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  • Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature
  • Robert K. Nelson
Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature. By Ivy Schweitzer. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 276 pp. $49.95/$19.95 paper.

In this intellectually intrepid study, Ivy Schweitzer explicates a long history of “friendship discourses” dating back to the classical world (6), arguing that early American authors drew upon and, to varying degrees, attempted to reshape those discourses. Excavating an ideal of friendship that held a much deeper political resonance prior to the twentieth century, Schweitzer offers thoughtful readings of four early American literary works.

Schweitzer finds friendship to be at the thematic and political heart of “several [End Page 164] representative early American texts” (13): in the “familiar commerce” of John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian Charitie” (73), as an egalitarian alternative to marriage in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, and in the interracial relationships in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. The importance of friendship in these works, she suggests, evidences something we have not fully appreciated: the pervasiveness and significance of friendship in Western literature. Schweitzer modestly calls her first chapter an “abbreviated history of friendship theory” (13). It is in fact an erudite and impressively researched analysis, charting the place of friendship in Western thought beginning with Aristotle, ending with Derrida, and treating Cicero, Montaigne, and Adam Smith, among others, in between. What she finds in classical, Christian, and early modern works on friendship is the assertion that sameness or similitude is prerequisite for friendship and equality. Friendship, she shows, simultaneously functioned as a model for egalitarian, lateral relations between elite men who shared the same sex and class, and as the justification for social and political hierarchy between those men and all others who differed from them in terms of sex, class, or race.

In early American literature, Schweitzer finds a new, politically radical idea introduced into this two-thousand-year-old discursive tradition: Sameness might not necessarily be requisite for friendship and equality. Friendship might function, these American writers either hoped or feared, “as a way to imagine connection without hierarchy,” fostering egalitarian relationships across differences of sex, race, and circumstance (15). In “A Modell of Christian Charitie,” Schweitzer argues, John Winthrop worked to contain this democratic potential. He raised the semblance of an inclusive spiritual society that included men and women, rich and poor, only to undermine that portrait of ubiquitous friendship by rhetorically conflating it with hierarchical marriage. Conflict between egalitarian friendship and hierarchical marriage is the thematic center of Foster’s The Coquette. Foster’s heroine successfully resists the “tomb of marriage” in her pursuit of friendships (both same-sex and cross-gender), but that evasion costs her her life (103). Ultimately, she is not seduced by the rakish villain so much as by an ideal of personal liberty and egalitarian friendship that he both proffers her and, perversely, represents.

Schweitzer’s final two chapters turn to interracial friendships in Cooper’s and Sedgwick’s novels. In both, Schweitzer finds the possibility of friendship functioning to expand American equality and republicanism beyond white males. In The Last of the Mohicans, Hawk-eye, Chingachgook, and Uncas “model a democratic ‘micropolity’” true to the inclusive and egalitarian spirit of American republicanism (146). Hope Leslie goes further, making the interracial bond between two women exemplary of America’s highest political ideals. Yet, [End Page 165] in both novels, this democratic potential of friendship is not realized. Much like “A Modell of Christian Charitie,” The Last of the Mohicans disarms the egalitarian implications of friendship, in this case through a “symbolic cannibalism” where Native Americans are not socially included alongside, but ideologically consumed by, whites (24). The “ethical failure of friendship” in Hope Leslie was not Sedgwick’s goal but rather her critique of the United States’ exclusion of women and people of color from the social and political body (197).

If there is a weakness to Schweitzer’s study, it is that her analyses of texts are often distant, if not disconnected, from the world outside those texts. She opens Perfecting Friendship...

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