Rakes, Coquettes and Republican Patriarchs: Class, Gender and Nation in Early American Sentimental Fiction

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d'etudes americames Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 1995, pp. 41-62 Rakes, Coquettes and Republican Patriarchs: Class, Gender and Nation in Early American Sentimental Fiction Gareth Evans 41 A number of recent studies underline the novel's role in the formation and consolidation of American middle-class identity (Brodhead 1991; Davidson 1986; Hansen 1991a, 1991b; Lewis 1987). However, when these studies turn to assess the politics of sentimental novels such as William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy ([1789] 1969), Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette ([1794] 1986), and Susanna Rawson's Charlotte Temple ([1797] 1986), they either deny sentimental fiction's particular role in middle-class development (Davidson 1986), 1 or fail to elaborate on Ian Watt's claims for sentimental fiction's middle-class affiliations (see Hansen 199 la, 199 lb; Lewis 1987; Watt 1963). In particular, those who have followed in Watt's footsteps have avoided grappling with what it means to apply the phrase "middle-class novel" to fictions produced in a culture that still used class terminology only sparingly, and lacked a coherent "middle-class'' to which that term might be applied (Blumin 1989, 19). The key to solving this conundrum lies in Nancy Armstrong's analysis of the British sentimental novel. Viewed from Armstrong's perspective, sentimental fiction is a catalyst for, not a symptom of, middle-class development . Like their British counterparts, American sentimental novels did not address the needs of a pre-existing middle class, but instead 11 helped to generate the belief that there was such a thing as a middle class with clearly established affiliations before it actually existed" (1987, 66).2 In a society 42 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadtenne d'etu.des americaines that, much like eighteenth-century Britain, lacked either an easily identifiable or self-identifed middle class, Brown, Foster, and Rowson suggest the need for that class to be invented by opposing the virtues of middle-class social models and norms to the vices of aristocratic codes of conduct. Sentimental fiction was the most widely read genre in late eighteenthcentury America (Davidson 1986; Hart 1950; Mott 1947). With a readership drawn largely from outside the post-revolutionary elite (Davidson 1986), sentimental novels were perfectly placed to contribute to the first steps of the middle class's gradual emergence from an alliance of artisans, retailers, smallbusiness owners, "public officials ... , clerks, ... and genteel professionals" such as "schoolteachers, doctors and lawyers with small practices, [and] ministers to congregations of ordinary people" (Blumin 1989, 37). Sentimental novels demonstrate both what this emergent class stands to lose from aping aristocratic manners and what it stands to gain from adopting middle-class values and behaviour patterns. For as they warn that a dramatic fall in class status inevitably awaits those seduced by the rake's promises of upward social mobility, they also reveal that self-interest demands an unstinting pursuit of middle-class repectability. Brown, Foster, and Rowson represent the rake as both an aristocratic barrier to the practice of appropriately middle-class conduct, and as the embodiment of English and French threats to the new nation's stability and integrity. In an attempt to ward off the dangers posed by the rake, the first American sentimental novelists propose new models of patriarchal authority and womanhood. This new form of patriarchal authority depends on grounding male power in consent rather than coercion. What the new model woman who appears in these same novels consents to is a form of 'selfgovernance ' by which she checks both sexual desire and the desire for social eminence. Women who consent to work in tandem with 'benign' patriarchs are conferred with a badge of superior moral righteousness that permits them a role, however limited, in shaping male conduct in both the private and public spheres. Women who failto be convinced by the virtues of the newly benign patriarch, however, are condemned to seduction, ruin, and death. While Brown, Foster, and Rowson assert the advantages of adopting middle-class manners and mores, they simultaneously obscure the class Gareth Evans I 43 dimension of the gender models they promote by cloaking them in a nationalist discourse of "liberal...