Obliged to Wander

Urbanity did not just travel through pipes or print. It also spread via the mobile bodies of people who immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, carried their versions of these new cultures to other settings, and adapted them anew. Chapter 5, “Obliged to Wander,” focuses on two largely forgotten novels that explore women’s movement within and among cites: Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood’s Dorval, or the Speculator (1800), and Martha Read’s Monima, or the Beggar Girl (1802). Through mobility both free and forced, these novels’ protagonists traverse numerous developing cities including Boston, New York, and Philadelphia; inhabit a variety of urban domestic and institutional settings ranging from palaces to prisons; and call attention to the complex causes of urban poverty. They also move outside of the US to Europe, the Americas, and San Domingo, positioning women as key participants in the dissemination and transformation of urbanity. In so doing, Dorval and Monima revise gender and genre expectations to construct the liminal city as a space of active self-making for women as writers, readers, and characters; the texts both highlight this space’s potential and foreshadow its end.