ABSTRACT
The tenth chapter of American Literature and American Identity turns to Judith Sargent Murray, the author of the important 1790 tract On the Equality of the Sexes, considering two of her plays. The first, Virtue Triumphant, appears to take up Murray’s feminist ideas in a way directly relevant to American identity. Specifically, it addresses the equality of men and women in marriage. However, the play is equivocal on the nature of such equality. The play also includes gender stereotypes, though this is complicated by the suggestion that an androgynous combination of putatively masculine and feminine traits is both preferable and possible. The second play, The Traveller Returned, deals more explicitly with national identity in representing early governmental structures of the revolutionary United States. Murray again appears to accept patriarchal structures in her representation of male–female relations. However, she is clearly critical of the suspicion and intrusive policing of citizens by the new nation’s Committees of Safety. These, in turn, are directly paralleled by the suspicion and intrusive policing of wives by husbands. She thereby hints that relations between the sexes need to be reconsidered if the women in the nation are to achieve any reasonable level of equality and personal freedom.
