Review: Transgression and Order in Early America

Reviewed Work(s): Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic. University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. by Doron Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown: Foul Bodies:
Cleanliness in Early America. Yale University Press, 2009. by Kathleen Brown: Witches,
Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America. Cornell
University Press, 2011. by Elaine Foreman Crane
Review by: BRIAN CONNOLLY
Source: Massachusetts Historical Review , Vol. 17 (2015), pp. 153-156
Published by: Massachusetts Historical Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5224/masshistrevi.17.1.0153

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 Review Essay
R
Transgression and Order in Early America
b r i an c on n ol ly

Doron Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown, Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature
in the Early Republic. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America. Yale University
Press, 2009.
Elaine Foreman Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law
and Common Folk in Early America. Cornell University Press, 2011.

A ll cultures, it would seem, have mechanisms for determin-

ing and maintaining the distinction between licit and illicit, pure and
impure, prescribed and proscribed. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas
has written, “rituals of purity and impurity create unity in experience. . . .
Similarly the ideal order of society is guarded by dangers which threaten
transgressors.”1 This dynamic precipitates two questions: What kinds of
rituals are in place to mark the boundary between the licit and illicit? What
cultural roles do these rituals play? Three recent books in early American his-
tory attempt to answer these questions in different manners and with varying
degrees of success.
Doron Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown’s Taming Lust: Crimes Against Na-
ture in the Early Republic and Elaine Foreman Crane’s Witches, Wife Beaters,
and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America offer microhis-
tories of transgression—in Ben-Atar and Brown’s book, two cases of bestiality

Brian Connolly is an associate professor of history at the University of South Florida and
a member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (2015–2016). He
is the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century
America.

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 the massachusetts historical review

in 1790s New England and in Crane’s book, a series of legal cases including
slander in New Amsterdam, family violence in New England, witchcraft in
Bermuda, rape and slavery in Rhode Island, and ghosts on trial in Maryland.
In both the colonial and early national contexts, transgression frequently
challenged established order and served as points around which authorities
reconstituted order and power. Like many microhistories, these two books
accumulate a surfeit of detail that is too often merely descriptive. In Crane’s
case this frequently amounts to exhaustive recounting of each legal case,
while Ben-Atar and Brown’s frequent asides to the contemporary moment do
more to obscure than illuminate. Is “hormone-driven”(40) all that useful a
description of young men’s sexuality? Is reference to the twenty-first-century
death of a “gay-porn actor” during sex with a horse relevant? And what,
moreover, makes him a “gay-porn” actor?
With Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores, Crane has written a microhistory
that, in its varied topics and locations, is surprisingly expansive and held to-
gether ably by her sociohistorical interpretation of legal culture. Crane’s aim
is to show “the ways in which legal culture and the routine of daily life were
knotted together in early America” (4), that is, the ways in which law and the
people—common law and common folk, to borrow Crane’s language—were
mutually constitutive. In that, Crane’s book reads like an early American
analog to Laura Edwards’s The People and Their Peace. In an absolutely fasci-
nating chapter that should be required reading for anyone working on early
American legal history, Crane traces a 1797 inheritance suit in Maryland in
which one of the key testimonies came from the ghost of a deceased property
owner. A shrewd and subtle reading of the case and the legal culture of the
time allows Crane to make great use of the ghost story to explore the distinc-
tion between statutory and community law. Insights like this make Crane’s
occasionally overly descriptive chapters worthwhile.
Ben-Atar and Brown have also chosen to explore the illicit through micro-
history but have a much more narrowly focused project: two cases of bestial-
ity in New England from the late 1790s. Taming Lust is similar in scope and
method to Brown’s previous book on incest (written with Irene Quenzler
Brown). Ostensibly about bestiality in the early republic, it is primarily con-
cerned with how two octogenarians were prosecuted for capital crimes in an
era of decreasing reliance on execution for violations “typically associated
with young men” (7) (I do not know that bestiality is commonly associated
with anyone, but this gestures toward the odd tone of the book). The two
cases of bestiality are understood as screens for political conflict, attempts by
an “anxious elite” to assert order through enforcing the law. After a chap-

154

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 Review Essay

ter that serves as a cursory overview of the long history of bestiality from
ancient Greece through to the late eighteenth century, the authors address
the two cases from a variety of perspectives, reconstructing the legal, social,
and political context of the trials and ending with the claim that these trials
represented the waning influence of Puritan ideas. In the end, this is a brief
and at times informative history of life in late eighteenth-century provincial
New England towns. But it raises the question, why write it as a history of
bestiality? Ben-Atar and Brown seem taken with the idea that writing about
bestiality is itself a scandalous transgression, an illicit scholarly act. Concise
comparisons throughout the book suggest that a history of sexuality is never
really their aim. For example, that they compare their two cases to newspaper
reports on the Jay Treaty and XYZ Affair (149), for instance, is preposterous.
Moreover, the book is marked, not infrequently, by what Freud called “wild
psychoanalysis”—moments that do more harm than good, in this case, to
both psychoanalysis and the history of sexuality.
What is striking about these books, despite how much their similar ap-
proaches diverge (Crane’s expansive and eye-opening account as opposed
to Brown and Ben-Atar’s narrow and familiar one) is that they claim to be
histories of sexuality, yet they refuse to take sexuality seriously. For instance,
Crane reads sexual slander in the form of the word “whore” as a way of ne-
gotiating “a hotly contested commercial market” (28). The impulse to find
a “real” meaning for sexual language is common to many historians, and
often the result of subtle readings, but it also creates a sense that sexuality is
always epiphenomenal. This can be a way of reading sexuality out of history.
Rather than a history of bestiality, Brown and Ben-Atar present an argument,
at times circuitous, that both men charged with bestiality were casualties
of partisan political fighting. Slanderous implications of nefarious sexuality,
including bestiality, are not all that surprising. That partisan political fight-
ing would justify execution under the guise of sodomy and bestiality belongs
in a book on early national New England political culture, not in one on the
history of sexuality. While they need not adopt the language of the dominant
strains of this historiography, one wonders why Ben-Atar and Brown never
once stop to ask why we consider bestiality a part of sexuality and how that
produced sexual subjects in the late eighteenth century. These two questions,
had the authors engaged them, would immediately inform the more Foucaul-
dian variants of the history of sexuality.
Kathleen Brown’s Foul Bodies is a book of a different order, as it offers a
sweeping history of cleanliness in the Atlantic World and early British colo-
nies through to the mid-nineteenth-century United States. It is not too much

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 the massachusetts historical review

to say that, with it, Brown has equaled, if not surpassed, her previous work
in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. While it is certainly
one of the best works of history of the past several years, it also belongs on
the shelf next to works such as Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, Mary
Douglas’s Purity and Danger, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s The
Politics and Poetics of Transgression. This is to say that, unlike the works of
many other historians, the horizon of Brown’s work is quite distant from the
narrow precincts of history. Her questions are not simply historiographical
and local, but political and ethical. Historically, the book is sweeping: track-
ing the practices, aesthetics, politics, and economics of cleanliness around the
Atlantic, Brown refuses the standard chronological breaks of early America,
instead carrying her narrative from the sixteenth through the mid nineteenth
century. Moreover, Brown resists the historian’s urge not to make comment
on the contemporary. Rather than fearing empty charges of presentism,
Brown ends the book by implicating our modern hygienic practices in her
narrative: “Situating our own ways of caring for the body in the history of
that care, we confront the limits of our modernity, its debts to empire, its
vulnerability to disease, and its continued reliance upon the domestic labor
of women” (367). While there is not the space here to fully account for the
myriad insights and complexities of Brown’s arguments, it is worth noting
that this exemplifies what I would call critical history. Not circumscribed by
one subfield of history, Brown moves through social, cultural, political, eco-
nomic, legal, imperial, and national histories. She documents and describes
cleanliness, yes, but she also upends conventional notions of what we mean
when we invoke cleanliness, and how the body—clean and unclean, pure and
impure, laboring and at rest, raced, classed, gendered, sexualized—is an ef-
fect of the discourses and technologies and political economies that produce
it.
Taken together, these books point to the importance of transgression in the
establishment and maintenance of order at the local, national, and imperial
levels. All offer important insights. As Brown’s book testifies, it is in setting
the widest ethical and political horizons that we can do the most significant
and pressing work as historians.

Notes

1. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(New York, 1970), 3–4.

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