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.