"Republican Virtue" and the American Eve; or, Class(ical) Constructions of Female "Boldness" and Political Liberty (review)

Abstract

"Republican Virtue" and the American Eve; or, Class(ical) Constructions of Female "Boldness" and Political Liberty Mark L. Kamrath (bio) The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self. John C. Shields. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. xlv, 422 pp., index. These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia. Susan Branson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. 208 pp., index. I could not have imagined that I would one day be talking about vaginas on talk shows in places like Athens, Greece, chanting the word vagina with four thousand wild women in Baltimore, or having thirty-two public orgasms a night. These things were not in my plans. —Eve Ensler, The Vagina Monologues (1998) Athens has, historically, been a symbol of democracy and freedom—the birthplace of modern attitudes toward the body and the body politic. In an entry in her travel journal, Hannah Griffitts (1727–1817) remarked, in passing, that she would help make Philadelphia "the Athens of North America." It was a promise she tried to realize by translating Fénelon's Aventures de Télémaque into English heroic verse, by producing several volumes of original and transcribed poems, and by conducting salons in her home (Stabile 12 ).1 As foreign or removed as the remark may seem to us now, it references standard attitudes held by men and women of Griffitts's generation; it also [End Page 139] helps unearth a series of misconceptions about the function and impact of "classical culture" in early America and the ways that a Greco-Roman discourse affected our nation's cultural identity. It points, like Susan Branson's These Fiery Frenchified Dames and John Shields's American Aeneas, to a dimension of America's past that has been all but smothered by an unquestioning belief in the Adamic myth and now classic studies on the American self by R. W. B. Lewis and Sacvan Bercovitch. Just as Shields's and Branson's studies explore neglected cultural paradigms and material sources, so their juxtaposition as critical studies enables us to brush up against ideas of American exceptionalism and literary agency not easily seen in the archival record or fully appreciated in American studies. Their monographs, in other words, provide a mutually illuminating lens or "translatio cultus" for identifying the manner in which the early American imagination transplanted biblical and classical notions of the self and cultivated, long before 1776, a historically self-conscious sense of political and cultural independence (Shields 3, 58). At the same time, arguments made in The American Aeneas and These Frenchified Dames raise provocative questions about the relationship between, and legacy of, republican "virtue" and "womanhood" and what, especially for women in middle- to lower class backgrounds, constituted bodily "sin," shame, and sexual agency in the streets of a city like Philadelphia. To begin, The American Aeneas, as Shields suggests, examines various texts, including pastorals, elegies, literary independence poems, religious discourses, and political writings with an eye toward tracing the myth of Aeneas—his sea journey and desire to establish a New Troy or Rome—and its role as a trope for American consciousness. It focuses in particular on how the Constitution, a "distinctly American expression of Vergil's pietas" at first (274), came to reflect an "Adamic ideology" that persists until this day (277). In showing how our nation's secular roots have been neglected in favor of a Judaeo-Christian mythos, Shields perceptively charts how the Adamic myth—the loss of innocence in the New World—came to displace the Aenean one and adapted itself to American cultural and political circumstances. He shows how the "myth of Aeneas, then, and now, remained in place beneath the more visible Adamic myth" (xxvi). By organizing his recovery of the Aenean or classical strand of the American past historically or chronologically, Shields provides fresh readings [End Page 140] of a range of authors, including Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, Phillis Wheatley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. For example, Shields alerts us to Taylor's classical interests and how in his poems and sermons "classical references function either metaphorically or typologically" (42). This tension between the Calvinistic and classical elements in material like his...