Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic

Abstract

This study of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte recovers the life of an impressive woman who successfully challenged the gender, political, and cultural conventions of the early American republic to reinvent herself as a European lady of taste and refinement. Born in 1785, the Baltimore beauty rebelled against the democratic world of her homeland. Achieving personal independence through, ironically, her unsuccessful marriage in 1805 to Jerome Bonaparte, younger brother of the French emperor, she found her land of opportunity in the Old World, where she styled herself an aristocrat, attaining transatlantic celebrity. While most Americans prized democratic equality, she found a comfortable niche toward the top of a well-defined social hierarchy. When many in the new nation feared the corrupting influence of aristocratic luxury, she embraced lavish display as proof of superior culture. And even as most American men and women found themselves moving in increasingly “separate spheres,” with women building domestic virtue while men staked out their places in public, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte enjoyed “mixed-gender sociability” (p. 158). Rejecting domesticity, she asserted that “Marrying is almost a crime” (p. 205); moreover, her manipulative motherhood focused more on social positioning than moral training.