Seduction and Sedition in Judith Sargent Murray’s Story of Margaretta

Sari Edelstein

Although Judith Sargent Murray was one of the most prolific and well-known women in the early American republic, her literary productions have received little scholarly attention. Critics tend to read Murray’s only novel, The Story of Margaretta, as a piece of “conduct fiction,” advocating the need for female education and showing young women the consequences of ill-chosen romantic pursuits. While Murray was a proponent of republican motherhood, she was also outspoken on a wide range of political topics, from the equality of the sexes to the formation of a national bank.

This paper situates The Story of Margaretta within the newspaper wars of the 1790s, which saw the coextensive rise of party politics and mainstream political journalism in the early republic. Throughout the decade, Federalists vilified the opposition press as anti-national and seductive and ultimately tried to silence Republican newspapers with the Sedition Act of 1798. Placing Murray’s novel in the context of this vituperative print culture, this paper reads the plot of seduction as an engagement with the threat of partisanship. Through the figure of the seducer, Murray dramatizes the Federalist fear of faction and corruption, linking rhetorical and political seduction. Her intervention into the public sphere represents the liberatory potential of the novel and also suggests the paradoxical position Murray inhabited as a Federalist and a proto-feminist.