Radical Pornography and Homoerotic Society in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness
Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond or the Secret Witness (1799) is the most radical novel written by an American until perhaps Melville’s Moby Dick (1850). Brown’s narrative rejects middle-class aspirations of individual merit and commercial success by looking to nurture a community based on the values of rational cooperation and mutual betterment. Though these collectivist ideals are rooted in the Quaker worldview of Brown’s family background, Ormond breaks from the Society of Friends’ pacifism by exploring violence as a catalyst for liberation, especially for homoerotic relations. Inspired by a brief moment of renewed revolutionary activity throughout Europe in the late 1790s, Brown’s novel differs from the period’s emerging descriptions of same-sex sexuality as it conceptualizes homoeroticism more in terms of its group politics, rather than those of aberrant biological sex or its codification in gender roles. Instead of wondering what sexual acts reveal about an individual’s personality, their “identity,” Brown’s romance considers homoerotic desire and an enlightened, democratic ethics as mutually enabling. This consideration of sexuality as defined by the striving for social justice appears remarkably modern, but the historical context of Brown’s perspective belongs to eighteenth-century arguments surrounding the concept of civil society, which was developed as a counterweight against the early modern institutions of the absolutist state and doctrinal church.
Locating Brown within the period’s definition of civil society, rather than the consecration of personal “individuality,” will prove tremendously useful to students of pretwentieth-century (homo)sexuality, as it breaks out of a current impasse in sexuality studies regarding the self-aware emergence of groups associated with certain erotic modes of pleasure. After Foucault, the dominant paradigm for analyzing same-sex sexuality has been his distinction between sexual acts and identities.1 Anglophone cultural historians consequently often argue that a homosexual identity was only possible after the concept of personhood, defined by a subject’s interior psychology of quasi-genetic drives, arose and became consolidated throughout the nineteenth century. In the early modern period, roughly between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, same-sex activity was punished if it violated the traditional hierarchies of rank and gender submission, but it was not held to signify a truth about one’s self, mainly because the period’s elites could not allow the potentially dangerous notion that the lower ranks might have a private life worth noticing, let alone policing.
The acts-versus-identities model has had ambiguous effects for recovering sexual cultures. For the notion that conceptions of sexuality are socially conditioned and historically mutable has frequently meant that even otherwise gay-friendly critics often deny that pretwentieth-century agents gave meaning to their sexual practices. The initial problem with an overly dogmatic use of Foucault is that his work concentrates on tracking the changing terms used by officials to describe sexual activity. He never attempted to develop a method for discerning how the subjects covered by terms like “sodomy” or “homosexuality” may have conceptualized their own erotic behavior. Likewise, his work never acknowledged the belatedness of bourgeois professional knowledge, where middle-class writers and publicists usually begin discussing cultural matters long after these formations have already existed, especially if they were initiated by the laboring-class or other groups on the margins of middle-class expectations. The fact that early modern authorities refused to acknowledge the presence of alternative attitudes and semicovert communities in their midst does not mean they did not exist before 1800.
A tendentious use of Foucault has resulted in sexuality studies policing itself in ways far more rigid and unimaginative than is the case for other kinds of social history. We acknowledge the presence of a middle class before 1800, even while we understand that the particular bourgeois ideal of antagonistic individualism protected by the refuge of nuclear family domesticity does not fully exist then because the middle classes have different traits that they emphasize as defining themselves. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe does not have the rich interiority of a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman’s hero, but the novel begins by clearly nominating Crusoe as belonging to the mercantile, middling class. It would be nonsensical to argue that, just because Crusoe does not fit the particular form of middle-class behavior dominant in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie, and the larger category of capitalism, does not exist before 1800. For sexuality studies, the overly homogeneous nature of the Foucauldian paradigm does not give us critical tools that are supple enough to make sense of sexual cultures that cannot easily be slotted into the acts or identities categories. This two-stage model flattens the multiple and often uneven phases of erotic practice in the post-medieval West, especially those within the eighteenth century as a phase of transition and radical transformation between the early modern and modern periods.2
Ormond’s significance is that it indicates a late eighteenth-century response that does not mainly consider sexuality either in terms of licit/illicit acts or personal identity, but as a collective experience shaping a diffuse set of groups and subjects into an interactive society. Here Brown participates in one of the main preoccupations for eighteenth-century writers associated with the middle class: the question of how to form a nonaristocratic civil society, rather than the one about consecrating competitive individuality. In works like Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and Abbe Sieyres’s What is the Third-Estate? (1789), publicists sought to articulate visions of what a nonaristocratic, nonplebian society might look like. This metropolitan, sociological imagination differs markedly from a nineteenth-century one. Unlike later ideologues, Adam Smith’s defense of free trade saw the good of commerce in terms of national wealth and as a medium for fashioning a moral community among strangers, not an arena of permissible war of all against all. Unlike scholars, like Tönnies, who contrast an idealized, agrarian organic community (Gemeinschaft) of recognizable, traditional relationships against a modern society (Gesellschaft) of alienated individuals coercively administered by impersonal bureaucracies, eighteenth-century writers saw the term “society” as defining a positive emancipation from the gothic rigidities of rule by lineage elites and religious superstition. To understand the period’s consideration and enactment of same-sex sexuality, we need likewise to consider this phenomena within the terms provided by these larger debates. Rather than engage in the ahistorical search for a homosexual personal identity, the terms of which would have been unavailable and uninteresting to most agents in the period, we must explore the rudiments of a homoerotic society as enacted in a variety of institutions and parainstitutions.
Much of the period’s debate on the question of civil society involved discussions about the desirability of fixed institutions. An institution has managers who administer the survival and routinization of social actions with the rent or purchase of an enclosed architecture that can house the enactment of conventional beliefs and practices. On the other hand, a parainstitution is more like simple customary behavior, highly mutable because it lacks a stable mechanism for self-regulation. In the early American Republic, New York merchants transformed the parainstitutional street trading of stocks by hand gestures under certain trees and appointed a committee to institutionalize the stock market by purchasing the Tontine Coffee House, the forerunner of the New York Stock Exchange, for their use as a bourse. A cruising ground is a parainstitution because its rules of sexual behavior are fashioned by an anonymous collective whose money is not spent on its upkeep, even if the site contains financial exchanges, like prostitution. An eighteenth-century London pub of male-male encounters (a “molly house”) is an institution because a specific individual, like “Mother Clap,” is clearly responsible for its operation and rent.3
As children of modern institutions, we find it difficult not to see these as teleologically necessary. Eighteenth-century writers were uncertain about the matter, not least because the period’s main examples of institutionality, the absolutist state and the Catholic Church, were negative ones. Many writers either favored parainstitutionality, as with sentimental claims for the spontaneous circulation of affect or Adam Smith’s notion of the marketplace’s “invisible hand,” or highly limited forms of institutionality. Whatever positions writers took, the debate’s parameters delineate the period’s discursive field for the social question.
This tension between society as best formed by parainstitutions or institutions is our best framework for recognizing and evaluating homo-eroticism in the eighteenth century, as with the writings of French novelist Pierre François Godard de Beauchamps. In The History of King Apprius (1728), Beauchamps divides male-male eroticists into two tribes, the Ugo-bars and Chedabars.4 The Ugobars are “enemies of display and ornamentation.” They dress and act modestly and conduct their activities in private, an “inviolable secrecy conceals them from the eyes and scrutiny of all those who have not been initiated into their practices.” On the other hand, the Chedabars are “insensible to the repugnance of humiliation.” Their appearance is “soft, effeminate, and ephemeral ...they are recognized by the richness of their outfits and even more by their manner of handling themselves. Their glances are calculated; their gait is affected.” Chedabars use perfume, curl their long hair, and “have a language of their own, full of affection” and nicknames for each other.
At one level, Beauchamps clearly reaffirms the period’s clichés of active pederasty, with its gendered correlation to masculinity and inversion with a feminized receiver. Yet these sex-gender descriptors mask a more substantive difference between the men involving their positions regarding cultural assimilation and autonomy. The Ugobars protectively closet their erotic difference against retaliation from mainstream society, perhaps due to their greater age and wealth. On the other hand, the Chedabars’ ostentation suggests that their stylized language and mannerisms are knowingly crafted to advertise their rejection of secret integration, indicate their erotic behavior as chosen and embraced, rather than felt as a burden, and consolidate erotic solidarity. Beauchamps makes it clear that these gendered codes are situational, rather than intrinsic, as he writes that some Chedabars become Ugobars after they lose their youthful bloom. Though Beauchamps is no friend to same-sex eroticism, his discussion of same-sex sexuality indicates an awareness about the use of gendered bodily performances as a means of representing cultural disposition rather than confused sexual object choice.
It does not require much pressure then to see the institutional implications of Beauchamps’s later narrative about the war between the Cytherans and the Ebugors in Anecdotes to be Used in the Secret History of the Ebugors (1733).5 The heterosexual Cytherans assume that other societies are inferior deviations from their natural ideal. Against this chauvinism, the cosmopolitan Ebugors are an “enemy of prejudices and of a very sociable disposition.” Since Beauchamps argues that one joins the Ebugors by “vanity rather than taste” (cultural choice rather than congenital predetermination), these furious soldiers struggle to overcome Cytheran domination through the formation of a nation-state based on values of inclusion. The Secret History goes beyond King Apprius as it suggests that same-sex groups, like their cross-sex sexual contemporaries, were likewise formed by the context of debates about the political difference between modern society and the old regime.
Brown does more than just reflect this long-lasting debate, since he sculpts Ormond as an inquiry into the durability of revolutionary energies and erotic possibilities in the 1790s at a time of their increasing containment with the unexpected return of political and ecclesiastic conservatism. Ormond’s particular contribution here is that by rehearsing a strategy about preserving homoerotic collectives through a tactical manipulation of the mediums of representation, like the novel or other aesthetic forms, it offers a vantage point on a less-remarked strand of self-reflexive lesbian and gay history.
Brown is the author who first brought same-sex sexuality explicitly into American fiction as his incompletely serialized Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1800) includes a woman’s condemnation of her husband’s unembarrassed intercourse with other men. While Brown’s writing often elliptically registers the pressures placed on homoeroticism, Ormond is the one most determined to overcome erotic pessimism by manipulating narrative and bodily form. On initial glance, Ormond can be read as little more than a conventional sentimental romance about a morally reckless libertine’s siege on female sexual purity. The plot involves the trials of a merchant’s daughter, Constantia Dudley, after her father becomes bankrupt in the early 1790s due to the machinations of a confidence man. Without credit or credibility, the impoverished man moves his family to Philadelphia, where it is left to Constantia to maintain him after her depressed mother dies, through his ensuing blindness and alcoholism, and their self-imposed quarantine during the yellow-fever plague. Amid these domestic and metropolitan crises, Constantia encounters two figures, the male Ormond and female Martinette de Beauvais, who enthusiastically align themselves with the spirit of international revolution, rejection of bourgeois mores, and support of the above through the use of secrecy, dissimulation, and racial and gender transvestitism.
With the entry of these two characters, never seen together even as they act similarly toward Constantia, Brown alters the generic structure of virtue in distress in three sequential ways that allegorize the rise and fall (and rise) of same-sex sexual radicalism. First, the familiar tale of cross-gender seduction, with the male rake Ormond’s pursuit of Constantia, is unexpectedly matched with Martinette’s frequent and seemingly rehearsed visits to Constantia. While the heterosexual libertine novel often gives the male rake a female accomplice, as with Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782), the lack of contact between Ormond and Martinette suggests that Martinette is less an aide than a competitor for Constantia’s attraction. While Martinette’s enactment of gestures otherwise taken as the prerogative of male erotic ambition insinuates the proximity of female-female desire, Brown acknowledges the resistance to this kind of female-female sexual desire with the tale’s narrative voice. The omniscient narrator reveals herself midway through the tale as Sophia Westwyn, the childhood friend of Constantia who had been separated from her in adolescence. Not only does Sophia appropriate control of the text’s exposition, but she also physically arrives in Philadelphia to place herself as Constantia’s protector from the influences of Ormond and Martinette in ways unusual for these tales of a woman’s distress, wherein female solidarity rarely succeeds. Yet if Sophia appears to represent a different mode of female-female relations with her turn against Ormond and Martinette’s linkage of bodily transvestitism with political and erotic freedom, Brown’s narrative has one more turn of the screw as he refunctionalizes the period’s existing ideology of universalizing sentimental vision that Sophia deploys by routing it through contemporaneous British critiques of gender and French pornographic tales of voyeurism and sexual initiation. With Ormond’s tale of transvestitism and other shape shifting, Brown does a conceptual trick that aligns violence to bodily markers of race and gender with his own confusion of literary genres so that the medium of literary representation can act as a surrogate institution for sustaining homoerotic sociality through an incipient long period of reaction. If Constantia’s relationship to Martinette and Sophia exemplify two kinds of female-female sexuality, in ways that might index butch/femme roles, Brown attempts to resolve this tension with a third position. By fashioning an erotically suffused cultural address that simultaneously indicates trauma and supersedes it through a coding device that can be decrypted by ideal readers, Brown telegraphs the onset of the gay-associated style we today call camp in ways that arguably makes him one of the first modern-looking writers of “homosexual” literature.
The above claims for Ormond’s motivation would seem to be refuted by the relative lack of mention about homosexuality in the American colonies and early Republic. Throughout Western Europe and the Atlantic basin during the eighteenth century, police prosecution of same-sex sexual acts and spaces provides an initial vantage point on a widely shared geography of homoerotic enactments.6 Since the United States was tightly integrated within the trade circuits that shuttled men, cultural artifacts, and social codes throughout the oceanic matrix, it would be commonsensical for analogous scares and indictments to occur in the United States. Despite a few ministerial and juridical complaints about sodomy, a term which does not solely refer to sexual practices in the period but also covers any kind of dissent, there were no prolonged or significant condemnations of ongoing same-sex practices in the British American colonies. Does this mean that Americans lacked a homoerotic sensibility that was found elsewhere in the Atlantic?
The absence of court trials and police records about homosexuality need not indicate the nonexistence of homoeroticism; it simply marks a missing need for social anxieties to find the form of homophobic pronouncements. Most moral scares about immoral, secret practices emerge from the fear by petit bourgeois groups that their tenuous hold on bourgeois privileges is slipping away. In order to bolster their fading prestige, they denounce outrageous behavior as a means of reestablishing themselves on the right side of the status divide. When London East End artisans felt threatened in the 1720s by an increasingly restive and newly urbanized laboring class population that was increasingly intruding on their neighborhoods and customs, they pounced on the “molly houses,” the pubs where mainly working and underclass men met for homoerotically charged sociality and sex.7 The raids on the molly houses tell us that these clubs existed, but they offer little insight on how long these places existed before coming to the notice of the lower middle-class moral police. While there was no comparative public scare in British America, this silence may simply convey how American colonialists had an easier target than sodomites onto which to project their discontent, namely, the London court and political establishment. In contrast to the Iberian and Caribbean colonies, which aggravated fears about disestablishment with the personal intermixture among metropolitan European administrators, white creoles, and (semi-)free mestizo groups of “color,” the British American colonies’ strictly guarded racial divides, relative lack of absentee landowners, and limited boundary disputes between colonies, did not replicate or amplify fears of blurred status distinction as elsewhere in the New World.
Even during periods of heightened police persecution in the Old World, an episodic state repression was only successful in removing the new homoerotic institutions, like the molly houses, and not the less formalized, parainstitutional grounds of encounter that often evaded police recognition. Some of London’s parks and gardens, like Moorfields, remained active sites of male-male liaison for decades, if not longer. Despite the vulnerability of same-sex sexual institutions, homoerotic collectives showed remarkable resilience in the face of danger. In his account of life in Paris at the height of the Terror, Restif de la Bretonne describes how the Palais Royale became eerily empty of its normal retinue of pornographic booksellers, female prostitutes, and promoters of staged sex acts by adolescents. Yet the men cruising for (unpaid?) sex remained.8
A similar dynamic occurs when an American threshold of emergence for same-sex sexual parainstitutions and the possibility for institutionality occurs during the 1790s. As a result of the dual Francophone revolutions in France and Haiti, American merchants gained full access to the lucrative trade of Caribbean sugar and coffee.9 The increased volume of shipping to America ports also brought a greater number of transient maritime laborers, who carried circumatlantic hetero- and homosexual mores to the harbor towns. With the ensuing economic boom, America urbanized with internal immigration into the seaboard cities, mainly New York and Philadelphia. As previously isolated hinterland Americans came into contact with the port’s linkage to Atlantic experiences, the United States generated new metropolitan mixtures similar to those that London realized earlier in the century when the molly houses began to be recorded.
With deruralization came the loss of traditional artisan structures as masters increasingly paid apprentices to find their own room and board.10 As young craftsmen were freed from the workplace’s surveillance of personal behavior, the time and space for nonregulated hetero-and homo-erotic contact in an increasingly anonymous city was made possible.11 A similar process happened with an increased number of literate, college graduates who also congregated in the port towns, where they often associated and lived together in ways that ignored the regional and denominational status divides of the prior generation. This cosmopolitanism of experience was facilitated and amplified by Americans’ increased contact with circumatlantic ideas regarding new experiences.
European progressive ideals about gender politics filtered into the States, especially with the popular writings of Paine, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft. These writers condemned absolutist regimes as legitimizing their coercion through obfuscation and a mythology of traditional hierarchy as unalterable. Because these writers believed personal relationships to be socially constructed, they took the reformation of intimacy as a precursor to large-scale social transformation. In this light, they condemned marriage as no more than contractual slavery and promoted the ideal of heterosexual erotic friendship as a more consensual organization of physical contact outside of the church and regal state’s despotism. Part of this reformation of sexual attitudes were calls for removing the prejudice against sodomy, which was seen to be little more than another example of the old regime’s irrational resistance to natural human affinities.
One other factor catalyzes the American moment for nonnormative sexual activity. Although their numbers were relatively small, the Catholic, Francophone exiles from the Jacobin terror in France and the black uprising in Haiti had a cultural influence in the 1790s United States far greater than other prior ethnic group arrivals. Unlike the Germans, the French diaspora was concentrated in the rapidly transforming seaboard cities.12 As many exiles survived exile as dancing teachers, dressmakers, chefs, hairdressers, and fencing masters, the French exodus brought a new awareness of mutable bodily presentation in fashion, comportment, and sexual manners precisely at a time when young Americans were challenging older behavioral conventions.13 Knowledge of sexual affairs increased as the immigrants also established Francophone newspapers and bookstores, which frequently reproduced the pornographic libels that were a mainstay of French political discourse.14 The Haitian creoles also carried northward that boundary-disrupting object of sexual wonder—the free mulatta mistress—and both sets of French immigrants brought forward a new ease regarding the recognition of same-sex sexuality, oft-mentioned in the obscene books, after the National Assembly’s 1791 decriminalization of sodomy.15 The two elements of miscegenation and female homoeroticism were often mixed, since the beautiful mulatta’s perceived transgression of racial lines was often taken to indicate analogous sexual excess.16
As Charles Brockden Brown begins writing fictional prose in New York and Philadelphia amid the years of an internationalizing urban transformation, his tales resonate from their crucible of new life conditions and radical social ideas, especially involving a debate on social historiography. Inspired by Godwin, Brown distinguishes between the categories of historical and romance writing. “History” is simply the collection of archival facts, while romance constructs a critical narrative that attempts to explain the hidden springs that may have caused these events to occur.17 This notion of inductive narration is congruent with Dugald Stewart’s naming of Adam Smith’s method as one of theoretical or conjectural history, which Stewart feels is akin to what his French contemporaries call Historie Raisonnée.18 These writers developed the notion of intuitive history because it allows for a means of making history legible and pertinent to their middle-class readers, who were themselves hidden from the histories produced before the eighteenth century. This method of historiography thus belongs to a larger project by which the middle class might conceptualize and record their own social emergence and rise to power.
From a contemporary perspective, conjectural history violates the later demands for an empirical history, based on the evidence provided by official archives, as it mainly seems to reveal its authors’ mentality. If prerevolutionary French historians produced romantic “secret histories” of the court and church’s sexual irregularities, this may be proof less of Marie Antoinette’s actual lesbian activity, than what these writers thought was a good way to condemn the court. Yet because relying on official documents as the only legitimate historical sources simply reinforces existing authorities’ institutional disapproval about new types of erotic behavior, this kind of history writing is particularly unsatisfactory with regards to lives of the marginalized and victimized. Here the ostensible weakness of conjectural history can be a strength because of its preexisting dissatisfaction with archival evidence’s ability to provide a fair or feasible explanation for the events it records. Because these writers believed in the power of personal relations to transcend governmental prohibitions, their work captures transformations in the culture of sexual practice in ways that other evidentiary sources cannot.
While critics have long recognized the presence of same-sex female desire in Ormond, Brown’s purpose in representing this desire has not.19 Brown’s narratives are frequently mis- or incompletely read because they are done so outside of his self-declared intellectual context within a British radical perspective. The project in Ormond is not simply to document the existence of same-sex eroticism in the early American Republic, but to make a “romantic” argument about the values that lead to that presence and inform its politics. Writing while the bright prospects of institutionalized radicalism were fading under the glare of insurgent conservatism, Brown dissents from the slightly earlier Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s distrust of institutions. Still beholden to a belief in the parainstituional effects of sincere, public declarations of personal desire (what we might call a politics of visibility), the British dissidents failed to conceptualize the role of counterhegemonic institutions. Brown sees their parainstitutional performances as incomplete and having left progressivism unprotected against the ensuing conservative backlash.
Considering that the moment for progressive social change is rapidly diminishing by the late 1790s, Brown produces literary narrative as a surrogate institution for erotic collectives, something that is more fixed than a parainstitution, but less vulnerable to repression than an easily located geographically fixed institution. Ormond breaks up generic literary and behavioral forms to reassemble them as a cultural space in between the open-air parainstitution and the enclosed institution. Brown most likely enacts this literary project of erotic communalization from inspiration by the Francophone obscene texts that were more widely available in the 1790s as a result of the French influx.20 The French generic tale of sexual initiation and tutelage through didactic voyeurism allows him to disrupt the optics of sentimental vision with the theme of covert surveillance (“secret witness”-ing). Brown also uses the image of occluded vision as his metaphor for dominant society’s limited field of social recognition and the canniness of marginal communities to transmit group-affirming encoded meaning in semipublic, semiprivate ways. Brown then deploys the theatrical imposture of transvestitism for its violence against (symbolic, textual, and anatomical) form as a new sensibility for a radically queer community. He thus moves beyond Beauchamps’s opposition between careful assimilation and flamboyant refusal to argue for a third position, involving literary tales of coded gender masquerade that some ideal readers will recognize as pointing to the existence of a homoerotic society.
Ormond’s framing narrative introduces its themes and symbols. The young painter Stephen Dudley is forced to return to New York from Italy to manage his recently died father’s apothecary. The transition from art to commerce is not immediately distasteful, since even business has its own intellectual challenges. However, these are short-lived and the repetition of the shop’s tasks depresses Dudley. Taking on an apprentice, Thomas Craig, Dudley has the idea of eventually returning to painting after shifting the business to his junior partner. The merchant then discovers Craig’s correspondence with his American working-class mother, which reveals the youth’s reference letters and English identity as forgeries, just before Dudley realizes that a suddenly vanished Craig has embezzled from and bankrupted him. When his daughter’s suitor consequently loses interest in the now poor Constantia, the family moves to Philadelphia where they hide under a pseudonym. As Dudley goes blind under poverty’s strain, Ormond argues that social constraints become embodied ones and conversely that freedom from the constraint of dominant opinion will be associated with fluid physical form. The vignette of Craig’s fraudulent letters also conveys the notion that textual records barely disguise social antagonism, especially those unable to be recognized from a bourgeois perspective. Dudley’s painterly eye fails to discern the forces of class difference because his middle-class aesthetic conventions cannot represent other social groups. From the normative reader’s and the narrative voice’s perspective, Craig is a villainous scoundrel. A slightly reversed gaze reads his deception as a working-class youth’s covert resistance to the superficial civility disguising Dudley’s exploitation of Craig’s labor and examination of his behavior.
The dual themes of ambivalent optics and liberation through physical transformations are negatively combined in Philadelphia, where Constantia must now “square her conduct” and remain constant to expectations of female subordination by selling her personalizing books and clothes to support Dudley (the mother has died) and moving with him into progressively smaller apartments. When the Dudleys quarantine themselves during the yellow-fever plague, Constantia’s retreat into tighter architectural spaces represents the ongoing restriction of her experiential domain, an ascetism that also functions as her rejection of male privilege. While Stephen wants to avoid the shame of recognition, Constantia’s closeting of her self and wish for “security and solitude,” or the security of solitude, conveys her desire to avoid contact with a public sphere that she understands as a “theater of suffering” scripted by invasive masculine surveillance, which simply views her as an available object of prostitution, either literally or in the matrimonial traffic of women.
Constantia’s perception of heterosexuality as the combination of violence and tedium is underscored as she escapes a potential street rape only because a self-made businessman, Balfour, rescues her. An epitome of bourgeois norms, Balfour “betray[s] few marks of intelligence,” lacks emotional lability, and proposes to Constantia because he admires her “economy of time and money.”21 Dudley urges Constantia to accept and realize her biology’s value in the exchange between men, but she rejects the offer by equating marriage with slavery.
By resisting a generic matrimonial conclusion, Constantia transcodes an apparently conventional tale of a woman’s “happy” end in domestic enclosure into one that explores the possibility of avoiding marriage’s compulsory and commodified heterosexuality. This refusal forces the narrative to begin anew, a return signified by the surprise resurfacing of Craig, as if Constantia bade the narrative to go back and investigate an alternative history of female experience than the one it had so far mapped out.
The remainder of Ormond’s trajectory has to be understood through Brown’s technique of thinking through a problem, such as the question of liberated female subjectivity, with variations on an initial question. Brown manages these forensic shifts through his use of what I call a segmentifier, where a narrative element, often a (minor) character or scenario, reappears to demarcate the start/stop of the fiction’s internal units. The segmentifier has both a semantic value, in that it means something in itself, and a syntactic one, as part of the text’s grammar of rhetoric. In Ormond, the segmentifier is the figure of the forger Thomas Craig, who bundles the themes of fraudulent letters, the disruption of marriage plans, the presence of hidden affectionate networks, and Brown’s own self-positioning as the author of what initially seems to be a tale of conventional gender roles.
In its first post-Craig reincarnation, Ormond stages a series of encounters where Constantia becomes increasingly drawn emotionally to a Frenchwoman who appears under different guises and names. This spiral of intimacy begins after the plague when she hears the story of the émigré Ursula Monrose. Living alone with her father before the plague’s onset, Ursula was seen tearlessly burying a man at midnight in the garden before she disappears amid the plague. Listening to the tale, Constantia feels “unspeakable regret” that she will never meet Monrose, since Constantia believes that Monrose “would prove worthy of her love,” given their similarity in “principles, sex, and age,” and that the midnight burial hints at a more substantive revolt.22 While the Frenchwoman is described as living in poverty with her father, she is later seen after the plague as wealthy and surrounded by black male servants. Because Brown frequently uses images of ethnoracial passing in his other fictions and had written a short story that describes a French émigré living openly with his mixed-race wife, Ormond implies that Ursula and the man belong to the white Haitian exodus and black Revolution, and that Monrose, described as having a lightly dark skin, is the man’s mulatta mistress.23 Ursula may have conducted her own private revolution by assassinating her master/lover, escaping, and then performing a public fiction of white mastery to protect the man’s now liberated darker-skinned slaves from recapture.
This keyhole glance at the linkage between erotic desire, emancipation, and public emergencies (plagues and revolutions) as a feature of mysterious identity is continued when Constantia shortly afterward goes to pawn a lute, her father’s last item of pleasure. At the shop she finds a Frenchwoman, who buys the instrument through the merchant’s translation. Since we later discover that the woman speaks perfect English, the moment is construed as a reversal of gender prerogatives, where the male trader’s voice is made to be the object exchanged between the two women. Because a lute is traditionally used in the pictorial conventions that Dudley has been trained within to represent erotic passion, the moment not only provides Constantia with a glimmering of female autonomy, but also suggests how public mediums might be used to exchange homoerotic affections.
The sexualized nature of the encounter is further insinuated as Constantia, typically the object of men’s observation, reverses this erotic sight as she concentrates on “interpreting the [Frenchwoman’s] language of looks and gazes.” Noticing something that the narrator says a less astute observer would have missed, Constantia is electrified by how the other woman’s “muscle belongs to woman, but the genius of her aspect ... was heroic and contemplative. The female was absorbed . . . in the rational creature.”24
The meaning here is that the woman has freed herself from the prison-house of her biological sex and its assumed mores. What Constantia does not recognize, the narrator says, is the “utmost accuracy” between her and the other woman’s body. The claim is superficially surprising because Constantia is a tall, light-skinned, rough-looking sixteen-year old, while the foreigner is a small, delicate, darker-skinned thirty-something. Yet the narrator insists that while Constantia herself is “probably unconscious of this resemblance,” the similarity will later “influence her in discovering” its meaning.25
This encounter quickly passes and Constantia remains secluded until, hearing a lute once more, she discovers her new neighbor to be Martinette de Beauvais, the widow of a guillotined Girondin. After a ballet of invitation, which can be likened to the maneuvers of seduction, Martinette becomes a “frequent” visitor to Constantia’s home after revealing herself as both Ursula Monrose and the lute-buyer. As Constantia listens to Martinette’s complex biography of travel, education in male topics, and participation in revolutionary crises, she wonders about the difference between her own uneventful past and Martinette’s cosmopolitan experience. The Frenchwoman answers that while Constantia “grew and flourished, like a frail mimosa, in the spot where destiny” had planted her, she is “better than a vegetable.”26 Refusing the fixed location of naturalized gender that delimits women, Martinette describes her own process of self-liberation through rebellion against sex-gender roles. When cross-dressing to fight in the American Revolution, she discovered that “the timidity that commonly attends women gradually vanished” as she felt “imbued with a soul that was a stranger to sexual distinction.” Returning to France to cross-dress again in the Revolutionary Republic’s army, Martinette explains that she discovered so many other covert militant women in the ranks that they could have filled whole regiments. Some fought alongside male lovers, some fought because of a passion for war, and some for patriotism, while others did so from “contagion of example.”27
Constantia becomes flushed on hearing of Martinette’s adventures, but hesitates at what she considers to be the final violation of passive femininity, not dressing like a man, but the bloody rupture of his flesh. Martinette’s eyes sparkle, however, as she describes how two of the thirteen royalists she killed in battle were prerevolution lovers, and that she had narrowly missed passing as an émigré to assassinate a French royalist general. The plan recalls the story of that other murderous Girondin, Charlotte Corday’s assassination of Marat. While Constantia initially recoils at the terror committed in “a scene of so much danger,” Martinette responds, “Danger my girl? It is my element. I am an adorer of liberty, and liberty without peril can never exist . . . [as a woman of reason] my hand never faltered when liberty demanded the victim.”28
The idea of Martinette’s sublime sex, or faith in transvestite action that consumes the distinctions of gender, and how this withering away of the physical state and its implied same-sex sexuality can enact social change comes to Brown from at least two sources.
First, there is Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, which Brown had already used in his earlier writing. By insisting that exclusion from a useful education and the division of vestimentary codes is responsible for female limitation, Wollstonecraft describes enfranchisement as a process where the acquisition of knowledge is intrinsically connected to transforming the appearance of female physique. She emphasizes this point by including D’Eon, the cross-dressing French ambassador in her list of great women.29 Second, as she says that the mathematician Newton “was probably a being of superior order, accidentally caged in a human body,” Wollstonecraft implies that the body should not be understood as the container of civil rights, but their containment.30 Wollstonecraft’s gambit here is to suggest that human rights are not inalienable, or fastened to the body, but, like that extraterrestrial Newton, are ontologically alienable, and best realized when disconnected from the material of naturalized gender.
In this light, Martinette’s conversion of the female is not her becoming masculine, or even androgyne, but is conceptualized as the use of reason to go beyond the categories of sex and gender for the purposes of human advancement. Brown reads Wollstonecraft more radically by taking her to suggest that the rational does not lie in creating the fiction of gender’s transparency, as the notion that equal rights are achieved by making distinctions invisible. Instead the liberating act of reason lies in its ability to recognize and then violate its own morphology, be these traditional containers literary or anatomical, and Ormond’s conceit is that the two are the same. Furthermore, reason is not simply an individual act of self-realization, but a channel for collective social action as it pedagogically encourages others into alternative life-experiences. It was exactly this expansion of autonomous female-female education that terrified the period’s authorities. When women were caught cross-dressing as male soldiers on either side of the 1790s Revolutionary wars, their male interrogators did not want to know why the women cross-dressed, taking the benefits of masculinity as self-evident. Instead they wanted to find out how the women knew it was possible to cross-dress; what were the training channels that circulated this information? These were the covert tutelary networks that authorities wanted to stop.31
We do not have a good sense of how these mainly plebian communications operated, but the popularity of the printed narrative accounts about these women had paradoxical effects. On the one hand, they informed the women who could read, or listen to a reader, about the existence of female daring. On the other hand, they also provided a pornographic thrill to the male reader since the generic conventions of transvestite narratives require a scene of the disrobed female body as a moment of visual confirmation of her gender.32 This dual aspect of voyeuristic secrecy and collective revelation is one that Brown partially learns through its advertisement in contemporaneous French pornography.
In their research on Continental print culture, Robert Darnton and Lynn Hunt argue that the French bourgeois reading public of the eighteenth century received erotic narratives as manuals of social instruction, more than private pleasures, that encouraged the appropriation of governmental functions previously forbidden to the middle class.33 As the bourgeoisie titilated itself with secret histories about the church’s and court’s sexual peccadilloes, frequently involving male and female homosexuality, to criticize the Catholic Church and the Queen, respectively, their literary voyeurism helped the middle class abandon their deference to the manners of traditional elites. A chief carrier of these energies was the literary convention of the hidden watcher, who narrated the tale in ways that the voyeur, as a metonym for the sidelined bourgeoisie, could excite the reader’s own awareness of an alternative society and behavioral conventions. This dual function explains why the period’s censors used “bad books” as the term for both obscene texts and philosophic critiques of absolutism.
Brown could have become aware of these codes’ intermingling of eroticism and social transformation from multiple sources, including his two closest friends at the time of Ormond’s composition, Elihu Hubbard Smith and William Dunlap, and his French émigré publisher, Hoquet Caritat. Both Smith and Dunlap were familiar with French commentary on samesex perversion. Smith studied Tissot’s Onanism, or Physical Dissertation on the Illnesses Caused by Masturbation (1760), which includes accounts of “clitoral” pollution where some women appropriate “virile functions” in the salon and bedroom in order to seduce younger women into a life of homosexuality.34 Smith typically handed his medical readings over to Brown as a usable resource for his fictions, which frequently rely on medical and psychological anomalies as plot devices. Dunlap’s diary records him hearing from his French language tutor in 1798 about the “bestiality” of priests and nuns that occurs because of their isolation from the opposite gender.35 Brown may have also encountered French sexual acknowledgment of homoeroticism as he was an inveterate searcher for French language texts among New York bestsellers. He need not have gone far since his Manhattan publisher, the bookseller Hoquet Caritat, advertised for sale titles like Restif de la Bretonne’s notoriously pornographic The Perverted Peasant, which tells the story of a provincial youth’s corruption by metropolitan immorality through scenes of secret watching, in an edition that includes plates of secretly observed lesbian orgies.36 Given that Continental French booksellers kept two sets of catalogs, one that could be shown to authorities and another that indicated the more illicit texts on offer, Caritat might have also sold even more explicit texts than those he openly advertised.37
Caritat was no shady or marginal seller. His 1790s bookstore was based in New York’s fashionable City Hotel, used for decades by the town’s political, social, and financial elites to meet, dine, and seal contracts. The well-connected Caritat’s bookstore was also a lending library, which had the largest collection in New York.38 With its special ladies reading room, Caritat’s was also one of the few secular, semipublic places for middle-class women to encounter each other outside of parental and male supervision. That a well-educated Caritat advertised Francophone pornographic texts at such a mainstream site suggests a much wider familiarity with homo-erotic topics and codes in the early Republic’s reading communities than has been otherwise recognized.
In Ormond, Brown fuses the political radicalism of an otherwise prurient Wollstonecraft with Continental obscenity to link a political critique of sex-gender codes, which assumes that their alteration leads to social betterment, with equally politicized ones about erotic free-play for the purposes of creating a surrogate institution for homoerotic society.
This dynamic first appears when Constantia asks Martinette how the latter could have survived the plague at a time when the panic about infection should have closed all doors. Martinette answers that Philadelphia’s French émigrés lived without fear of the disease and continued to sing and dance “with their customary unconcern.” She tells Constantia that none of them would have refused “a countrywoman, even if her name had not been Martinette de Beauvais ...[even] without a farthing and without a name, I would not have incurred the slightest inconvenience.”39 In contrast to Constantia’s grim isolation, Martinette describes an inviting city, unacknowledged by its other citizens, which would welcome you amid a general health crisis, even if you really were not a Mademoiselle, and even if you did not have a ready name with which to enunciate your subjectivity.40
Promising to bring Constantia her written memoirs that will more fully divulge her past transvestite exploits, Martinette disappears from the narrative, which then relies on the male figure of Ormond to continue Constantia’s tutelage into a new world perspective. Like Martinette, Ormond is a master of disguise, and he first visits Constantia’s house disguised as an African servant, a transgression of skinside boundaries that reiterates Brown’s scripting of embodied identities as fictional categories open for revision. Belonging to a secret society advocating global Jacobinism and devoted to forming a new world utopian community, Ormond increasingly details these ideas to Constantia as if encouraging her to join. While the narrative’s voice claims that Ormond and Martinette are separated siblings, no evidence supports that claim. However, their shared skill in biological masquerade, failure ever to be seen together, despite frequent visits to Constantia, and implied link through an embedded narrative about a Southern male fraud, Martynne, whose name recalls Martinette’s, suggests that the two might be actually the same figure alternatively masking gender roles and that Ormond’s declaration of sexual desire for Constantia ventriloquizes Martinette’s as well.
Against Constantia’s increasingly voluntary affiliation with radicalism, the forces of conservatism regroup, personified by the narrator Sophia Westwyn. As Constantia’s childhood friend, who has returned from Europe to look for her, Sophia stands as the ideological opposite of Martinette de Beauvais. Although they share similar conditions in their upbringing, Martinette is cosmopolitan, comfortable with the adversity of historical flux, and socially and politically radical, while Sophia is provincial, resistant to alterity, and reactionary. Sophia’s revelation that she has been the previously undeclared narrator has been treated in two ways by critics. Male scholars often see Sophia as merely vocalizing Brown’s own cultural politics. William Hedges reads Sophia’s control of the narrative voice as “the sure sign that the novel will tolerate no deviance from accepted views,” and Robert Levine takes her as Brown’s suggestion that “the preservation of liberty may require a ‘reactionary’ power.”41
More recently, Sophia’s heated description of her affinity with Constantia is read more sympathetically by female critics as Brown’s welcoming of homoerotic attraction.42 Both readings overlook Brown’s purpose in contrasting Sophia and Martinette’s competing models and the narrative’s repeated use of masquerade at every level and scene. Sophia’s emotionally saturated relationship with Constantia is an Ugobar-like one that looks to establish a privatized coupling that accepts the regulations of mainstream society, and indeed desires to accommodate heterosexual regulations in marriage as a discrete safeguard behind which female emotional relations may continue to develop. Martinette conversely looks to guide Constantia into a Chedabar-like, semipublic collective that operates within dominant society, but also manhandles its behavioral conventions as a means of telegraphing its presence, and sees homoeroticism as enabling, if not defined by, an ethical dedication to insurrection and refusal to acquiesce to dominant manners.
Brown’s adjudication between the two models of assimilation versus autonomy for female-female relations appears at the narrative’s end, when Sophia rushes to Constantia’s home to prevent what she believes will be Ormond’s rape of Constantia. Entering the house, she looks through a locked door’s keyhole to see a teary and dissheveled Constantia with two male bodies lying next to her. “One of them was Ormond. A smile of disdain still sat upon his features. The wound by which he fell was secret and was scarcely betrayed by the effusion of a drop of blood.”43 The other corpse is Craig’s.
When Constantia recovers, Sophia pruriently asks if anything “has happened to load you with guilt or shame,” as though secretly desiring the impregnating event that would force Constantia away from public view and into her private care. After Constantia explains, in tones more like a sorry lover than an aggrieved victim, that she killed Ormond by a random knife-thrust, Sophia enlists a judge, ostensibly to acquit Constantia, but functionally to remind her of the social order’s power to incarcerate her if she continues to deviate from the script of normative female submission. Favoring “the ultimate restoration of tranquility,” where monotony is the abeyance of radical enthusiasm, Sophia effectively polices Constantia by distancing her from Martinette and removing her to England, where Sophia smugly says that Constantia’s life now experiences “little variation.”44 Returned to the domestic enclosure in which she began the novel, Constantia is seemingly being prepared by Sophia for a tedious marriage to a German Balfour, the I. E. Rosenberg to whom the novel is addressed as an epistolary narrative.
Sophia’s planned ending of social restraint is not Brown’s. With Constantia standing over Ormond with a pen-knife, his secret wound, that bleeds but a little, suggests a gender reversal wherein Constantia deflowers Ormond. If Martinette claims that the boundary separating Constantia’s cloistered domestication from her own transgressive mobility can be broken by violence to male anatomy, then the scene suggests that Constantia has crossed that line by completing the Corday-like gesture of symbolic castration. Yet Ormond’s “disdainful smile,” with its lurid postcoital air of satisfaction, suggests that what Sophia interprets as the evidence of rape may actually be his knowing performance of a “scene of danger,” the staging of which Martinette says is the prerequisite to liberation. This dramatization of violence may be Constantia’s entry into the affectional community represented by the tangled male bodies lying on the floorbed.
The presence of this alternative erotic geography appears when Ormond had previously revealed his knowledge of Constantia’s intimate secrets. When a befuddled Constantia asks how he knows so much about her, Ormond explains that the back of her father’s closet was covered by a canvas sheet that hid an entrance to a neighboring rowhouse from which he could watch her. If Constantia’s home, with its backdrops, functions as the dramatic stage on which the costume-changing Ormond and Martinette have both watched and acted before her, then the narrative’s subtitle, the secret witness, may refer to Constantia, who only belatedly recognizes herself as a spectator in this play. If she follows the “contagion by example” by removing the closet’s membrane, she can follow Ormond into a nouveau Philadelphia, whose lack of enunciation cannot be taken as its historical absence.
The sense of this reading comes as the second male body next to Ormond belongs to Thomas Craig, the segmentifier that indicates both the end of one narrative segment and the beginning of a new one. What could this beginning look like since the novel is in its last pages? One possibility emerges from Craig’s prior scrambling of Constantia’s compulsory marriage and his fraudulent letters surrounding his family. This logic implies that the novel is not yet over, even as Sophia seems literally to end it with the framing letter to Rosenberg. Since Constantia has already twice before eluded bourgeois marriage in moments linked to the appearance of Craig, his resurfacing, even as a corpse, insinuates that she will soon find a similar escape from Rosenberg’s embrace, an evasion that is implied in Rosenberg’s name. Wil Verhoeven notes that Rosenberg is Mon(t)rose translated into German and inverted.45 Hence, it could be that the Rosenberg who Constantia is being prepared in marriage for may be another of Martinette’s disguises to enable Constantia’s escape from Sophia’s closet. If the supple Martinette and Ormond have already made a mockery of the corporeal limits of race and gender, then why not those of death as well?
Despite Sophia’s authority, there is no reason why readers should grant that other piece of writing, which is the text of the Ormond itself, as substantive. If all the letters in the novel are either inauthentic or missing when called on to testify, then Craig’s return encourages the reader to give over to Sophia the tangible record of the printed page and look beyond the text’s canvas-like sheets to join Ormond’s last remaining secret witnesses, those other readers who are schooled to recognize Brown’s connotations of utopia.
The ultimate message of Ormond is one mutually shaped by Brown’s own formation by radical political science and personal sense of conservatism’s rising hegemony at the century’s turn, a dynamic allegorized by Sophia’s late arrival and appropriation of the narrative. At this historical juncture, Brown implies that the opposition of quiet assimilation and outrageous declaration for sexual cultures is neither satisfactory nor tactically feasible. Instead, he argues for a third, “French” position of circulating codes through the framework of a publicly distributed narrative, as a means of setting up camp, in the dual sense of establishing sanctuary from attack and a modern gay rhetorical style. Rather than accept a definition of homoeroticism as a mode of dysfunctional anatomy, criminal act of confused gender assignment, or degenerate individual personality, Ormond’s uses a “romance” narrative about masking and unmasking the body as a means of indicating to future readers the prior existence of a spirited homoerotic society, long before Stonewall’s own rebellion.
1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I (London: Penguin, 1980).
2. Stephen Shapiro, “‘Man to Man I Needed Not to Dread His Encounter’: Edgar Huntly’s End of Erotic Pessimism,” in Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics, and Sexuality in the Early Republic. eds. P. Barnard, M. Kamrath, and S. Shapiro (Knoxville, TN, Univ. of Tenn. Press, 2004), 216–251.
3. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, Gay Men’s Press, 1982); Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London, Gay Men’s Press, 1992).
4. Pierre François Godard de Beauchamps, “The History of King Apprius,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection, eds. J. Merrick and B. T. Ragan, Jr. (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 127–8.
5. Pierre François Godard de Beauchamps, “Anecdotes to Be Used in the Secret History of the Ebugars,” in ibid., 128–31.
6. Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600, ed. David Higgs (London, Rout-ledge, 1999); Clare A. Lyons, “Mapping an Atlantic Sexual Culture: Homoeroticism in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in this volume.
7. Stephen Shapiro, “Of Mollies: Class and Same-Sex Sexualities in the Eighteenth Century,” in In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, eds. Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, E. and Murray Platt (London, Ashgate, 2002), 155–176.
8. Restif de la Bretonne, My Revolution: Promenades in Paris, 1789–1794 (London, Allen Lane, 1971), 310.
9. The following description of the 1790s condenses arguments in Stephen Shapiro, The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, forthcoming, 2008).
10. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1984), 33; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1989), 61–63.
11. The 1790s saw an increase in New York of brothels and streetwalkers in regions near the docks. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York, Norton, 1992), 25.
12. Nearly 10 percent of Philadelphians in the 1790s were recent Francophone immigrants. John L. Earl III, “Talleyrand in Philadelphia, 1794–1796,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 91 (1967): 282–298.
13. Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1973), 255–7.
14. Because the main bibliographic archive, Evans, does not list foreign-language imported or printed in the early Republic, it structurally silences the impact and diffusion of these texts, a quarter of which were French. See Bernard Fäy, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America (New York, Cooper Square Publishers, 1966).
15. Susan Branson and Leslie Patrick, “Étrangers dans un Pays Étrange: Saint-Dominigan Refugees of Color in Philadelphia,” in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 193–208. French politician Talleyrand scandalized Philadelphia natives by parading in the streets with his arm around a (French?) black woman. Earl, 291.
16. Moreau de Saint-Méry, A Civilization that Perished: The Last Year of White Colonial Rule in Haiti (New York, University Press of America, 1985), 82.
17. Charles Brockden Brown, “Walstein’s School of History, from the German of Krants of Gotha,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, eds. Alfred Weber and Wolfgang Schäfer (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1992), 31–39; Charles Brockden Brown, “The Difference Between History and Romance,” in Literary Essays and Reviews, 83–85.
18. Dugald Stewart, Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith in The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 3, eds. W. P. D. Wightman, and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1982), 218–86.
19. For a review of the critics on Ormond’s lesbianism, see Kristin M. Comment, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic,” Early American Literature 40 (2005), 57–78; Heather Smyth, “‘Imperfect Disclosures’: Cross-dressing and Containment in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, New York University Press, 1998), 240–261.
20. While Lyons indicates that Continental pornography was already circulated earlier in the century, the increase in French booksellers in the 1790s widened the channels of textual entry.
21. Charles Brockden Brown, Ormond; or, The Secret Witness, ed. Mary Chapman (Peterborough, Canada, Broadview, 1999), 101–102.
22. Ormond, 93.
23. Charles Brockden Brown, “Portrait of an Emigrant,” in Somnambulism and Other Stories, ed. Alfred Weber (Frankfurt, Peter Lang, 1987), 112–6; Ormond, 98, 187.
24. Ormond, 98.
25. Ibid., 97.
26. Ibid., 194.
27. Ibid., 206.
28. Ibid., 205. Paul Lewis argues for Brown’s tacit endorsement of Martinette’s Corday-like acts. Paul Lewis, “Attaining Masculinity: Charles Brockden Brown and Woman Warriors of the 1790s,” Early American Literature 40 (2005), 37–55. For period accounts of Corday’s politics, familiarity with male knowledge fields, like history, and gender dimorphism, see Nina Corazzo and Catherine R. Montfort, “Charlotte Corday:femme-homme,” in Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789, ed. Catherine Montfort (Birmingham, Summa Publications, 1994), 33–54. In 1796, the New-York Magazine praised Corday’s beauty and republican stoic self-control, and her similarity to Brutus as a defender of liberty in the “Sketch of the Character of Marie Anne Victoire Charlotte Cordet, who was executed under the Reign of Robespierre, for the Assassination of Marat.” For period dramatic representations of Corday, see Marie-Helen Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat’s Death, 1793–1797 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1982).
29. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; A Vindication of the Rights of Man (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), 149. For a recent history of D’Eon, see Gary Kates, Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York, Basic Books, 1995).
30. Wollstonecraft, 101.
31. Rudulf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestitism in Early Modern Europe (Houndmills, Macmillan Press, 1989). See also, Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668–1801 (London, Scarlet Press, 1993). For other accounts of belligerent transvestitism, see: Alfred Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, Vintage, 2005); Judith Hiltner, “‘She Bled in Secret’: Deborah Sampson, Herman Mann, and The Female Review,” Early American Literature (1999): 190–220; Lynne Friedli, “‘Passing Women’: a Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century,” in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, eds. George S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1987), 234–260; Dianne Dugaw, “Female Sailors Bold: Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender and Class,” in Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920, eds. Margaret S. Creighton and Lise Norling (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 34–54; and Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite, “Woman and Militant Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, eds. Sarah E. Meltzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992), 79–101.
32. Mourão argues for lesbian readerly pleasure in these scenes as well. Manuela Mourão, “The Representation of Female Desire in Early Modern Pornographic Texts, 1660–1745,” Signs 24 (1999): 573–602.
33. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London, Harper Collins, 1996); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993; The Invention of Pornography, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York, Zone Books, 1993). See also, Jean Marie Goulemot, Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and its Readers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, Polity Press, 1994); David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England, 1660–1745 (np, Book Collector, 1963); Bradford K. Mudge, The Whore’s Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 1684–1830 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Wagner, Eros Revived: Erotica of the Enlightenment in England and America (London, Secker & Warburg, 1988).
34. Samuel Andre Tissot, “Onanism, or Physical Dissertation on the Illnesses Caused by Masturbation,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France, eds. J. Merrick and B. T. Ragan, Jr., 28–29.
35. William Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839) (New York, New York Historical Society, 1931), 335.
36. Amy Wyngaard, “Libertine Spaces: Anonymous Crowds, Secret Chambers, and Urban Corruption in Restif de la Bretonne,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 104–122; David Coward, “The Sublimations of a Fetishist: Restif de la Bretonne (1734–1806),” in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment, ed. Robert Purks Maccurbin (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988), 98–108; Restif de la Bretonne, The Corrupted Ones: Le Paysan and La Paysanne Pervertis (Bristol, Neville Spearman, 1967). Wyngaard reproduces the obscene plates from Restif de la Bretonne, Le Paysan Perverti, Vol. 1 (The Hague & Paris, Esprit, 1776), 138. Judging by publication dates, this edition and its lascivious plates may have been the ones that Caritat advertised for sale and Brown may have handled.
37. Caritat’s catalog contains numerous other Francophone titles that could indicate obscene texts, but this cannot be verified because no extant copy exists. The catalog also includes texts that are not textually obscene, but which, nonetheless, often came with lascivious plates, such as Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvrai’s tale of cross-dressing and seduction, The Life and Adventures of the Chevalier de Faublas, Sophista Longus’s The Pastoral Amours of Daphnis and Cloe, and Diderot’s La Religieuse. George Gates Raddin, An Early New York Library of Fiction: With a Checklist of the Fiction in H. Caritat’s Circulating Library, No 1. City Hotel, Broadway, New York, 1804 (New York, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1940). Philip Stewart notes how books were sold with accompanying plates that often illustrated erotic acts not explicitly mentioned in the text. I am suggesting that Ormond similarly links printed word to implied vision. Philip Stewart, Engraven Desire: Eros, Image, and Text in the French Eighteenth Century (Durham, Duke University Press, 1992). An earlier catalog published by Caritat in the same year as Ormond lists pornographic titles such as Chronique Scandaleuse, ou Histoire Secrete des Sociétés pendant ces dernières annés; Choix de poesies Erotiques; Danger d’un amour illicite; Histoire Publique et Secrete d’Henry IV; Histoire de la Vie Privee de Louix XV; Histoire Amoureuses des Gaules; Poësies de Sapho; along with Bretonne’s Paysan Perverti and Pornographe. Hoquet Caritat, Catalogue des Livres Francais (New York, 1799). Bretonne’s work was sold in the U.S. by French booksellers as early as 1790. C. P. Raguet, Catalogue of French, and other Books (Philadelphia, 1790).
38. George Gates Raddin, Hocquet Caritat and the Early New York Literary Scene (Dover, NJ, The Dover Advance Press, 1953), 30.
39. Ormond, 208.
40. Brown’s “Portrait of an Emigrant” has one of its narrative voices say that “the French are the only people that know how to live,” based on the émigrés’ habit of waking up late, working a few hours, and then spending the rest of the day in playful leisure.
41. William Hedges, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Culture of Contradictions,” Early American Literature 9 (1974): 107–142; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), 49.
42. Smyth, ‘Imperfect Disclosures’; Comment, “Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond and Lesbian Possibility in the Early Republic; Lewis, “Attaining Masculinity”; and Faderman in this collection.
43. Ormond, 273.
44. Ormond, 275–276.
45. Wil Verhoeven, “Displacing the Discontinuous; or, the Labyrinths of Reason: Fictional Design and Eighteenth-Century Thought in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond,” in Rewriting the Dream: Reflections on the Changing American Canon, ed. Wil Verhoeven (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1992), 202–29.