New World Roots: Transatlantic Fictions, Creole Marriages, and Women’s Cultivation of Empire in the Americas

Abstract

J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur famously proclaimed Americans to be “a people of cultivators.” As was typical of the eighteenth century, his conception of cultivation is capacious, including both agricultural production and the so-called civilizing mission of building roads, communities, and institutions in the New World (67). Much has been made of the connections between the kind of cultivation valorized by figures like Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson and the creation and extension of empire, a vision focused on the figure of the masculine yeoman farmer who transformed “empty” land into fertile fields. In his engagement with a feminized landscape, the eighteenth-century Anglo-American male farmer shared many similarities with other figures associated with conquest and settlement, including colonial explorers, frontiersmen, clergy, scientists, and soldiers. Annette Kolodny, Mary Louise Pratt, and others have revealed the masculinist dimensions of such narratives of conquest and cultivation, which, as Kolodny notes, engage “not simply the land as mother, but the land as woman, the total female principle of gratification” (The Lay of the Land 4).¹ Actual women are conspicuously absent from discussions of imperial cultivation like those found in Crèvecoeur and Jefferson, texts that seem to dwell in a kind of homosocial fantasy of masculine production. Yet two transatlantic novels from the 1760s imagine women playing a central role in the cultivation of American landscapes and populations: the anonymously published The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield (1767) and The Adventures of Emmera, or The Fair American (1767).²