Not Forever Blasted: The Redemption of Virtue in The Female Marine

This essay examines popular assumptions about marriage and expectations of virtue in the early American republic through the lens of the popular nineteenth-century female warrior narrative, The Female Marine. This anonymous tale of a young girl’s unwed pregnancy, descent in to prostitution, adventures as a cross-dressing sailor, eventual return to home and marriage, has often been cited as a radical departure from the conventional woman-warrior trope that challenges the gender-based limitations of early American citizenship. In contrast to this reading, this essay argues that The Female Marine ultimately reaffirms rather than challenges traditional gender roles, using the theory behind the matrimonial concept of coverture to normalize the protagonist’s transvestism as a symbolic marriage that uses a masculine identity to rehabilitate her defiled feminine identity. Though transvestism seems subversive on the surface, this identity eventually gives way to and is replaced by traditional marriage wherein the protagonists identity remains covered by her husband’s and allows her to return to the gender-determined domestic sphere. Ultimately, rather than being a narrative of the assertion of female identity and agency, The Female Marine reaffirms the social belief in the ability of masculine identity not only to dominate but to save and rehabilitate the feminine.