Intricate
Relations
Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789-1814
By Karen Weyler
“If the most informative map of a nation’s imagination is created by
surveying its anxieties, then Karen A. Weyler’s Intricate Relations is the
foundational chart of the American psyche. Triangulating sex, property, and institutional
discipline in a host of fictions, conduct books,political tracts, and popular
imprints, Weyler traces the haunted landscape of the early republic, where debt,
seduction, and madness were situated in city, town, and country with no haven
of security.”—David S. Shields, editor, Early American Literature
Intricate Relations charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early
republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers:
sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789
and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical
literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes
opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read.
In 1799, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown used the evocative phrase “intricate
relations” to describe the complex imbrication of sexual and economic relations
in the early republic. Exploring these relationships, he argued, is the chief
job of the “moral historian,” a label that most novelists of the era
embraced. In a republic anxious about burgeoning individualism in the 1790s and
the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the novel foregrounded sexual
and economic desires and explored ways to regulate the manner in which they were
expressed and gratified.
In Intricate Relations, Weyler argues that understanding how these issues underlie
the novel as a genre is fundamental to understanding both the novels themselves
and their role in American literary culture. Situating fiction amid other popular
genres illuminates how novelists such as Charles Brockden Brown, Hannah Foster,
Samuel Relf, Susanna Rowson, Rebecca Rush, and Sally Wood synthesized and iterated
many of the concerns expressed in other forms of public discourse, a strategy
that helped legitimate their chosen genre and make it a viable venue for discussion
in the decades following the revolution.
Weyler’s passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic
role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary
theorists and scholars in women’s and American studies.
Karen Weyler is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro.
Available January 2005
292 pp, 9 photos, 2005
$39.95 hardcover 0-87745-884-7
See, UI Press's page for
this book, http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/weyintrel.htm,
which features secure online ordering.
December 13 ,
2004