Legal history and intellectual history 49 self to changing the marital property and civil commitment statutes in the United States. Hartog derives fromPackard’s story the following insights: that as late as the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Blackstone’s harsh account of the oppressive features of the law of coverture more accurately described the legal position of married women in the United States than has been supposed by many recent revisionist histories of family law; that Packard’s fidelity to the “cult of domesticity” and the (loosely) related concept of “manliness” simultaneously limited the radicalism of her proposals for statutory reform and provided her powerful strategic arguments in favor of the changes she did demand; and that Packard’s career exemplifies the “psychologically coercive capacity” of legal rules (i.e., the extent to which Americans during this period constituted themselves through law).^- In several respects, the methodology of the article resembles that employed by NewHistoricist literary and cultural critics. First, a small episode, discovered serendipitously,*^-^ is mined for insights into major themes of American history. Thus, in Hartog’s hands, Packard’s relatively inconsequential career becomes a “‘site’ through which ran many of the most important highways of American cultural history. Second, the essay is suffused with a sense of the ambiguity of Packard’s writings. Hartog plainly lacks the Contextualists’ confidence in their ability to discern authors’ intentions; instead, he eagerly explores the protean potential meanings of the phrases (like “right of a married woman”) around which Packard’s arguments revolve.Third, Hartog situates Packard’s texts in many, polyphonous discursive contexts - ranging fromthe cult of domesticity to “republican obsession with the abuse of power.” Fourth, Hartog not only (in now traditional fashion) uses each of those contexts to help interpret Packard’s texts, he also uses her texts to suggest revisions of the traditional views of those contexts. (Thus, for example, he contends that “an explication of Packard’s writing on dependency will help us make sense of the ways persons did and did not view themselves as property in nineteenth-century America.”*^^) Finally, Hartog is intensely interested in the light that Packard’s writings cast on the structures of power in nineteenth-century American, but eschews simple applications of the concepts of cultural hegemony and false consciousness. (Thus, he repeatedly ruminates on the extent to which Packard was the prisoner or manipulator of the various ideological structures in which she moved.) In the other essay, the “historeme” that provides the vehicle of Hartog’s analysis is an obscure 1819 criminal case in the Mayor’s Court in New York Hendrik Hartog, “Mrs. Packard on Dependency,” Yale Journal of Lan' and the Humanities I (1988): 87-101. “1 came across the trial rcccird of her case while working my way through family law trial records.” Ibid., 83. S'* Ibid. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 85.
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