‘Our Good Angel’: Women, Moral Influence, and the Nation in Antebellum American Pirate Novels

Abstract

During the 1840s and 1850s, several American authors wrote remarkably successful novels which featured heroines who donned male garb and assumed male authority, captaining pirate ships, commanding bandit hoards, and ruling bands of outlaws. While these female protagonists initially seemed to challenge their societies’ gender boundaries and feminine ideals, they in fact upheld social order and embodied traditional, domestic virtue, consistently abandoning their powerful roles as pirates for the private sphere of home and family by the end of their narratives. In their works, authors of pirate fiction thus entered into contemporary debates about the proper roles of women within the public sphere, indicating that the political empowerment of women was largely superfluous, as women already possessed the ability to shape the destiny of the nation through their moral influence over men. These largely unstudied pirate novels offer significant insights into debates about gender, power, and public space in nineteenth-century America.

Keywords

• american fiction, gender roles, pirate fiction, gender identity, feminine authority