Gender, Neutrality, and the Nursing Father in Pratt’s Emma Corbett
This article examines Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1780 epistolary novel Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War, a text which represents familial relations in terms of the American Revolutionary War, as well as how this war divided families, such as the novel’s Corbett and the Hammond families, based on their national affiliation. This essay considers family in Emma Corbett by discussing representations of motherhood and masculinity. I argue that Pratt represents figurative and actual mothers in the novel as problematic in a number of ways, and he figures maternal subversiveness as in need of eradication. Instead, the neutral patriarch, who exemplifies the proper balance of sensibility and reason, is worthy of supplanting women in the text, and he is to be preferred even to sensible, poetic men and to dutiful, soldierly ones. Representations of masculinity in the novel demonstrate that to show emotion was a sensible, manly quality, but sensibility needed to be tempered lest a man become too emotional, too patriotic, or even effeminate. By critiquing masculinity as well as motherhood as they are embodied by characters like Emma Corbett, Charless Corbett, and Henry Hammond, Pratt offers Robert Raymond as the “solution” to these problems of motherhood and masculinity: he becomes a neutral, hybridized masculine and feminine patriarchal example who, as a kind of Lockean nursing father figure, repairs the Corbett and Hammond families’ damaged relationship, one instigated by their divisive national alliances.
Bearing Arms, Bearing Burdens: Women Warriors, Camp Followers and Home-Front Heroines of the American Revolution
Was the American War for Independence a revolutionary war? In addressing this question, historians have examined the conflict from many angles, including that of women’s positions in the Revolution. Some say that the War for Independence does not qualify as revolutionary simply because women participated in it, for women have always been a part of warfare, if not as soldiers then as military retainers, home-front supporters, resisters or victims. Others argue, however, that their participation had revolutionary effects, given the crucial influence women’s actions during the rebellion and the later representations of their varied wartime services had on American perceptions of women and their place in society.
`Heroic Virgins' and `Bellicose Amazons': Armed Women, the Gender Order and the German Public during and after the Anti-Napoleonic Wars
In Prussian-German history, the period of the Anti-Napoleonic Wars between 1806 and 1815 is central for the formation of a national political culture. These wars accelerated and intensified the nationalization of the gender order and the ‘gendering’ of the nation, while permanently influencing the fundamental structures of the relationship between women, the state and the nation. The article analyses one form of female patriotic activities during this period: the participation of armed women in the wars, as well as the ways in which they were perceived and commemorated. By studying their collective perception and remembrance with a focus on Prussia in a broader European context, the article explores the relationship between women, war and the nation.