The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

In this highly intelligent and elegantly written book, Elizabeth Maddox Dillon makes the important observation that U.S. liberalism depends upon the concept of gender for its successful functioning and, more particularly, that women's private status has been integral to liberalism since its inception. As Dillon goes on to make clear, such an observation is of immediate importance to those interested in American literary and political cultures, as well as to those working in political theory and feminist studies. Feminist critics, for example, have tended to argue that "liberalism is flawed insofar as it excludes women," but Dillon shows that "while it is indeed the case that the figure of the woman within liberalism often stands opposed to the autonomous, white male liberal subject," "this opposition is itself crucial to liberal thought and culture" (3). Such a shift in thinking about gender and liberalism simultaneously locates women firmly within the broad conceptual history of liberalism and reveals liberalism's deep dependence on those female citizens it seems to exclude. Further, such an analysis reorganizes familiar histories of liberalist theory, as Dillon demonstrates when she explains how early liberalist rhetoric was at work in both Ann Hutchinson's trial and Winthrop's strategic representations of it to an English public upon whom the Massachusetts Bay Colony depended for resources.

After an adeptly argued introductory chapter on gender, liberal theory, and the literary public sphere, Dillon moves to a consideration of how the antinomian controversy, which has long been seen as repressing women, actually involved an intricate and extended negotiation of women's political power. Showing that the antinomian controversy marks the beginning of an institutionalization of liberalism, rather than its repression, Dillon persuasively locates U.S. liberalism's origins much earlier in the nation's history than is usually assumed. Such a rehistoricizing of liberalism—one that shows the centrality of women's assumption of prominence to the evolution of a liberal public sphere—is followed by a chapter on the importance of marriage to a developing U.S. political culture. Showing a correlation between marriage's development into an increasingly intensive relation between individuals and political culture's increasing decentralization, Dillon makes the important observation that marriage shores up liberalist structures by emphasizing heterosexual desire and thus emphasizing sexual difference. As she argues, consensual marriage's primary condition "seems to be the cultivation of desire for a partner defined in sex specific terms: one need not only find a partner of the opposite sex, but it is precisely their sex—their manliness or womanliness—that one must find desirable" (129). It is sentences like this that make The Gender of Freedom a pleasure to read.

In her fourth and final chapter on sentiment and sociality, Dillon explores four infanticide narratives that precede and, she argues, help to produce nineteenth-century sentimental novelists' primary concern with the mother-child bond. Moving from marriage to motherhood, this chapter argues that the repeated trope of the dead child in sentimental fiction works to "produce the freedom of the liberal subject through [the] affective abundance" created by the child's death (203). While it is certainly true that child death is a prominent theme in sentimental fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the fact that maternal death and orphanage seem equally important elements of other popular novels raises an important and unexplored question about female mortality's impact on liberalism. Similarly, the interest of this chapter in infanticide narratives brings to mind the many slave narratives that depict a slave mother's desire to kill her offspring as an act of maternal nurture, and one wonders, finally, about the place of racial identity within the model of gender and liberalism that Dillon generates. It is, no doubt, the case that women engaged with the gendered dynamics of a developing liberalist ideal in distinct ways, based on other constituting elements of their social identities. Yet a brief consideration of...