Hale, Sarah Josepha | Susan M. Griffin (essay date 1997)
Susan M. Griffin (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: "'The Dark Stranger': Sensationalism and Anti-Catholicism in Sarah Josepha Hale's Traits of American Life," Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1997, pp. 13-24.
[In the following excerpt. Griffin focuses on the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Hale's story "The Catholic Convert."]
In "The Romance of Travelling," one of the sketches collected in Sarah Josepha Hale's 1835 Traits of American Life, Hale focuses on Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, as a typical American landscape, which "gives to the heart a sensation like that of suddenly meeting the smiling face of a friend" (195). Hale follows the landscape tradition of focussing on the reflective and imaginative qualities that water lends to landscape (195; Novak 40-41). Conventional, too, is Hale's discovery of a ruined habitation in the landscape, a site that marks time's passing and signals historical depth. Yet the "remembrance connected with the lake"...
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