Dangerous Domestic Spaces in The Female American

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ See especially, Betty Joseph’s “Re(Playing) Crusoe/Pocahontas: Circum-Atlantic Stagings in The Female American.”

² Among these, Matthew Reilly makes a strong case for the way Arabic and Quaker texts may have influenced the text’s treatment of subjectivity in “‘No eye has seen, or ear heard’: Arabic Sources for Quaker Subjectivity in Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American.” Scarlet Bowen identifies Anglican sermons of the same period as an influence on the text in “Via Media: Transatlantic Anglicanism in The Female American.”

³ Nancy Armstrong argues that the novel “no longer constituted a form of resistance but distinguished itself from political matters to establish a specialized domain of culture where apolitical truths could be told” (Desire 21). The Female American, however, serves as a counter to the novels of Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen, which Armstrong uses to build her case that the novel reifies the domestic sphere.

⁴ Denise Mary MacNeil observes how in The Female American, the “[h]andling of European American prisoners is markedly benign in tone, even when violence is involved” (93).

⁵ Roxann Wheeler examines how the book evades questions about intermarriage in late eighteenth-century Virginia by setting the story in the distant past before the influx of slaves from Africa into the colony. Indeed, Virginia outlawed all interracial marriages by 1691. At the same time, Wheeler notes how The Female American “promotes the notion that however unsettling dark color may be, it is ultimately insignificant” (168).

⁶ Michael McKeon identifies that “what seems truly innovative about [eighteenth-century England] is its extraordinary concentration upon the question of the marriage choice, and upon the paradigm of a basic opposition—embodied in typical familial (or simply human) personages—between love and money” (131). Yet The Female American reconsiders this opposition between love matches (disregarding money) and marriages (in which money is paramount) to reveal how even romantic attachments prioritize socioeconomic mobility.