The novel and the conservative: The politics of early American women's fiction (Susanna Haswell Rowson, Hannah Webster Foster, Tabitha Tennay, Frances Burney, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox)

“The Novel and the Conservative” argues that the unhappy endings of American heroines emphasize a sense of national uncertainty about the struggle for the nation's future that resonated with the deeply-seated Federalist beliefs of their authors. Susanna Rowson, Hannah Foster and Tabitha Tenney each suggest that conservative values are the best way to preserve the integrity of the American character. However, with Washington stepping down from office and Adams failing to win re-election, these Federalist thinkers were left wondering what would happen in a future led by members of the opposing party. Perhaps the country and its citizens would be able to weather the storm of Republican values threatening to transform their vision of how the country should be molded. But readers are left wondering if survival is enough. The quest depicted in Charlotte Temple, The Coquette , and Female Quixotism is a quest for safety, a quest for a home. The unhappy endings of the three novels in which we are left with dead or victimized heroines and an absent hero/Washington-figure summarizes Federalist sentiments regarding the state of the Republic after a Republican victory in the election of 1800. Furthermore, it establishes the novel as a conservative instrument of Federalists as opposed to its more typical designation as “revolutionary,” an innovative response to traditionalists. In connecting early American women's fiction to its conservative past, this dissertation connects the historical relationship of American women's fiction to its British roots by considering Foster's work in relation to Frances Burney's Evelina and Tenney's work in relation to Lennox's The Female Quixote. Early American heroines, who regularly function as thwarted mother figures, are presented to us as older, flawed versions of many of the British counterparts found in the conventional marriage plot. The influence of British authors can be visibly traced in early American women's fiction. Reading them against each other recognizes the simultaneous births of a new nation and a new literary voice and, at the same time, connects them to their predecessors.