Women's Petitions and The Linwoods

I have again come a petitioner to you," says republican heroine Isabella Linwood to the British military leader Sir Henry Clinton in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's historical romance The Linwoods (1835), highlighting Isabella's repeated role as a petitioner in the novel (275). In central scenes throughout The Linwoods, Isabella petitions Sir Henry, appealing with "due humility" to reunite the Linwood family (240), if not to free her patriot brother Herbert, imprisoned in New York while impetuously seeking reconciliation with their Loyalist father. Isabella's petitions simultaneously trace the constitution of her political convictions from tory to rebel. In turn, Sedgwick petitions her readers throughout her "humble story," echoing Isabella's goals of republican union and transformation for her own era (315). In a series of gendered political performances in The Linwoods, Sedgwick thus invokes a central genre informing mid-nineteenth-century American women's writing: the petition, or political prayer, often on behalf of others—and a foundational genre in Anglo-American jurisprudence, relying on conventions of humility and republicanism to express requests to government officials.

In translating the petition's rhetorical conventions of humility and republicanism into The Linwoods with an eye to performances of gender, Sedgwick's fiction foregrounds the constitutive rhetorical production of both citizenship and womanhood in nineteenth-century America. In recent years, historical studies have underlined the importance of tropes of humility and republicanism in petitions by American women who "were clearly aware of gender categories in antebellum America that mapped gender onto the public/private distinction" such that "to petition Congress was, for many women of the early Republic, a calculated but significant political risk" (Carpenter and Moore 483). In the novel, Sedgwick is aware of the calculated risk of women's petitioning; consequently, as in antebellum women's petitioning, she invokes the humble rhetoric of petitioning with strategic performances of gender to persuade her auditors while still embracing republican ideals, registering protest with the goal of union. In doing so, Sedgwick uses Isabella's petitions to imagine women's political agency and to cast her as a burgeoning model of female citizenship who could still, without losing womanly virtues, participate in the body politic. In petitions to readers, the narrator of The Linwoods does the same, performing gender conventions alongside petitioning's conventions, often to mitigate its potential political risk.

Sedgwick is among several nineteenth-century women writers who discursively explore women's political agency through novel incorporations of such in-text, thematic petitions and extratextual, authorial petitions, such that the fictions themselves can be read as petitions to their readers that theorize women's political agency. Not only in The Linwoods, female heroines and their authors strategically recast the rhetoric of the petition—beseeching, appealing, or praying, in speech, writing, or action—to intervene in issues of justice and freedom and to become political actors in gender-inflected ways, as rhetorical situations demand. For instance, at the heart of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Mrs. Bird petitions for escaped, potentially imprisoned slaves, challenging husband Senator Bird on the Fugitive Slave Law with a political prayer, as she "ruled [in her domestic sphere] more by entreaty and persuasion than by command or argument" (68; emphasis added). Mrs. Bird's spoken petition marks Senator Bird's political transformation, preparing him to receive the live, runaway Eliza at their door, with her own, embodied appeal in "the real presence of distress,—the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony" (77; emphasis added). In E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), the popular heroine Capitola circulates a written petition for Black Donald, also unjustly imprisoned, and, when her conciliatory petition fails, Capitola resorts to action, a radical rescue of this prisoner. While these earlier fictions integrate women's petitioning rhetoric, by the time Rebecca Harding Davis published Life in the Iron-Mills (1861), women's petitioning had become so recognizable that it evolved into a figure sculpted of korl—a fully embodied visual representation of Davis's authorial petitions, direct sentimental appeals to her readers on the soul-starvation...