Gender, Neutrality, and the Nursing Father in Pratt’s Emma Corbett

Abstract

This article examines Samuel Jackson Pratt’s 1780 epistolary novel Emma Corbett; or the Miseries of Civil War, a text which represents familial relations in terms of the American Revolutionary War, as well as how this war divided families, such as the novel’s Corbett and the Hammond families, based on their national affiliation. This essay considers family in Emma Corbett by discussing representations of motherhood and masculinity. I argue that Pratt represents figurative and actual mothers in the novel as problematic in a number of ways, and he figures maternal subversiveness as in need of eradication. Instead, the neutral patriarch, who exemplifies the proper balance of sensibility and reason, is worthy of supplanting women in the text, and he is to be preferred even to sensible, poetic men and to dutiful, soldierly ones. Representations of masculinity in the novel demonstrate that to show emotion was a sensible, manly quality, but sensibility needed to be tempered lest a man become too emotional, too patriotic, or even effeminate. By critiquing masculinity as well as motherhood as they are embodied by characters like Emma Corbett, Charless Corbett, and Henry Hammond, Pratt offers Robert Raymond as the “solution” to these problems of motherhood and masculinity: he becomes a neutral, hybridized masculine and feminine patriarchal example who, as a kind of Lockean nursing father figure, repairs the Corbett and Hammond families’ damaged relationship, one instigated by their divisive national alliances.