National Domesticity

1. National Domesticity Contextualizing Hannah Foster’s The Coquette

2. Questions: • Our investigation of Anderson and Derrida – and our readings of Hawthorne, cummings, and Hughes – have allowed us to see some of the “styles” in which national community is “imagined” for different purposes and effects • With these reading practices in mind, we can now turn to more specific questions. • What is the relation of domesticity to nationalism?

3. The Coquette • “or, The History of Eliza Wharton; A Novel; Founded on Fact” • 1797 - One of the earliest popular novels in the U.S. • “Fallen Woman” Narrative/seduction novel – falling in line with a dominant theme of 18th C novels (Richardson, Defoe, Rowson)

4. Context: Rise of “National Consciousness” • Anderson’s history documents a change in “imaginations of community” – a shift in what constitutes legitimate power • What happens to hierarchical forms of social organization in our new horizontal, nationalist imagination? (Here’s a hint – they don’t just go away…) (God) King literati “Horizontal” Brotherhood of Strangers (Citizens) • “Vertical” • Hierarchical • Authority Subjects Horizontal, Contractual (natural law) Authority

5. Context: George’s survey of “Domesticity” • “Keywords” is an attempt to describe the (diverse and varied) work of American Cultural Studies. They “map” the field in relation to certain key terms • Read these entries as summaries of all the ways that these concepts have been important to studies of U.S. history, politics, etc. • How has “domesticity” been taken up by American Studies scholars. What have they argued about it?

6. Context: Elizabeth Whitman Scandal • Based on a true story – the mysterious death of a “respectable” woman in childbirth out of wedlock • “Once Whitman’s identity was revealed, ministers, journalists, and freelance moralists industriously made meaning – their meaning – of her otherwise perplexing end” (Davidson viii) • Used in sermons, editorials as “an object lesson on the dangers of female rights and female liberty” (Davidson ix) • Story became a national sensation through its dissemination in newspapers… and novels.

7. Questions in Context: • How were social forms like marriage and gender integrated into an imagination of nation and why? • How does domesticity function towards this end? How does culture “produce” the value and form of domesticity in this period? • Why were issues like women’s purity so important to conceptions of nationalism?