Revolution and the Word by Davidson Cathy N.;

Author:Davidson, Cathy N.; [Davidson, Cathy N.;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780195148237
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2004-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Rhetoric of Republican Dissensus

A number of novelists of the early national period turned the essentially conservative subgenre of the sentimental novel (with its fetishization of female virginity) to a subversive purpose by valorizing precisely those women whom the society had either overtly condemned (the fallen woman) or implicitly rendered invisible (woman as feme covert). Yet even the most progressive sentimental novels still focused primarily on women’s restricted familial role. Within the confines of the novel and the society, women only sporadically and peripherally entered into the political discourse of the era, either as objects of the debate or participants in it. Certainly a number of sentimental novels (such as The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy) include scenes in which female characters discuss political issues, but given the Constitutional silencing of women, this fictive act is just that—a fiction. Lacking any legal standing, women’s political opinions could be dismissed as easily as John Adams dismissed his wife’s plea. “Every man, by the Constitution, is born with an equal right to be elected to the highest office,” the Reverend John Cosens Ogden of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, declaimed in 1793. “And every woman, is born with an equal right to be the wife of the most eminent man.”1 No wonder sentimental fiction remained closeted, circumscribed by home and hearth. No fictive young woman could ask, existentially, “To be or, not to be?” for all versions of that question were preempted by the patriarchy’s more controlling consideration, “Is she or isn’t she?”

In the picaresque novels with which I am concerned in this chapter, politics is the central issue, and, not surprisingly, women mostly enter the picaresque world in passing. Except for one subgroup of novels that I term the female picaresque (discussed in detail later in this chapter), the picaresque virtually excludes women precisely because women mere excluded from the politics of the new Republic and also from the more perfect, imagined polis formulated by most of early America’s political visionaries. In custom, law, theory, and literature, the political world of the new Republic was predominately a world of men.

But what was that world of men? If it was ostensibly centered in the Founding Fathers and the revolutionary emergence of a new political order, it, nevertheless, necessarily took shape tangentially to that center—not in Independence Hall but in the city itself, in the shanties that dotted its margins; in the shacks around its malodorous, fever-infested swamps; and in the surrounding countryside where cash was scarce and where a revolution had not brought the prosperity for which so many had hoped. Political discourse centered, too, not in the promised equality of all men but in a different practice that allowed some men to be more equal than others (slaves, the poor, not to mention the women). How, a number of writers asked, could the novel portray the nation’s complex and contradictory political realities? The picaresque seemed to many to be the perfect form to address the divisive political discourse of the era. The

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