Pub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846211.003.0009
Betsy Klimasmith
Chapter 6, “Kelroy’s Shifting City,” centers on Rebecca Rush’s 1812 Philadelphia novel Kelroy, which charts Philadelphia’s transition from a cosmopolitan urbanity where family, blood, and inheritance are reliable indicators of class and status, to a more fluid and performative urbanity. In Kelroy, Rebecca Rush constructs—and distorts—a Philadelphia of the past that offers a useful window on fantasies and anxieties about US urban life and urban spaces on the cusp of great political and cultural change. Set in 1790s Philadelphia, which by 1812 was fading into memory, Kelroy actively frames and fictionalizes a vision of a past Philadelphia that looks toward a different future than earlier authors imagined. Kelroy teaches cosmopolitan codes of gentility but violently undermines them as well. The novel thus reveals and emphasizes the limits of self-making, especially for the women, immigrants, and working-class people who might benefit most from performative modes of status and power. Kelroy gestures toward a developing US urbanity that includes characters of diverse classes, races, and ethnicities, but paradoxically reasserts the power of white men, foreshadowing dynamics that would structure the literature and culture of the Jacksonian period.
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The entr’acte, “Framing Urban Spaces,” focuses on two images by William and Thomas Birch that depict different aspects of the same Philadelphia streetscape, conveying the necessity of imaginative perspective to construct Philadelphia as a city. To use Birch’s words, these images, and the literary texts I read in Part II, meditate on Philadelphia as a city “raised, as it were, by magic power.”
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Pub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846211.003.0003
Betsy Klimasmith
Chapter 1, “Drama Uncloseted in Boston,” argues that American urbanity began at home. The cosmopolitanism practiced in elite domestic spaces after the American Revolution signaled an urban future; in opening these homes to a broader public, novels would transform it. But not without serious resistance. Instead of embracing urbanity after the revolution, Bostonians strained to negotiate competing desires for republican equality and cosmopolitan sophistication. This tension found a fitting narrative in a public scandal of incestuous infidelity, pregnancy, and suicide involving Perez Morton, a prominent Boston lawyer and drama aficionado; his wife, poet Sarah Wentworth Morton; and her sister, Fanny Apthorp, whose published suicide notes were widely read. I trace the scandal’s circulation through Boston newspapers, as a subplot in William Hill Brown’s 1789 novel The Power of Sympathy, and in three plays, two by Brown himself, that were printed for private performances in Boston, where public theater remained illegal. These texts offer a fascinating case study of the formally diverse and multivocal print culture in which cosmopolitan culture clashed with new ideas about American urbanity. The epistolary novel emerged as a form concerned not with the past or present, I argue, but with the future—a future that writes out of existence the varied voices, especially female and Black voices, present in the plays, poetry, and papers.
第一章“波士顿揭秘的戏剧”认为，美国人的彬彬有礼始于国内。美国革命后，精英家庭空间中的世界主义实践预示着城市的未来;在向更广泛的公众开放这些房屋的过程中，小说将改变它。但并非没有严重的阻力。革命后，波士顿人没有拥抱文雅的生活，而是竭力在共和平等和世外桃色的双重愿望之间进行协商。这种紧张关系在一桩有关乱伦、不忠、怀孕和自杀的公开丑闻中得到了恰当的描述，这桩丑闻涉及波士顿著名律师、戏剧爱好者佩雷斯·莫顿(Perez Morton);他的妻子，诗人莎拉·温特沃斯·莫顿;还有她的妹妹范妮·阿普索普，她发表的遗书被广泛阅读。我追溯了这桩丑闻在波士顿报纸上的传播，作为威廉·希尔·布朗(William Hill Brown) 1789年的小说《同情的力量》(the Power of Sympathy)的一个次要情节，以及三出戏剧(其中两出是布朗本人写的)的情节，这些戏剧是为波士顿的私人演出而印刷的，在波士顿，公共剧院仍然是非法的。这些文本提供了一个引人入胜的案例研究，在形式上的多样化和多声音的印刷文化中，世界主义文化与美国都市化的新思想发生了冲突。我认为，书信体小说作为一种与过去或现在无关的形式出现，而是与未来有关——在未来，戏剧、诗歌和论文中出现的各种声音，尤其是女性和黑人的声音，将不复存在。
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Pub Date : 2021-10-21DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846211.003.0008
Betsy Klimasmith
Urbanity did not just travel through pipes or print. It also spread via the mobile bodies of people who immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, carried their versions of these new cultures to other settings, and adapted them anew. Chapter 5, “Obliged to Wander,” focuses on two largely forgotten novels that explore women’s movement within and among cites: Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Dorval, or the Speculator (1800), and Martha Read’s Monima, or the Beggar Girl (1802). Through mobility both free and forced, these novels’ protagonists traverse numerous developing cities including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; inhabit a variety of urban domestic and institutional settings ranging from palaces to prisons; and call attention to the complex causes of urban poverty. They also move outside of the US to Europe, the Americas, and San Domingo, positioning women as key participants in the dissemination and transformation of urbanity. In so doing, Dorval and Monima revise gender and genre expectations to construct the liminal city as a space of active self-making for women as writers, readers, and characters; the texts both highlight this space’s potential and foreshadow its end.
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