Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
of virtue obliterate its remembrance. Reputation is the life of woman; yet courage
to protect it is masculine and disgusting; and the only safe asylum a woman of
delicacy can nd is in the arms of a man of honour. How naturally, then, should
we love the brave and the generous; how gratefully should we bless the arm raised
for our protection, when nerv’d by virtue and directed by honour! Heaven grant
that the man with whom I may be connected—may be connected! Whither has my
imagination transported me—whither does it now lead me? Am I not indissolubly
engaged, “by every obligation of honour which my own consent and my father’s
approbation can give,” to a man who can never share my aections, and whom a
few days hence it will be criminal for me to disapprove—to disapprove! would to
heaven that were all—to despise. For, can the most frivolous manners, actuated
by the most depraved heart, meet, or merit, anything but contempt from every
woman of delicacy and sentiment?
[VAN ROUGH without. Mary!]
Ha! my father’s voice—Sir!—
Enter VAN ROUGH.
VAN ROUGH
What, Mary, always singing doleful ditties, and moping over these plaguy books.
MARIA
I hope, Sir, that it is not criminal to improve my mind with books, or to divert my
melancholy with singing, at my leisure hours.
VAN ROUGH
Why, I don’t know that, child; I don’t know that. They us’d to say, when I was a
young man, that if a woman knew how to make a pudding, and to keep herself out
of re and water, she knew enough for a wife. Now, what good have these books
done you? have they not made you melancholy? as you call it. Pray, what right has
a girl of your age to be in the dumps? haven’t you everything your heart can wish;
an’t you going to be married to a young man of great fortune; an’t you going to have
the quit-rent of twenty miles square?
MARIA
One-hundredth part of the land, and a lease for life of the heart of a man I could
love, would satisfy me.
VAN ROUGH
Pho, pho, pho! child; nonsense, downright nonsense, child. This comes of your
reading your storybooks; your Charles Grandisons, your Sentimental Journals, and
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