Heroines Gritty and Tender, Printed and Oral, Late-Breaking and Traditional: Revisiting the Anglo-American Female Warrior

Pirate Narratives and the Revolutionary Atlantic in the Early Republic and the Antebellum Period

“…In Fanny Campbell , the sea is primarily a site of play and potentiality (Woertendyke 2013, 223) with regard not only to heroic piracy, but equally to gender performance. Female pirates and cross-dressing sailors had a long and deeply rooted tradition around the Atlantic world for centuries, both as historical figures and as larger-than-life characterizations in ballads-the so-called "female warrior ballad" (Dugaw 1996;Wheelwright 1994, 8)-and a number of other (semi-)literary forms catering to a "semi-literate working class" (Rediker 1996, 11). Ever since Captain Johnson had made popular the lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read in his General History, female seafaring and piracy were themes in print and on the stage as well as in oral culture-in Britain, most famously in John Gay's satirical ballad opera Polly (1729), the widely successful sequel to The Beggar's Opera (1728) featuring a cross-dressing heroine who joins a group of pirates in the West Indies in search of her husband, 31 and in the United States in the Female Marine trilogy (1815-1818), the fictional story of a young cross-dressing woman serving on the U.S. frigate Constitution in the War of 1812, which ran through nineteen editions within just four years (Cordingly [2001(Cordingly [ ] 2007Cohen 1997).…”

“…A]n exceptional woman, glorifying masculine values, finally returns to her appropriately self-sacrificial maternal role" (Wheelwright [1995(Wheelwright [ ] 1996; Bonny was American-born (although of Irish immigrant stock rather than New England Puritan heritage) and, like Fanny, went to Cuba to be with her lover, pirate Captain Jack Rackham, aka Calico Jack (188; Cordingly [2001Cordingly [ ] 2007Defoe/Johnson [1724. As Johnson's renderings inspired a plethora of popular (often ephemeral) literary and oral forms, the "idea that women could be searovers was enshrined in popular ballads and dramas of the eighteenth century which celebrated the feats of cross-dressed women (even if some did come to terrible ends)" (Stanley 1995, 42;Dugaw 1996). Fanny can be placed in this tradition of the "female warrior" genre that had emerged from a late medieval world in transition to the modern (Dugaw 2010, 274), following its conventions closely: it borrows its episodic structure and roguish protagonist from the picaresque, features romance elements (especially the heterosexual love story) and standard tropes such as "the heroine's independent spirit; her masked pursuit of a husband or lover; … proofs of her service and valour" (292), as well as a play with samesex desire.…”

“…While Dugaw (2010) argues that such outlaw "heroines"-regardless of their limitations as models of liberation-had given way to more docile models of femininity by the early nineteenth century, Rediker insists that figures like Bonny and Read continued to inspire young women to try alternative paths of life, citing also the work of Julie Wheelwright, who demonstrates that the historical and fictional figures of the female soldier and sailor were important to nineteenth-century feminists in that they disproved the prevailing assumptions regarding women's incapacities, physical and mental. Indeed, cross-dressing heroines continued to be common in popular fiction in the second half of the century (Anderson 2011, 95;Smith [1950] 2009, ch.…”