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.
Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess And The Genealogy Of The Novel, 1680-1810
Introduction Part I: Amatory Fiction Part II: Sentimental Fiction Part III: Gothic Fiction Epilogue Bibliography Index.
The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America
In its contemporary colloquial usage, "virtue" is usually a term for female sexual prudence and benevolent activity with old-fashioned connotations. It evokes traits like chastity and altruism and, in a cynical post-sexualrevolution world, prudery and hypocritical do-goodism. On the one hand, these connotations are very old in Western culture. The sexual meaning of the word dates back to medieval and ancient times when the virtues were symbolized as virgins.' The Catholic ideals of celibacy and charity also reinforced the association of Christian virtue with sexual purity and personal sacrifice. On the other hand, the Protestant Reformation placed less emphasis on these qualities, criticizing the monastic ideal of celibacy and denying the spiritual efficacy of church offerings. It stressed other individual virtues-piety, temperance, frugality, and work in a useful calling.