Sexuality: An Early American Mystery

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a lost world. Does the dearth of print comments and court prosecutions mean Americans found their sexual relations unremarkable, for whatever political, denominational, and personal reasons, or have we only begun to discover ways to discern the period's complex attitudes? Most recent sexuality studies build on Michel Foucault's writing, but two key absences, one historiographic, the other methodological, problematize its usefulness for early American sexuality studies. In his account of modern subjectivity's emergence in Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes three phases of penalty: the ancien rdgime's spectacles of torture and regal terror, the revolutionary era's semiotic punishment of sentimental mimesis, and nineteenth-century modernity's disciplinary surveillance of the soul.1 When Foucault turned from penalty to The History of Sexuality, these three periods collapsed into two: the early modern regime of illicit acts, when a person's deeds, sexual or not, were obscene only if they challenged the church-state's material and symbolic hierarchy, and the modern sense of intrinsic personhood, strongly defined by one's immanent sexual desires, whether enacted or not.2 The early modern period emphasized the subject's subordination to traditional chains of vertical command; the modern one uses standards of normality, often typified as the lack of erotic perversion, for its control mechanism. What Foucault left out was his operative schema's implied middle, the eighteenth-century term. The resulting truncated binary, between early modern acts and industrial modern identities, has long since bedeviled eighteenth-century studies, which has been left with a container with too few compartments. We can, however, mind the gap ourselves. Because industries and nation-states in the nineteenth century needed constantly replenishing supplies of labor power to fuel their industrial and imperial engines, the period's dominant economic, politi-