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Chapter 11: Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: A Woman between Two Worlds
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247 The decades after 1800 were a period of uncertainty and anxiety. “Four memorable evils” still threatened the “unexampled freedom” of the republic, warned Thomas Ritchie, the editor of the Richmond Enquirer, in 1806: “war,” “party spirit,” disunion, and “luxury.” Each of these “evils” appeared at one time or another in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Scholars have fully examined the divisions of the first party system and the diplomatic challenges that culminated in the War of 1812. And they have recently turned more serious attention to the fears of disunion. But they have had very little to say about the widespread concerns about luxury and Americans’complex ideas regarding this particular evil. Unlike their colonial and Revolutionary ancestors, early nineteenthcentury Americans were no longer ambivalent about refinement. For most men and women, refinement was acceptable, even necessary, for the new republic. It gave polish—and legitimacy—to republican society and those ladies and gentlemen who led it. But luxury corrupted. Luxury threatened the republican experiment, since it could, in Ritchie’s words, “unnerve the zeal that would watch over the public welfare.” By 1800 Americans had made a distinction between refined manners and ideas, which were suitable for the republic, and corrupting behaviors and thoughts, which threatened to bring on the evils of luxury. Though their colonial forebears had drawn directly upon the English gentry for their ideas about refinement, early nineteenth-century Americans explicitly linked luxury with aristocratic behavior, ideas, and objects and regarded aristocratic luxury as the opposite of a desirable republican simplicity. By the early 1800s Americans had combined their definitions of refinement with feelings of nationalism. While refined manners and minds may have drawn upon courtly antecedents ,good republicans would no longer celebrate them as such.It seems that elite Americans had agreed to reject aristocratic luxury and laud republican Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte A Woman between Two Worlds charlene boyer lewis s Charlene Boyer Lewis 248 simplicity as the focus of refinement.Indeed,they would create an American version of refinement.Courtly ways would still have a place,but it would be a limited one.Americans concurred that refinement should and would work to celebrate the nation, not the European court. As Americans of the early nineteenth century struggled to decide just what constituted “American” character and culture, they necessarily did so in a transatlantic context.In spite of their political independence,the image of “Europe,” not specifically London,still stood as the center of culture and fashion for Americans. While they constructed their culture and their national identity, and even while they traveled in Europe, Americans sought to redefine the old, colonial division of American provincial and European metropolitan.Europe remained the yardstick by which Americans measured their cultural attainments—and they often suffered feelings of inferiority when they did so. But for Americans, Europe also represented corrupting luxury. When they thought about the nature of American character and culture, many Americans feared the corrupting influence of European individuals,manners,and ideas; many dreaded that American culture might replicate that of monarchical Europe. Given Americans’ deep concerns over the dangers of luxury to the new nation, women, who had long been linked to fashion and luxury, seemed especially worrisome.They could mislead men through their public roles as conveyors of refinement or, even worse, reward aristocratic fops instead of virtuous republican suitors by agreeing to marry them. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to women’s influence on American culture in this era. Judith Sargent Murray, Susanna Rowson, and a few others from the 1780s and 1790s who contributed to the ideals of republican motherhood have received some attention. And women who influenced the culture of the nation’s capital, whether in New York, Philadelphia, or Washington, have been addressed thoroughly and creatively. In a broader sense, however, women have been relatively absent from the historiography of the creation of a national culture in the new republic. Before and especially after 1800, women,at least elite women,fully participated in these cultural debates and greatly influenced the formation of a national identity. Culture, even political culture, as many historians have persuasively argued, is a public realm shared by men and women.In drawing rooms,dining rooms,ballrooms,and even the halls of government power, American men and women engaged in strident debates over the place of aristocratic ways in the new nation’s...