Sarah on 25 July 2004 at 12:18 PM, post #56

#12-unrevised Brown, Gillian. "Consent, Coquetry, and Consequences." American Literary History 9.4 (Winter 1997): 625-52.

Gillian Brown examines Hannah Webster Foster’s critique of coquetry in The Coquette, viewing coquetry as a “critique and an appropriation of consent” (627). Agency, writes Brown, is not enough for the heroine of an 18th century seduction story. Though coquetry implies a certain level of female self-determination, “what Foster delineates in Eliza’s practice of consent is the limits in which consent always operates” (626). Brown looks to Lockean consent theory, or the idea that the consent of the governed establishes legitimate government, to explain the social system which operates around female consent and the subversiveness of coquetry, the refusal to give or deny this consent.

Brown devotes pages to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s depiction of the coquette, his denial of the existence of rape, and view that woman, created to serve man, is by nature sexually consenting. Compounded with the dissimulation inherent in the idea of coquetry and the historical identification of women as deceptive, Brown paints a picture of the opposition faced by feminist readers of seduction stories. She cites Catherine Macauley as a critic of the 1790s who responded to Rousseau with anticoquetry rhetoric that placed blame on the actively consenting woman, not the entire gender, and believed that coquetry derived from social inequality between genders.

Brown examines the disjunction between consent and consequences, the association of coquetry with monarchical power, and the very idea of female consent in a society which still often viewed women as property. She goes on to discuss Charlotte Temple’s ambiguous consent as well as evidence in the seduction story—destroyed and created bodies as proof of consent and the subversiveness of eliminating these elements from a story, as was done in The Coquette.

On the subject of determinism, Brown writes, “Converting the liberal paradox of freedom and determinism into a causal sequence, both narratives [The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy] aim to identify an accountable agent, to reduce the number of actors or agencies active in consent to one authorizing agent or source” (638). Blame is thus placed on the coquette, her seducer, and the practice of coquetry itself.

Sarah on 21 July 2004 at 3:57 PM, post #55

#11-unrevised. Carey, Janet Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Gender and Writing Instruction in Early America: Lessons from Didactic Fiction. Rehetoric Review, Vol. 12, No. 1, Fall 1993. P. 25-53. Eldred and Mortensen address the dearth of eighteenth century composition research, citing such rare exceptions as Dennis Baron's Grammar and Good Taste. They examine the period between the American Revolution and the "rise of the Republican Mother and female academies in the last decades of the 1700s," with special interest paid to letters, novels and other such forums for female rhetoric (27).

Hannah Webster Foster's instructive novel, The Boarding School, is described as "at least one woman's imagined ideal of composition instruction for women in the new nation" (28). Foster's preceptress character tells anecdotes meant to fill young girls with virtue, guard them against the seducer's rhetoric, impress upon them the danger of illiteracy. Eldred and Mortensen argue that Foster turns sensationalism to the purpose of highlighting its opposite, morality.

Eldred and Mortenson discuss the female academies after the Revolution, before which girls were often compelled to read, but not to write. Female academies were a form of secondary education for women, offering academic and not ornamental studies. Foster's fictional boarding school, Harmony Grove, boasted a curriculum of "physical exercise, productive free time, moral lessons, and academic instruction" (35). The idea was to cultivate reason, not rote learning. "The aim of a woman's education is twofold: to be an interesting conversant, even in the company of men, and to be a teacher of young children" (43). Further, the authors claim that Foster meant to show society's responsibility for women's performance, and discredit the popular logic that women are defective by nature.

The epistolary form, write Eldred and Mortensen, was particularly prominent as an art which women could perfect. Letter-writing guides like Hester Chapone's Letters on the Improvement of the Mind encouraged morality and craft in correspondence, which was meant to be public more than personal.

The authors conclude that Foster's text is a useful supplement to factual primary source material and a "point of departure for inquiring into multiple forms of literacy" in 1790s Connecticut (44). Final reflections are made on the develoment of the Carnegie Center of Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky.

Justin on 21 July 2004 at 1:37 PM, post #54

Forster, E.M.. "Story and Plot." Narrative Dynamics. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2002. 71-72.

Forster's short essay deconstructs the words story and plot in an examination of their relative functions in narrative. A story is a "narrative of events arranged in their time sequence" while the plot revolves around the ensemble of these stories. He proceeds to construct curiousity as a relative of the story, one that avoids intelligence and memory in blind pursuit of an ending. "If we would grasp the plot we must add intellgence and memory" (71). The intelligent reader uses past encounters with similar devices to interpret, while memory allows us to see the story as thematically non-linear, linking earlier pieces with later ones across time (both physical time reading and novel time passing). The plot "ought not to mislead," it should be, Forster concludes, a cohesive whole which should excite in the able reader new combinations and permutations long after initial reading, new arrangements rendered more enjoyable by their obscurity.

Sarah on 14 July 2004 at 3:41 PM, post #53

#10-unrevised

Krause, Sydney J. “Ormond: Seduction in a New Key.” American Literature, Vol 44, No. 4 (Jan., 1973), 570-584.

Krause opposes Donald Ringe’s point that Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond is an artistic failure. He cites the book’s unusually complex seduction story and the “ironic variation on the stock situation of a master seducer being mastered” (571). The seduction, writes Krause, is more protracted and subtle than in many works of gothic and sentimental literature, and the growing resistance of the heroine and boldness of the hero create a heightened tension within known moral prohibitions.

Krause moves into a study of the explicitness of seduction scenes in sentimental literature and gothic novels of the late eighteenth century. The muted or implied seductions in Ormond, Richardson’s Clarissa, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple are expanded into more explicit scenes in gothinc novels like The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Monk, and The Italian. Krause points out that these novels are concerned mainly with the practical implications of seduction, whereas Brockden Brown delved into the psychological implications.

The rest of Krause’s article is an analysis of the text of Ormond. Constantia is a sympathetic heroine who is actually attracted to her seducer and Ormond is a highly rational and enlightened man, not a “single-minded gothic villain” (578). Krause summarizes the novel’s plot at length. The end of the novel, in which Constantia stabs Ormond, gaining physical mastery over him, and in which Ormond’s argument for sex free from moral disgrace stands unrefuted, supports Krause’s point that Ormond is a seduction story of outstanding irony and complexity.

Elisa on 14 July 2004 at 2:40 PM, post #52

Forcey, Blythe. "Charlotte Temple and the End of Epistolarity." American Literature. 63:2, 1991 (225-241).

This article examines why the epistolary form, though universally considered the root of the British and the American novel, actually enjoyed only a very brief life of influence. Drawing parallels between epistolarity and the "typically benighted heroines" of novels, Forcey hypothesizes that the "polygot [speaking,writing, written in, or composed of several languages] world of eighteent-century Anglo-America" silenced the form. Secifically, Forcey uses Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple as the paradigm of what was silenced, as a work with the once "traditional Richardsonian plot and ... an authoritive, unifying narrative voice" (225).

Forcey first examines the social and ethnic changes that brought a flux of new languages and new groups of people to America during the first five years of the last eighteenth-century decade. She narrates the social mood, one of "anonymity and volatility." She notes that "most potential readers [of Charlotte Temple], even those seemingly least likely to identify with Charlotte Temple--battle-scarred old soldiers, jaded prostitutes, sophisticated society matrons, successful merchants, or ambitious young entrepreneurs--would still have been affected by the pervasive sense of 'homelessness'" (226). Forcey also discusses how Charlotte Temple allowed readers to experience their worst fears and yet emerge unscathed, noting the motherly tone of the narrator and how this motherly role filled a void in a lonely, individualistic society. And, Forcey concludes, "lacking the support of such narrative guidance, the epistolary novel could not make the successful crossing to the New World" (228).

Forcey then examines the lack of boundaries in epistolary novels and the break in reader-author trust that led to the fall of the form: "knowing that they [authors] were writing in a time of rapid transition and for many possible audiences (rural/urban, British/American, naive/wordly, male/female, moral/amoral), they could no longer trust readers to interpret on their own" (229). Rowson, Forcey argues, must narratively intervene in order for Charlotte's story to be understood: a warm, motherly presence, this narrator acts as an editor, moralizer, translator, and guide for her young readers. Rowson eschewed the role of mere passive compiler of letters and, in the process, ensured that Charlotte Temple's voice was not misconstrued or erased" (230).

Next Forcey examines the presence of letters and letter-writing within the novel itself and the 'motherly' way in which Rowson guides the reader to avoid epistolary influence. Specifically, Forcey notes several key instances in which Rowson replaces the text of letters "with an interpretive passage that neutralizes [their] potentially negative effect" (231). The methods by which Rowson shifts narrative attention are highlighted, and Foley examines every in-text letter.

Forcey concludes that "taken together, Rowson's narrative incursions provide an authoritative unifying voice which gives structure and guidance to the reader. An epistolary novel can have no such unifying voice; inherently multi-vocal, its linguistic duplicity resists the explicit direction and control possible in the narrated form" (236). She then adds a discussion of Francophobia in the time period's English and American literature, explaining that this strain "rested not only on the horror of the French Revolution but also on the idea that the French, through their vaunted verbal arts, could seduce even the sane into hysterical behavior" (237).

Sarah on 14 July 2004 at 1:55 PM, post #51

#9, unrevised.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. “Libertine America.” A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11.3 (1999) p. 1-28.

Tennenhouse challenges Ann Douglas’ claim that American reading tastes in the end of the eighteenth century gradually shifted from masculine to feminine and from an “authentic American tradition of letters” to popular fiction. He reviews the criticism which supports Douglas’ theory of the feminization of American readership and outlines modern critics who oppose Douglas such as Shirley Samuels, Julia A. Stern, and Elizabeth Barnes. Then he constructs an argument that American readers saw themselves as neither feminine nor masculine in the way that Douglas implies. He also suggests that the figure of the libertine in this “feminized” literature was a social experiment: “The seduction stories so popular during the early republic offered an American readership experiments in imagining just who could marry whom, thus new ways of reproducing class distinctions” (6).

Variations within the seduction genre tell us that it is not a heroine’s education or sexual restraint which determine the outcome of her story. It is the “interiority,” or the moral and emotional struggle within the heroine, vital in British seduction stories such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela which Tennenhouse points out as lacking in American seduction stories. He posits that the American seduction story replaces female interiority with a preoccupation with men’s relationships with other men through the economic and social medium of women. With regard to “the impact of libertinage on kinship relations” and class privilege he analyzes William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (8).

Tennenhouse writes that when the novel became popular in the nineteenth century, the libertine transgressed boundaries of race as well as class. He describes Cassy’s seduction by her white owner in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a seduction story, her owner the traditional libertine. “Once race is entangled with kinship through the institution of slavery there seems to be no way to legitimate the family produced by the libertine” (20). Tennenhouse also examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as a novel in which a libertine must interfere repeatedly with two houses of different social standing before they can be united.

Tennenhouse concludes that the disruptions of the American libertine infuse the reader with the desire to save the “common collective body” of the nation (24).

Justin on 14 July 2004 at 11:59 AM, post #50

Annotation #10:

Schmitt, Cannon. "Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian". ELH 61.4 (1994) pp. 853-876.

Cannon Schmitt's "Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe's The Italian" examines the use of nationality, and subsequently otherness, by the gothic novelists not only as an intensification of the Britain-other binary, but as a way of "developign techniques of suspense and terror characteristic of the Gothic novel and its literary descendants: sensation, horror, and detective fiction" (863).

The frame, Schmitt begins, immediately renders The Italian a story of otherness, "[The Italian] should be taken as emblematic of Italianness, Catholicism, a mysterious and un-English way of life" (853). Schmitt moves on to questions of familiarity, remarking that Paulo's attachment to Naples' landscape is typical of servant characters. However, Schmitt contends that complex foreignness is no better than simple homeliness. "Foreignness in The Italian is concentrated in the figure of Schedoni" (860). Ellena then becomes English, or at least non-other.

Schmitt continues by describing the "technologies of terror" that these questions of nationality uncover. The gothic novel, in general, takes a character that the reader has identified as non-other and places them in foreign, frightening situations (dungeons, the Inquisition, medieval Italy to name a few) which subsequently become frightful. Schmitt proceeds by invoking Foucault, as well as a Foucauldian reading by Nancy Armstrong, to analyze questions of otherness from a 20th-century perspective. He concludes by arguing that "the Gothic novel nevertheless fails to become synonymous with English nationalism in the way that, for instance, the Gothic revival in architecture does" (872). The function of the Gothic is inherently British, to some degree, and the technologies of terror were founded on an English perspective.

Justin on 14 July 2004 at 10:45 AM, post #49

Annotation #9:

Andriopoulous, Stefan. "The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel". ELH, 66.3 (1999) pp. 739-758.

Stefan Andriopoulous' "The Invisible Hand: Supernatural Agency in Political Economy and the Gothic Novel" examines the passage from Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776) where he describes the "the invisible hand" and follows this metaphor to fruition in the gothic novel. Andripoulous argues that there is a relationship between the portrayal of the invisible hand in Smith and the reappearance of a literal invisible hand in many Gothic novels (The Castle of Otranto by Horatio Walpole and The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, for example). Focusing on examples from Otranto but extrapolating to Gothic conventions, Andriopoulous argues that "Thus--according to the gothic novel--only those 'who affect to trade for the public good' are rewarded for their virtuous self-denial" (748).

Andriopoulous links the function of Smith's economic "invisible hand" with the narrative function of the same entity. "...the social science of political economy seeks to follow the model of the natural sciences in discovering hidden, regular laws behind nature's sensible appearances" (741). The invisible hand is something which, both to Smith and to the gothics, makes things work. Gothic authors, Andriopoulous argues, rely on the same sort of mysterious force to guide their narrative world. Andriopoulous targets words such as "imperceptibly" (742) or "unintentionally" (752) to identify inner workings which pervade gothicism.

Andriopoulous concludes by recognizing that while "the invisible hand" only appeared once in The Wealth of Nations, "[Adam Smith] is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention: the writing of a gothic novel" (753).

Elisa on 08 July 2004 at 1:45 PM, post #48

Christophersen, Bill. The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown's American Gothic. London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993.

In this book, Christophersen analyzes and contextualizes Brown's four Gothic novels in order to proove that Brown's title 'father of the American novel' is neither perfunctory nor questionable (x). By taking into account Brown's self-conscious nationalism along with his philosophical, moral, literary and psychological conerns, Christophersen uses a cultural-historical lens to examine the American character of Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly.

The first of seven chapters highlights "key issues and events of the 1790s and [is] tailored to concerns Brown himself voiced about the Republic" (x). Chapter two delineates Brown's method and style. Each of the subsequent four address one novel in full. The last chapter examines why it would be so easy for Brown to "imagine the legacy of the Enlightenment and of America in such pessimistic terms" (166) as his books convey, why Brown would spearhand a Gothic counterpart that, "oblivious to morality, reason, laws, and social compacts, mocks the young citizen's modish pretensions even as it strikes him down" (178).

Sara on 07 July 2004 at 11:28 AM, post #47

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Paul Gilroy’s ambitious study of black Britain spans the period from the Enlightenment to Toni Morrison. He uses ships and sailors as central metaphors for explaining the culture he terms the “black Atlantic,” which includes not only black Britain but journeys to and from Europe, America, the Caribbean and Africa. The fluid nature of Gilroy’s metaphor supports his argument for flexible constructions of identity and his opposition to “pure” constructions of race and nationalism.

Gilroy argues that the hybridity of the black Atlantic serves as a counterculture to bounded modernities, including chapters on the concepts of masters, mistresses and slaves in the development of modernity; black music; Germany, W.E.B. Du Bois and “double consciousness”; France and Richard Wright; and the memory of slavery and the utility of the diaspora concept.

Most of the subject matter of The Black Atlantic is located outside of the 1790s, but Gilroy places the achievements of early black Atlantic citizens “partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of Enlightenment and its operational principles” (48), even as their poetics and politics worked against the narrow scope of English nationalism. He discusses Edmund Burke’s idea of the sublime, which depends on the interchangeability of darkness and blackness. Drawing on the work of Peter Linebaugh and others, he also writes about blacks involved in radical and working-class movements, such as Robert Wedderburn. Gilroy concludes by calling for a “more modest formulation of tradition” (192) that would challenge Africentrism and which would value “mutation, hybridity, and intermixture en route to better theories of racism and of black political culture” (223).

Back to main menu