Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature by Maria O'Malley (review)

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• Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature by Maria O’Malley
• Lucas P. Kelley

Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature. By Maria O’Malley. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. Pp. xii, 230. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7848-5.)

In Imaginary Empires: Women Writers and Alternative Futures in Early US Literature, Maria O’Malley analyzes five eighteenth-and nineteenth-century [End Page 413] literary works that reveal women’s engagement with the processes of empire in North America. The texts’ authors, notes O’Malley, all “assert an imagined world in an attempt to wrest power from the prerogatives of empire building to provide an imagined ontology of power for women as they escape patriarchal systems” (p. 15). More than simply creating an imaginary literary realm, these authors offered their own alternative future of the United States, or settler colonialism more generally, which allowed them to “reckon with the various power loci within empires and the ambivalent role of women who negotiate between their own subordinate position and sovereignty over others” (p. 3). O’Malley’s close reading of the five texts demonstrates how women’s engagement with empire-building varied based on historical context and their individual identity.

The book’s first four chapters explore works of fiction. O’Malley begins by analyzing The Female American, published in 1767 by an unknown author. The text encouraged readers to imagine how English colonization might have taken place with women in charge through its story of a shipwrecked, mixed-race woman of English and Indigenous ancestry and her effort to convert Native people to Christianity. The Female American, notes O’Malley, “reterritorializes women’s role in empire building while simultaneously charting the fears women’s agency inspires” (p. 17). Fear is a common point of emphasis in scholarly interpretations of the Haitian Revolution. Yet in her analysis of Leonora Sansay’s Secret History: or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) in chapter 2, O’Malley highlights the “rhetorical power” presented by Black revolutionaries as they articulated the possibilities of an independent Haiti as well as the “sexual power” that Black women employed to challenge French rule (pp. 53, 54). Chapter 3 returns to colonial America with its focus on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie: A Tale of Massachusetts, which chronicles how the settler household advanced English colonization through the text’s interpretation of conflict between New England Puritans and the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. O’Malley’s concept of alternate futures is especially evident here, for Sedgwick published Hope Leslie in 1827, a time when many Americans were debating Indian removal. Sedgwick, suggests O’Malley, was trying to “shape attitudes toward incorporating the experiences of indigenous peoples into the stories of American peoplehood” (p. 82). O’Malley makes a similar point in chapter 4 by demonstrating how Lydia Maria Child’s Romance of the Republic (1867) imagined a postwar United States where mixed-race people, joined through interracial marriage, could be the driving force of the nation’s future imperialism.

Historians of the American South will be especially interested in O’Malley’s analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the book’s final chapter. O’Malley makes the compelling point that Incidents should be recognized as a work of imagination, futurity, and empire. Jacobs conjures an imaginary Massachusetts to gain power over her enslaver, and in doing so, she also articulates a site of future perfection in the abolitionist North, an expectation that results in disillusionment once Jacobs begins making a life in New York and Boston. Moreover, argues O’Malley, Jacobs’s “representation of a divided United States troubles the notions of a coherent nation that aspires to imperial might” (p. 19). Most historians read Incidents to understand how gender influenced enslaved people’s experiences, but O’Malley demonstrates [End Page 414] how a literary analysis of the text results in fresh understandings, which should influence how historians teach and interpret Jacobs’s book. Imaginary Empires serves as a valuable reminder that historians should engage with literary criticism in order to better understand the historical actors that are...