Chapter 2 - Post-Reproductive Female Sexuality and the Early American Novel

Summary

While childhood and same-sex sexuality play a key role in early American studies, the aging straight woman has not found significant purchase. This study of post-reproductive sexuality in early American culture attempts to change that. It focuses on the 1810 novel Rosa; or, American Genius and Education to note that mature white women frequently served as literary objects of desire. They were just as likely to be ridiculed. What differentiated the compelling from the absurd postmenopausal subject was her attitude toward her own sexuality. In a heteronormative Anglo-American context, only those women who had renounced sex were erotic. Their recalcitrance, in turn, exemplified meritorious literary discourse. As such, the fact that sexy older women proliferated throughout the pages of early American novels should not fool us into complacency regarding the period’s tendency to represent womanhood as a figurative locus of civic norms that were nonetheless premised upon their participatory exclusion.