SOURCE: "Flirting with Destiny: Ambivalence and Form in the Early American Sentimental Novel," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring, 1982, pp. 17-39.

In the following essay, Davidson argues that some domestic novels ironically subvert typical social constructions of femininity.'

Even though the late eighteenth-century American public was "reading novels with increasingly greater frequency than it read other kinds of books," the growing popularity of fiction did not assure its respectability.¹ On the contrary, the rise of the novel in the United States elicited a general condemnation of the form.² Such prominent Americans as Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, and Noah Webster all denounced the new genre, a genre that necessarily offended, by its very nature, those whose literary standards had been shaped by either a residual Colonial Puritanism or an emerging Yankee pragmatism.³ Did novels promote the Kingdom of God? Could they further...