Liberalism’s Incestuous Subject: Private and Public Sex in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and reaching its apex in the midnineteenth century, a discourse of the private family came to dominate normative visions of social and political life in the United States. Where previously the family had been conceived as the central institution of social and economic life, serving as a “little commonwealth” analogous to the state, by the mid-nineteenth century, at least in prescriptive literature and sentimental novels, the family was private, increasingly cut off from economic production and political life. It did, however, retain a political function: the production and dissemination of virtue, morality, and chastity that ensured the political health of the nation precisely by abstaining from politics. As countless historians have told us, this made for a relatively clear, gendered distinction between public (male and masculine) and private (female and feminine). The public-private distinction, with the virtuous, sentimental family at its heart, was taken as the guarantee of stability for liberal democracy in nineteenth-century America. The social and political function of this family was to instill order in an increasingly disordered nation. Vice and licentiousness, keywords of the American Revolution, only became more prevalent with urbanization. In the discourse of the frontier, civilization was always on the verge of disintegrating. Democracy itself, once something to be feared, was becoming an object of desire, manifest in the expansion of universal white male suffrage, and later, in claims by women and the enslaved for liberty and full citizenship. Sovereignty was becoming increasingly murky. The novelty of democracy was not that sovereignty disappeared, but that it was no longer localizable to any absolute authority. As the political theorist Claude Lefort has argued, “Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and