Notes
Notes Introduction . Noah Webster, ‘‘Incest, n.,’’ An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, ). . Noah Webster, ‘‘Incest, n.,’’ A Dictionary of the English Language: Abridged from the American Dictionary (New York: F. J. Huntington, ), . . I use the term ‘‘problematic’’ here advisedly. A central, if ambiguous, concept in the work of Michel Foucault, the term is frequently used loosely, too often simply a synonym for problem. Yet, as Michael Warner has usefully pointed out, problematic is more than a problem and has a much richer meaning. As Warner writes, Foucault ‘‘treats a problematic not just as an intellectual tangle, but as the practical horizon of intelligibility within which problems come to matter for people. It stands for both the conditions that make thinking possible and for the way thinking, under certain circumstances, can reflect back on its own conditions. Problematization is more than arguing; it is a practical context for thinking.’’ The discourse of incest in nineteenthcentury America was this horizon of intelligibility for understanding the liberal subject and for the occasional critically reflexive moment. Michael Warner, ‘‘Styles of Intellectual Publics,’’ in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, ), –. . Calling the period between the Revolution and the Civil War ‘‘liberal’’ necessarily implicates this book in the decades-old, and now relatively stale, historiographical debates over whether the Revolution was liberal or republican. I am interested not so much in this debate as I am in the production of the rights-bearing, consenting, contractual , autonomous individual, a figure that despite the tensions between liberalism and republicanism had a central place in both. In terms of the Revolution and the historiographical debate, Joyce Appleby has been the most fervent advocate of the liberal tradition; see, for example, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: New York University Press, ); and Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). See also Jay Fliegelman , Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), and Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), both of whom privilege Lockean conceptions of society. Some historians, like Gordon Wood, treat republicanism and liberalism diachronically, with Notes to Pages – liberalism emerging out of the breakdown of republicanism circa ; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, ). J. M. Opal, in a different register, makes a similarly diachronic argument in Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ). The liberal subject, however, cannot be reduced to these two political frames. For an approach that situates the liberal individual among a plethora of competing, overlapping, and reinforcing discourses, including evangelical Protestantism, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). As Bruce Burgett puts it, ‘‘liberalism and republicanism name two antithetical and inseparable possibilities inscribed within the larger idea of democratic self-government.’’ Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . The liberal subject was the subject of democratic selfgovernment and moved in and out of various discourses across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. . On these relations, to begin with, see Pamela Haag, Consent: Sexual Rights and the Transformation of American Liberalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), chapters and ; Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Elizabeth Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’’ in Language, CounterMemory , Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –. . Among other works, see Gillian Harkins’s incisive account of incest and neoliberalism in Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, ); Judith Lewis Herman, with Lisa Hirschman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ). . See, for example, Arthur P. Wolf and William H. Durham, eds., Inbreeding, Incest, and the Incest Taboo: The State of Knowledge at the Turn of the Century (Stanford , Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). . The Table of Kindred and Affinity was a list of all kin relations considered to be near enough that marriage was prohibited. A hugely influential instance of the incest prohibition, it was born out of Henry VIII’s various marriages and was implicated in both the legitimacy of succession and the origins...
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