Reviewed by Catherine Kerrison | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2

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Reviewed by Catherine Kerrison | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Catherine Kerrison, Villanova University

Intricate Relations: Sexual and Economic Desire in American Fiction, 1789–1814. By Karen A. Weyler. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. 281 pages. $39.95 (cloth).
For Gordon Wood the radicalism of the American Revolution lay in the "hundreds of thousands" of Americans who comprised the "prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society" the United States became after the war.¹ After reading Karen A. Weyler's Intricate Relations, I could imagine novelist Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood vigorously nodding her matronly capped head in agreement. She had certainly done her level best to put that Revolution on a tight leash. In Dorval; or the Speculator. A Novel, Founded on Recent Facts (1801), she warned nineteenth-century Americans about an imposter whose apparent wealth and pleasing manners earned him entrée to the Republic's respectable homes and society. He was a speculator, a gambler, or an unscrupulous rake, down on his luck and looking for an easy mark, which should be easy to find in a nation that had sold its republican soul in its greed for quick money. No one would ask the "gentleman stranger" (140) how he had come by his money; it mattered only that he had it (or the appearance of it) and access to a lot more. Unfettered by any external regulations, such strangers could wreak a path of sexual and economic ruin as they smooth talked their way into reputable social circles, secured profitable marriages, drained family bank accounts, and disappeared. These new entrepreneurs were, for both Woods, the stuff of the Revolution. Whereas Gordon celebrated one type, Sally deplored another; her anxiety about how to regulate sexual and economic desire mirrored that of many Americans in the early Republic, Intricate Relations argues. And in reaching for her pen, Wood armed herself to fight the good fight. She would write novels, not in a subversive attempt to expose the limitations of the Revolution, but in an impassioned plea to preserve the "conservative" (32) values increasingly ignored in a world run amok.	1
In the scholarship that has emerged since Cathy N. Davidson's seminal Revolution and the Word two decades ago, the early American novel's concern with sexual and economic desire has been everywhere assumed, Weyler believes, but nowhere explicitly examined. Intricate Relations proposes to correct this oversight, training our attention fully on these concerns because they are "fundamental to understanding the novels themselves and their role in American literary culture" (2). In the novels' preoccupation with the disposition of sex and property (each a form of capital), Weyler sees the manifestation of a national anxiety about women and men, respectively, who were a bit too cavalier about their expenditure of each. Our perspective thus reoriented, we can begin to see novels as reflections of "broad-based, pervasive bourgeois concerns" (10) with "property, inheritance, and the relationships among sexuality, marriage, and social standing" (20) in a cultural climate of rampant self-serving individualism.	2
Weyler's observation that the novel could serve ideological constituencies other than the subversive is well taken and indeed persuasive; relying completely on prescriptive sources (novels and medical, political, religious, and economic tracts) to take the anxiety temperature of the nation is less so. Certainly historians and literature specialists are in her debt for enlarging the early American literary canon with a careful analysis of previously obscure novels such as Wood's Dorval and Rebecca Rush's Kelroy, a Novel (1812). Yet Weyler's new additions ultimately elaborate and reinforce arguments made by Davidson more than twenty years ago.	. . .

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