Can friendship be equalizing, or does it require equality and similitude as its basis? This is the question Ivy Schweitzer grapples with in her analysis of friendship in early American literature. It is a significant question for American culture – both early and contemporary, particularly when friendship is considered not simply a private but a public relation and a model for egalitarian democracy. In the classical tradition inherited by America's founders, public friendship was the ideal ennobling relationship, a path to virtue and the basis of the polis. Classical notions of friendship influenced ideals for the early American community in texts like John Winthrop's “Modell of Christian Charity,” which interwove spiritual equality with hierarchy and male domination. Yet, as Schweitzer shows, classical notions were also adapted to portrayals of interracial and female friendships that pressed at the limits of equality in early America.

Schweitzer's theme is original and complex. She brings together expertise in theory, gender studies and early American literature, and introduces her readers to the discourse of friendship from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, through medieval and Renaissance culture, to the eras of sympathy and sentiment. After highlighting the role of the friend as a “second self” in classical sources, Schweitzer presents case studies of Winthrop's “Modell,” Foster's Coquette, Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and Sedgwick's Hope Leslie to show the adaptation of friendship discourse to the American context. The chapters are of individual interest, presenting lively readings that engage with history and recent scholarship, in addition to building Schweitzer's broader argument.

It is a convincing thesis that “perfecting friendship,” especially across gender and ethnic boundaries, is key to improving democracy in America, but Schweitzer's analyses demonstrate the project's difficulties more than its successes. Interpreting Foster's Coquette as showing the female “flipside” of Winthrop's vision, Schweitzer observes the heroine's doomed attempts at rational friendship with men, and homosocial friendships in resistance to hierarchical/“Federalist” marriage. While Leatherstocking's cross-cultural values defy a monoracial America, and Cooper's political allegory underscores the importance of egalitarian friendship to a stable democracy, the bond between Hawkeye and Chingachgook remains, Schweitzer concedes, a fantasy that allowed readers to sustain egalitarian ideals in the face of slavery and genocide. Even the door opened by Sedgwick's novel to “the future possibility of ethical friendship across difference” (205) seems only slightly ajar, as Schweitzer finds in the ultimate defeat of the interracial friendship an encouraging recognition of otherness. If equality can be made a result rather than a prerequisite of friendship, Schweitzer's study also suggests the immense cultural work this entails.