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74 3 Female Quixotism and the Fantasy of Region In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern, that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by Geographical discriminations —Northern and Southern—Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavour to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. —George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796 In Ormond, Brockden Brown explored the fantasy structure generated under republicanism with the explication of the figure of the secret witness, which there designated an external—or more precisely extimate —position from which subjects could unconsciously imagine themselves being seen behaving just as their idealization of self ought to behave. Ormond’s fascinating achievement is to imagine the structural necessity of the secret witness stepping out of fantasy to become a social figure. While still a figure whose ideational content is obscured by an overabundance of associations—Ormond signifies wealth, radical sexuality, conspiratorial manipulation, and doubling—he occupies the position of secret witness by adopting a racialized disguise: blacking up and taking on the role of a chimney sweep—hence Brown’s insight that republicanism gins up a plenitude of fantasy Others to obscure what is unspeakable, namely, that the omnipresent but overlooked black (slave, servant, underclass) is the final arbiter of the republican subject’s coherence. Brown suggests that the black subject operates on three levels simultaneously: as an impure presence, as the identifier of structural impurity in the republican schema, and as the agent for cleansing those impurities. If we may hazard a politics here, the struggle to the death at the end of Ormond seems to endorse the Jeffersonian view of the inevitability of race war (see Notes on the State of Virginia, Female Quixotism and the Fantasy of Region 75 “Laws”). Ormond offers up to Constantia a series of possible obstacles to self-actualization at the end of the novel. He trades sexual debauchery for sentimental companionate love, restores the father’s blindness, ameliorates the Dudleys’ poverty, and ultimately kills off the paternal superego when it challenges the new equalitarian basis for sexual union. Finally, Ormond disposes of the fraudulent Craig, the gravest economic threat to the fantasy of transparent republican codes of virtue, benevolence, and order, the sign of excessive personal self-interest. But this is not enough. In the end, the novel reinstates Sophia, whose role has been both to reveal and partially to obscure Ormond’s various conspiratorial associations. Looking through the keyhole, Sophia offers Constantia the key, albeit the wrong one, for unlocking Ormond. As Constantia sways toward Sophia’s views, there are but two viable (and compatible) solutions—escape to Europe and the death of Ormond—for no reconciliation may be imagined. Brown’s was one literary approach to the problem of republicanism, focused as it was on the extimate dynamics of virtue. Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801), however, serves as a useful counterpoint, for while it also explores the fantasy structure of republicanism, it shifts the focus to the broader coalitional logic of republicanism as a binding force in the United States. Written as Federalism moved from the institutional core to the periphery of the nation—that is, at the moment when the partisan conflicts of the 1790s give way to the more far-reaching regional divisions— Tenney’s novel offers an insightful analysis of the limitations of partisan analysis. The novel’s first significant episode is the thwarted marriage plot of the northerner (Dorcasina) with the southern slave owner (Lysander), while the remainder of the novel is a series of episodic explorations and repetitions of the aftermath of this failure. As in Brown’s novel, such an exploration necessarily entails the symbolic enhancement and elevation of the black slave, Scipio, who from a conventional point of view seems to hover comically on the novel’s margins but who actually, we argue, provides a necessary suturing of the novel’s multivariate marriage dramas.1 To put this differently, our burden is to show how the well-known scene of interracial desire—the garden scene in which Dorcasina and Scipio caress each other with love talk—is far from a simple moment of comic relief and is rather the novel’s key episode. Indeed, this is the moment akin to the sudden transformation of Ormond at the end of Brown’s novel, where the logical structure of Aaron Burr is mapped out and predicted. But let us first begin with a...

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