The Picaresque And The Margins Of Political Discourse

Abstract

Abstract A number of novelists of the early national period turned the essentially conservative subgenre of the sentimental novel (with its fetishization of female virginity) to a subversive purpose by valorizing precisely those women whom the society had either overtly condemned (the fallen woman) or implicitly rendered invisible (woman as feme covert). Yet even the most progressive sentimental novels still focused primarily on women’s restricted familial role. Within the confines of the novel and the society, women only sporadically and peripherally entered into the political discourse of the era, either as objects of the debate or participants in it. Certainly a number of sentimental novels (such as The Coquette and The Power of Sympathy) include scenes in which female characters discuss political issues, but given the Constitutional silencing of women, this fictive act is just that-a fiction. Lacking any legal standing, women’s political opinions could be dismissed as easily as John Adams dismissed his wife’s plea. “Every man, by the Constitution, is born with an equal right to be elected to the highest office,” the Reverend John Cosens Ogden of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, declaimed in 1793. “And every woman, is born with an equal right to be the wife of the most eminent man.”1 No wonder sentimental fiction remained closeted, circumscribed by home and hearth.