SOURCE: “Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance,” in Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, edited by Eric Heyne, Twayne Publishers, 1992, pp. 110-22.

[In the following essay, Singley examines Hope Leslie as a frontier romance that offers an alternative vision of American women and culture.]

Hope Leslie, published in 1827, was Catharine Maria Sedgwick's third and most successful novel. A historical romance set in the early colonial period, it centers on the adventures of a spirited, independent young woman, Hope Leslie, who energetically resists traditional conventions imposed by her Puritan world, yet who ends the novel in the most typical of ways, married to the young colonial hero, Everell Fletcher. Like many American novels of its time, Hope Leslie has a convoluted, somewhat contrived plot, with many doubling structures, cliff-hanging chapter endings, and narratorial intrusions. The novel primarily focuses on three issues: the friendship, romance, and eventual marriage of Hope to her foster brother and childhood friend, Everell Fletcher; a rigid and intolerant Puritan system, intent on order and suppression of women and Indians; and the complex relationship of settlers, land, and Native American culture, represented chiefly through Magawisca, the young Pequod woman who risks her life to save Everell's and who forms an indissoluble bond of friendship with Hope.

As historical romance, Hope Leslie combines mythic aspects of the American frontier, a fictional marriage plot, and historical accuracy. Several events in the novel—the Pequod attack on the Fletcher family, Magawisca's rescue of Everell, the villainy of Tory sympathizer Sir Philip Gardiner—are based on documented historical data that Sedgwick culled from her reading,¹ but the novel is primarily fiction, intended, as Sedgwick says in her preface to Hope Leslie, to “illustrate not the history, but the character of the times” ([Hope Leslie, hereafter,] HL, 5). The novel has from the very beginning been compared with the frontier romances of James Fenimore Cooper. Sedgwick's contemporary, Sarah Hale, called Hope Leslie Sedgwick's “most popular tale; and indeed, no other novel written by an American, except, perhaps the early work of Cooper, ever met with such success” (quoted in Foster, 95). Reflecting the biases of the day, one reviewer noted that Sedgwick “had fallen into the error, so apparent in the works of Cooper … that have anything to do with Indians” (HL, x), but most applauded Sedgwick's depiction of American Indians, some granting that Sedgwick's novel contained “pictures of savage life more truthful than that of Cooper” (quoted in Foster, 95). Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, noting Cooper's faults, also praised his fiction for its “redemption from oblivion of our forest-scenery, and the noble romance of the hunter-pioneer's life,” and in her next paragraph gave Sedgwick—the only American woman novelist she ever cited by name—tempered praise for writing “with skill and feeling, scenes and personages from the revolutionary time.” Sedgwick's work, Fuller wrote, “has permanent value.”² Alexander Cowie, indicating the direction that critical opinion of Sedgwick would assume by the end of the nineteenth century, compared the fiction of the two writers, implying that Sedgwick “modestly” and wisely did not try to compete with Cooper.³

Despite Sedgwick's extraordinary popularity, by the end of the nineteenth-century she was practically unread, excluded from the anthologies that canonized Cooper and formed the literary myths of Adam in the New World—the “melodramas of beset manhood,” as Nina Baym has called them.⁴ We have little trouble recognizing this process of marginalization. At one time thought to be the American literary form, the historical romance gave way to the more imaginative, abstract romances of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and other male writers. Men's narratives assumed the status of the universal while the domestic novel became associated with the particularized, narrow interests of “scribbling women.” By 1936 Van Wyck Brooks could write of Sedgwick, “No one could have supposed that her work would live.”⁵

But live it has. Newly reprinted and accessible to a new generation of readers, Hope Leslie stands ready to take its place in the American literary tradition. I argue here that Sedgwick deserves as prominent a place in an American canon as Cooper, not only for the comparable literary value of her fiction—after all, the same “threadbare formulas” and assortment of escapes, rescues, and pursuits that Robert Spiller cites in Cooper's fiction are no more egregious in Sedgwick's novel,⁶ and, furthermore, Sedgwick's prose is often cleaner and clearer in expression than Cooper's (Foster, 94)—but for the alternative vision of the American woman, American culture, and the relationship to nature that she provides. While following romantic conventions, Sedgwick in fact undercuts many of the assumptions upon which the romance is organized. Also, while apparently obeying the moral and literary dictum that literature teach by adhering to the facts of history and by depicting authentic characters and events—Gov. and Margaret Winthrop, the Reverend John Eliot, the Pequod Chief Mononotto, for example—Sedgwick provides an alternative literary history, one that exposes injustice against women, Native Americans, and the land. Finally, while Cooper works in the realm of the abstract, indulging the masculine fantasy of escape into some past golden age or into timelessness,⁷ Sedgwick engages both the social and the natural realms, suggesting a transcendental ideal achievable in society as well as nature.

Critics of American literature have persistently favored a mythology that David Levin has described as “a movement from the ‘artificial’ toward the ‘natural.’”⁸ This practice celebrates the individual white man either alone in nature—whether he be Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, Thoreau, or Huck Finn—or in union with a same-sexed other.⁹ For example, writing about the second of Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans—the novel in which the hero, Natty Bumppo supposedly “matures”—D. H. Lawrence is exuberant: “In his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo, Cooper dreamed the nucleus of a new society … A stark stripped human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love.”¹⁰ With its “wish-fulfillment vision” (Lawrence, 73) and yearning for escape, the male-defined main-stream American romance has been constructed around impossibility. Sedgwick shows us the damage that results from insistence on this impossibility: the very fabric of society and nature itself is jeopardized. Order turns to confusion; America's promise is unfulfilled.

Because Sedgwick utilizes the conservative form of the romance—the so-called “woman's novel”—readers have generally read her fiction as reinforcing the conventional nineteenth-century notions that woman's fulfillment is found in the domestic sphere¹¹ and as validating the notion of the progress of history (Bell). Only recently has attention been given to the deeply critical qualities of Sedgwick's novel. Sandra Zagarell, for example, reads Sedgwick's treatment of women and Indians as two sides of the same repressive Puritan coin, noting not only Sedgwick's domesticity but her concern “with the foundations and organization of public life.”¹² Contrary to critical consensus, Hope Leslie is not “an extraordinary conventional novel” (Bell, 213-14), nor is its comic marriage plot, as Frye explains, one “that brings hero and heroine together [and] causes a new society to crystallize around the hero.”¹³ Despite the conservative requirements of its genre, Hope Leslie exhibits signs of its own unraveling, as if to suggest the unworkability of its own romantic conventions. The novel replicates the chaos and contradiction inherent in the Puritan conception of its “errand in the wilderness,” addressing problems that fall outside the accepted sphere of historical romance. It also posits a heroine who resists what Leslie Rabine calls the “totalizing structure” of romantic narrative, and who struggles, valiantly and sometimes successfully, to sustain herself as an autonomous subject rather than become absorbed into the male quest for identity and mythic unity with himself.¹⁴

On some levels, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and James Fenimore Cooper have much in common. Both choose fictional contexts to express concern over the rapid, careless encroachment of civilization on the wilderness and the extinction of the Native Americans. Both also depart from their privileged, Federalist backgrounds to advocate egalitarian notions of democracy. We see important differences, however, when comparing Hope Leslie with a Leatherstocking novel written just one year earlier, during a period when the Jackson Indian Removal Policy had effectively cleared the eastern United States of Native American presence. The Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826 and set in 1740, is only tangentially colonial in that it depicts a chapter from the nine-year French and Indian War. In contrast, Hope Leslie focuses specifically on a nine-year colonial period from 1636 to 1645 and, as Mary Kelley notes in her introduction, explores “the roots of American moral character” (HL, xiii). Cooper's characters seldom leave the forest or evince concern with the political, economic, or social aspects of the law; Sedgwick's characters directly confront Puritan social, religious, and legal systems, finding in them the basis for discord and injustice. In Cooper's novels, the American hero can thrive only outside the constraints of civilization. Sedgwick addresses questions both of culture and nature, criticizing the “Law” of the Founding Fathers that enforces policies of actual repression and thereby fosters patterns of imaginative escape.¹⁵

If the character of Hope Leslie can be read as the “spirit of American history” (Bell, 221), it is history with a revisionary spirit. Hope's adventurous and generous nature contrasts with the repression and self-absorption of the Puritans; her many “doubles” in the novel challenge dichotomous views of womanhood and warn of the fragmented nature of the American psyche, split in such ways that fusion of the individual, nature, and society is impossible.

The force of Sedgwick's critique is suggested by her biography as well as by her fiction published before Hope Leslie. “The country is condemned to the ministration of inferior men,” she wrote in a letter to her brother Robert in 1814.¹⁶ In 1821, Sedgwick changed her membership from the Calvinist to the Unitarian church. Her first novel, A New England Tale (1822), is a blatant attack on Puritan hypocrisy; after venturing into a novel of manners with Redwood (1824), she returns to a critique of Puritanism with Hope Leslie, this time linking the present-day concerns about American expansion to the original project of the Puritan founders. Feeding the nation's appetite for historical fiction, Hope Leslie became an instant success. But it is by no means a book of reconciliation or progress. Below its seemingly accepting surface are deep fissures that throw into question not only the American project in the new land but also the romance literature that since Richard Chase has been synonymous with the American project.

The novel opens in England with a tale of thwarted romance—that of Hope's mother, Alice, and Alice's liberal-thinking cousin, William Fletcher. Alice's father, also named William Fletcher, prevents her from eloping to the New World with her cousin. Under pressure from her father, Alice marries Charles Leslie instead, but when her husband dies, she sets sail for the New World on her own. She dies at sea, leaving her two daughters to the guardianship of her former lover William Fletcher, who has since married a “meek” and “godly maiden and dutiful helpmate” (HL, 14), followed John Winthrop and John Eliot to America, and settled on the western frontier near Springfield, Massachusetts. When Fletcher meets the two orphaned girls in Boston, he renames them Hope and Faith, and sends Faith on ahead to Springfield. In a surprise Pequod attack on the Fletcher homestead, Faith and the Fletchers' son Everell are captured, Mrs. Fletcher and her infant son are killed, and two Indian children, Magawisca and Oneco, captives from a previous battle, are reunited with their tribe. Hope and William Fletcher, some distance away, are spared. The Pequod chief, Mononotto, intends to kill Everell, but Magawisca heroically saves his life and effects his escape; Faith, however, remains a captive, eventually converting to Catholicism and marrying Oneco.

As their names suggest, religious “Faith” of the Puritans is lost to the Indians, while the more secular “Hope” remains to confront the Puritan intolerance and repression spearheaded by Gov. Winthrop and his docile, subservient wife. And although the younger William Fletcher embodies a more liberal Puritanism than his stern elders, he is by name indistinguishable from the authoritarian uncle he has left in England. With this naming, Sedgwick suggests that Old World repression is simply transferred to the New World, at least so far as Native Americans and women are concerned. Themes of imprisonment, captivity and family disruption, rather than the comic restoration of social order associated with romance, pervade the novel. And despite epigraphs from A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, in Hope Leslie unlike in Shakespearean romantic comedy, there will be no return to a green world at the end of the story. Society is not rejuvenated.

After the Pequod attack and escape sequence, Sedgwick resumes the narrative nine years later. Everell is being educated in England; writing to him, Hope describes her own “education” in nature as well as an incident in which an Indian woman, Nelema, saves her tutor's life by curing a snakebite. The Boston authorities respond to the news of Nelema's kindness by imprisoning her for witchcraft and removing Hope from Fletcher's custody so that she can profit from the more ordered training at the Winthrop residence. Here Hope shares a room with Winthrop's newly arrived niece, Esther Downing. Undaunted by Puritan restrictions, Hope manages to free not only Nelema but Magawisca, who has been imprisoned as a result of a scheme by Sir Philip Gardiner to overthrow the Puritan government. The plot then follows a comedy of manners formula, with Hope escaping the seductions of Gardiner and his hired sailors and finally marrying Everell after predictable mistaken identities and confused affections. At the end of the novel, Esther returns to England and Magawisca to the forest.

Although Sedgwick bases the major elements of her narrative on documented history, it is not her adherence to facts but her departure from them that is so intriguing. Sedgwick's subject, set in “an age of undisputed masculine supremacy” (HL, 16), attempts an alternative history from a woman's perspective, a perspective also sympathetic to the plight of the Native American, whom she sees in an oppression parallel to woman's. This woman's history, which as Rabine tells us, takes place outside “dominant frameworks,” is deeply critical and seeks “to subvert romantic ideology” (107). Thus, while the Springfield settlement is historically accurate, Sedgwick dramatizes with particular sensitivity the vulnerability of Margaret Fletcher and the children as they sit helpless and ignorant on the porch while the Pequods stealthily plan their attack. Women, the scene demonstrates, are powerless pawns in masculine battles. Whereas in the annals of history, Philip Gardiner's mistress lives on to marry, Sedgwick has her die in a fiery explosion, graphically depicting society's intolerance of sexually experienced unmarried women. And while no exact historical figure exists for Esther, Sedgwick invents her as the submissive, dull counterpart to Hope, a model of passivity that only a masculinist ideology like Winthrop's could endorse.

Sedgwick's rewriting of the Indian attack is most telling. The attack on the Fletcher homestead is preceded by a narrative by Magawisca, in which it is clear that the Puritans—not the Indians—precipitated the violence by first attacking the sleeping, unsuspecting Pequod village. During this brutal raid, the Indian children Magawisca and Oneco are captured and their mother and brother killed. The structural symmetry of the two attacks—in each battle a mother and son are killed and two children are taken captive—renders the acts of male violence morally indistinguishable and underlines the falsity of assigning blame to the Indians. The one inescapable difference, however, is that in the end the Puritans will prevail and the Indian tribes will be eradicated. Reinforcing this imbalance of power, Sedgwick depicts Magawisca raising and losing her arm to protect Everell from her father's axe, and noting later in the novel that the Indians cannot “grasp in friendship the hand raised to strike us” (HL, 292).

The parallel massacres by the Puritans and the Pequods—the first a “ghost chapter” in the novel—haunt the narrative, undermining dreams of harmony and unity that sent the Puritans to America. Kelley writes that the romance “is interwoven with the narrative of Indian displacement” (HL, xxi). In fact, the massacre threatens to displace the romance altogether, just as role inversions in the novel subvert the gender system in which the male provides and protects and the female submits and obeys. The Indian attacks actually set into motion an alternative narrative of redemption, not through Calvinist devotion to doctrine but through the wits and magnanimity of the female characters. Hope and Magawisca, more generous in spirit than their male counterparts, attempt to undo the wrongs of their male leaders, fundamentally challenging the precepts upon which the Puritan, male world is constructed. They do not offer a Cooperian escape or romantic/comic affirmation.

Like Natty Bumppo in The Leatherstocking Tales, Hope takes “counsel from her own heart” (HL, xxiv), but her independence is unlike his because she is female. Hope's power extends beyond domestic morality and the woman's sphere. And if she exemplifies the selflessness that Kelley associates with nineteenth-century femininity (HL, xxiii), she also embodies the traits attributed to men, acting on behalf of her own advancement as well as others'. Hope, as Bell remarks, “seems to specialize in freeing Indians” (216); this observation is true both in the terms of the novel's plot and Hope's larger project of social justice. An “unfettered soul,” Hope does not hesitate to commit “a plain transgression of a holy law” (HL, 280, 311).

If Hope stands for the white woman's resourcefulness and defiance of male restrictiveness, Magawisca represents the integrity of the Native American woman. But unlike Natty Bumppo's noble savages, who slay in order to achieve peace, Magawisca engages in no violence, whatever the personal risk. Foster (77) and Bell (216-17) speculate on Sedgwick's use of local town history for Magawisca's amputation, with Bell suggesting a source in the Captain John Smith—Pocahontas story. But Sedgwick tells us in her preface that with respect to Magawisca, “we are confined not to the actual, but the possible” (6). Magawisca, her Indian double, Nelema, and her white double, Hope Leslie—all of whom save lives even when it means their own captivity—are Sedgwick's “hope” for a revised American history and new literary mythology. The magnitude of their heroism is Sedgwick's version of what Levin calls the movement from the “artificial” to the “natural.” In Sedgwick's view, society should move away from the “artificial” imposition of violence and oppression and toward the “natural” coexistence of peace and mutuality.

Despite Hope's rebellions, the novel ends in the heroine's marriage to the young Puritan Everell Fletcher, seemingly validating Rabine's observation that women's protests and assertions occurring in the middle of romances are often negated by their endings. Marriage is an outcome Cooper assiduously avoids for his own heroes, but a more realistic Sedgwick reminds the reader that no matter how independent the heroine, marriage is not easily renegotiated.

Family is the mainstay of the woman's romance as well as the “familiar” domain appropriated by American male writers to contrast with the fears and unknowns of the American wilderness. And the family, Gossett and Bardes assert in their study of Hope Leslie, is the central building block of a democratic republic. Although Sedgwick's reputation rests on her domestic writing, and Kelley describes her as “a divinely appointed reformer within the confines of domesticity,”¹⁷ in Hope Leslie no home is glorified. The Fletcher homestead is exposed and vulnerable, the Winthrop home is repressive, and Digby's parlor is the setting for mistaken identities and mismatched lovers. Families are repeatedly torn apart in this novel; women and children are not protected by men but become victims of their battles. Home, then, is not a comforting haven, with “good living under almost every roof,” as de Crèvecoeur would have it,¹⁸ but a precarious site of danger.

Ann Snitow notes that the “one socially acceptable moment of transcendence [for women] is romance;”¹⁹ that is, conventional love between men and women leading to marriage. As her name implies, Hope Leslie is “hopelessly” committed to this bourgeois romantic ending. Yet Hope is also an individual—a “pathfinder” in her own right, to use Cooper's term, and through her, Sedgwick goes farther than most previous American writers in exposing Puritan hypocrisy and affirming the value of Native American and female culture. Hope breaks the boundaries of normal expectation for young women as she treks through nature, befriends Indians, frees political prisoners, and eludes drunken sailors. Her most inspiring and affecting experience is not marrying Everell but climbing a mountain with her tutor to survey an expanse of undeveloped land. “Gaz[ing] on the beautiful summits of this mountain,” Hope writes in a letter to Everell, who is receiving his education in England, not in nature, “I had an irrepressible desire to go to them” (HL, 99). Hope resists romantic seduction, political captivity, and traditional domesticity throughout the novel; she will not become a Mrs. Winthrop, who “like a horse easy on the bit … was guided by the slightest intimation from him who held the rein” (HL, 145).

Forever the adventurous youth, never the adult, Hope not only challenges conventional notions of what it means for a woman to grow up; she also resists Puritan mandates to be “hardened for the cross-accidents and unkind events … the wholesome chastisements of life” (HL, 160). Hope, in fact, achieves a fantasy of indulgence and sacrifice, of selfishness and doing for others, proving as she moves undaunted through one escapade after another that, contrary to Calvinist doctrine, good deeds on earth can bring joy. Emerging from virtually every situation unscathed, Hope subverts Puritan ethics and behavior; and although she marries Everell at the end of the novel, the major events in her life revolve not around romance but around nature and the sense of fair play.

Neither is Everell Fletcher romantic or heroic in the traditional sense. Well-meaning but weak, he is an example of the dilution of the bloodline that so worried the Founding Fathers, a parallel to that most famous of feeble Puritan sons, Arthur Dimmesdale. Everell has more tolerance than his stern male forebears, but he lacks vision and capability to put thought into action. His capture during the Pequod raid of the Fletcher farm inverts the traditional female captivity narrative: a white man, he must be saved by an Indian woman. Everell's significant instruction comes not from the Bible or England, but from Magawisca's narrative about her own people's plight. When Magawisca later is imprisoned because Puritan officials mistakenly think her guilty of inciting an attack on Boston, Everell fails to free her because of his fears: the hapless young man struggles outside the jail with a ladder while Hope successfully schemes for Magawisca's release. Passive and ineffectual, Everell is the hero because he marries the heroine.

The true bond—and the real romance—in this novel is between Hope and Magawisca. It is a same-sex bond that Fiedler has found essential to American romance. In constructing same-sex friendship between Magawisca and Hope, Sedgwick creates a parallel of the relationship between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook in The Leatherstocking Tales—but with a difference. Doubles throughout the novel, Hope and Magawisca are drawn together by, and in spite of, the destructive acts of their fathers. Both have lost their mothers through war, both are torn between obedience to their fathers and the dictates of their own minds, and both oppose Puritan law, finding inspiration and guidance in nature or their own consciences. In prison the two learn the meaning of trust and betrayal, and in a secret meeting in a cemetery—symbol of death by male order—where their mothers are buried, they seal their bond: “Mysteriously have our destinies been interwoven. Our mothers brought from a far distance to rest here together—their children connected in indissoluble bonds” (HL, 192). The union of Magawisca and Hope represents the waste caused by masculine violence as well as the need for feminine healing—a healing not between the Old World of England and the New World of America, as traditional American romances have it, but between the original world of the Native Americans and the new, intrusive world of the Puritans. Unlike Natty and Chingachgook, Hope and Magawisca do not retreat into nature together, isolated but free. They participate in society, serving as its critics, mediators, and healers. When their relationship is sundered, Hope's marriage to Everell can only be a partial substitute.

Women, Sedgwick suggests, must play active and essential, not passive or secondary, roles in American society. In Cooper's fiction, in service to the American Adam mythology, women are rendered dichotomously. As Fiedler notes (21), Cooper establishes the “pattern of female Dark and Light that is to become the standard form” in American literature: an innocent, passive woman juxtaposed with a vibrant, sexualized one, whether Alice and Cora in The Last of the Mohicans, Hetty and Judith in The Deerslayer, or Inez and Ellen in The Prairie. While women in nature figure as tokens of exchange in elaborate captivity sequences engineered by men in The Leatherstocking Tales, Cooper fundamentally endorses the standard nineteenth-century view of separate spheres for men and women, with women “the repositories of the better principles of our nature.”²⁰ This dichotomous view of women has its corollary in the male view of nature: a lone male figure either seeks a lover's alliance in nature as replacement for the relationship he fails to achieve with woman, or he views nature as a fearful object he must conquer or destroy in order to validate his own existence.

Sedgwick rejects these dichotomies for her female characters. Magawisca and Hope are as capable as their male counterparts of participating in nature and society. As sisters, Hope and Faith represent active and passive aspects of the female principle, but this distinction is never expressed in terms of sexual and spiritual purity or innocence. No female in Hope Leslie exhibits the “yearning felt by a presumably experienced woman to return to the pristine state of the innocent virgin” that Porte finds in Cooper (21), a view that incidentally reads all female sexuality as a fall into sin requiring redemption or escape. Faith, on the one hand, not only marries, she marries a “red-blooded” Native American; Hope, on the other hand, a virgin throughout the novel, romps from adventure to adventure unaffected by salacious sailors and villainous seducers. And Magawisca, who according to the Cooper paradigm must be “wild and dangerous” because Indian (Bell, 218), is, in fact, peaceable and socially oriented. Only Rosa, seduced and abandoned in the New World, appears as a stock character—a desperate reminder of romance's failure to accommodate women's sexuality. A prototype of Bertha Rochester, she takes vengeance on her oppressor, destroying herself in the process. Rosa gives angry expression to the female energy that her more socially integrated counterpart, Hope, channels into minor rebellions.

Hope Leslie forbids a reductionist view of women and the romance. It rejects patriarchal concepts of female submissiveness and purity, instead presenting women as complex models of democracy, adventure, mutuality, and sympathy. Sedgwick, in fact, presents not just one double of Hope, but many, demonstrating multiple rather than dichotomous ways of womanhood. Hope, Magawisca, and Esther all love Everell, but Magawisca and Esther give him up. Hope marries, but her union with her foster brother is more a friendship than a romance, modeled perhaps on Sedgwick's own relationship with her brothers.²¹ Esther's single status endorses autonomous womanhood: “Marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman,” Sedgwick writes in defense of Esther's decision (HL, 350, italics in original), and her own life is testimony that a single woman can find satisfaction as friend or sister.

The doublings become uneasy where Native Americans are involved, however. By eschewing a retreat into nature that Natty Bumppo achieves with Chingachgook, Sedgwick emphasizes the crucial difference between the races: the inevitable decimation of the Native American to make way for white expansion and greed. “We are commanded to do good to all,” Hope explains to her tutor as she works to free Magawisca (HL, 312). But she cannot prevent the inevitable. Esther, prevented by Puritan conscience from helping Magawisca escape from prison, essentially gives herself up to the rigid law-of-the-father; and Magawisca, “first to none” (Kelley 1978, 224), returns to a nature that is blighted and a people “spoiled.” Dichotomies reemerge with Magawisca's declaration, “The Indian and the white man can no more mingle, and become one, than day and night” (HL, 330).

In The Prairie, published in 1827, the same year as Hope Leslie, Cooper uses a tree as a symbol to describe the natural cycles of growth, ripening, and death, comparing the monumentality of nature to the works of humans: “It is the fate of all things to ripen and then to decay. The tree blossoms and bears its fruit, which falls, rots, withers, and even the seed is lost! There does the noble tree fill its place in the forests. … It lies another hundred years. …²² Sedgwick also presents such a Pantheistic notion of nature, giving Magawisca words that fuse the natural and the human: ‘The Great Spirit is visible in the life-creating sun. I perceive Him in the gentle light of the moon that steals through the forest boughs. I feel Him here,’ she continued, pressing her hand on her breast” (HL, 189). But this notion of nature has been negated by white encroachment. Sedgwick uses the familiar nineteenth-century symbol of the blasted tree, which Mononotto points to as representative of his race at the hands of the white men, to signify not only the decimation of the Native Americans but also the assault against women and nature. Thus Magawisca's body, the right arm missing, is truncated like the blasted tree. Hawthorne uses the same symbol in “Roger Malvin's Burial” to convey the guilty conscience of Reuben, who fails to send a rescue party to his dying father-in-law. Hawthorne's message, anticipated by Sedgwick, is that the strong and able have responsibility to succor those in need.

Hope's sister Faith, another double, also goes off into the wilderness, married to chief Mononotto's son Oneco in one of the few cases of miscegenation in early American fiction—certainly one that Cooper disallows in The Last of the Mohicans. The relationship of Faith and Oneco is mutually loving, gentle, and respectful. The bird imagery associated with the couple throughout the novel communicates a spirit of openness and freedom in nature. But just as Magawisca is mateless, the marriage of Oneco and Faith has a sterile, frozen quality about it. Faith speaks no English, and the couple is without children.

Constrained by her own position in history, Sedgwick perhaps could not conceive of an ending that both subverts and rewrites the white patriarchal plot. Were she able to do so, the pressure to produce salable fiction most likely would have prevented its articulation. Nonetheless, Hope Leslie strains against its conventions as surely as its female characters struggle against unjust imprisonment.

Hope Leslie is discomfiting for literary critics and readers who prefer retreat into a fantasy world where one can ignore the injustices to nature by escaping further into the wilderness. In this novel, the frontier myth does not seem to be, as Annette Kolodny has outlined it in The Lay of the Land, a fantasy of the land as a domesticated garden.²³ It is, to some extent, what Leland Person suggests in his essay on miscegenation: a successful intermarriage of races, an Eden where the white woman is included and the white man excluded.²⁴ The point is not that women ultimately prove superior—as they inevitably do, both in romance and in this novel—but that the pact with power engineered by men has jeopardized men, women, and nature. Cooper's paradisiacal wilderness is a profound and evocative symbol in American literature, but Sedgwick, while valuing nature, forbids an egocentric or overly romantic view of it. She does not let us forget that we are usurpers and that there will be no regeneration through violence. Her view more closely resembles what David Mogen calls “a gothic tradition of frontier narrative” that expresses, among other meanings, “despair about our history and our future.”²⁵

The American literary hero feminizes the land, seeking in it a validation of his own creative principle. He wants to be the sole possessor of the virgin soil, which he penetrates with axe or gun and seeks to make pregnant with unresolved possibility.²⁶ Sedgwick tells us that this pregnancy is a false one and that woman/land will not be reduced to a medium for man's self-glorification. The white man will, like Everell, inevitably find himself its captive rather than its victor. A possessive relationship with the land only results in estrangement from it. Thus Fussell writes, “Cooper's heart was in his writing,” but a “habitual need for recessive withdrawal … sprang from [his] fundamental alienation from his country” (28, 29).

If the male fantasy is escapist, the female fantasy is integrationist, inclusive of the whole of woman's traits—religious, sexual, adventurous, heroic. Without this integration, there can only be fragmentation. Governor Winthrop's household “move[s] in a world of his own” (HL, 301), cut off from the very unity of nature, God, individual, and society that it seeks.

This transcendental vision of unity, suggested in Sedgwick's historical and romantic critique, is developed some years later, not in the individualistic transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but in the social transcendentalism of Margaret Fuller. Like Emerson, Fuller embraces the ideal of the individual in nature, but while valuing the abstract, she also advocates social awareness. Looking out at the western territory near the Great Lakes in the summer of 1843, Fuller seeks “by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry, is to be evoked.” Hope enjoys this same personal and transcendental relationship when she visits Mount Holyoke with her tutor and Nelema. But Fuller's fantasy is modified by the “distaste I must experience at its mushroom growth”: development “is scarce less wanton than that of warlike invasion,” and the land bears “the rudeness of conquest.” Emerson sought to unify technology and transcendental philosophy into a seamless fabric of hopeful expansion, but Fuller notes not transcendental insight but blindness: “Seeing the traces of the Indians … we feel as if they were the rightful lords of the beauty they forbore to deform. But most of these settlers do not see at all” (Chevigny, 318, 322).

The first writers, as Fussell notes, gave the West its mythology, finding in it their own dreams of possession and control. For women, identified with and through nature, the myth spells death and defeat. Sedgwick quietly but radically alters that mythology, transcending the limits of romance and history to establish her own yearning for social and natural unity.

Notes

1. For detailed discussions of Sedgwick's uses of historical sources, see Michael Davitt Bell, “History and Romance Convention in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” American Quarterly 22 (1970): 216-18; hereafter cited in text; Edward Halsey Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Twayne, 1974), 73-80; hereafter cited in text; and Mary Kelley, ed. and intro., Hope Leslie; Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827; reprint, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), xxi-xxxiii; hereafter cited in text as HL. Sedgwick also explains her fictional use of these materials in the preface to her novel (5-6).

2. Bell Gale Chevigny, ed., The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976), 190; hereafter cited in text.

3. Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book, 1948), 204. Readers sometimes had difficulty distinguishing Sedgwick's and Cooper's fiction. Published anonymously in 1824, Sedgwick's Redwood was attributed to Cooper and actually appeared in France and Italy with Cooper's name on the title page. See Harold E. Mantz, French Criticism of American Literature Before 1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1917), 43.

4. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123-39.

5. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), 188.

6. Robert E. Spiller et al., Literary History of the United States, 3d ed., rev., vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 256.

7. See, for example, Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); hereafter cited in text: “Natty is the epic hero par excellence” (43), with The Last of the Mohicans and The Pioneers serving as Cooper's Iliad and Odyssey (39-52); and Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel (New York: Humanities Press, 1965), who finds “an almost epic-like magnificence” in Cooper's portrayals (64). Addressing Cooper's aesthetics, H. Daniel Peck, A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper's Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), finds in his landscapes not so much a frontier consciousness but a timeless, classic pastoral ideal. Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York: Minton, Balch, 1931); John McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and others have noted Cooper's social and political criticism, but these interests appear mainly in Cooper's middle and late novels, not his early fiction, which is more appropriately compared with Hope Leslie. As Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Denver: University of Denver Press, 1947), writes, “In the Leatherstocking Series … we have nothing whatever to do with social criticism, or at least nothing of importance” (185).

8. David Levin, History as Romantic Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), ix.

9. See Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Stein & Day, 1975); hereafter cited in text; and R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).

10. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York: Viking, 1964), 78; hereafter cited in text.

11. Suzanne Gossett and Barbara Ann Bardes, “Women and Political Power in the Republic: Two Early American Novels,” Legacy 2 (Fall 1985): 13-30; hereafter cited in text.

12. Sandra A. Zagarell, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6 (Fall 1987): 225.

13. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 163.

14. Leslie Rabine, Reading the Romantic Heroine: Text, History, Ideology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 7; hereafter cited in text.

15. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel, New York: (Oxford University Press, 1985), argues that The Last of the Mohicans captures the spirit of the 1640s (39-40); but Cooper does not, like Sedgwick, take on the Puritan system of life in this novel. While one might argue that with its portrayal of the early stage of a hero's life, The Deerslayer, published in 1841, is a more appropriate companion text for Hope Leslie, this novel, even more than The Last of the Mohicans, reflects a timelessness and abstract yearning for lost origins and freedoms. Wayne Franklin, The New World of James Fenimore Cooper (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), even while defending Cooper's involvement with history, admits “even in The Deerslayer, as far back as he could push Natty, [Cooper] … introduced Tom Hutter and Harry March. … This bite of realism upsets what otherwise might become pure dream” (107-108).

16. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Life and Letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Mary E. Dewey (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1872), 101.

17. Mary Kelley, “A Woman Alone: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” The New England Quarterly 51 (June 1978): 209; hereafter cited in text.

18. Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, Letters From an American Farmer (1782; reprint, New York: Dutton, 1957), 64.

19. Ann Barr Snitow, “Mass Market Romance: Pornography for Women is Different,” Radical History Review 20 (Spring-Summer 1979): 150.

20. Quoted in Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 52.

21. Unmarried, Sedgwick sublimated her erotic energies into an ethos of sibling love and comradeship: “The affection others have given to husbands and children I have given to brothers,” she wrote (Kelley 1978, 213).

22. James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (1827; reprint, New York: Signet, 1964), 250.

23. Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1975.

24. Leland Person, “The American Eve: Miscegenation and a Feminist Frontier Fiction,” American Quarterly 37 (Winter 1985): 668-85.

25. David Mogen, “Frontier Myth and American Gothic,” Genre 14 (Fall 1981): 330-31.

26. See, for example, Wyandote; or, The Hutted Knoll (1843), where Cooper's language is explicitly sexual and generative: “There is a pleasure in diving into a virgin forest and commencing the labours of civilization. … [This diving] approaches nearer to the feeling of creating, and is far more pregnant with anticipation and hopes. …” Quoted in Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 28; hereafter cited in text.