Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late Eighteenth-Century American Culture

This research project is an analysis of the representation of the female body in late 18th-century American literature and culture. Looking at the different ways in which the body is constituted and addressed within the Early National Period, my project examines the relations among sentiment, embodiment, citizenship, and sexual identity. My study aims to explore the underside of the culture of enlightened public rationality, analyzing how the Enlightenment refusal to see mind as affected by its connections to a sexed body actually constitutes the "problem of sexuality." Using the interdisciplinary methods of American, Cultural and Gender Studies, I will investigate the ways in which the category of "woman" was deployed in order to transform the legal and political status of female subjects of the Republic. In analyzing the epistemological complexities that underlie 18th-century texts, I want to show how cornerstones of corporeally based sexes were themselves deeply implicated in the politics of gender. In addition to the early sentimental novels, William H. Brown`s The Power of Sympathy (1789), Hannah Webster Foster`s The Coquette (1797), Susanna Rowson`s Charlotte Temple (1794), and Charles Brockden Brown`s Clara Howard (1801), my analysis of sexual difference will include plays by Royall Tyler, Mercy Otis Warren, and Judith Sargent Murray, as well as unpublished material and lesser known texts, such as diaries, broadsides, letters, and newspaper articles. My investigation of the various ways in which the diverse changes in the Early National Period in America, the constitution of the female body and women`s bodily sensations were interrelated will shed new light on Early American culture.