Abstract
During the last few decades of the eighteenth century, Anglo-American settlers began to move westward from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and farther afield into the United States’ recently acquired land between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The Ohio Valley was a locus of international rivalry among Britain, France, and the United States, with each of these powers seeking to control its land, resources, and native tribes. As westward migration increased, the Ohio Valley also became a literary site for exploring the contested meanings of sentiment, a term deeply implicated in the literatures and cultures of the nations contending for control of the region. Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants; or the History of an Expatriated Family (1793) is perhaps the first novel set in the Ohio Valley. This essay examines how The Emigrants incorporates the discourses of sentiment and natural rights produced by the American and French revolutions into an ideology of westward migration and settlement.1
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Notes
Other eighteenth-century novels that depict the Ohio Valley include the anonymously authored Berkeley Hall (1796), Disobedience (1797), and Henry Willoughby (1798), and George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799).
Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants; or the History of an Expatriated Family (1793), ed. W. M. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy (New York: Penguin, 1998), 19, 145. Subsequent citations will be parenthetical.
See Verhoeven, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008).
Craig Thompson Friend, Introduction to The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, ed. Craig Thompson Friend (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 3.
Michael Wiley, Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 57.
Lawrence Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England 1660–1857 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10.
Stone, Broken Lives, 13. Rebecca Probert challenges Stone’s claims for the relative docility of women in unhappy marriages in Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
John R. Cole and Robert R. Hare have argued, based in part on these resemblances, that The Emigrants was written by Mary Wollstonecraft. See Cole, “Imlay’s ‘Ghost’: Wollstonecraft’s Authorship of The Emigrants,” Eighteenth-Century Women 1 (2001)
Hare, Introduction to The Emigrants (1793)/Traditionally Ascribed to Gilbert Imlay But, More Probably, By Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Robert R. Hare (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1964), v–x. For a refutation of Wollstonecraft’s putative authorship, see Verhoeven and Gilroy, Introduction to The Emigrants, xliii–xliv.
Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 4, 20.
See Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 112–29, and Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 26–44.
Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 26–44.
Basch, Framing American Divorce, 22–30. Basch mentions as an example one Abigail Strong, who petitioned for divorce in Connecticut in 1788, reasoning that she was not obliged to submit to her tyrannical husband’s authority since “even Kings may forfeit or discharge the allegiance of their subjects” (30). On revolutionary rhetoric in divorce proceedings, see also Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 31–34.
Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 6.
Tim Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture, 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24.
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 196–217.
On relations between settlers and Native Americans in Kentucky, see Ellen Eslinger, Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 57–58, and Friend, The Buzzel about Kentuck, 11–13.
Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 4.
Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington, DE, 1784), 101.
On landownership and political participation in Jeffersonian republicanism, see David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 53–118.
Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (September 1998): 581. On the myths of racial origins informing the ideology of Manifest Destiny see Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
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© 2012 Toni Bowers and Tita Chico
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Shields, J. (2012). Genuine Sentiments and Gendered Liberties: Migration and Marriage in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants . In: Bowers, T., Chico, T. (eds) Atlantic Worlds in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014610_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137014610_3
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