Abstract
The Early National Period witnessed a struggle between the Romantic, sentimental ideal and discourses of control and containment of the female body. This conflict was also carried on through the genre of the novel, which insisted on the link between the public order and the female body. In its attempt to educate young readers in the requirements of republican womanhood, the sentimental novel was aimed at inculcating national interests and was therefore also complicit in the process of empire building. The ideology of what Linda Kerber has called “Republican Motherhood” gave women a political function—raising children to be virtuous citizens of the new nation—without their participation in political activity outside the domestic realm (cf. 203). The burden of the nation’s success thus seems to have rested on women’s bodies.
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© 2016 Astrid M. Fellner and Susanne Hamscha
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Fellner, A.M., Hamscha, S. (2016). “Solitary, Neglected, Despised”: Cruel Optimism and National Sentimentality. In: Balkun, M.M., Imbarrato, S.C. (eds) Women’s Narratives of the Early Americas and the Formation of Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543233_11
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