Tennenhouse, Leonard. "Libertine America." A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 (1999), 1-28.

Tennenhouse challenges Ann Douglas’ claim that American reading tastes in the end of the eighteenth century gradually shifted from masculine to feminine and from an “authentic American tradition of letters” to popular fiction. He reviews the criticism which supports Douglas’ theory of the feminization of American readership and outlines modern critics who oppose Douglas such as Shirley Samuels, Julia A. Stern, and Elizabeth Barnes. Then he constructs an argument that American readers saw themselves as neither feminine nor masculine in the way that Douglas implies. He also suggests that the figure of the libertine in this “feminized” literature was a social experiment: “The seduction stories so popular during the early republic offered an American readership experiments in imagining just who could marry whom, thus new ways of reproducing class distinctions” (6).

Variations within the seduction genre tell us that it is not a heroine’s education or sexual restraint which determine the outcome of her story. It is the “interiority,” or the moral and emotional struggle within the heroine, vital in British seduction stories such as Richardson’s Clarissa and Pamela which Tennenhouse points out as lacking in American seduction stories. He posits that the American seduction story replaces female interiority with a preoccupation with men’s relationships with other men through the economic and social medium of women. With regard to “the impact of libertinage on kinship relations” and class privilege he analyzes William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (8).

Tennenhouse writes that when the novel became popular in the nineteenth century, the libertine transgressed boundaries of race as well as class. He describes Cassy’s seduction by her white owner in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a seduction story, her owner the traditional libertine. “Once race is entangled with kinship through the institution of slavery there seems to be no way to legitimate the family produced by the libertine” (20). Tennenhouse also examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables as a novel in which a libertine must interfere repeatedly with two houses of different social standing before they can be united.

Tennenhouse concludes that the disruptions of the American libertine infuse the reader with the desire to save the “common collective body” of the nation (24).

Entered by Sarah on 28 July 2004 at 10:48 AM.