Englisches Seminar, Grosser Hörsaal
Sexual Impulses in 1799
Charles Brockden Brown's unfinished novel Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (1799-1800) is an important document in the history of sexuality. For one thing, it has the first identifiable sodomite in U.S. fiction. But more importantly, it has characters who are subject to what the novel calls "sexual impulses" (see the penultimate page of the first serialized installment), a virtually unprecedented phrase in English language usage at the time. What's more, it engages the intricate relationships between race, slavery, and sexuality in explosive ways--which may be one reason Brown was not able to complete the novel. Perhaps most importantly, it is a novel that theorizes the emergence of modern sexuality (as Foucault famously framed it) as an interiorized disposition of the individual person. It thus registers an historical event--the emergence of sexuality as such--in a way that is only partially visible in other early American documents and events like Franklin's Autobiography, Alexander Hamilton's sex scandal, Foster's The Coquette, or other novels by Brown.
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