Raynal, Abbé, 41
promises, 71 reading, 54, 57
See also contracts; covenant; vows Relf, Samuel, 155n11
property representation
in Clara Howard, 82–83 in Brown’s novels, 71
contract and, 75 in Clara Howard, 79, 85–86
equity and, 76 equity and, 94
in Jane Talbot, 85–86 family and, 7
slavery and, 139–40 Federalism and, 84–85
proslavery writing, 127–42, 174n13, intention and, 80, 83, 86, 88–90,
175n20, 175n29, 176n40 93–94
pseudonyms in Jane Talbot, 89–90, 92
and anonymity, 40 marriage and, 83–84, 85–86
in Power of Sympathy, 56 political, 70, 79, 84–85
public Republic (Plato), 174n11
abstraction and, 16–17, 18 Republicans, 3, 85
access and, 150n23 reputation, 30, 62, 64, 131, 165n34
class mixture and, 33 Revolution and the Word
conversation and, 24–25 (Davidson), 49
education and, 23, 150n25 Rhode Island, 159n39
gender and, 17 Rice, Grantland, 61
gossip and, 14, 16–20 Richardson, Samuel, 127
in Habermas, 16–18, 150n23, Ringe, Donald, 84
156n20 Rolfe, John, 116
intimacy and, 24–25 Roulston, Chris, 160n1
in Kierkegaard, 20 Rowson, Susanna, 1, 49, 73, 100,
schools and, 23 158n36
as term, 4 See also Charlotte Temple
women and, 148n4 (Rowson)
Index 207
sacrifice as egalitarian political model, 45,

femininity and, 127 122
in Hope Leslie, 117, 118 in Hope Leslie, 115–21
relatedness and, 117 incest between, 101–4
satire, 43–44, 49, 146n12, 147n1, in Power of Sympathy, 53–55
154n78 and property, 90, 123
schools, as public and private, 23 spiritual v. biological, 103–4,
See also education 157n33
Schweitzer, Ivy, 154n3 and spouses, 80, 90, 116
Scriblerian Club, 27 Slaveholder Abroad, The, or Billy
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 99–123, Buck’s Visit with his Master, to
106–7, 107–8 England (Starnes), 135
See also “Daniel Prime” slavery
(Sedgwick); Hope Leslie, abstraction and, 127, 130–34
or Early Times in the auction staging performances,
Massachusetts (Sedgwick); 125, 173n1
“Slavery in New England” Beecher, Eunice and, 125–26
(Sedgwick) covenant and, 140–41
seduction, 6, 50, 52, 53, 55, 65, 66, custom and, 131
femininity and, 136
71, 73, 122
freedom and, 106–7, 135–36,
self-complacency, 52
139–41
self-reflection, 162n6
Hope Leslie and, 104, 106–7, 125
sentiment
law and, 131, 138
in Beecher, Eunice, 125–26
marriage and, 127, 130
as critical lens, 6–7, 18–19, 49–50
property and, 139–40
in eighteenth century, 127, 129,
wage, 135, 136, 141
142, 143–44n3, 156n20, women and, 130
158n34 writings against, 128, 129, 131,
gender and, 142 132, 169n17
in nineteenth century, 126, 129, writings in support of, 126–38,
142, 143–44n3 140, 174n13, 175n20,
Sentimental Journey, A (Sterne), 175n29, 176n40
142, 158n36 See also Freeman, Elizabeth
sentimental novel. See novels “Slavery in New England”
sexuality (Sedgwick), 106–7, 108–9,
fornication, 41–43 111–12, 171n40
intimacy and, 5, 145n7 Smith, Adam, 51–52, 101–2,
See also incest; rape 156n20, 168n8
Shakespeare, William, 99, 158n36 Smith, John, 116
Shapiro, Steven, 162n6 Smith, Melancton, 59, 85–86
Shattuck, Charles, 158n36 Sociology for the South (Fitzhugh), 135
Shevelow, Kathryn, 28, 32, 39 Sollors, Werner, 169n17
Shields, David, 37 Sons of Liberty, 45
Shuffleton, Frank, 165n39 space
siblings, 123 access and, 19
208 Index
space (continued ) Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith),

discursive, 13–14, 20, 25, 34 51–52, 102, 156n20, 168n8
gossip and, 13–14, 20 “threesome,” 161n1
intimacy and, 25–26 Tise, Larry, 128
schools and, 23 Tompkins, Jane, 49, 50
Spacks, Patricia, 19, 24 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 104
Spectator (Steele and Addison),
14, 21–26, 28, 38, 149n18, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 126–
149n21, 151n32 27, 132, 134, 135, 138
See also Female Spectator
“Speech of Polly Baker” (Franklin), vows, 47, 92–93, 126–27, 131,
40–44 137–39, 140–41
spiritual autobiography, 162n6 See also promises
Starnes, Ebenezer, 135 voyeurism, 22
state
family and, 50–51, 156n15 wage slavery, 135, 136–37, 141
identity and, 156n15 Warner, Michael, 37–38, 38–40
Steele, Richard, 14, 21, 38, 147n1 Waterman, Bryan, 157n27
See also Spectator (Steele and Weston, Alice, 133–35
Addison); Tatler (Steele) Weyler, Karen, 161n6
Stern, Julia, 49, 121, 122 Wheeler, Betsy, 109–10, 171n33
Sterne, Laurence, 127, 158n34 Wheeler, Ephraim, 109–10, 171n33
stewardship “When Mr. Beecher Sold Slaves in
husband’s of wife’s property, 79, Plymouth Pulpit” (Beecher),
83 125–26
master’s of slaves, 141 White, Edward, 148n1
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 126–27, Whitman, Elizabeth, 55, 59
132, 134, 138 Wieland (Brown), 1, 69, 70
Structural Transformation of the wife
Public Sphere, The (Habermas), America as England’s, 47–48
16–17 gossip and duties of, 32–33
Stupp, Jason, 173n1 marriage with sister of deceased,
suffrage, women’s, 79, 163n15 103–4
Swift, Jonathan, 147n1 See also husband; marriage
sympathy, 6, 50, 102, 156n20 Wilcocks, Alexander, 161n2
will
Tamar, in Bible, 111–12 in Clara Howard, 82–83
Tatler (Steele), 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, in Jane Talbot, 88–90
28, 38, 147n1, 149n18 only one in marriage, 83, 85–86,
See also Female Tatler 90
tea shops. See India houses See also intention
temporality, 127–30 Williams, Roger, 99, 105
Terry, Rose, 126 women
theater, 158n36 in Alcuin, 163n15
Theory of Legislation (Bentham), coffeehouses and, 150n23
102, 168n10 domestic novels and, 174n6
Index 209
Federalist Papers and, 146n12 suffrage of, 79, 163n15

gossip and, 44 wage slavery and, 136–37
in Hope Leslie, 100 See also femininity; gender
paternalism and, 128 Wood, Gordon, 159n39
in The Planter’s Northern Bride, Wood, Sally, 100
136 writing
polygamy and, 174n6 antislavery, 128, 129, 131, 132,
public and, 148n4 169n17
single, 41–42, 61–62, 121, 122, in Jane Talbot, 89–90, 91–92
164n21 proslavery, 127–42, 174n13,
slavery and, 130 175n20, 175n29, 176n40
stewardship and, 79 See also novels

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Intimacy and Family in

Early Amer ican Wr iting

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: May 2014

This section is by far my favorite part of the book to write, because I am

John Jay’s English department is full of wonderfully warm,

I t is a truism among early Americanists that few people survive child-

communal bonds is perhaps unsurprising. What is more intriguing,

early nineteenth-century American writing, as authors struggled to

their ability to chuckle at the ignorance of others. “Chuckling” here is

understands those interactions, moreover, not as precursors of more

particularized inequality, which have dominated the last few decades

heart. This internal moral duty, however, mandates a familial rela-

mortality rates, but in part may allegorize a pessimistic view of the

B eginning a book about the trope of family in early American lit-

range, for example, required to hear gossip—but to temporal space as

Or consider the development of the word “gossip” itself: while

intimacy in a printed text. Rather, I want to underscore the fact that

Th e P u bl ic , the P r ivate, and Gossi p

the early eighteenth century, but that abstraction is not a prerequisite

simple” only insofar as human is understood to mean male.6 Second

the sort of secrecy he imagines such normativity opposing. That is to

While I clearly agree that gossip manufactures intimacy, I’d like

Tat tl ing Lik e Men

but rather in specific and personal ones: What to do when an amour

within houses throughout “London and Westminster,” that gives

“private” become far less relevant to our understanding of subjec-

possible to have a conversation meant for only one or a few other

Fema l e Tat tl ing, Femal e S pectati ng

shall publish mine the contrary days, viz. Mondays, Wednesdays

Crackenthorpe here accomplishes a remarkable shift: the pre-

multiple persons and personas. Unlike a novel, in which readers are

Mrs. Crackenthorpe’s willingness to be bought off with some appetiz-

Far more than simply turning her daughter’s head, Oldfashion

each other: the ostensible service provided by the Crackenthorpes of

pretend to discover who likes who; what fine new-married Lady

What comes across most clearly in these words is a fear of class

What the Female Spectator aims to accomplish, then, is a reposition-

Fr a nk l in’s S c andal izing L adi es

Every blockhead, ancient and modern, that could handle a pen,

These excerpts come from two essays, both published in September

manag’d, no way entertaining, and yet . . . profitable to him”—

early eighteenth centuries, on the basis of which print could be taken

This rather strict discipline—which really amounted to a self-dissolution

briefly to the question of Franklinian personae. As suggested earlier,

“attempt to enact the translation of print rationality into civic vir-

I readily Consented to the only Proposal of Marriage that ever was

Reflect a little on the horrid Consequences of this Law in Particu-

Shame, to imbrue, contrary to Nature, their own trembling Hands in

Franklin/Green here introduces the specter of “public Shame” (a

“The words Mother Country . . . are only sounds without

B en Franklin’s Polly Baker essay, I have suggested, connects sexual

K i nship Vio l ent and Viol ated

more closely continue to proliferate. He asks his readers, “Bring the

as close to America as she had when imagined as a mother devouring

Fa mil iar ity and Famil iali ty

the eternal contrarieties, in company, of men’s pride and self-conceit,

Affectation, disguise, and concealment: these are the means by which