This chapter extends the study of security from political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology to literary studies. To this end, the chapter puts into conversation Charles Brockden Brown’s urban gothic novel Arthur Mervyn (1799/1800) and the theorization of security offered by Michel Foucault. Brown’s fictional exploration of security and Foucault’s historico-theoretical approach both focus on political responses to infectious disease in urban spaces. While there are striking similarities between their perspectives, this chapter does not read Brown with Foucault. Rather, it shows how Brown’s literary treatment of the yellow fever epidemic that raged through Philadelphia in 1793 differs from what Foucault called the “security dispositif.” Brown proposes that the embrace of uncertainty in responding to the epidemic will have positive effects on the moral fiber of the republic. His republican security imaginary is irreducible to the Foucauldian program of critiquing the biopolitical regulation of individual and collective life, not least because Foucault’s target is a political order that is liberal rather than republican.

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.