(Working title)
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the early republic was grappling with a conflicting sense of freedom and independence that primarily applied to affluent white men. Women were barely mentioned in the new nation’s constitutional and institutional discourses. This project explores how early American narratives that center young women give an insight into the acts of defiance and instances of control afforded to and claimed by women. I therefore examine different print media of the early nation and the way these media forms, particularly the novel and the periodical, offer spaces in which women can explore and transcend the limitations of the American republic’s patriarchal hierarchy. The dissertation further foregrounds a transatlantic perspective through narratives that are set in and tied to revolutionary Haiti and France. This allows for an exploration of how late 18th-century Enlightenment thinking functions to accelerate both an ongoing negotiation of what it means to be a young, oftentimes white, woman and a citizen in the early republic.