SOURCE: Traister, Bryce. “Libertinism and Authorship in America's Early Republic.” American Literature 72, no. 1 (2000): 1-30.

In the following essay, Traister compares some of Tenney's male characters in Female Quixotism to the stereotypical American libertine male and his representation in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn.

Late in the first book of Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), the novel's heroine, Dorcasina Sheldon, “calling herself the most wretched of women” because her unreasonable father has prohibited her marriage to Patrick O'Connor, rejects the novels “in which she had formerly taken such delight” and turns for comfort to the letters O'Connor had written her during their clandestine courtship. Dorcasina “had got them arranged in perfect order, tied with a silken string, and wrapped in a cover, upon which was written these words, Letters from my dearest O'Connor before marriage.”¹ One of the great novel-reading heroines of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American antinovel tradition, Dorcasina has...