Abstract
The Early National Period witnessed a struggle between the Romantic, sentimental ideal and discourses of control and containment of the female body. This conflict was also carried on through the genre of the novel, which insisted on the link between the public order and the female body. In its attempt to educate young readers in the requirements of republican womanhood, the sentimental novel was aimed at inculcating national interests and was therefore also complicit in the process of empire building. The ideology of what Linda Kerber has called “Republican Motherhood” gave women a political function—raising children to be virtuous citizens of the new nation—without their participation in political activity outside the domestic realm (cf. 203). The burden of the nation’s success thus seems to have rested on women’s bodies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited
Aspiz, Harold. “The Body Politic in Democratic Vistas.” Walt Whitman: The Centennial Essays. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1994. 105–19. Print.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Harper, 1976. Print.
Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” The Phantom Public Sphere. Ed. Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 173–209. Print.
——. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.
Brown, Gillian. The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. Print.
Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998. Print.
Crampe-Casnabet, Michèle. “A Sampling of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy.” A History of Women in the West: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Ed. Natalie Z. Davis and Arlette Farge. Cambridge: Belknap, 1993. 315–47. Print.
Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print.
Fellner, Astrid M. Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late-Eighteenth-Century American Culture. Forthcoming.
Fellner, Astrid M., and Stefan Brandt. “Introduction: Making the Body, Making America.” Making National Bodies: Cultural Identity and the Politics of the Body in (Post-) Revolutionary America. Ed. Astrid M. Fellner and Stefan Brandt. Trier: WVT, 2010. Print.
Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. Print.
Frost, Linda. “The Body Politic in Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism.’” Early American Literature 32 (1997): 113–34. Print.
Gaitskill, Mary. Two Girls, Fat and Thin. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print.
Herzogenrath, Bernd. An American Body-Politic: A Deleuzian Approach. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College P, 2010. Print.
Hoffer, Peter Charles. Sensory Worlds in Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Print.
Kerber, Linda K. “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective.” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 187–205. Print.
Russell, Emily. Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2011. Print.
Tenney, Tabitha Gilman. Female Quixotism Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon. 1801. Ed. Jean Nienkamp and Andrea Collins. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Print.
Trumbull, John. The Satiric Poems of John Trumbull: The Progress of Dullness and M’Fingal. Ed. Edwin T. Bowden. Austin: U of Texas P, 1962. Print.
Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Print.
Webster, Noah. “On the Education of Youth in America.” 1788: n. pag. A Collection of Essays and Fugitive Writings. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977. 1–37. Print.
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Print.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2016 Astrid M. Fellner and Susanne Hamscha
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fellner, A.M., Hamscha, S. (2016). “Solitary, Neglected, Despised”: Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58102-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-54323-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)