SOURCE: “Inscribing the ‘Impartial Observer’ in Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” in Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1997, pp. 81-92.

[In the following essay, Ford discusses the manner in which Hope Leslie addresses the repressive treatment of women and Native Americans.]

Taken together, recent criticism discussing Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie constructs a dialogue concerning not only Sedgwick's neglected position in the canon, but also what most critics agree to be her unconventional portrayal of both women and Native American characters. In fact, several critics have pointed out the manner in which Sedgwick's novel questions the repressive treatment of both women and Native Americans,¹ which leads to a question I hope to address: Does the novel negotiate race and gender within the context of domesticity in the same way, to the same ends? The novel's remarkable preface pushes race to the forefront, as it positions the narrative to challenge the dominant racist assumptions of nineteenth-century America by arguing that “the enlightened and accurate observer of human nature, will admit that the difference of character among the various races of the earth, arises mainly from difference of condition” (6). This statement assigns a bold mission for the novel, as it must contend with the discourses which produce the negative images of race which inform the literature of Sedgwick's period. Additionally, this preface introduces a complex preoccupation with language which this paper will explore, particularly in the crucial images the novel constructs for an “enlightened” reader, images bearing conflicting levels of signification.

Several critics have praised Sedgwick's narrative for transcending racist and sexist notions, an assessment based largely upon the protagonist, who acts decisively and independently upon a Puritan power structure that not only marginalizes her, but treats Native Americans unjustly. However, a schism opens between what Sedgwick's narrator says and how Sedgwick's readers—today as well as in antebellum America—may read the actions and statements of the text's characters. In effect, the novel's preface suggests a certain degree of faith that the “accurate” reader will fill this schism in a desirable manner. Suzanne Gossett and Barbara Bardes provide the sort of reading which reveals how this schism opens largely out of discursive conditions during Sedgwick's time:

Hope never speaks against male authority, but her actions demonstrate a similar sense of being exempt from its application. Of course she is a romantic projection, and her actions go unpunished because Sedgwick chooses that they shall. In 1827 Sedgwick could not assert that women are oppressed by their exclusion from the political process, but she designs her plot to drive the reader to this conclusion.

(23)

However, even as the textual events “drive the reader” toward a progressive conclusion concerning gender equality, the novel reveals a deeper, more problematic nature concerning questions of race. Indeed, Sedgwick's novel opens gaps where the cultural assumptions of Sedgwick's period sneak through, resulting in a tension in the text that operates contrary to the intentions Sedgwick outlines in her preface. The voice of Hope herself reveals anxiety, even some horror, at the crossing of the racial boundaries prescribed by the European settlers. This embedded conflict raises questions concerning how Sedgwick's audience may have envisioned an “accurate observer,” and for contemporary readers, the text continues to raise questions: Does such a position actually exist, and if so, in what form?

Signs of this tension have not gone unnoticed by the novel's commentators. In her reading of the text, Sandra Zagarell notices “forces” which Hope Leslie presents “stubbornly and openly unresolved,” such as Faith's refusal to return to the Puritan community (239). Indeed, Faith's presence in the text causes much of the novel's buried tension to rise to the surface. This tension reaches a particularly urgent pitch in the middle of the text, when Magawisca reunites Hope with Faith, whom the Pequods, led by Mononotto, had kidnapped in a raid upon the Fletcher home in the novel's first volume. This kidnapping results in a cultural transformation for Faith: she grows up neither speaking nor understanding English, she appears in “savage attire,” and as Hope learns, she has married Oneco (227). Furthermore, she responds to Hope's emotional embrace by “remain[ing] passive in her arms. Her eye was moistened, but she seemed rather abashed and confounded” (227). The manner in which Faith's response to the reunion differs from Hope's plays into what Louise K. Barnett in The Ignoble Savage outlines as “a characteristic common to all [Indian] stereotypes,” namely stoicism, which “ranges from a habitual failure to register facial expression to control over all forms of physical reaction during moments of intense stress” (76). Sedgwick's reunion scene bears traces of the overall pattern Barnett detects in other representations. While Faith's eye appears “moistened,” the narrator quickly qualifies this response by noting that her appearance suggests confusion and embarrassment; in other words, Faith's need to control her own emotion, and her confusion over her own disconcertment, might signify to the nineteenth-century reader “Indian” or “Other” as much as her attire or her language.

However, the complexity of this scene becomes evident in light of the multiple possibilities of interpretation it contains simultaneously, each affected by the cultural conditions which arrange perceptions of both the embarrassment and the “moistened” eye. That is, read through the lens which Barnett's scholarship provides, Faith's embarrassment exhibits itself, as I have suggested above, as a response to her own tear. In effect, the Indian that Faith has become shows embarrassment at the old feelings which Hope awakens in her. A reading of this kind leaves the “stoic Indian” stereotype intact within Sedgwick's novel. Or the tear itself represents Sedgwick's dismantling of racial stereotypes, affirming emotional expression as a capacity of Native Americans and not one limited to white European settlers. Faith herself, being a “conditioned” Indian and not Indian by birth, adds a further dimension of uncertainty to this scene; again, the extent to which we read her Otherness as reversible—as Hope does when she entertains methods of bribing Faith back into Puritan society—affects the way we read Sedgwick's handling of racial stereotypes. Does Faith embody Sedgwick's belief that race actually involves conditioning, as suggested in the preface, or does the tear signal that Faith lacks the “essence” of being Indian?

Before looking further into Sedgwick's negotiation of race within this scene and the rest of the text, the novel's preface warrants another look. As I have noted earlier, this preface suggests that racial differences occur “mainly from difference of condition.” Elsewhere, Sedgwick criticizes the way Puritan settlers represented Indians in their own writing:

These traits of their character will be viewed by an impartial observer, in a light very different from that in which they were regarded by our ancestors. In our histories, it was perhaps natural that they should be represented as “surly dogs,” who preferred to die rather than live, from no other motives than a stupid or malignant obstinacy.

(6)

The resurfacing of Faith in the narrative bears textual witness not only to Sedgwick's statement concerning racial conditioning, but also to the narrative's search for the type of impartial observation which Sedgwick describes above. In a sense, Faith becomes the site which Sedgwick installs for such an observer; yet this scene's instability, borne out of the conflicting meanings which occupy the same narrative space, demonstrates how different discourses overlap, including remnants of the Puritan discourses which Sedgwick sets her novel against in the preface. The scene of Hope's reunion with Faith becomes charged with a tension which reverberates through the rest of the novel, shifting the ground beneath the impartial observer, who, ideally, would embody a stable consciousness somehow outside the discourses which produce negative stereotypes.

Hope's difficulty in accepting Faith's cultural transformation becomes equally problematic, particularly when read in the context of her later actions, which involve her challenges to unjust Puritan rulings against Native American subjects: first Nelema, an old woman who saves Craddock from a snake bite, and later Magawisca. Twentieth-century critics read these later actions and rightly point out, as Carol J. Singley has, that the novel “undercuts” several romance conventions, specifically by “exposing injustice to women, American Indians, and the land”; these injustices, of course, perpetuate themselves through the discourses of a repressive Puritan power base, and as the conventions of the antebellum frontier romance suggest, some of these discourses survive into Sedgwick's era (40).

By looking for ways in which Hope Leslie “expos[es] injustices,” we tend to read the novel as subverting a single, monolithic ideology of a repressive mechanism, thus obstructing our view of the plurality of discourses which produce power. Michel Foucault draws a helpful distinction between the two in “Truth and Power.” Of three reasons why the “notion of ideology appears … to be difficult to make use of,” Foucault says of the first that,

like it or not, [ideology] always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth. Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing historically two effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.

(60)

Thus it becomes helpful to view how Hope Leslie represents individual discourses which produce conflicting versions of “truth,” rather than a single, over-arching ideology. Such a view reveals that the novel internalizes such conflict and engages in processes more problematic than the straightforward correction of injustices brought about by a monolithic form of power. In other words, the novel's consideration of Native Americans and women as (to borrow an image employed by Singley) “two sides of the same coin” appears more complicated (41).² Indeed, Foucault's explanation provides a reading lens which helps melt, so to speak, this coin—an image of wholeness, solidity, impregnability; we can then note ways in which the text, by incorporating a range of discourses, often inadvertently undercuts the progressive mission its preface has outlined.

Even as Sedgwick focuses her novel upon establishing a position for an “impartial observer,” her text becomes subject to the discursive materials of its era.³ In the first volume of the novel, the narrator says of Hope, “It has been seen that Hope Leslie was superior to some of the prejudices of the age,” suggesting that she serves as the point where this “impartial observer” becomes inscribed in the text (123). As the second volume begins, the text continues to inscribe around Hope a design by which its readers can decipher “truth” and “falsehood”; yet this design begins to show increased signs of unraveling as Hope finds herself needing to invent an explanation for her absence and the time she spent meeting Magawisca and Faith in the cemetery. Simple oppositions—such as “truth” or “falsehood”—show their limitations as Hope must develop skills of “diplomacy,” which the novel describes as “that art that contrives to give such a convenient indistinctness to the boundary line between truth and falsehood” (175). The novel increasingly scrutinizes how the notion of “truth” constructs itself while Hope serves as the voice through which more lines of discourse enter the novel, blurring the “boundary line between truth and falsehood.” The notion of an “impartial observer” thus shows signs of stress, as the novel struggles to locate the position for such a vista among the truth-shaping processes of diplomacy that go on throughout the novel.

To return to the usefulness of Singley's coin metaphor, the text confounds itself with Hope's eventual dilemma concerning her sister's transformation, to the crucial point that “truth” becomes increasingly subject to negotiating and bargaining. Philip Gould has already pointed out the ways in which Sedgwick's “recital” of the Pequot War bargains in a sense for the reader's sympathy by challenging the chronology of events leading up to the war, as described in Puritan accounts.⁴ The confrontation between Magawisca and Hope over Faith's cultural transformation reveals further instances of negotiation, particularly when Hope offers to buy her sister back into Puritan society with jewels and feathers; however, the true bargaining in this scene occurs in determining the very language suitable in describing the extent of that transformation. This bargaining puts Hope's diplomacy skills to the test, as she reveals some negative cultural assumptions when learning of Faith's marriage to Oneco: “‘God forbid!’ exclaimed Hope, shuddering as if a knife had been plunged in her bosom. ‘My sister married to an Indian!’” (188). Magawisca's response challenges the implied construction of “Indian” in Hope's outburst with an alternative construction:

“An Indian!” exclaimed Magawisca, recoiling with a look of proud contempt, that showed she reciprocated with full measure, the scorn expressed for her race. “Yes—an Indian, in whose veins runs the blood of the strongest, the fleetest of the children of the forest, who never turned their backs on friends or enemies, and whose souls have returned to the Great Spirit, stainless as they came from him. Think ye that your blood will be corrupted by mingling with this stream?”

(188)

In constructing an idealized vision of the Indian, this passage echoes the cadences of the preface's description of the Indians who “were never enslaved,” who “could not submit, and live,” and who “courted death, and exulted in torture” after being “made captives” (6).

In effect, Magawisca assumes the voice of the “liberal philanthropist” who, Sedgwick writes in her preface, “will not be offended by a representation which supposes that the elements of virtue and intellect are not withheld from any branch of the human family” (6). Nevertheless, nothing Magawisca says registers with Hope until the negotiation turns to the delicate weighing of religious terms: “‘Listen to me,’ [Magawisca] said; ‘your sister is of what you call the christian family. I believe ye have many names in that family. She hath been signed with the cross by a holy father from France; she bows to the crucifix’” (189, emphasis added). Hope finally responds with some degree of hesitance, reasoning that “any christian faith was better than none” (189). In effect, acceptance of Faith's marriage comes with conditions—conditions which, at their root level, hinge upon what to call Faith and agreement upon a proper signifier; indeed, Faith needs to belong to what Hope may “call the christian family.”

Price in Sedgwick's novel frequently revolves around language, and words often become a form of currency accepted for payment. When Magawisca becomes imprisoned thanks to the sinister manipulations of Sir Philip Gardiner, she can escape prison by verbally exchanging one set of principles for another. Hope overhears these conditions, which hinge upon Magawisca's being “induced to renounce her heathenish principles, and promise, instead of following her father to the forest, to remain here, and join the catechised Indians” (279). Like the novel's Puritan leaders, Hope also places considerable weight upon Christianity in the novel's represented systems of weights, balances, and exchanges. Yet, Sedgwick's novel also highlights the need for Hope to develop the ability to see value as it exists outside of these systems. An indication of this need comes in a scene in which Magawisca reappears after a period of absence, disguised and pretending to sell moccasins. When Mrs. Grafton walks in, wanting to know how much the moccasins cost, Hope claims not to know. Mrs. Grafton chides her, “Do not know! that's peculiar of you, Hope Leslie; you never inquire the price of any thing” (184). This statement becomes ironic in light of the fact that Hope actually seeks the price that will buy her sister back into Puritan culture. After Hope's diamond ring catches Faith's eye during their reunion scene, Hope tells Magawisca that if Faith “will come home with me, she shall be decked with jewels from head to foot, she shall have feathers from the most beautiful birds that wing the air, and flowers that never fade—tell her that all I possess shall be hers” (229-30).

This scene illustrates Hope's difficulty in looking beyond value as her culture prescribes it, and it dramatizes in remarkable fashion the attempt to locate and define Otherness beyond popular, sensational images. Indeed, elsewhere in this scene, Faith (or Mary, as the novel sometimes refers to her) reveals her own cultural signifier—a mantle, which emphasizes the finality of her cultural transformation:

[Hope] thought that if Mary's dress, which was singularly and gaudily decorated, had a less savage aspect, she might look more natural to her; and she signed to her to remove the mantle she wore, made of birds' feathers, woven together with threads of the wild nettle. … The removal of the mantle, instead of the effect designed, only served to make more striking the aboriginal peculiarities.

(228)

This scene poses the need to perceive Faith outside of the debilitating discourses which distort identity. By removing the mantle, Hope believes she can remove Faith's Otherness; yet, the persistence of Faith's “aboriginal peculiarities” unhinges this hope and, more important, complicates the novel's own representation of Faith to the impartial observer. While Hope needs the mantle removed in order to see Faith with a “less savage aspect,” Sedgwick actually needs the mantle to portray Faith's Otherness. In other words, the novel finds itself caught at cross purposes: it insists that Faith's mantle does not contain her cultural identity, that this identity exists as something apart from it; yet, the novel requires the mantle to make Faith's Otherness visible to its reader.

Sedgwick's novel dares to imagine a discourse which can make cultural distinctions clear and draw sympathy from its reader, but it ultimately finds itself confined by the limiting discourses actually available. Recent scholarship suggests that the prevalent forms of writing during Sedgwick's era reflect this situation, bearing witness to the unavailability of a truly liberating discourse. In “The Literary Debate Over ‘the Indian’ in the Nineteenth Century,” Sherry Sullivan analyzes two modes of writing—writing sympathetic to the Indian and antiprimitivist writing—but she argues that ultimately the two discourses “were one and the same.”⁵ She observes that “[b]oth interpreted ‘the Indian’ in terms of white civilization and ignored the actual, historical Indians before them. Both also agreed that white civilization was morally superior to ‘primitive’ Indian culture, as they understood it (though they disagreed as to whether it was a relative or an absolute superiority)” (25). Clearly sympathetic to the native inhabitants of North America, Sedgwick's novel dramatizes through Magawisca the conflict which Sullivan notices at large in sympathetic writing. Indeed, by the end of the novel, Magawisca must leave the settlement for the wilderness, despite the consternation of Hope and Everell, who desire her to remain and become assimilated into the Christian community. Of course, Magawisca does not choose to remain, the novel thus maintaining Magawisca's strong, independent nature. Yet, expressing Magawisca's virtue becomes problematic, for the novel finds such expression only in terms valued by the white Puritan culture which she rejects. Filtered through Hope's eyes, Magawisca's belief in a “Great Spirit” invites “the thought that a mind so disposed to religious impressions and affections might enjoy the brighter light of Christian revelation—a revelation so much higher, nobler, and fuller, than that which proceeds from the voice of nature” (332). The novel asks us to sympathize with Magawisca, but by and large this sympathy comes by understanding Magawisca's virtue as Christian-like.

Furthermore, the novel provides a rare, though not solitary, example of interracial marriage in antebellum fiction, but even such an example comes with conditions. Barnett once again assesses an overall pattern in fiction of this period, and she notes the rules by which sexual relations could—or to be more specific, could not—take place: “Because whites are depicted as superior in all ways, they must be more sexually desirable than Indians.” Barnett goes on to explain that as a result, “fictive male Indians often desire white women,” though only “exceptional cases” occur in which these Indians “succeed in possessing them” (113). Barnett's generalization provides a context for Faith's marriage to Oneco, suggesting that even in this “exceptional case,” Sedgwick's novel on a surface level actually subscribes to a discourse which constructs superiority in whiteness. Adding support to this notion, the novel hints at the possibility of romance between Magawisca, an Indian, and Everell, a European, but this romance never develops. Barnett's analysis of antebellum literature uncovers the improbability of such a union: “In keeping with the aggressive and passive stereotypes of sex role [sic] which are little altered by race, Indian males—but not females—can actively pursue whites” (119).⁶ In fact, Magawisca herself expresses the complications of a union between European and Indian when she observes that “the Indian and the white man can no more mingle, and become one, than day and night” (330).

However, a direct reading of Magawisca's statement as articulating the novel's complicity with an unwritten rule of literature disregards how Hope Leslie maintains itself as a provocative, if conflicted, text. Indeed, even when Sedgwick's novel adheres superficially to the discursive “rules” governing the treatment of race during this period, it also manages to unsettle and call attention to those rules. Magawisca's comment concerning the impossibility of unity between the Native American and the European contains metafictional resonances, as if to direct readerly attention toward the (im)possibilities depicted in the fiction of this period, including even representations found in Sedgwick's novel. In other words, no such union could take place in fiction. As the preface to the novel powerfully suggests, Sedgwick's interest rests largely in representation itself, while implying that her own set of representations will correct the unsavory Puritan depictions of America's natives. Magawisca and Everell maintain a fictional impossibility in frontier fiction, but Sedgwick also has Magawisca articulate this sort of impossibility, placing the power of commentary and perspective in the hands of a normally marginalized character: a Native American woman.

Significantly, at least one of the novel's early commentators found Magawisca disagreeable for her allegedly non-Indian characteristics. A review originally published in the Western Review in 1827 refers to Magawisca as “the first genuine Indian angel” and goes on to say that “[t]his angel, as she stands, is a very pretty fancy; but no more like a squaw, than the croaking of a sandhill crane is like the sweet, clear and full note of the redbird.” The writer continues by defining the role of a fiction writer in matters of race: “Dealers in fiction have privileges; but they ought to have for foundations, some slight resemblance to nature” (qtd. in Foster 86). This decree for “some slight resemblance to nature” hearkens back to Foucault's statement concerning how ideology “always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth.” A survey of the frontier literature of the nineteenth century, such as Sullivan provides, suggests that a significant degree of disagreement existed over just what form this “nature” should take. Sullivan dismantles the notion that the “Indian hater fiction,” which first became popular in the 1820s, accurately reflects “a broad negative consensus of [white] views about the Indian,” but indicates instead “a wide divergence and a persistent debate” (14). As Sullivan points out, perception in the early nineteenth century shifted away from the negative portrayals predominantly found in Puritan texts and captivity narratives, to a portrayal influenced by Romanticism wherein the Native American “became less an object of fear and disgust than a source of both pity and admiration” (16).

Even Hope Leslie, a sympathetic text constructed for the “impartial observer,” finds itself negotiating with the multiplicity of attitudes which Sullivan detects. Clearly aware of “Indian hater fiction,” Sedgwick incorporates such discourse into her novel, particularly through Digby, a veteran of the Pequot war, which preceded the events of the novel. After witnessing Magawisca running through the woods, he expresses himself in language appropriate to “Indian hater fiction”: “I had rather meet a legion of French men than a company of these savages. They are a kind of beast we don't comprehend—out of range of God's creatures—neither angel, man, nor yet quite devil” (42). Richard Drinnon has pointed out that “[i]n times of trouble natives were always wild animals that had to be rooted out of their dens, swamps, jungles,” and Digby's language in the passage enforces this line of thought to some degree (53).⁷ However, even in expressing his distaste for Indians as a “kind of beast,” Digby runs into a problem depicted frequently in Hope Leslie, a problem rooted in the limitations of language, specifically in the lack of a name for that which disturbs him. Indeed, Digby's confusion suggests that for the European-American, the Indian exists not just “out of range of God's creatures,” but somehow “out of range” of available language.

Comparisons to other texts help illuminate the degree to which naming the Other constitutes a concern for Sedgwick in the writing of Hope Leslie. For instance, in 1703, when the French began aligning themselves with the Abenaki Indians, Solomon Stoddard wrote a letter to Massachusetts governor Joseph Dudley outlining a proposal to use dogs to hunt Indians “as they do bears” (373). “They act like wolves and are to be dealt withal as wolves,” Stoddard's letter states (374). Additionally, a canonical text, Mary Rowlandson's A True History of the Captivity and Restoration, creates an image of the Narragansett Indians as “a company of hell-hounds,” and in an image with parallels to Digby's, it includes a striking image of “the roaring, and singing, and dancing, and yelling of those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance of hell!” (29). Both Stoddard and Rowlandson's texts help reveal Sedgwick's method of interrogating such imagery through Digby, who becomes perplexed over not just the physical reality of the Indians he fears, but the linguistic category in which to place them. In struggling to name the danger, no such “lively resemblance” makes itself apparent to him, as it seems to in the case of Rowlandson's narrator.

Not only does the novel confront preexisting semiotic challenges in representing Native American characters, but it relies upon some familiarity with the genre of the captivity romance in creating sympathy for Indians within its largely white readership. In a paper recently presented at a meeting of the Southeastern Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola observes, “In Indian captivity narratives by and about women the main metonymy is the decisive fracturing of the original family unit which, after the attack by Native Americans, rarely reconstructed itself intact” (4). This generalization helps illuminate the manner in which Sedgwick constructs a striking reversal of the captivity romance—specifically by exploring the integration of the Indian captive into the white family unit. Early on, the novel concerns itself with efforts to assimilate Magawisca and Oneco into the Fletcher household, and, in a sense, the novel becomes for this time their narrative of captivity. They do not simply become adopted by the Fletchers, as in the case of Faith and Hope, but rather Sedgwick embeds their stories with a sense of dislocation.

Enforcing this idea, Magawisca's background includes the crucial detail that she learned English through the instruction of “an English captive, who for a long time dwelt with their tribe” (21). This bit of information implies an embedded text within Hope Leslie, one borne out of the writing popularized by figures such as Rowlandson. Far beyond simply explaining Magawisca's ability to speak English, this detail implies that there exist multiple subject positions from which to view captivity and that the experience does not limit itself to the white subject. Language again plays a significant role, however, as the expression of the “captivity” story of Magawisca and Oneco becomes the property, in a sense, of Mr. Fletcher. As he tells Mrs. Fletcher their story, he includes the negative tropes of representation one finds in Puritan writing, particularly in the way he describes the manner in which their “wolfish tribe were killed, or dislodged from their dens” (21). This negative language creates friction with further sections of his narrative where he expresses regret over the fate of other captives: “Some, by a christian use of money were redeemed; and others, I blush to say it, for ‘it is God's gift that every man should enjoy the good of his own labour,’ were sent into slavery in the West Indies” (21). Even as he brings to light the tragic reality of slavery, Fletcher bases his concern for its victims upon a biblical authority, the same authority, in fact, which becomes an object of resistance in the case of Monoca, the mother of Oneco and Magawisca. Fletcher describes her resistance to conversion elsewhere in his narrative, noting that “she would not even consent that the holy word should be interpreted to her; insisting, in the pride of her soul, that all the children of the Great Spirit were equal objects of His favour; and that He had not deemed the book he had withheld, needful to them” (22).

In the above passage, the novel once again places emphasis upon translation, as Monoca refuses an interpretation of the “holy word,” highlighting a concern for language as not simply a means of bridging cultural understanding but also as a source of disruption. Contributing to this complexity, this passage also presents a conflict which resonates throughout the novel as a whole: Sedgwick would expect her readers to share some of Fletcher's religious sensibility, despite the counter-purpose of her prose which also inspires admiration for Monoca's transgressive actions. Clearly, Sedgwick includes several instances of transgression—particularly those performed by Hope herself—which have become the subject of recent commentaries of the novel's place(s) among other domestic novels and frontier romances of its period. One of the strongest such commentaries comes from Carol J. Singley, who proposes the intriguing notion that as a frontier romance, the “real romance [in the novel] … is between Hope and Magawisca” (47). Inevitably, the impartial observer which Sedgwick imagines for her text would be informed by such literary forms and would find her or his perceptions affected by them.

Understanding the novel's notion of the location of this impartiality comes in part by understanding the novel's relationship to these forms, including a preoccupation with powerful conflicts emerging where these forms intersect within the novel. In fact, the novel restructures the monolithic categories of “Indian” and “Christian” prevalent in Puritan writing into an opposition between domesticity and the wilderness. This opposition becomes evident in the case of Magawisca, who becomes an object of domestication within the Fletcher household. In a letter to her husband, Mrs. Fletcher describes Magawisca's response to this process:

I have, in vain, attempted to subdue her to the drudgery of domestic service, and make her take part with Jennet; but as hopefully might you yoke a deer with an ox. It is not that she lacks obedience to me—so far as it seems she can command her duty, she is ever complying; but it appeareth impossible to her to clip the wings of her soaring thoughts, and keep them down to household matters.

(32, emphasis added)

The complexity of this passage presents itself in light of the intersection it creates between domestic fiction, whose conventions appear in the novel, and the genre of the frontier romance, which Sedgwick helped popularize. Conflicting meanings emerge within these shifting, and not altogether harmonious, contexts. As a character in domestic fiction, Magawisca's “wings” in this passage suggest the “angel” which, for the critic in the Western Review mentioned previously, put her authenticity as an “Indian” at risk. As a frontier romance contributing to white representations of Native Americans, however, the figuration in this passage reorients itself to construct an image of Magawisca complicit with other popular images. Indeed, in this case, the “wings” associated with her thoughts suggest animal characteristics, a romantic image which nonetheless duplicates the antiprimitivist inclination to paint Indians as animal in nature.

This discourse emerges earlier in the novel—again through the voice of Mrs. Fletcher. In this case, she tells Magawisca and Oneco that they “will soon perceive that our civilized life is far easier—far better and happier than your wild wandering ways, which are indeed, as you will presently see, but little superior to those of the wolves and foxes” (24). Everell, Magawisca's champion through much of the novel, upbraids his mother for this remark, but he does so in language that appears conciliatory to the “wild animal” discourse. He says, “hunted, as the Indians are, to their own dens, I am sure, mother, they need the fierceness of the wolf, and the cunning of the fox” (24, Sedgwick's emphasis). Everell corrects his mother's racism, but he does so in a manner which maintains her language and, by applying new connotations, confirms its suitability. In this manner, Everell echoes a passage from Sedgwick's preface: “[I]t was perhaps natural that [Indians] should be represented as ‘surly dogs,’ who preferred to die rather than live, from no other motives than a stupid or malignant obstinacy” (6). These passages illustrate the novel's dissatisfaction with the existing discourse available for the representation of Native Americans, as well as the difficulty of creating a place outside of it. Negotiating with this discourse ultimately entails entering it, and inevitably, the novel reinscribes it to a degree.

Much of the novel's criticism has focused upon its more affirmative characteristics, noting the remarkable degree to which Sedgwick constructs a “sisterhood” between Magawisca and Hope that transcends conventional depictions.⁸ Singley identifies the “union” between Magawisca and Hope as one which counters “masculine violence” with “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 culture of the Native Americans and the new intrusive society of the Puritans” (47). Even while maintaining this powerful vision, the novel preoccupies itself with the problematic nature of representing this Native American culture; furthermore, while the images this paper has focused upon might, in one sense, point out the novel's short-comings, I argue that Sedgwick, as a skilled artist and a woman in a male-dominated culture, maintained an awareness of language as a medium which distorts even as it fosters the possibility of unity and understanding. Her text, far from simply remaining subject to discursive constraints, becomes a commentary upon those constraints.

The novel's treatment of marriage becomes an important arena in which to explore these constraints, particularly as Sedgwick challenges her culture's assumptions concerning the necessity of marriage in the lives of women. As Singley points out, the novel does conform with the conventions of the period by ending with the marriage of Hope and Everell, indicating that Sedgwick “could not conceive of an ending that would both subvert and rewrite the white patriarchal plot” (49-50, Singley's emphasis). However, the novel also depicts Esther Downing, who chooses to stay single, a decision the narrator supports with a biting statement: “She illustrated [the] truth … that marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman” (350, Sedgwick's emphasis). This statement also underscores where the novel's treatments of race and gender diverge. That is, marriage between Everell and Magawisca becomes not a matter of choice, but a matter of “nature.” At one point in the novel, Everell explains to Digby his feelings for Magawisca: “I might have loved her—might have forgotten that nature had put barriers between us” (214). The surface events of the novel leave this construction of nature intact: Everell marries Hope, thus serving as the means by which the novel conforms to conventions which call for a female protagonist to marry at a novel's conclusion. Together, Everell's statement concerning “nature,” the novel's adherence to certain conventions, as well as Sedgwick's preface calling attention to “condition” as a determining factor in cultural differences, generate textual conflict; yet out of this conflict comes the novel's most provocative “statement” concerning race. Indeed, by conforming to conventions on the surface, Sedgwick actually reveals the degree to which Everell's notion of “nature” exists as a construction of language.

I want to conclude by returning to the reunion scene between Hope and Faith. Here, Hope confronts a newly constructed Faith, literally a product of a language new and unfamiliar to Hope. With Magawisca acting as translator, Hope makes significant use of the negative tropes which occur throughout the narrative: “Ask her … if she remembers the day when the wild Indians sprung upon the family at Bethel, like wolves upon a fold of lambs?” (229). Again, Indians act like “wolves.” But here, these tropes must become translated into the language of the very people denied humanity by such tropes. Magawisca's translation of Hope's question remains outside the reader's realm; we have only Magawisca's translation of Faith's confirmation that she does, in fact, remember the incident. We never know what Magawisca translates—that is, whether or not, or in what form, her translation recreates images of Indians as wild animals.

The importance of the language barrier then becomes paramount, from the moment that Faith's response to Hope's emotional entreaties—“No speak Yengees”—proves halting to the line of communication Hope would take. “Oh what shall I do! what shall I say!” Hope says in response (228). It becomes easy to imagine Hope speaking for Sedgwick's novel, which preoccupies itself with the limitations of language and asks itself similar questions. With Faith no longer sharing Hope's own language, Hope finds herself in the narrow and unknown passageway between languages, an unwritten passageway, in effect, where transformations could and likely do take place. Indeed, this scene of translation becomes the novel's center of gravity in its attempt to imagine an impartial observer, one who can negotiate between the disparate effects produced by conflicting discourses. Just as Magawisca leaves Hope and Everell with the declaration that “the Indian and the white man can no more mingle, and become one, than day and night” (330), so too does this elusive passageway between languages represent a potential mingling of day and night, a crosscultural point of connection.

Notes

1. Sandra Zagarell's excellent reading presents a particularly clear view of the many ways in which Sedgwick's text links gender and race issues. Zagarell points out how the text succeeds in “problematizing the Puritan founders' beliefs and policies,” including “their attitudes towards white women as the domestic analogy of their view of Indians” (236). Likewise, Suzanne Gossett and Barbara Ann Bardes note that “[t]he dilemmas faced by Hope and Magawisca allow Sedgwick to question the legitimacy of a political authority which excludes certain groups in the population, in this case women and Indians” (23). Also, in her introduction to the edition of the novel published in the American Women Writers Series, Mary Kelley elaborates upon Sedgwick's textual perception of Native Americans: “[Sedgwick] dismissed the idea that Indians were inherently inferior and made them as fully human as those who clothed themselves in the mantle of civilization” (xxix).

2. Singley derives this coin metaphor from her own reading of Zagarell's article, “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.”

3. Zagarell acknowledges that the novel “has its share of conventional formulas and stereotypes,” but her reading revolves around the notion that the novel “casts light on the collusion between the established narrative structures and racist, patriarchal definitions of the nation” (233).

4. Gould provides the following detailed explanation: “By dislodging the traditional narrative frame for the attack on Mystic, Sedgwick effectively emancipates readerly sympathy for the Pequots consumed by the flames, and hence recovers the humanitarian pathos at the core of domestic virtue which Puritan historians—and their early national descendants—successfully repress” (646).

5. As Sullivan points out, Roy Harvey Pearce had made this point earlier in Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (U of California P, 1988), which in 1953 was originally titled The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization.

6. In her survey of this trend, Barnett notes that “[a]mong major characters in the frontier romance, no Indian girl acquires a white husband” (113).

7. In “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War,” Philip Gould gives close attention to Digby and the role he plays as a “living metaphor for a masculine historiography with which Hope Leslie now competes” (646). Gould concludes this arresting section by pointing out how Digby's epistemology “fails,” and thus, “Everell—and Sedgwick's reader—clearly need another historian” (647). For more on Sedgwick's revision of the Puritan account of the Pequot War, see Gould's essay.

8. Zagarell points out one particularly noteworthy way in which Sedgwick undercuts such depictions. Because of Hope's dark hair, Sedgwick “revises the prevalent tendency, racist as well as gynophobic, to split women characters into the sexual and the chaste, the dark and light” (237).

Works Cited

Barnett, Louise J. The Ignoble Savage: American Literary Racism, 1790-1890. Westport: Greenwood, 1975.

Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle. “Troping Captivity in Early American Women's Fiction: Rowson, Foster, and Bleecker.” Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. February 1995.

Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1980.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New York: Twayne, 1974.

Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 51-75.

Gossett, Suzanne, and Barbara Ann Bardes. “Women and Political Power in the Republic: Two Early American Novels.” Legacy: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers 2.2 (1985): 13-30.

Gould, Philip. “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War.” American Literature 66 (1994): 641-62.

Kelley, Mary. Introduction. Hope Leslie. By Catharine Maria Sedgwick. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987. ix-xxxix.

Rowlandson, Mary. A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Classic American Autobiographies. Ed. William L. Andrews. New York: Penguin, 1992. 20-69.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie. 1827. Ed. Mary Kelley. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1987.

Singley, Carol J. “Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance.” The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers. Ed. Joyce W. Warren. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993. 39-53.

Stoddard, Solomon. “Letter to Governor Joseph Dudley.” 1703. Remarkable Providences: Readings on Early American History. Ed. John Demos. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 372-74.

Sullivan, Sherry. “The Literary Debate over ‘the Indian’ in the Nineteenth-Century.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 9 (1985): 13-31.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6 (1987): 225-45.