EMBODYING GENDER: SENTIMENTAL MATERIALISM IN THE NEW REPUBLIC

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In Charles Brockden Brown's Alcuin; A Dialogue, Alcuin, an "unpolished wight" and schoolteacher of "slender" stock, attends the coterie of Mrs. Carter, a decidedly middle-class salonniere whose "unbribed inclination" to superintend and serve constituted "the whole difference between her and a waiter at an inn, or the porter of a theatre." When Alcuin awkwardly addresses the "mistress of the ceremonies" (4),"Pray, Madam, are you a federalist?" she responds with the following disclaimer:

What! ask a woman, shallow and inexperienced as all women are known to be, especially with regard to these topics, her opinion on any political question! What in the name of decency have we to do with politics? If you enquire the price of this ribbon, or at what shop I purchased that set of China, I may answer you, though I am not sure that you would be the wiser for my answer. These things, you know, belong to the women's province.... The daringness of female curiosity is well known; yet it is seldom so adventurous as to attempt to penetrate into the mysteries of government. (7)

Of course, once she recovers from the "novelty" (7) of Alcuin's question, Mrs. Carter discourses quite eloquently on the subject of women's rights. Employing a rhetorical strategy widely used by republican women writers, Mrs. Carter mocks by hyperbolically articulating the sexist convictions of her age, her rhetorical performance dramatizing the distinction between the conventions of gender and the "natural" abilities of women. But what I wish to point to here is Mrs. Carter's demarcation of distinct, and distinctly gendered, "provinces" of male and female experience: the former encompassing the "mysteries of government" and public life; the latter, the seemingly less compelling (but, for Alcuin at least, equally daunting) "mysteries of tea-table decorum" (5) and the purchases that make these polite performances possible. The opposition was a convention of eighteenth-century Anglo-American social criticism and was used to mark the particularity of women's concerns, which purportedly rendered them incapable of disinterested rationality and, therefore, political virtue. In line with a lengthy philosophical tradition that infused popular wisdom, these writers presumed that women, naturally deficient in reason and incapable of abstract thought, were inescapably buffeted about by the immediate and the contingent, the sensory and the sensual, excluded from the poise of reflection and the transcendental constancy of rationality. In the binary logic of eighteenth-century Anglo-American gender formulations, women were private and consuming, not public and political, creatures.

But if shopping, to borrow Mrs. Carter's phrase, "belong [ed] to the women's province," exemplifying in its particularity something essentially feminine, it was also being rewritten by a variety of social discourses and legitimated as essential to an ethic of domestic sociability and social responsiveness. The complex interconnections between the emerging familial form known as domesticity and what Neil McKendrick has called "the birth of a consumer society" have not been carefully explored — largely because historians of domesticity have tended to emphasize its spiritual and affectional, rather than its material bases. Cultural forms of domesticity adopted earlier, aristocratic ideals of courtesy, hospitality, and politesse to a more modest and — to borrow from the contemporary lexicon, less "promiscuous" — model of sociality, a model materially shaped by the democratization of consumption; in the words of one writer, "if a taste of any kind happen once to prevail among men of figure, it soon turns general." And what was "general" in eighteenth-century America, according to social historians, was a new taste for domestic commodities such as decorative furnishings, tableware, musical instruments, and the equipment of tea service, which helped form and express ideals of domestic sociability, comfort, and care.

In this chapter, I discuss the genesis of a consumer ethic of feminine domestic sociality and aestheticism in eighteenth-century Anglo-American discourse, focusing on its contested articulation in a variety of texts published in the new republic, when an expressly "American" political economy and social ethic were first being formulated. This consumer ethic emerged out of a synthesis of Protestant and liberal discourses about the social significance of the family, the status of women, and the importance of mediating structures — economic, social, and aesthetic — in "civilizing" subjects and in promoting what eighteenth-centurytheorists termed "civil society." I will argue that the new feminine consumer ethic exhibited the constitutive ambivalence of liberal feminine subjectivity as an instance of what Hortense Spillers terms a "patriarchilized female gender." In particular, it constructed women as social beings while falling short of positioning them as full participant citizens in American civic culture.

In a discussion of the moral philosophy of Scottish Enlightenment writers, especially Adam Smith, David Hume, John Millar, William Robertson, and Lord Karnes, whose works were well known in America, I address representations of gender, property, and the emerging category of the "social" in Scottish liberalism. Although there are important differences among these writers, they share certain assumptions about the relationship among capitalism, sexual relations, and civil society, and it is their shared assumptions and rhetorical investments that interest me here. Consequently, I discuss these Scottish writings as a discourse, a representational matrix that (re) defined the ways in which commerce in general, and consumption in particular, could be "thought" in the new republic, and that set in place a network of discursive associations (e.g., among capitalist expansion, standard of living, and "civilization") that became unexamined conventions of U.S. writings about capitalism throughout the nineteenth century. In identifying luxury goods, which express "imaginary wants" and are thus explicitly invested with symbolic value, as vehicles of "civility" and "femininity," the Scots defined commodities as signifiers of subjectivity — specifically, of gender, sexual, and racial subjectivity — while they reified certain gender constructions as culturally normative. Scottish discourse operated to define...