by Judith Hiltner
During my sabbatical I focused upon the cultural uses of fiction and narrative in the early American republic. Cultural authorities in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America still were condemning novel reading as subversive to the moral fiber of the new nation. Novel writers defended their tales as morally edifying and insisted they were not actually fiction, but based upon real life people and events from which can be gleaned valuable lessons that would strengthen the civic character of the reading public. In telling their stories novelists were attempting to shape and define American character and American identity.
I began my sabbatical by taking an intensive seminar in "The History of the Book in America" at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. The seminar introduced me to the important cultural role played by publishers and printers in the Early Republic in attempting to shape the reading tastes and habits of the commonweal and to promulgate values, morals and manners deemed appropriate to "a rising people." I became quite interested in one particular narrative published in 1797 by Herman Mann, distant cousin of Horace Mann, and a Massachusetts publisher and printer. His book called The Female Review purported to be the memoirs of Deborah Sampson, an actual historical figure who served in the continental army during the American Revolution disguised as a man. By examining the books that Mann advertised in the newspapers he edited and that he sold in his bookstore, I was able to locate and identify the fictional sources that he used to compile Sampson's "memoirs," and to assess the "cultural work" he was attempting to accomplish in shaping her story.
My research resulted in three articles which have been accepted for publication. In the first, I trace Mann's initial efforts to shape Deborah Sampson into an American hero--a "Republican Minerva" and a model of wisdom, chastity and courage. In the second I show how cultural pressures, including middle class distaste for "women of the army," and increasingly conservative ideology regarding woman's "proper sphere" in the new republic, forced him to revise her story in his subsequent writings on Sampson. Finally, in the third article I trace two centuries of the "Deborah Sampson print industry" generated by Herman Mann's initial publication of her story. I note how Sampson chroniclers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have appropriated and substantially revised The Female Review to shape a Sampson accommodated to contemporary cultural needs. Examining changes in the telling of her story reveals changing ideologies regarding female heroism, women's role and female intimacy.
During the final months of my sabbatical, I read a wide range of eighteenth and early nineteenth century American novels, as well as critical and theoretical studies by scholars who examine the cultural role of fiction in the new republic. I planned a new graduate/undergraduate course called "Stories of the Republic: Fiction and the Shaping of National Identity in the Early Republic."