The Gender Dichotomy in Early American Literature - Assignment Example

The Gender Dichotomy in Early American Literature I. Introduction At hand is but one thing more fascinating than the intellectual history of mankindand that is the intellectual history of a nation. The American populace, beginning into existence in the premature part of the seventeenth century, has been full of activity from the time when in recording their intellectual history in decrees, manners, and traditions, in battles with humankind and fiend and natural world, in thoroughfares, quarries, edifices, in visual memoirs, in sculptures, in black and white. It is in written accounts that this people, ever since their existence, have made the most classified and unequivocal record of their minds. However, literature for its own sake was not much reflected upon, or lived for, in the early period of American literature. The men and women of vigor were planting their strength and most imperative tasks relating to their current realities and the future. There was a wealth of intellectual liveliness among them; and the nation developed. The missions to whom those men and women assigned themselves, the colonization of America, was, subjected to the conditions of the period, an extremely difficult one, time-consuming, tiresome, threatened by practically every form of peril, full of wonder for heavy hearts. Their most primitive motive for writing accounts was bound up in a normal and even pitiable desire to resend hearsays of themselves to the old world, that secure, in harmony, crowded place, which they had abandoned when they traveled by water out toward the hazards and anonymity of the vast ocean and of the still greater wasteland which rest buried in the shadow afar from it. This provides people with the first collection of American writings, and gives details for the audience a large number of titles in that primordial period, the manuscripts written upon the direct arrival and at intervals after that, with the intention of transporting home tidings of wellbeing or of ill fare. Likewise, the concept of sexuality in early American literature served as a primary category in the debate and regulation of gender and that in stark contrasts to popular understandings. The mid-eighteenth-century in America was blended with a complex environment where dwellers immersed in an array of non-marital and extramarital affairs, where women fashioned rooms in which they could practice their independence, where sex commerce and immorality flourished mostly unmonitored, and where many such deeds and behaviors go astray lines of gender. By the nineteenth century, nevertheless, the American nation’s influential and developing middle-class fathers pioneered a variety of social and legal reforms to confine women’s autonomy and nearly all one and all’s sexual behavior. Even though this transformation modified the links between gender and sex to influence and social manipulation, particularly among the least powerful, the reallocation greatly fell short to persuade the desired behavioral changes. II. Richard Godbeer’s “Bodies in Space” Literalists have been thinking who formulated the question, “What counts as sex?” (Logan, 2001, para 1) which became the subject of American cultural debate. Richard Godbeer opts for the Puritans in his investigation of the intellectual, cultural and social records of sex, which validates that originating from a an array of circumstances, early Americans acknowledged sex and its challenged definitions as a critical “social, economic, political, legal, moral and religious issue” (Godbeer, 2002, p. 10). Facilitated by the principle that British America was engaged in a “culture war, pitting different conceptions of sexual and marital etiquette against each other,” (ibid, p. 9) the literature maps out the inconsistencies between popular sexual perceptions, expressions, and practice and the contradicting standpoints and markers that key personalities used to denounce them in their crusade for reform (ibid). Godbeer meticulously and cleverly traces the ethical and linguistic anxieties that resulted as disrespectful settlers whose venture in moral correctness was the least and a dynamic colonial population coexisted with clerics and magistrates bowed on implementing a different sexual code. In Godbeer’s masterpiece, he defined sex as an “erotically charged interaction tending toward though not necessarily including genital orgasm” (ibid, p. 11). This illustration makes clear from a historian’s point of view that, before of presently, whether Americans acknowledge it or otherwise, sex is not merely about sex or affection, and it is indivisible from cultural insights about gender. For early Americans, who had not yet achieved awareness on the modern concept of sexual orientation or sexuality as a significant characteristic of identity, sex acts were distinct elements of spirituality, cultural character and social status. Godbeer reflects on three dimensions of early American sexual history, namely, the fight against sexual immorality, the ways that sex contributed into colonists’ alarm about the effect of the New World on cultured and enlightened traditions and conduct, and the associations among sexual and political revolution in the late eighteenth century. In due course, Godbeer suggests a new analysis of the “moral and cultural architecture” (Logan, 2001, para 2) of early America and the American Revolution in the course of his scrutiny of sexual traditions and behavior. Goodbeer’s arguments about the permanence of social roles and the flexibility of bodies established an important level of consideration for literary scholars. Through confusing the categories of gender in the literature, the absorbency of the bodies and the deeds, which are sexual, social and spiritual, that those corporeal entities perform, are recognized. Such appreciation enables a higher understanding of sexuality that depends on early American cultural notions of physical bodies, rather than the modern frameworks of sexual identity, and invites a reinterpretation of the relationship among sex, gender and desire. For instance, Godbeer’s discoveries are significant to the appreciation of premature American captivity narratives, which usually alter gender roles and relocate the Puritan bodies of captives into wasteland holes with indistinct limitations. Godbeer’s writing has definite propositions for feminist literary scholars and remarkable theorists who put emphasis on questions of agency and misbehavior. If the themes of captivity, misdeed and cross-dressing stories, early narratives and seduction romances, personal accounts, journals and chronicles, the need to set hurdles on modern notions of the likelihood for narrators and main characters to perform as they bargain the association of gendered bodies in early American discursive gaps, becomes apparent (ibid, para 5). Furthermore, Godbeer’s analysis expounds on the legal systems, including those guidelines of proofs in cases of sexual harassment, sodomy and marriage break-up, which then can shed light on the relationship among social hierarchies, fitting gender attitude and sex. The examination of gender roles and both homo and heterosexual gender rapports in early American literature must be influenced by the knowledge of the prevailing culture’s faith in healing, remorse and salvation, at least when the person responsible for was a white man (ibid, para 7). III. Linton’s “The Romance of the New World” Feminism has been a forthright presence in early modern English literature; however, it has preserved its immobile expression when scholar scholars of contemporary England shifted to the England’s relationship to the New World. Linton’s work promises an extended feminist, trans-Atlantic model to English literature that conveys England adjacent to its New World colonies. It challengingly entwines together orientations of gender that created the English understandings of gender roles of the New World (Hall, 2001). Linton argues that romance is “a vehicle for the translation of one set of social relations into another” (Linton, 1998, p. 4) and hence a valuable tool for understanding and mastering the originality of the American experience. Specifically, the ‘family romance’, wherein adventurers in due course build their wealth through marital bonds, produces a ‘new domestic masculinity’ that influences the principles of English commerce and colonial enterprises overseas. Linton views romances as a lens in which women can appeal or argue against texts that promote patriarchal gender hierarchy, coupled with its newly commercialists’ motives, and hence best fulfill the concern of the male traveler/lover (Hall, 2001, para 5). Its perception that female drifting portends a female sexual submissiveness that should be tamed through male sexual potency in marriage innovatively revises the romance project for hopeful affluent males. Subsequently, Linton moves to a more materialist emphasis on trade and goods. The importance of cloth and cloth manufacturing were examined as sites for fostering of a new, bourgeois English manhood; stories in both domestic and colonial accounts “are in fact stories of an ideal bourgeois manhood elaborated through the economics and politics of cloth-making” (Linton, 1998, p. 62). This model of manhood is illustrated by commercial skill, achievement at trade and the appropriate application of domestic/ national authority. Apparently, a relevant gendered movement in cloth production, the removal of women weavers from their tasks and their immersion into a new, male-manipulated cloth business. However, Linton is precarious to stress that these narratives are figurative and may pass on attention from real disappointment over endeavors to build markets for cloth; nevertheless, her analysis leaves one speculating whether the narrative of victorious English manhood also dislodges a prolonged mythic tradition that relates weaving with women’s prowess (Hall, 2001, para 7). Therefore, the conflict between the males and females in terms of roles in America has been engendered by the English colonists who introduced to the natives their own orientation of gender roles. IV. Kerrison’s “Claiming the Pen” This literature, fundamentally, explores how and when privileged southern women assumed the authority, long claimed by men, “to read, write and advice” (Meacham, 2006, para 1). The narrative begins in the early eighteenth century when Virginia planter William Byrd disagrees with his wife’s appeal to have access to a book. After a century, a merchant scampered to fill Lady Jean Skipwith’s book orders. Kerrison maintains that colonial women who had reflected upon intellectual subservience transform early to republican women who declared their intellectual rights (Kerrison, 2006). Kerrison elaborates that southern women lagged behind English and New English women since tobacco slavery delayed the development of educational institutions and because planter, reluctant to provoke opposition from slaves or women, gave girls with lesser education than their brothers. Southerners decided that women should read only the Holy canon or the Bible and male-written recommended literature that put emphasis on Eve’s transgressions and the consequent necessity of female compliance (Meacham, 2006, para 8). V. Conclusion The discourses of gender and empire are intimately related in the English colonization of America, and that association can be partially mapped out in illustrations of English and Native American materialistic bodies. Historical studies warn readers and scholars of the need to continuously examine interpretations of gender roles in early American literature because the risk of over-depending on modern insights about gender could result in a stabilization of one interpretation, which then could lead to more biases. Moreover, one effective way of combating the blinding influence of national and shared myth-production, particularly what is explored in romances, which is the natural subservience of women to men because of the latter’s knighthood and courage, is to put emphasis not only the dispossessed in history, specifically women, but also the agency of learners as producers of history and literature themselves. Lastly, women should be remarked for their outstanding achievement in educating themselves despite of the insurmountable odds that they have confronted, as seen in the cases of the Southerner women. Works Cited Godbeer, R. (2002). Bodies in Space. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hall, K. F. (2001). The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism.(Review). Shakespeare Studies . Kerrison, C. (2006). Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Linton, J. P. (1998). The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Logan, L. M. (2003). Bodies in Space: Reading Gender and Race in Context Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676.(Book Review). Early American Literature . Meacham, S. H. (2006). Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography . Read More