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Like James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy, The Tory Lover'”Sarah Orne Jewett's own rewriting of the American Revolution'”might be subtitled 'A Tale of the Neutral Ground.' Choosing as the basis of its diegesis one of the highly paradigmatic moments in American history, Jewett's historical romance not only challenges the revolutionary logics of 'us versus them,' it also questions the contemporary rise of 'True Americanism' and its binary and essentialist logic that was to underlie the imperialistic turn at the end of the nineteenth century. Against the tide, The Tory Lover favors the neutral as its wavering point of anchorage, and rewrites the origins of the nation as an erotic intermingling of contraries rather than a battle of right and wrong. Americanness then becomes a modality of experiencing the neutral, understood neither as a coward's easy way-out nor as a reconciliation of opposites but as a place of ongoing internal tensions. History itself is questioned at the very moment when it is built as a science and discipline aimed at cutting out the real into concepts. In The Tory Lover, the writing of history is envisaged as the wording of a complex experience of fertile ambivalence. Confronting the paradigmatic logic of caesura'”commonly seen as the only tool for engendering meaning'” The Tory Lover simultaneously blurs gender and national identities, and undoes essentialist a priori binaries'”English/ American; man/woman'”so as to dramatize the heterogeneity of each 'category' and their inter-dependence. The scene of military operations then becomes a theatre of Eros, where gender and nation are not so much stable moorings as roles to be chosen and acted upon. Jewett's tale of the neutral ground, this paper will argue, turns history into experience, and nation into performance.