SOURCE: Samuels, Shirley. “Wieland: Alien and Infidel.” Early American Literature 25, no. 1 (1990): 46-66.

In the following essay, Samuels explores the connections between family and nation and the threat to both from outsiders as a prominent theme of Wieland.

An eighteenth-century New England minister who wrote a history of the American Revolution once described the need to “dress” his history modestly: “laboured elegance and extravagant colouring only brings her into suspicion, hides her beauty, and makes the cautious reader afraid lest he is in company with a painted harlot” (Gordon 393). While it seems understandable that a minister would not want his reader to keep “company with a painted harlot,” the conjunction of history and harlotry here appears rather striking. Such nervousness about licentious sexuality in language—specifically language that depicted the still-volatile topic of the American Revolution—extended to other writers, ministers, orators, and politicians in the young republic. They...