An "Inconceivable Pleasure" and the Philadelphia Minerva : Erotic Liberalism, Oriental Tales, and the Female Subject in Periodicals of the Early Republic

The sexual misapprehensions so noticeable in the past have continued into the present. With the rise of Islamic fundamentalism one message has been made very clear. Muslim preachers assert Islam is under threat from the spread of Western sexual laxity and immorality. . . . Western decadence is personified by the unveiled woman who in their view is an open invitation to sexual immorality.

Derek Hopwood,
Sexual Encounters in the MiddleEast:
The British, the French and the Arabs (1999)

Remarking in his Monthly Magazine and American Review (1799) on James Dalloway's "Description of Constantinople" (London, 1797) and the treatment of "virgin slaves," Charles Brockden Brown included a footnote on Dalloway's observations about the "Avert Bazar" or "woman market." Appropriating language from Dallaway's own marginalia, Brown's commentary on how intrigues with female slaves led to pregnancy and an endless parade of victims being "taken out into the sea at the dead of night, and committed to the deep" reveals more than his feminist inclinations or his awareness of gender relations around the world.¹ His sympathetic echoing of Dallaway's remarks concerning the treatment of Eastern women references, at that time, a nearly two-decade-long fascination in early American magazines with the Far East, particularly its purported sensuality and images of sexual laxity, and highlights the ways Oriental tales about the Middle and Far East served to reinforce—and further expose—early republican attitudes about female sexuality, erotica, and agency.²

Although largely ignored, the Oriental tale in American print culture occupies an immense amount of textual and ideological space. In addition to a large body of travel literature, histories, and other writings about the East, almost 300 tales were printed in various periodicals between the mid-eighteenth century and the end of the Civil War. Despite the wealth of material concerning Eastern relations, scholarship that examines this vast array of material, particularly its reception in America since the early eighteenth century, has been minimal.³

Using new historicist as well as recent postcolonial, feminist, and psychoanalytic reading strategies, this study examines the wealth of neglected eighteenth-century periodicals and reassesses how early republican magazines like the Philadelphia Minerva (1795-98) viewed the exotic and more often than not "erotic" contents of Oriental tales and negotiated not only traditional or didactic content but also the often related discourses of sentiment, colonialism, and female eroticism. In asking how we might understand the overt sexuality or eroticism of the female body in certain Oriental tales relative to seduction literature and its emphasis on female chastity and virtue, and male immorality, I argue that Oriental or Eastern tales archive a highly ambivalent discourse. They embed a moment in the republican body politic and "inner states" of individuals where the ideology of political liberalism—and the historical differences between democratic freedom and despotism—intersects with an erotic or sexual equivalent.⁴

Contrary to the idea that the ideological forces of evangelicalism, civic republicanism, and sentimental literature simply promote "female virtue" and "self-sacrifice" in a domestic way and remove that concern from the male sphere, I suggest that the Oriental tale in magazines like the Philadelphia Minerva not only interrogates male virtue but also provides a provocative glimpse into the elusive history of American sexuality, women's reading and writing practices, and republican print culture. It offers insight into how erotic and, at times, sadistic images are intimately bound with sentimental discourses and a desire for sexual agency and liberation.⁵

European Print Culture, Orientalism, and the Eastern Tale

"Pleasure," remarked Lord Chesterfield to his young godson in the 1760s, "is now, and ought to be, your business." This statement, says Roy Porter, embodies the "'sensationalist' psychology" of the eighteenth century and the ways...