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.
The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760
Introduction: historicising motherhood Part I. Royal Motherhood: Queen Anne and the Politics of Maternal Representation: 1. 'The teeming Princess of Denmark': Anne as mother, 1684-1700 2. 'Thy nursing mother': symbolic maternity and royal authority at the coronation of Queen Anne 3. Symbolic maternity and practical politics in Queen Anne's England Part II. Monstrous Motherhood: Violence, Difference, and the Subversion of Maternal Ideals: 4. 'Unnatural' motherhood in two novels by Daniel Defoe 5. Dreams of maternal autonomy: scandalous motherhood in three tales by Eliza Haywood 6. Maternal failure and socio-economic difference: the unnatural mother Part III. Domestic Motherhood: Constraint, Complicity, and the Failure of Maternal Authority: 7. Female virtue and maternal authority in Pamela, Part 2 8. Maternal virtue and maternal failure in Clarissa Conclusion: going public: the case of Lady Sarah Pennington Appendix.
Women in the Era of the American Revolution: The Case of Norwich, Connecticut
W TAS the condition of women in eighteenth-century America improving or deteriorating? Did the Revolution change women's status? One answer emphasizes patriotic activities, contrasting them to worsening legal and household oppression; another is that women's domestic drudgery was lessening and the ideology of the Revolution was a liberating influence.' These questions, and their one-sided answers, remain unresolved. This essay documents the principal trends in women's condition in a single community, Norwich, the second largest Connecticut town at midcentury, where women were benefiting in some aspects of domestic and economic life and suffering in others. While the Revolution accelerated changes which had been in progress for decades, it also contributed to a new self-awareness of women as a group. Rather than "improving" or "deteriorating," the lives of women in Connecticut were growing more complex. A study of eighteenth-century American women begins with the household, the focal point of most women's lives. Mehetabel Coit of Norwich, for example, records in her journal family events-the births of her children, visits of friends, and various domestic recipes.2 The composition of the colonial household-age, sex, and number of members-