Transcorporeality and the Pursuit of Happiness in Leonora Sansay’s Laura (1809)

Abstract

This article examines the way in which Laura , a short novel by Leonora Sansay published in 1809, associates the theme of the search for the founding happiness of the Young Republic to the dream, full of hope but doomed to failure, of conjugal bliss within a pastoral paradise. Sansay, in this little studied novel, uses the conventions of seduction novel and pastoral landscape around Philadelphia to question the validity of the social and physical boundaries that define a set of tensions between the human body and the natural world, and, finally, to question the possibility even for the young women of the nascent Republic to participate in the collective quest for happiness.