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Recent discussions of early American fiction have focused upon the problematic trope of woman as icon of national identity. However much this association might have presaged political agency for women, it enforced a troubling set of female gender assumptions; women in early republican literature simultaneously were regarded as the model for virtuous influence and as the epitome of all that threatens the commonweal.' Philip Gould recently has identified in literature between the Revolution and 1830 a period of unstable and shifting gender identifications with powerful consequences for national identity. The valorization of the feminine as a signifier of national virtue contributed to an increasingly androgynous ideal for national heroism; the "feminization of republican manhood" transpired as one adjustment of republican ideology to market capitalism and emergent liberalism.2
One remarkable site exposing anxiety over the association between female gender and national identity during the post-Revolutionary period is Herman Mann's fashioning of the life of Deborah Sampson, who served for eighteen months in the continental army during the American Revolution disguised as a male. Throughout his career as public educator, a role which he assumed in all of his print ventures, Mann resisted what he viewed as threats to republican virtue introduced by the forces of increasing social diversity and economic competition; like many republican commentators at the turn of the century, he viewed women as vital agents of social control in their "civilizing" influence upon men and children. In his book The Female Review, purportedly the memoirs of Deborah Sampson, the patriotic printer attempts to shape an icon of national virtue and a myth of the early republic from the raw material of a cross-dressing female soldier.
Mann's The Female Review (I797) continues to be the most frequently tapped primary source for popular and scholarly accounts of Sampson's career. Although long acknowledged as a "romanticized memoir" or even as a "novel," the text retains a certain biographical status because it has been reprinted throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in lieu of any definitive account of Sampson's life.3 However, in commenting upon his composition of the book Mann acknowledged that at the request of friends he wrote it hurriedly after accumulating a range of sources, presumably to support Sampson's initial petition for a federal Invalid Pension,...