By Paul Carrier
Born in the Massachusetts town of Plympton in 1760, Deborah Sampson (or Samson) married Benjamin Gannett 25 years later, and had three children by him. The Gannetts raised their family, which also included an adopted child, on a small farm in Stoughton, Mass., the town where they were wed in 1785.
None of which was especially notable. But what Sampson did as a young, still-unmarried woman definitely was. Disguising herself as a man, she adopted the name Robert Shurtliff (once again, spellings vary) and enlisted in the Continental Army during the closing years of the American Revolution.
It is a fictionalized version of that story that Alex Myers, a distant relative of Sampson, tells in Revolutionary. Myers is a revolutionary of sorts himself, a female-to-male transgender person who spent his childhood in Maine and his first three years at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy as Alice, before returning to Phillips Exeter as Alex in his senior year.
Myers describes himself as the first transgender student at Phillips Exeter and the first openly transgender student at Harvard University. Although that may give him a unique perspective on Sampson’s behavior, Myers has said in interviews that he does not believe Sampson was a transgender person.
Sampson joined the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in 1782, fought in “numerous skirmishes” and received “sword and musket wounds,” according to britannica.com. The Massachusetts Historical Society says on masshist.org that Sampson’s gender was discovered while she was treated for “a near-fatal fever.” She received an honorable discharge from Gen. Henry Knox in October 1783.
Sampson first appears in Myers’ account as a former indentured servant who is now making her living as a weaver. Her unsatisfying life as a relatively poor woman with no marriage prospects plummets from unpromising to hopeless when a personal crisis effectively forces her to flee the town where she lives. Sampson (as Robert) signs up not so much out of patriotism as to escape the constraints and travails of her repressive small-town existence.
Sampson develops friendships with three soldiers in her unit, and overcomes much of her initial anxiety as she discovers that she’s clever enough to conceal her gender, intelligent enough to learn what is expected of her and physically strong enough to pull her weight. In real life, Sampson was said to have been plain-featured and unusually tall for a woman, which helped her to disguise herself. Thanks largely to her height, size and strength, she was assigned to the regiment’s elite light infantry company.
Myers’ novel suggests Sampson quickly came to see that her assumed role gave her greater autonomy, and won her more respect, than she had ever known as a woman in a male-dominated world. "Her clothes were like an eggshell about her, a thin layer of protection, a veneer that both kept out and held in." That is plausible, but a literary device Myers uses to illustrate Sampson’s evolving gender-based self-image is extremely distracting.
Following Sampson’s enlistment and for some time thereafter, Myers consistently refers to his protagonist as Deborah, and uses a female pronoun to describe her. But after that, over the course of more than 20 pages, Myers alternates between female and male references to Sampson (Deborah, Robert, he, she, etc.), before finally settling on a male name and pronoun for most of the rest of the novel.
This isn’t a case of sloppy writing. I assume it is quite deliberate, to illustrate how Sampson’s perception of herself reflects a duality, even as she becomes increasingly comfortable passing as a man. Still, as a reader I found the alternating references to Sampson as male and female maddening, albeit only temporarily.
The spine of Myers’ novel is Sampson’s complex, ever-changing view of herself, and the emotional toll of her deception and secrecy. But Myers would have been hard-pressed to construct an entire novel around Sampson’s introspection regarding her gender bending.
The author avoids that trap through lively and well-paced plotting that involves much more than cross-dressing. Sampson saves the life of a corporal who has uncovered her secret, discovers that the man may be a traitor, survives a trial by fire in which another treasonous comrade is killed during a skirmish, is wounded by British forces, digs a musket ball out of her own leg to maintain her disguise, and becomes romantically involved with another soldier.
Myers deserves credit for introducing readers to a remarkably strong-willed woman who refused to be defined by her circumstances and her gender. “I wanted to serve, sir, I wanted to be of use,” Sampson tells a general after her identity has come to light. “And yes, I wanted to be free too.”
None of which was especially notable. But what Sampson did as a young, still-unmarried woman definitely was. Disguising herself as a man, she adopted the name Robert Shurtliff (once again, spellings vary) and enlisted in the Continental Army during the closing years of the American Revolution.
It is a fictionalized version of that story that Alex Myers, a distant relative of Sampson, tells in Revolutionary. Myers is a revolutionary of sorts himself, a female-to-male transgender person who spent his childhood in Maine and his first three years at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy as Alice, before returning to Phillips Exeter as Alex in his senior year.
Myers describes himself as the first transgender student at Phillips Exeter and the first openly transgender student at Harvard University. Although that may give him a unique perspective on Sampson’s behavior, Myers has said in interviews that he does not believe Sampson was a transgender person.
Sampson joined the 4th Massachusetts Regiment in 1782, fought in “numerous skirmishes” and received “sword and musket wounds,” according to britannica.com. The Massachusetts Historical Society says on masshist.org that Sampson’s gender was discovered while she was treated for “a near-fatal fever.” She received an honorable discharge from Gen. Henry Knox in October 1783.
Sampson first appears in Myers’ account as a former indentured servant who is now making her living as a weaver. Her unsatisfying life as a relatively poor woman with no marriage prospects plummets from unpromising to hopeless when a personal crisis effectively forces her to flee the town where she lives. Sampson (as Robert) signs up not so much out of patriotism as to escape the constraints and travails of her repressive small-town existence.
Sampson develops friendships with three soldiers in her unit, and overcomes much of her initial anxiety as she discovers that she’s clever enough to conceal her gender, intelligent enough to learn what is expected of her and physically strong enough to pull her weight. In real life, Sampson was said to have been plain-featured and unusually tall for a woman, which helped her to disguise herself. Thanks largely to her height, size and strength, she was assigned to the regiment’s elite light infantry company.
Myers’ novel suggests Sampson quickly came to see that her assumed role gave her greater autonomy, and won her more respect, than she had ever known as a woman in a male-dominated world. "Her clothes were like an eggshell about her, a thin layer of protection, a veneer that both kept out and held in." That is plausible, but a literary device Myers uses to illustrate Sampson’s evolving gender-based self-image is extremely distracting.
Following Sampson’s enlistment and for some time thereafter, Myers consistently refers to his protagonist as Deborah, and uses a female pronoun to describe her. But after that, over the course of more than 20 pages, Myers alternates between female and male references to Sampson (Deborah, Robert, he, she, etc.), before finally settling on a male name and pronoun for most of the rest of the novel.
This isn’t a case of sloppy writing. I assume it is quite deliberate, to illustrate how Sampson’s perception of herself reflects a duality, even as she becomes increasingly comfortable passing as a man. Still, as a reader I found the alternating references to Sampson as male and female maddening, albeit only temporarily.
The spine of Myers’ novel is Sampson’s complex, ever-changing view of herself, and the emotional toll of her deception and secrecy. But Myers would have been hard-pressed to construct an entire novel around Sampson’s introspection regarding her gender bending.
The author avoids that trap through lively and well-paced plotting that involves much more than cross-dressing. Sampson saves the life of a corporal who has uncovered her secret, discovers that the man may be a traitor, survives a trial by fire in which another treasonous comrade is killed during a skirmish, is wounded by British forces, digs a musket ball out of her own leg to maintain her disguise, and becomes romantically involved with another soldier.
Myers deserves credit for introducing readers to a remarkably strong-willed woman who refused to be defined by her circumstances and her gender. “I wanted to serve, sir, I wanted to be of use,” Sampson tells a general after her identity has come to light. “And yes, I wanted to be free too.”
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