17
Ivy Schweitzer
From the very first instances of contact, gender, sex, and seduction, inflected by premodern notions of racial difference, were tightly braided into Europe’s imagination of the Americas. Consider, for example, the 1619 engraving of Amerigo Vespucci “discovering” America by Theodor Galle, based on a drawing by Jan van der Straet that circulated widely in the 1580s and represented a trend in allegorizing the so‐called New World as an Indigenous woman. In Galle’s engraving, the woman is naked and reclines on a hammock surrounded by exotic native flora and fauna. She wakes and languidly reaches her hand out toward Vespucci, who stands before her upright, cloaked, armored, and wielding a cruciform staff and banner, a sword, and an astrolabe: the very image of passive, primitive, and feminized nature meeting the hard, masculine edge of European technology.
Although the bearing of the explorer exudes conquest and dominance, in the background between the two figures other naked females roast a human leg in the iconic “American” act of cannibalism, linking femininity, danger, and savagery. In his “Preface” to The Writing of History, Michel de Certeau calls this “an inaugural scene” and theorizes that it initiated “a colonization of the body [of the other] by the discourse of power. This is writing that conquers. It will use the New World as if it were a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written” (1988: xxv).
That desire, as other writing from this period confirms, was insistently masculine, white, and dominating. Exploring the eastern coast of North America at the end of the sixteenth century in order to found a colony, Sir Walter Raleigh named the vast territory “Virginia,” in honor of Elizabeth I, his “virgin queen” (with whom he was, incidentally, involved in a love triangle with one of her ladies‐in‐waiting, whom he eventually married). But the insinuation of seduction, ravishment, and possession implied in the name of this so‐called virgin land was not lost on the English court.
In a seemingly playful response, John Donne penned “Elegy 8. To his Mistress Going to Bed,” which employs figures of sexual difference to expose the dynamics of desire underlying the fantasy of conquest. As he seductively describes disrobing his unresisting mistress, Donne’s male speaker imagines himself as an intrepid explorer and, reaching full arousal at her naked display, apostrophizes: “O my America, my new found land, / My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d, / My mine of precious stones, my empery; / How blest am I in this discovering thee!” (2007: 35, ll. 27–30). Despite the fun he is poking, Donne’s poem recirculates the image of the silent woman as the blank page and passive America of European imperial hopes and designs: uninhabited, biddable, and compliant, not a new Eve but a new Eden welcoming the new Adam into a new – and profitable – paradise. This gendered and raced fantasy achieved wide popularity in the myth of Pocahontas’s rescue of John Smith and the Barbadian legend of Inkle and Yarico.
Only with the advent of feminist theory and the creation of women’s studies as a recognized academic field did literary scholars begin to unpack the gendered dynamics of this pervasive and loaded rhetoric and gauge its effects on early American writing. I begin this chapter with a short historical contextualization for thinking about gender and sex in early American literature. Then, I summarize the first, field‐defining phase of feminist scholarship from the last quarter of the twentieth century, which developed feminist approaches to literature and literary history and began recovering the occluded voices of women writers and feminine/feminist perspectives. Initially, this work focused on the nineteenth century, a reflection of a larger trend in which “colonial literature,” as it was initially called, interested scholars as a precursor of the “classic” literature of the United States written during the so‐called American Renaissance of the mid‐nineteenth century by men like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville. Feminist recovery and revision of that canon began with the ignored female contemporaries of these writers.
This first phase lasted from the 1970s to around 1989, when the publication of Joan Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History positioned the study of women within the larger critical field of gender studies. This shift, as well as the expansion of identity politics within society and the academy, helped to open literary studies to include women of color and non‐elite women, the study of masculinities, and an examination of non‐normative forms of sexuality. Anthologies, edited collections, and book series played an important role in calling attention to non‐canonical writers and questions of gender and sexuality in the early period. I will examine the last 15 years of the literary scholarship on these topics and conclude with speculations on the new directions our future scholarship might take.
It is important to note at the outset that the very terms of our discussion are being dramatically unsettled and must be continually reframed in the light of new scholarship. In the initial stages of gender theory, it was customary to distinguish sex, meaning the body and biology, which was understood as given, from gender, meaning cultural norms and behaviors that express biological differences and are considered contingent, socially and historically constructed. Understanding sex as biologically fixed, many feminist thinkers tended to bracket it off from gender.
Emphasizing gender’s constructed nature allowed thinkers to engage it critically and historically as a site of social change. As Joan Scott observed, gender’s “uses and meanings become contested politically and are the means by which relationships of power – of domination and subordination – are constructed” (1988: 2). Influenced by the work of Gayle Rubin, who theorized the “sex/gender system” (1975: 159), and Michel Foucault, who argued that the body and sexuality were inextricably entangled with discourses and regimes of power and knowledge, feminist thinkers began to dismantle the long‐held distinction. For example, Judith Butler, among others, argues that “sex itself is a gendered category” (1990: 11).
The mobility of these terms is further complicated in the early period, so some historical contextualization is necessary. Scholars consider American literature to have originated in a rich mix of cultures interacting in North America before 1700, including a variety of Native peoples who inhabited the eastern seaboard (Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Pokanokets, Mohegans, Nipmucs, Pequots, Patuxets, and Narragansetts), explorers and settlers (from Spain, France, Netherlands, Portugal, and Italy), and African slaves who first arrived in Jamestown in 1611. The English were latecomers, but eventually dominated the cultural field and produced what Emory Elliot calls “two very different literary beginnings: one deriving from the austere rhetoric and sacred imagery of the Puritan sermon and the personal narrative of New England; another fostered by Enlightenment thought, neoclassical literary principles, and language play and humor of Augustan England” (2002: 156).
The shift in paradigms occurred roughly at the end of the seventeenth century. Before that, the American colonies developed culturally in relative isolation until the Glorious Revolution in England (1688) produced more intervention into colonial affairs and the hysteria of the Salem witch trials (1692) undermined Puritanism’s authority. Still, Puritan attitudes, especially strongly held beliefs about theocratic patriarchal rule, the subordination of women to men, and the confinement of sex and pleasure to marriage, lasted well into the eighteenth century – and beyond – even with the influx of Enlightenment ideas from Europe and attempts by figures like Benjamin Franklin to establish a national literature after the American Revolution.
Because New England was settled mainly by English Congregationalists derisively known as Puritans (for their zeal in purifying the English church), who were stereotyped as anti‐fun of all kinds, few scholars even thought to investigate their sexual culture. Edmund S. Morgan did in 1942. Sixty years later, Richard Godbeer (2002) published a capacious account of sex in early America that surveys a broader area, a wider swath of the population north and south, including the Caribbean, and benefits from the burgeoning scholarship on sexuality.
Godbeer comes to conclusions similar to Morgan’s: Puritans organized their communities around the patriarchal family and did not make the stark distinction between public and private that holds in the modern era. They celebrated sex and pleasure within marriage as a divine gift, as long as it was subordinated to “the greater glory of God,” condemned and punished sexual activity (which they called “fornication”) outside of marriage, and engaged in a wide array of sexual activities (Morgan 1942: 594). Puritans embraced marital pleasure to such an extent that courts punished husbands for not giving their wives the sexual satisfaction due to them in marriage.
Godbeer complicates this picture by pointing out that the very definition of marriage was unstable in this period; while church officials insisted that couples practice abstinence until they were formally married, many settlers in the wilder parts of North America took betrothal as sufficient (7–9). Likewise, the term “sodomy” encompassed a range of predatory, non‐procreative sex that included same‐sex contact but did not connote what we today understand as homosexual activities. Rather Puritans believed that in our fallen condition, corruption was universal and everyone was guilty of sin in thought if not in deed, what Thomas Shepard, the popular, first‐generation Puritan minister, vividly described as “heart whoredom,” “heart sodomy,” “heart buggery,” “heart blasphemy,” “heart drunkenness,” and “heart idolatry” (Godbeer 2002: 68).
Historians of the period argue that individuals and institutions in the early period distinguished between acts and identities: “Sex was not who a person was; it was merely what he or she did” (T. Foster 2006: xii). For this reason, Godbeer avoids using the term “sexuality,” which, he argues, “can obscure more than it illuminates when applied to a premodern context” (2002: 12). We will see that recent work challenges this distinction in the eighteenth century, though it is still important not to conflate early attitudes with modern ones. Subtitling his fascinating account of the sex lives of the founding fathers “The American Quest for a Relatable Past,” Thomas Foster observes that such a quest, while inevitable, is doomed because “sex is not transhistorical” (2014: 8).
Sex/Gender
By the mid‐1970s, feminist critics began to dismantle the male‐dominated and gender‐neutral approach to American literature that had reigned for decades. This shift first produced revised readings of canonical male writers and a tool kit of critical approaches that feminists would use to pry open the canon itself to reveal that its androcentric character was the result of structural exclusions, not the inferiority of women writers.
An early and influential example is Annette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975), which examined the metaphor of land‐as‐woman and its dire implications for real women and our ecological future. Kolodny analyzed some of the earliest documents of exploration and colonization, but spent most of her time considering the work of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century male writers. Likewise, Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1978) exposed the interpretive contradictions posed for women readers and critics by the misogynistic representations of women in texts by men regarded as foundationally American. Her reading of Irving’s classic story “Rip Van Winkle” is a masterpiece of feminist interpretation that changed the way many critics approached American literature. By 1978 the recovery of “lost” and ignored texts by North American women was in full swing, exemplified by Nina Baym’s pioneering study Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70 (1978), a milestone that begins at the end of the historical period this volume considers.
A slew of works on gender and women followed, though it would be a few more years before scholars began to work in earnest on the early period, and at least a decade or more before this recovery extended to women and men of color and to writers of the Americas understood hemispherically. Feminist historians preceded literary critics in turning their attention to the situation of women in the early period, but by the 1980s scholars were publishing foundational work on women, gender, and early American writing: Wendy Martin’s An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (1984), Anne Kibbey’s The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (1986), Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), and Amy Schrager Lang’s Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (1987). Critical interest in the life and work of Phillis Wheatley, the young African slave who became a poetic prodigy in the last half of the eighteenth century, would not begin in earnest for another decade or so.
Still, as late as 2007, scholars who study African American women voiced concerns “about a premature turn from archival and other practical research” such as “biographies, literary histories, and various reference and teaching aids,” types of scholarship that seem “passé,” but are crucial to preserving women’s voices and perspectives (F.S. Foster 2007: 36). This concern extends to Native American writers as well. In recent years, scholars have begun to investigate the various modes of early Indigenous literacy, opening up the lives and perspectives of people formerly regarded as unlettered.
A survey of the canonical status of early women writers shows the late but steady development of critical interest in issues of gender as well as significant diversity and shifts in feminist approaches. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), the first woman writer living in the American colonies to publish a book, was always nominally part of the early canon, but not an object of vigorous investigation or interest. In 1981, Adrienne Rich contributed the preface to a collection of Bradstreet’s poetry that, in the spirit of early second‐wave feminism, celebrated the poet’s domestic poems about her husband and children (poems which Bradstreet omitted from both of her manuscripts) as authentic and dismissed as derivative and lifeless the public poetry of The Tenth Muse, the edition published by Bradstreet’s brother‐in‐law in London in 1650.
Although Rich’s “discovery” of Bradstreet’s gendered voice, typical of the gynocritical strand of feminist literary criticism, brought her to the attention of scholars, it skewed the reading of her corpus until critics used deconstructive French feminist theory to excavate subversion of and resistance to female subordination in Bradstreet’s early elegies. This approach helped to reorient attention away from romanticized notions of authenticity and authorial intention to the historical and material contexts of Bradstreet’s public poetry, which is far from derivative or lifeless. As critics continue to explore the rich texture of Bradstreet’s formal poetry, they have complicated her status as exceptional by viewing her in the transatlantic context of early modern Europe and in relation to new understandings of manuscript publication and female coteries. One future direction, offered by Allison Giffen, is to consider Bradstreet’s “work as exemplary of a larger tradition of women poets who must similarly negotiate discursive systems that construct subjectivity as masculine” (2010: 4). Scholarship on this important writer continues to flourish, as illustrated by a 2014 issue of Women’s Studies that collects new approaches to Bradstreet’s work, including environmental, medical, educational, and queer perspectives.
Feminist scholars rediscovered other early women writers and the genres they favored. The Indian captivity narrative was a widely popular genre that can be considered the first American literary form primarily based on women’s experiences. The compelling account by Mary White Rowlandson (c. 1637–1711) of her captivity among the Wampanoag Indians during King Philip’s/Metacom’s War was the first North American publication by a woman and raises issues of gender and identity on its very title page, which fails to mention its female author by name. Indian captivity narratives served the mythology of Native savagery and Puritan victimization advanced by the Puritan elite, played very well in England, and could be recycled in times of nationalist need; a reissue of Rowlandson’s popular tale in 1773 sports a title page showing the author wielding a rifle in patriotic defense of her home against men who look suspiciously like English soldiers, except for the hatchets some of them brandish.
Critics read Rowlandson’s text through a variety of lenses to illuminate its gender politics, including Rowlandson’s authorship and powerful Puritan men’s framing of her narrative, her evolving attitude to Puritan religious mores about women’s place, her relationship with her Native captors and reflections on their very different gender arrangements. The 1998 collection Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, edited by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian‐Stodola, began with Rowlandson’s tale and included selections that spanned from 1682 to1892, indicating the tenacity of the form and women’s dominance of it.
Another writer whose “rediscovered” work changed the landscape of the early canon is Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, satirist, indefatigable letter writer, and unabashed supporter of women’s rights. While some critics consider her America’s first feminist, her politics was deeply entrenched in the terms and beliefs of her own time. In the years after George Washington’s election as the first US president in 1788, Americans began writing and publishing in growing numbers, but these efforts appeared mostly in periodicals, which were ephemeral. Books by American writers were rare, which is why, when in 1798 Murray collected 100 of her pieces into a book entitled The Gleaner and published it by subscription, it was a bold act, especially for a woman.
This collection contained Murray’s influential essay “On the Equality of the Sexes” and others on the themes of women’s education, history, condition, and contributions. Its subscribers included leading figures, such as George and Martha Washington and the current president and first lady, John and Abigail Adams, attesting to the heft of Murray’s standing. In her preface, Murray is unapologetic about her motive for publication, which was to achieve long‐lasting fame and recognition. Still, the volume had no second edition and by the middle of the nineteenth century Murray had vanished from view. It was reissued in 1992, edited by Nina Baym, and again in 1995 in a collection of Selected Writings edited by Sharon M. Harris for Oxford University Press’s series “Women Writers in English 1350 to 1850.”
Other women writers in this category include Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784), discussed below, and Susanna Rowson (1762–1824) and Hannah Webster Foster (1758–1840), discussed in the section on seduction. All of them have benefited from the steady stream of anthologies, books series, journal articles, editions and edited collections of and about early women’s writing, including Pattie Cowell’s Women Poets in Pre‐Revolutionary America, 1650–1775: An Anthology (1981), and Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives, edited by William L. Andrews, Annette Kolodny, Daniel B. Shea, Sargent Bush, Jr., and Amy Schrager Lang (1990).
Sharon M. Harris has been exemplary in her work to recover and study women writers from this era, and her list of anthologies, including her edition of Murray mentioned above, is impressive: Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers 1797–1901 ( 1995); American Women Writers to 1800(1996); Women’s Early American Historical Narratives (2003); with Jeffrey H. Richards, Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (2009) – another relatively neglected early writer; with Mark L. Kamrath, Periodical Literature in Eighteenth‐Century America(2005); and her critical study Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law(2005). Articles in the journals Early American Literature, Legacy, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, to name a few, and the collection of critical essays, Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies, edited by Mary C. Carruth (2006), have highlighted early women writers and issues related to gender. Most recently, a new collection of critical essays, entitled Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire (Balkum and Imbarrato 2016), explores the impact of empire building in the transatlantic world on a wide range of female bodies.
It is important to note a few critical developments that continue to shape the direction of our thinking about sex and gender in early American literature. In a 2005 review essay evaluating three recent studies of early American sex, Renée Bergland noted two factors that have materially contributed to the renovation of the field. First, feminism and gender studies made gender an important and continuing area of inquiry, leading to the explosion of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory, which showed definitively that sex and gender have histories that must be excavated. Second, the expansion of the archive has enabled scholars of the early period to begin to study “writing” rather than “literature” – that is, texts in a variety of forms that circulate in a variety of ways, not just the publishing of books that became the standard for measuring success in the nineteenth century (151).
The inclusion of manuscripts, diaries, letters, newspapers, translations, tracts, texts written collectively and anonymously, embedded texts, even multimedia objects like wampum, beadwork, baskets, rock art, and scrapbooks, has opened up the canon to the voices of women, people of color, non‐elites, people of African derivation, and Indigenous peoples. This expansion requires that literary scholars enlarge their methods of reading and interpreting, adopting the methodologies of cultural studies, critical race studies, Native American studies, and radical archives to think about positionality, liminality, biopolitics, and knowledge production from below.
These trends indicate a more general theoretical shift to an increased emphasis on materiality and a more deeply historicized scrutiny of the body. For example, Elizabeth Dillon begins her essay “Nursing Fathers and Brides of Christ: The Feminized Body of the Puritan Convert” (2001) by rehearsing the wide divergence of interpretations of Edward Taylor’s rather bizarre poetic depictions of the shifting anatomy of the male Puritan convert, from a babe suckling at God’s breasts, to a women with her own breasts, to the desirous bride of Christ. Critics differ widely in their interpretation of this imagery. In seeking an explanation for this critical contention as well as the popularity of this imagery in Puritan rhetoric, Dillon turns to the work of historians of the body Thomas Laqueur and Londa Schiebinger, who argue for a premodern theory of one sex and several genders. Based on the teachings of Galen, a Greek physician, this theory held that male and female bodies were essentially the same with inversely located genitals and different measures of vital heat, which made hot male bodies the most perfect and cooler female bodies inferior.
Applying this theory to premodern New England, Dillon argues, means recognizing that gender was not grounded in sexual differences but in “the divine hierarchy of God” so that “the body had a far more metaphorical status for the Puritans, and metaphors of sexed bodies emphasized relations of power more than physically grounded identities” (131–132). This suggests that we need to reread Puritan representations of sex and gender not through a two sex/two genders model, which coalesced in the late eighteenth century, but as articulating “power differentials that did not necessarily inhere in bodies” (134). Dillon also points out that the shift in the early eighteenth century coincides with a rejection of monarchy and inherited forms of power in favor of a modern politics of natural and individual rights, theoretical equality, and social contract (135). As scholars apply this important historical understanding, we might distinguish more specifically between seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century representations, and rather than a coherent understanding, find more diversity, conflicts, and dislocations.
Since the transnationalist turn in American and literary studies, scholarly interest in gender/sex and discovery has sharpened into an inquiry into gender/sex and empire. This turn focused critical attention on formerly ignored writing by Africans and African Americans, which emerged from the tumult of Atlantic traffic, trade, and slavery. The author who best exemplifies this direction is the poet Phillis Wheatley, taken as a child into slavery, shipped to Boston, and bought by an influential evangelical family who provided her with education and access to the transatlantic literary world.
In 2011, David Waldstreicher coined the notion of “The Wheatleyan Moment” in an article of the same name to explain how a very young enslaved woman and poet brilliantly negotiated the complex colonial and post‐Revolutionary political terrain and in the process permanently changed attitudes about race and racialized femininity in early America that critics have just begun to explore. Critical attention to Wheatley, and to the writings and socio‐literary contexts her career reveals, illuminates the imbrication of race, gender, and nation, a busy intersection that has and will continue to be a fruitful avenue of literary investigation.
Another important development in this area in the last 15 years has been a newly defined focus on masculinity: not the conventional androcentric centering of men understood as universal or gender neutral, but an approach, adopted from feminist projects, to men as gendered, raced, classed, and regionally specific subjects. The danger in this approach, according to the editors of the 2011 collection New Men: Manliness in Early America, is that it runs the “risk of occluding women and downplaying men’s power over women” while returning men to the center of scholarly attention (T. Foster 2011: 2).
Nevertheless, such an investigation of masculinity is a necessary stage in deepening our historically informed understandings of the representations of gendered power. It has produced exciting new work, like Peter L. Bayers’s essay of 2014, “We unman ourselves’: Colonial and Mohegan Manhood in the Writings of Samson Occom,” notable for combining studies of masculinity and the rapidly expanding field of Native America writing. Bayers begins by grounding his reading in research on colonial masculinity by Anne S. Lombard, who echoes Dillon’s argument by finding that “claims to [Anglo] manhood in early New England were based less on having a male body than on having attained rationality, self‐control, and mastery over whatever was passionate, sensual, and natural in the male self” (Lombard 2003: 9; Bayers 2014: 176). In order to position Occom within these claims, Bayers has to make them racially specific with an editorial inclusion, grounded in the historical context of disrupted Mohegan masculinity in mid‐eighteenth‐century New England. Bayers reads Occom’s masculinity as a dynamic set of strategic unfoldings in a tribally specific context. Likewise, several scholars working on Native American literature – Lisa Brooks, Joanna Brooks, Philip Round, Hilary Wyss, and Kristina Bross, to name a few – have begun to sketch the outlines of Native space in early America, a hybridized history that will encourage us to read early American literature as the culturally, linguistically, and textually diverse landscape it always was.
Sexuality
The recent wave of scholarship on early American masculinity is part of the burgeoning work on early American sexualities. In her essay mentioned above, Bergland notes that the 2003 US Supreme Court judgment in Lawrence et al. v. Texas that struck down the 1986 ruling Bowers v. Hardwick was based explicitly on a historicized understanding of sexuality contained in a brief filed by a group of distinguished American historians who drew heavily on Godbeer’s research showing that legal attitudes toward same‐sex contact had, in fact, hardened since the colonial period. Because, as many scholars argue, people living in the early period had no firm understanding of sexuality as an interior orientation or identity, homosexual identity was not a category in which individuals or institutions, like the courts or the Church, operated. Early American culture punished wicked acts, like adultery (sex outside marriage), rape, bestiality, seduction (of servants and minors), and sodomy, loosely defined as “unnatural” contact.
But this distinction – between acts and identities, doing and being – has been challenged by historians like Thomas Foster, whose work benefits from an expanded range of sources. Whereas, before, scholars confined themselves mostly to written sources from court cases and church documents, which gave them a view from above, Foster examines a much wider range of textual materials including newspapers, personal papers, and court testimonies (not just rulings from the bench or governmental edicts), which reveal the perspectives of ordinary citizens. Reading this diverse material, Foster finds that though early Americans used a language different from ours, some did connect sexual identity to external persona, appearance, dress, and sexual behaviors and that “sexuality in eighteenth‐century Massachusetts appears to be an inconsistent and shifting mixture of acts and identities” (2006: xii).
In Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same‐Sex Sexuality in Early America (2007), edited by Thomas Foster, contributors use literary criticism, among other approaches, to shed light on a surprisingly wide variety of sexual expressions that were formerly illegible. These stories reshape the way we can read, for example, the bodily erotics of the male Puritan convert, the bachelor figure, the fop, and other non‐normative sexualities that emerged in the expanding metropolitan and commercial cultures; accounts and dramas of women cross‐dressing as soldiers and sailors, itinerant ministers, or pirates, or women taking up piracy as women; the literary productions of eighteenth‐century salons; networks of female marriage resisters; cross‐racial networks of neighbors and friends and abolitionists; the affective turn to friendship as a non‐familial, anti‐patriarchal, and queer form of affiliation.
One revisionist reading that takes us to the very heart of the Puritan errand uses queer theory to open up areas of intimacy beyond the conventionally acceptable bounds of matrimony. In his prescient study of the Puritan trope of “sodomy,” Michael Warner reads John Winthrop’s founding vision of Puritan sociality, “A Model of Christian Charitie,” against the usual contemporary deployment of Puritan history to bolster homophobic and heterosexist agendas. He notes that Winthrop invokes the ancient principle of simile simili gaudet (like rejoices in like), which undergirds classical notions of Greek philia and Roman amicita, as the foundation of Puritan public body (1992: 29–30). Winthrop offers the biblical examples of David and Jonathan, who, according to David’s lament for his fallen friend, experienced “a love surpassing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:27), and Ruth and Naomi, relationships that fall outside the patriarchal marriage structure.
This understanding of the Puritan spiritual covenant based in likeness offers an alternative to what Winthrop and his age regarded as divinely fixed social hierarchy and also brings homosocial, even homoerotic, desire out from under the shadow of sodomy as debasement and into the light of sanctioned fellowship (Warner 1992: 35–36). Drawing on Warner’s work, Anne Myles finds “this symbolic space of erotic otherness” in writings on the conflict between Puritans and Quakers in mid‐seventeenth‐century New England and cautions us to “be flexible in seeking to trace what we might call the conceptual space of same‐sex sexuality in the period,” especially in terms of women, who have been rendered doubly illegible by the discourse of sodomy with its masculine connotations (2007: 116).
A queer studies approach allows scholars to avoid the acts versus identities dichotomy and focus on rhetoric and materiality. For example, Rosemary Guruswamy (1999) frames Bradstreet’s early poetry and the publication of The Tenth Muse in a complex transatlantic socio‐literary context in which authorship for women and publication for both sexes of the elite class were considered transgressive and were frequently staged as a metaphorical form of cross‐dressing. Many of the major writers of the early modern period, such as Philip Sidney and John Donne, as well as less visible groups, like Quaker women, did not publish their work, but circulated it in manuscript among networks that were often gender‐inclusive and prompted a collective form of editing and writing.
Guruswamy argues that Elizabeth I established the pattern for “female advancement largely through a discursive strategy of transgendering that sought to eradicate her culture’s normative notions of gender roles” (106). As a colonial creole, Bradstreet had several models for discourses of gender play that she employed to facilitate her entry into the male‐dominated literary world; scholars have found a similar strategy at work in the later eighteenth century, though in a secular register. According to Greta L. LaFleur (2013), writers in this period used the newly emerging science of botany as a way of reading human sexual behavior, especially the queer sexuality of cross‐dressers like Deborah Sampson, before there was a technical language to describe it. She urges that in interpreting texts we must “include the history of opacity as a fungible site of inquiry for the study of early sexuality” (96).
Seduction
Of all the sexual themes that early American writers have explored, seduction has been the most popular by far and has had the widest implications for national identity, at the same time tying North American literary productions to trends in the wider Atlantic, European, and global spheres. Seduction is, of course, a very ancient motif. For many Puritans, Eve constituted the first seductress, corrupted by Satan as the serpent, luring a besotted Adam into transgression, cursed by God with submission to husbands and pain in childbirth, and casting suspicion on all her daughters to come. Since the Reformation, Puritan sermons had drawn on the biblical figures of Jezebel and the whore of Babylon to denounce the seductive charms and lavish material excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. Although the image of woman as seductress persisted throughout the colonial period, enshrined in the literary figure of the coquette, the literature of seduction coming from Europe reversed the roles, casting the virtuous female heroine as the victim of a libertine or rake, whose reformation she often (vainly) undertook. Though the seduction plot took many forms, including poetry, plays, and short narratives in periodicals, it was the relatively new genre of the novel in which it found its most memorable form.
Puritans evinced a deep distrust of fiction reading, which they thought not just frivolous but immoral and dangerous, seducing the growing population of readers, especially young women, away from more serious and educational genres like history or religion. Still, as literacy spread throughout the eighteenth century into all classes and regions, more people began reading periodicals and novels imported from Europe. In 1744 Benjamin Franklin published an American edition of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a popular epistolary novel about the seduction and eventual triumph of a young English servant girl that defined the genre. The American novel widely considered the first did not appear until 1789, but inaugurated a wave of American fiction in the new nation.
Written like Richardson’s, as a series of letters illustrating the evils of seduction, The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature by William Hill Brown, a young Bostonian, sought to capitalize on the popularity of Pamela as well as Goethe’s dark tale, The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in English in 1779. Loosely based on a real‐life scandal involving a prominent Boston family, Brown’s novel spun a heady plot of incest, passion, and forbidden love, which it carefully prefaced with a dedication “To the YOUNG LADIES of United Columbia” and the claim that the story was “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” (1789: n.p.). In its wake, women writers took up the subject: Susanna Rowson published Charlotte Temple in 1794 and Hannah Webster Foster published The Coquette in 1797, both best‐selling epistolary novels in which young women are seduced by libertines and die in childbirth.
Although these novels were widely read in their day, the seduction novel as genre was left out of the early literary history of the United States because its tale of seduction, duplicity, and ruin – and perhaps its dominance by women – did not square with an androcentric myth of national origins (Duane 2011: 35). Anna Mae Duane (2011) argues that when feminist critics rediscovered Rowson’s and Foster’s novels in the 1970s, they developed two interpretive frames in which to read them. The first was a political approach bitingly summed up by John Adams, who used the names of the rake and victim from Richardson’s second seduction novel as allegories to excoriate popular rule: “Democracy is Lovelace, and the people are Clarissa,” he quipped to a correspondent (38). In this approach, the seduced woman serves as a symbol for the fledgling nation, lured by the libertine’s promise of liberty and agency. The other related frame explores gender politics and the “proto‐feminist subtext that emerges when we read these novels against the grain” (Duane 2011: 38) – that is, women writers setting their heroines’ susceptibility to the libertine’s seductions in the context of the new nation’s failure to grant women, and people of color, the same rights accorded to white men in our founding documents.
Both of these frames highlight the extraordinary explanatory power of what was, by the 1780s, a reductive plot with hackneyed characters, but one that assumed a special significance in the Age of Revolution. Its fascination for readers in this period stems from the many pressing issues it addressed not only in the new American nation but across the Atlantic world: the status of novels and the seductive pleasures of reading; the relationship of fiction and real events; literary writing and the larger sphere of print culture and public debate; the politics of revolution, republicanism, and conspiracy; the role of sympathy, sentiment, and sensibility in literature and politics; marriage laws, the regulation of sexuality, and the proliferation of feminist thought.
Recent scholarship on the theme of seduction has extended earlier feminist work and expanded the subject’s cultural geography. In 1999, Donna Bontatibus made the most forceful feminist claim yet when she argued that by offering trenchant social critique of the limited opportunities for women and the destructive stereotype of the fallen woman, these early novels expose what she calls the Revolutionary generation’s “neocolonialization” of its own domestic others, specifically women and peoples of color (57). Furthermore, she contends, using contemporary terms, these novels point “to the existence of a rape culture that fosters rape, assault, sexual harassment, and physical and verbal abuse – the most tragic methods of maintaining women’s compliance to gender roles and social expectations” (94).
Duane, quoted above, brings our current interest in the body to bear on her reading of the early American seduction novel as tapping into Enlightenment fears of the loss of bodily control and self‐possession. Setting the theme of seduction in the light of the Great Awakening’s celebration of “the bliss of kenosis – of surrendering one’s body to the divine force,” and contemporaneous slave narratives that detail the literal possession by another, she contends that seduction tales offered a “fraught counternarrative […] of ruined women […] to the national story of autonomous individualism” (40).
In their introduction to a 2012 collection of essays entitled Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century: Seduction and Sentiment, the editors substantially expand the reach of the seduction theme by arguing that it “functioned synergistically” with sentimental narratives “not merely as representational counterparts, but as mutually constitutive productions,” which operated “within and across mutually constitutive Atlantic sites” (Bowers and Chico 2012: 2). The proliferation of these “seduction‐and‐sentiment” stories, as they label them, throughout the long eighteenth century demonstrates literature’s ability to ignore national borders in offering readers tools for negotiating “hitherto unimagined manifestations of difference” (7).
Two final examples take the scholarship on seduction in directions of temporal and ethnic expansion. In his study entitled Sympathetic Puritans (2015), Abram Van Engen finds that the language of affection Warner spied in Winthrop’s iconic sermon undergirds the entire first generation’s socio‐spiritual vision. The necessity to feel and demonstrate this founding fellowship drove Puritan writers to use literary techniques Van Engen identifies as shaping the project of later sentimental literature. One of these is, of course, the language of seduction, which Puritan elders used with alacrity to spin the disruptive effects of the Antinomian Controversy of 1636–1638. In demonstrating that Boston’s essentially godly people fell for the seductive rhetoric of heretics like the defamed Anne Hutchinson, Van Engen argues that “the Puritan understanding of persuasion, which depended on a theology of sympathy, turned the Antinomian Controversy into one of America’s earliest stories of seduction” (91). Fascinating in itself, this revisionary reading flies in the face of conventional literary history that marks an epistemological shift with the advance of Enlightenment thought and prompts us to revise the temporal range of sympathy – and seduction – backwards in time to include the earliest colonial period.
Melissa Adams‐Campbell also challenges the primacy of Enlightenment thought, specifically as having a solidly progressive impact on women. In New World Courtships (2015) she argues that literary representations of marital practices in the Americas and the Atlantic world contest the Western monolith of companionate marriage as the only option available to women and, more importantly, as a mode of intimacy that provided women with agency and choice. In her reading of Leonora Sansay’s epistolary novel about Haiti, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808), Adams‐Campbell demonstrates how Sansay rewrote the conventional seduction plot by reversing it and embracing the open sociality of creole women.
The novel begins not with the usual group of young women searching for eligible partners in a constrained marriage market, but with an unhappily married couple, and a wife, Clara, who extricates herself from the arrangement by becoming a coquette. But instead of meeting deceit and ruin in the form of a rake whose liberty she envies, Clara “seduces” another woman with a vision of utopian possibilities, her blueprint for community based on creole connections that transgress national borders and overturn legal claims of men over women’s bodies. In this “alternative Caribbean domesticity” Clara finds support for her self‐development in an international homosocial community of single women, a rejection of the seduction narrative that “provides a powerful counterdiscourse to the hegemony of domestic morality in British and American fiction of the same period” (Adams‐Campbell 2015: 80).
Conclusion
While the feminist project of recovery continues to expand the voices studied and the types of expressions deemed worthy of consideration, it has been slower in the early period and there is much still to do. The development of the “New Puritan studies,” which elucidates what scholars are calling “a post‐exceptionalist” view of Puritanism, expands beyond New England, attending to the diversity of languages and cultures, shifting geographical and cultural boundaries, routes of travel in the early world, and varieties of encounters. Earlier conceptions of gender will continue to be challenged by the complications of racial, ethnic, class, and regional differences. Scholars will also continue to rethink how we understand what a text is and how we value it. For example, Jordan Stein (2018) argues that the modern editing of Puritan writers like Edward Taylor has imposed normative understandings of personality and sexuality that prevent us from apprehending their queerness. The new attention to life writing (including letters, diaries, journals, collaborative and communal works), edited and printed works, and orality and performance emphasizes the historically specific expressions of women and people of color who, in the early period, did not have recourse to standard forms of publication.
This direction has been given an enormous boost by electronic and digital resources, which will continue to open up previously shadowed area. For example, The Early Caribbean Digital Archive offers space for scholarly collaboration and co‐curation of primary texts from pre‐twentieth‐century Caribbean literature, as well as digital tools to facilitate the disembedding of subaltern knowledge and narratives from the welter of the dominant discourse. Online databases of primary and secondary material on women writers like Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present facilitate the exploration of new transnational, theoretical, comparative approaches. The growing accessibility and range of digital tools will, in turn, make collaboration easier and will help to restructure professional expectations for scholars.
Finally, a special issue of the journal Early American Studies that appeared in fall 2014 entitled Beyond the Binaries in Early America reveals future directions for scholarship, specifically on sex and gender in the early period. In her introduction, editor Rachel Hope Cleves points out that the title of the issue entered scholarly discourse through Jacques Derrida’s desire to move beyond the opposition of feminine and masculine and, with the work of Judith Butler, came to connote “expressions of sex and gender that disrupted the alignment of masculine‐man and feminine‐woman” (461). But in the current proliferation of sexual expressions, employment of the phrase “seems to mark a trend away from the use of transgender and transsexual as discrete identity categories towards an even more variable landscape of gender and sex nonconformity” (462).
Cleves sees this “new unboundedness” mirrored in our early American past, a claim compellingly elucidated by the essays in this issue, which explore surprisingly diverse modes of sexual expression in the early American period (462). Moving beyond the binary of dimorphic sex/gender means not only recognizing non‐conforming individuals but rethinking the historically normative organization of sexual difference – a reexamination of “core categories” that includes not only sex/gender but also binary racial categories and implies a sweeping reconsideration of binary thinking in all its aspects (Cleves 2014: 463). This, in turn, requires the cultivation of new, interdisciplinary methods of finding and reading early American texts.
References
Further Reading
See also: chapter 2 (cross‐cultural encounters in early american literatures); chapter 4 (the puritan culture of letters); chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 10 (acknowledging early american poetry); chapter 12 (early native american literacies to 1820); chapter 21 (manuscripts, manufacts, and social authorship); chapter 28 (medicine, disability, and early american literature).