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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
3.15.2 Reading and Review Questions
1. What are American virtues, according to this play? How do you know?
2. What are European vices, according to this play? How do you know?
3. How does European culture “infect” American society, and to what
eect?
4. What, if any, distinctions of class do you discern in this play? Which
class, if any, is perceived in a positive light? Why?
5. How free are the characters in this play? What, if anything, constrains
them? What liberates them?
3.16 HANNAH WEBSTER FOSTER
(1758–1840)
Hannah Webster Foster was born in
Salisbury, Massachusetts into a wealthy
merchant family. She was educated for
several years at a boarding school. In 1785,
she married the Reverend John Foster
(1735–1800), minister of the First Parish
Church in Brighton, the only church in
Brighton. She bore six children, three
of whom were daughters, two of whom
became writers as adults. As the wife of
the only minister in Brighton, Foster was
an important social leader of the town.
After she published two novels, Foster
focused her energies on her role as wife and
mother. In 1827, a group within the First
Parish Church broke away to establish
Image 3.24 | Hannah Webster Foster
the Brighton Evangelical Congregational Artist | Unknown
Source | Wikimedia Commons
Society. Soon afterwards, John Foster left
License | Public Domain
the church. He died two years later. Foster
moved to Montreal to live with her daughter Elizabeth, where she died in 1840.
Foster was wife, mother, and writer. Her writing considers women’s lives as
dened and constrained by their expected place in society as wives and mothers.
Despite the hopes of such revolutionary minds as Abigail Adams, women were not
freed from their dependence on the men who had legal authority over them after
the American Revolution. Women were faced, at a remove, with the new nation’s
changes in economy, urbanization, and politics, and their only support, foundation,
and stability amidst these changes was the institution of marriage, an institution
that legally saw no change post-revolution.
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