“Regular Love,” Incest, and Intimacy in The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette

Abstract

Ben Franklin’s Polly Baker essay, I have suggested, connects sexual acts to civil reproduction in a way that problematizes the presumptive 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 increasingly 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

“The words Mother Country … are only sounds without meaning.”

— A Son of Liberty, “A Discourse at the Dedication of the Tree of Liberty,” 1768¹