The Constantias of the 1790s: Tales of Constancy and Republican Daughters

Abstract

Little attention has been paid to many tales of constancy, fidelity, and fortitude authored by American during nativist 1790s or, indeed, to way they were supported by printers who reprinted British tales and exhortations on these same interconnected themes. Yet Constantias of 1790s were more popular with American readers during this decade than Harriot, Eliza, or even Charlotte, and more obviously relevant to building of new nation, to early republican womanhood, and to most women's ordinary lives. The most widely of these tales offered models of unswerving, principled, and courageous female agency and of virtuous women, undaunted by patriarchs, penury, danger, and war, submitting nobly to troubles and sufferings to establish families in America. They taught that establishment of virtuous, happy families and stability of early Republic depended on daughters' patriotic constancy and fortitude. American-authored tales of constancy were generally transatlantic, or had a transatlantic component, which addressed relationship of Americans to foreign commercial ventures and seductive British or French metropoles. They offered a sort of counterdiscourse to discredited language of loyalty-Loyalism, at a moment during early Republic when unswerving allegiance to patria needed to be articulated anew for a white population that had been accustomed for two centuries to traveling back and forth on the highway for purposes of education, patronage, or work, and to largely unhampered mobility within an Atlantic World-System, where provincial, national, and even imperial frontiers were still unstable, impermanent, and widely ignored. (1) By representing wanderer's constancy to new Republic as dependent on his constancy to republican daughter who had planted herself firmly on American soil, many tales indicated that American family, and with it viability of new nation, depended on daughters' patriotic constancy and fortitude. As we will see, protean anonymous voices urging constancy on republican daughters in name of an American lady also left their mark in important ways on skeptical and mutually debating texts of now canonical early American authors, such as Judith Sargent Murray, Susannah Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown. Cathy Davidson was perhaps first to notice that American-authored novels were often published [they] served social objectives that printer considered worthy of supporting with his enterprise and thus that the larger ... concerns of printers were ... crucial ... to genesis of American novel (98, 99). (2) But her insight has not, on whole, been pursued, perhaps because patriotic printers often addressed contemporary American concerns through conjunctions of carefully selected foreign reprints and American-authored texts. In reading American-authored texts against British novels, modern critics have been more struck by the narrative ingredients (Armstrong 373) that foreign- and American-authored stories shared, and have tended to see them as merely imitative as a result. But fact that eighteenth-century writers on both sides of normally indited by imitating and varying models made variation a significant for contemporaries who were accustomed to read double (Bannet, Quixotes 560). Imitation involving selective reproduction, alteration, and variation of British models was a technique used by Americans who were culturally and diasporically English in Leonard Tennenhouse's sense to adapt extant British literary and cultural materials to new, national, and republican ends. Itself a reproduction of cultural practices that originated somewhere else (Importance 9), imitation as British and American writers practiced it positively required them both to reproduce English literary forms and to remodel [them] to make a statement (12, 25). …