The face of Lucy Brewer

Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limit of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

            In this book Butler attempts to clear up misreading of key concepts from her seminal Gender Trouble. Specifically Butler relies on the term iterably to refute the notion that perfomativity of gender operates on the level of conscious choice by the subject. Performativity rather is a production with the repetition of roles and appearance imposed onto the individual which compels them, but does not literally force them, into accepting a sanctioned idea of gender.  This book was particularly useful for further understanding of Bulter’s concept of performativity and how different performances of gender can either weaken or strengthen the appearance of “naturalness” where gender is concerned.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

            Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is one of the most critically relevant and commercially successful theoretical texts in the last twenty years, becoming a foundational piece for gender and queer studies. Relying on the principles of power, discourse, and hegemony built upon principally by Michael Foucault with other poststructuralists, Butler convincingly argues that gender is not a natural phenomenon but rather a cultural construction: clothes, makeup, hobbies, jobs, and even family roles all work to collectively make masculinity and femininity ideal and natural. The book also introduces Butler’s widely used but misunderstood concept of perfomativity, and works as one of the key theoretical underpinnings for explaining how Lucy Brewer moves between two gender roles.  

           

Cohen, Daniel A. The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America’s Early Republic. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1997. Print.

            This work as a whole is the most comprehensive and complete edition of the 1815 cross-dressing narrative The Female Marine which follows the adventures of a fictitious female Lucy Brewer’s (presented at the time as real) fall from a respectable daughter to prostitute, then regaining her honor by disguising herself as a male soldier and serving aboard the USS Constitution, finally concluding with her marriage and becoming a respectable housewife. In addition to the primary texts compiled by Cohen also includes an extensive introduction to contextualize the text historically in terms of its cultural influences, role, and the process for constructing the text, removing the long-standing belief in its authenticity. This is easily the most complete and detailed account of the original text and absolutely essential for any analysis, or even detailed reading, of The Female Marine must include this work.

Hawkes, Gail L. "Dressing-Up—Cross-Dressing and Sexual Dissonance." Journal of Gender Studies 4.3 (1995): 261-70. Academic Search Premier. Web. 15 October. 2010.

            Gail Hawkes examines the role of cross-dressing within the heterosexual hegemony in a historic and contemporary context by building on the discourse of gender theory, particularly relying on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and to a lesser extent Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. The article distinguishes three key reasons for why cross-dressing occurs. Gender acts as a type of escape for the individual from their restrictive gender role, offering a new type of identity for individuals who remain unfulfilled, and illuminating gender as performance—channeling Butler the most directly here. The  article’s thesis is cross dressing subverts the heterosexual gender binary perhaps paving the way to a new understanding of identity, however not all cross-dressing disrupt normative gender constructions., In many cases unnatural gender representation can be categorized and codified so they serve as examples of unfavorabillity or simply reify traditional gender. This reification in particular is crucial to my reading to The Female Marines’ cross-dressing as not upsetting gender roles but does nothing to expose the performative elements of gender.

James, Janet Wilson.  Changing Ideas About Women in the United States, 1776-18-25. New York: Garland, 1981. Print.

            This book by Wilson offers a distinct account, as the title alludes to, of the cultural role and identity for women during the Revolutionary War and the following decades in America. Tracing the construction and change for the ideal American woman, as well as the influences in their creation, the text attempts to address the American concept of equal rights among all individuals to the reality that denied those rights to women. Other areas of concern for the role of women addressed include authorship, education, politics (which was to say none at all) and especially child-rearing. The chapter covering the period overlapping the period that The Female Marine was written was particularly useful for explaining how Brewers actions merely worked to reinforce what was the role of women was believed to be by the hegemony.

Logan, Lisa M. “Columbia’s Daughters in Drag; or, Cross-Dressing, Collaboration, and Authorship in Early American Novels.” Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Ed. Mary C. Carruth. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. 240-52. Print.

            Logan’s article examines the role of cross-dressing in texts containing women in early American texts. For Logan, the cross-dressing in the text occurs on multiple levels, including the actual construction of the text itself. The competing voices of these women’s actual experiences and their male biographers, as well as the blending of genres, acts as a type of cross dressing in that they all work to change the feminine ‘performance’. Not only does this text discuss the Female Marine, I argue that the level of cross-dressing Logan describes which work to upset gender roles is largely absent in The Female Marine.

Medlicott Jr., Alexander. “The Legend of Lucy Brewer: An Early American Novel.” The New England Quarterly. 39.4 (1966): 461-473. Web.

            This work examines The Female Marine (and its earlier iterations) as a foundational piece for the creation of the American novel. In order to do so the text examines the work’s myriad of influences in terms of content, style, and genre—both foreign and domestic— concluding the work is a formulaic blending of tropes to create a precursor for what will be the American novel. While the text being completely generic is useful for establishing the beginnings of a new American novel genre, text also adheres to the standards in terms of gender behavior and ideals meaning the textual level of cross-dressing  Lisa Logan argues for in her article lay absent in The Female Marine, largely because there is no authentic female voice.  

Weyler, Karen A. “An Actor in the Drama of Revolution: Deborah Sampson, Print, and Performance in the Creation of Celebrity.” Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. 183-93. Print.

            This article examines the way in which three women that passed as male soldiers during the revolutionary war were received by American society. Using the examples of two women who were culturally shunned Weyler is particularly interested in why Deborah Sampson was held in rather high public opinion even though she behaved in clearly inappropriate ways. Her ability to control how her story was depicted in print along with her ‘tours’ allowed her transgressions to be excused in service of patriotism. Aside from Deborah Sampson’s narrative being the direct textual influence for The Female Marine, patriotism as a viable ‘excuse’ to break societal roles is what makes Lucy Brewer’s cross-dressing not in itself unsettling.

Foucault, Michael. The History of Sexuality.  New York: Vintage, 1990. Print.

            The history of sexuality by Michael Foucault arguably is the most theoretically significant text in the field of literary studies of the 20^st century. His central concepts of discourse, power, and hegemony have completely changed how individual identity and culture are said to be constructed. Foucault discredits the validity of the repressive hypothesis, claiming that tying together sex and identity is a cultural misnomer. Butler’s claim in culture establishing a naturalness of gender builds on Foucault’s similar claim in regard to sex: while there might be a biological basis sex is largely codified, reinterpreted, and expressed through a myriad of sources within a culture which collectively support certain behaviors and identities but allowing room for sanctioned dissent.  While it could be claim relying on any piece of theory written after The History of Sexuality consults with it, hegemony is a particularly relevant concept for my argument, as well as sanctioned dissent.

Female Marine Rhetorical Analysis

     

                The Female Marine in the first chapter, combined with the title, artwork, dedication, and frontispiece is designed propaganda for a broad audience utilizing multiple rhetorical strategies. Lucy Brewer is offered as an example of what happens to women who engage in moral degradation, which is it leads to a life of poverty and prostitution where she can only redeem herself by ceasing to be a ‘woman’. The text’s audience is actually rather oblique: on one hand it was meant to be a piece of propaganda and so hand to appeal to men, and on the other it clearly serves as a moral warning meant to educate both children and women. Somehow the text has to reify certain cultural beliefs about the way all three of these groups need to act in the new nation. The protagonist’s fate warns women (and children) against losing their virginity or being disrespectful of authority. Contrasting this image were male readers who bought The Female Marine in droves for copiously satisfying their masculine egos as the authority. The text presents itself as authentic, going so far as to give the narrator an ‘alias’ of Louisa Baker to protect her true identity. It gives very descriptive accounts of Boston’s worst slums and the daily life of prostitutes residing in them. The text also places the narrator aboard the widely famous USS Constitution, but even though the settings and events were real the entire story is false. The narrator Lucy Brewer never existed: the still unknown author constructed her tale along genre conventions of other famous American female autobiographies. Lucy Brewer’s false autobiography—falling for an untrue lover, disobeying her father, losing her virginity, becoming a pregnant mother, running away from home, and becoming a prostitute—are components of an argument to warn the impressionable women of Boston against following in  her life.

                While there is certainly a negative image cast on female sexuality as a whole in the text, the chastising also turns into a sort of exploitation in order to appeal to the male readership. The emphasis on Brewer’s own promiscuous history, the graphic descriptions of “Negro Hill,” and revealing inner machinations of Boston’s prostitution industry take up the majority of the original text which must also appeal to men since Brewer’s military service (reminding them to be patriotic) only covers a few pages. The drawn-out focus on Brewer’s sexual history serves as a voyeuristic scope from which  the audience could look in on this ‘seedy underbelly’, while at the same time the incessant condemnation from the narrator keeps a work focused on improper behavior publishable.

                The title page contains a centered portrait of Lucy Brewer, not in her marine uniform but rather a low-cut dress with her hair done effeminately for a formal event—a clear attempt at feminizing her, but just beneath that states, “Who, in disguise, served Three Years as a MARINE on board an American FRIGATE,” making the underlying message the title page wants to convey, and to whom, convoluted (author’s capitalization 58). While parts of the title page appeal to both male and female readers, further down the page is a section targeting a third audience demographic: children.  The dedication does not mention of fellow soldiers, women lured into a life of prostitution, or god but is instead focused on her parents (who, like Lucy Brewer do not actually exist) and their ‘loss’ because, unlike the children who read her tale hopefully, Brewer disobeyed her parents. The first version of The Female Marine explicitly justifies the text morally to the three target audiences: children who will read the text as a warning against disobeying parents, women who need to maintain their purity to educate their children, and men as a form of propaganda at the end of the war in 1812, during which Boston did as much to help England as they did America leaving the patriotism of individuals after the war in question. Implicitly the text is trying to establish this broad readership and market itself commercially as a widely available text for fairly cheap---something not common up to that point in history—by giving the reader what they want, a legitimate excuse to look where ‘respectable’ citizens are never suppose to. The result is a text created for the sole purpose of marketability.