[In the following essay, Stadler explains that, by investing narrative authority in the figure of Magawisca, Sedgwick uses an individual to dramatize public issues of conflict between the colonists and Native Americans in her novel Hope Leslie.]

It has now become something of a critical commonplace in American cultural and literary studies to argue that the conceptual division between public and private spheres—a paradigm which has been particularly influential in work on the antebellum era—is artificial, ideological, and largely designed to enforce a social hierarchy between the genders. It has even been persuasively argued that the repeated critique of this binarism by feminist and other critics has unintentionally helped to maintain its authority.¹ But before doing away with this dualism as a frame of analysis, we might be wise to attend to our writers' and critics' continuing preoccupation with it (and with its deconstruction), one which I believe dates back to the earliest decades of the nation. By “preoccupation” I mean to emphasize the service these categories have provided for a rhetoric of fantasy, of imaginations of the self and its ability (or lack of ability) to act and to speak as a citizen, as an American self, in an American nation and culture. A particular branch of this genealogy of fantasy, usually found in work by liberal Euro-American writers, constructs people of color as mediating, critical figures in the always already problematic scheme of public and private life.² For a liberal, white writer, such a figure is embedded with deconstructive force, because he or she appears to wear the social on his or her skin—his or her very body is infused with a degree of cultural conflict which threatens the distinction between politics and the personal before s/he has uttered a word. Within this tradition, these characters of color, by means of the sensations and particularities that make up their selfhood, become the means of the author's general critique of the national configuration of public and private.

This usually means, more nearly, framing an issue as confined to the private sphere of individual deliberation—a sphere which masks the fact that certain individuals' deliberations are taken more seriously than others—and demanding the interposition of a public debate, a public conscience. Thus, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, the horrific spectacle of whipped black bodies, especially Uncle Tom's, is meant to dramatize the inappropriateness of leaving the slavery question up to individuals, individual families, or individual regions of the nation. Catherine Sedgwick's 1827 novel Hope Leslie is a still earlier instance of a slightly different take on the private/public dualism. By investing remarkable narrative authority in an Indian woman, Magawisca, this historical novel of early New England dramatizes public issues, primarily the colony's relations with native people, as foundational for the actualization of a model of private subjectivity suited to the proto-United States. The novel tells a revisionary history of the nation to its antebellum readership, one in which the privacy of Americans was secured through fascination with, and attacks on, the bodies of Indians. It thus attempts to ensure a place for corporeality, for embodied struggle, in the history of the nation.

Sedgwick, the daughter of one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, was intimate with the public life of the young nation, and grew up in a house which offered her many more opportunities for cultural growth than most families and schools of the time.³ Influenced like many of her contemporaries by the writings of Maria Edgeworth, her first two novels followed the parameters of “literary domesticity,” a phrase coined by Mary Kelley to describe the interest of many antebellum female writers in fiction set in the home, often telling the story of a young girl's rise into virtuous womanhood.⁴ In 1826, perhaps buoyed by readings of Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824) and the early volumes of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, Sedgwick set out to write a novel of early America turning on the presence of native characters. While the novel is set in the colonial era that many writers of the antebellum era found so appealing, it also alludes implicitly to the debates taking place in her time over forced Indian removal, especially of the Cherokees. As Lucy Maddox has argued, these debates were not simply a forum in which the ethics of removal were discussed, but “a wide-spread public reexamination of the terms in which the nation wished to define itself.”⁵ Thus Hope Leslie, which would make Sedgwick the most eminent American woman writer until Stowe's publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was situated within current public debates over the shape of the nation, of where it began and ended, of who belonged and who didn't.⁶

Hope Leslie takes place in a transparently fantastic seventeenth-century Massachusetts during a period of particularly violent clashes with the native Pequot people. It narrates the story of the Fletcher family, whose son, Everell, befriends a Pequot girl, Magawisca, and essentially adopts her as a surrogate sister. Magawisca's liminal position, we will see, between inclusion in the Fletcher family and exclusion from the entire English community, makes her into an important marker of the limits of the new white nation. When Hope Leslie, daughter of the woman Mr. Fletcher had once loved in England, arrives from overseas, she becomes almost instantly taken with Magawisca, and her attempt to defend Magawisca from accusations that she is conspiring against the colony is one cornerstone of the novel's plot.

Throughout the novel, the two girls are identified with one another. Each mourns a lost mother. Each is an adopted member of the Fletcher family—Mr. Fletcher brings the young Hope and her sister over from England upon the death of their mother, his one true love, whom he had been forbidden to marry. Both Hope and Magawisca are involved in passionate relationships with their fathers. Each openly desires Everell. In comparison to Magawisca, however, Hope is nervous, excitable and often agitated. Under the burden of holding a secret, she struggles to contain her information in a manner the text implicitly juxtaposes with Magawisca's composed body of knowledge. Having arranged, through the Pequot girl, a secret visit with her sister, kidnapped during the initial Pequot raid, Hope finds herself caught between her “duties” to the white community and the “obligation of her promise to Magawisca”:

She would waver and resolve to disclose her secret appointment; but the form of Magawisca would rise to her recollection with its expression of truth and sweetness and confidence, as if to check her treacherous purpose.⁷

Magawisca's “form” becomes a node of identification for Hope, by which she can mimic the Indian girl's own capacity to resist disclosure. Magawisca's iconicity—not her self but her “form,” not truth but its “expression”—releases Hope from a crisis of interior conflict. Throughout the novel, Magawisca's “form” helps the English characters—especially female characters—to regulate their psychological states. And while Magawisca exits the novel before its end, her work apparently done, Sedgwick ultimately attempts to embed some of her power in the body of Hope's friend Esther Downing, a young English woman who comes to resist the demands of the marriage plot which increasingly encroaches on the narrative.

The novel positions Magawisca, and her particular control of colonial New England's ability to “read” its fate, at the center of the making of the American nation. The surface of her body continually comes under scrutiny as the settlers attempt to decipher the relationship of her inner, private self—which knows whether her people, led by her father, plan to attack the settlement, but which also feels a sizable degree of emotional attachment to the Fletchers—to her outward, public appearance and what it can tell them about the safety and status of their proto-national community. With its dialectical relationship between Magawisca's public spectacularity and the interior absorption of the individual members of the Massachussetts colony, Hope Leslie delineates the constant mediations of the public in the private. It simultaneously presses this process into one that serves the formation of the American nation.

Hope Leslie, the character, is a heroine to the proto-nation to the extent that she acts to allow Magawisca to remain to some degree unreadable to the settlers; toward the end of the novel, she engineers the Indian woman's escape from prison, thereby ending the colony's effort to force her to signify her people's intentions. On the one hand, the novel is thus a remarkable instance of a radical skepticism toward humanism, of the philosophical and aesthetic doctrines of moral sympathy which so underwrote novels at this period in their history.⁸ Magawisca, Hope affirms, has a right to secrecy, a right to privacy, a right to difference. On the other hand, Sedgwick does something which we would today call appropriation; she makes Magawisca a figure modeled very much on her own interests as a white, bourgeois woman. This is not to say, exactly, that she “whitens” Magawisca, or projects traits and behaviors esteemed by her own culture onto the figure of the Pequot girl. She specifically uses Magawisca not so much to represent positive, definitive qualities with which she would like herself to be associated, but rather to make certain that through Magawisca the text registers a protest against the body politics of early republican citizenship—politics which Michael Warner has shown to extend a privileged disembodiment to white, male property owners, and to consign “others” to the ghetto of the “particular.”⁹ The principle of abstraction on which documents like the Constitution and Bill of Rights are written contains an invisible but powerful subtext excluding those with certain bodily traits—certain genitals, certain skin colors. Sedgwick, the daughter of one of the early republic's most powerful national politicians, finds it useful to go back more than a century before the writing of these documents and locate a different national origin, one in which bodily presence and pain help cement the state. More than to act as an ideal or heroine per se, the character Magawisca is largely present to provide the corpo-reality in this revisionary process of nation-building.

Sedgwick's apparent interest in native people—however fantastic it rendered itself in Hope Leslie—has led a number of critics to remark upon her difference from the bulk of the American women writers we have come to associate, perhaps too hastily, with “literary domesticity.”¹⁰ Much of the last two or so decades' effort to “reclaim” this fiction, the bestselling literature of its time, has focused on the novels' construction in the home of a kind of alternative world outside the vicissitudes of capitalism and public politics per se. What I find especially remarkable about Hope Leslie is the extent to which, when viewed as addressing antebellum gender politics, it takes a very different tack.¹¹ Rather than trying to politicize privacy by sanctifying it, Sedgwick's novel attempts to undermine the status of privacy by revealing, in what will prove an ambivalent political gesture, its construction on the grounds of history and the forced removal of native peoples. The novel thus levels a critique against the contemporary antebellum gendered politics of citizenship and against the increasingly privately defined domain of women. It certainly achieves the latter by showing female characters like Magawisca and Hope as active, spirited agents in an important foundational period for the American nation. But it also uses their relationship to posit the public force of fantasy, of identification, and, I would argue, of novel-reading.

Foreshadowing late-twentieth-century readings of the novel, a number of contemporary reviews of Hope Leslie, positive and negative, criticized Sedgwick's Magawisca as an implausible portrayal of a Native American woman. The Western Monthly Review objected that “we should have looked in any place for such a character, rather than in an Indian wigwam.”¹² The New-England Magazine urged its readers to remember that although Sedgwick's historical novel placed her in the first class of American writers, its portrayal of Indians meant it could be regarded at best as a “beautiful fiction.”¹³ Many reviewers of the time had also condemned James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, published a year before Hope Leslie, for its romanticization of Indian character. Both Sedgwick and Cooper had, to varying degrees, placed their Indian characters in authoritative roles in their novels. For Cooper, Chingachgook and Uncas were fading figures of innocent, benevolent patriarchy in a landscape blighted by European greed. For Sedgwick, Magawisca provided many of the same qualities: morality, honor, martyrdom. Moreover, she offered an unfamiliar historical narrative of Indian victimization to compete with the versions of seventeenth-century history proffered by the Puritan fathers themselves.¹⁴

Cooper responded to this criticism by explicitly referring to his subsequent works as “romances” and announcing in the preface to The Deerslayer that: “It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader.”¹⁵ Sedgwick, however, had responded to these charges in advance. In her preface to Hope Leslie, she issued what to some may have seemed an irresponsible disclaimer:

The writer is aware that it may be thought that the character of Magawisca has no prototype among the aborigines of this country. Without citing Pocohontas [sic], or any other individual, as authority, it may be sufficient to remark, that in such delineations, we are not confined to the actual, but the possible.

(6)

This seems to me, more than a disclaimer, a reclamation of the “possible,” of the fantasy work of the novel. Unlike Cooper, Sedgwick frames her fictional liberty-taking as a representational strategy from the beginning. Moreover, she explicitly posits the potential problem as one not of literary genre, but of authority.¹⁶ From the onset, Sedgwick's writing arises out of the question, who is going to authorize the discourse at hand? Pocahontas? The Puritan histories?¹⁷ Writing as a woman, Sedgwick's own authority comes under scrutiny from which Cooper and other male heirs of Walter Scott are protected. Her consciousness of the way the particularity of her gender could or could not make certain discourse make sense in certain spheres permeates Hope Leslie. A white woman writing a historical novel with a noble, honorable, erotically attractive, powerful Indian female character did not quite make sense to the bourgeois public sphere of 1827. Sedgwick is eminently conscious that to speak publicly she needs to cite authority; however, this consciousness, which she makes evident in this foreword-like paragraph, will grant her the liberty to create Magawisca, and it will form the basis of her portrayal of Magawisca.

Sedgwick immediately identifies this portrayal with the tenets of what we have come to call cultural relativism. She identifies her writing specifically with “liberal philanthrop[y],” and elegantly outlines her credo that the world's outer appearance makes it clear to the discerning eye that difference, as we say today, is relative:

The liberal philanthropist 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; and 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)

Interestingly, this eloquent paean to Enlightenment moral and political philosophy, writing which underwrote many of the documents of the American Revolution, is itself underwritten by an emphasis on appearance, and on the necessity that the “liberal” subject have a discerning eye. Sedgwick embeds this eye in Hope Leslie, placing it at various points in the foreheads of various members of the Puritan community, and directing it largely toward Magawisca's body, which forms (rather than on which will be written) a series of questions about knowledge, disclosure, and the power of secrecy. The text pays an indulgent amount of attention to her body, continually mapping its specificities and dramatizing the efforts of the English settlers to read her corporeality as a series of signs. In fact, it is Magawisca's body which comes to serve as the dominant authority shaping the novel's events.

At first, the expressive power of Magawisca's body seems largely to reflect a willfulness and personal integrity Sedgwick is attributing to the character's own “self.” The radicalness of her public utterances is at times remarkable, as when, on trial for fomenting Indian hostilities against English communities, she announces, “I deny your right to judge me. My people have never passed under your yoke—not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority” (286). But Magawisca's force of enunciation is consistently mirrored in the force of her physicality. The most dramatic and, for the novel, most resonant example of this is the force of a violently physical absence—the arm she loses defending Everell Fletcher from the vengeance of her father's blade. After a skirmish near the Fletcher household, Everell is kidnapped by Chief Mononotto, Magawisca's father, for purposes of execution, a deadly exchange for the killing of Magawisca's brother in a previous battle. Magawisca begs her father for mercy toward Everell, whom she has in effect already exchanged for her biological brother. Mononotto refuses his daughter's pleas, leading her to “interpose[] her arm.” The result is a gruesome corporeal spectacle:

It was too late. The blow was levelled—force and direction given—the stroke aimed at Everell's neck, severed his defender's arm, and left him unharmed. The lopped quivering member dropped over the precipice. Mononotto staggered and fell senseless, and all the savages, uttering horrible yells, rushed toward the fatal spot.

(93)

Brought about by the assumption that it is better her arm than Everell's head, Magawisca's paternally administered amputation becomes the mark of her loyalty to the sympathetic bonds offered in the proto-antebellum-domestic-space of the Fletcher household. The dynamic associated with Magawisca throughout the novel is most succinctly portrayed here; her body protects the colonial mind. Consequently, mirroring the larger historical force of Indian removal, accelerating during the time of Sedgwick's writing, a violently inflicted Indian absence becomes the marker of the native role in American nation-building.¹⁸

The amputation returns with Magawisca later in the novel as a publicly effective force which will augment the force of her body to cement the colony's proto-national bonds. Yet Magawisca's physical authority shapes the novel virtually from its beginning. Recently captured in a battle between white settlers and the Pequot tribe led by her father, Magawisca makes her first appearance in Hope Leslie when she arrives to take up a position as a servant in the Fletcher household. As she emerges into the clearing around the house, which lies removed from the town (called Bethel, on the border of the colony), William Fletcher immediately makes note of her appearance to his wife:

“Here comes the girl, Magawisca, clothed in her Indian garb, which the governor has permitted her to retain, not caring, as he wisely says, to interfere with their innocent peculiarities; and she, in particular, having shown a loathing of English dress.”

(22)

Immediately, the novel grants Magawisca control over her self-representation. She has successfully fought to keep her physical appearance in the manner she desires. And while the narrator here establishes a likely ahistorical ethic of liberal tolerance that will permeate the novel (the hegemonic acceptance of “innocent peculiarities”), the text has also established a continuum between the “look” of the native characters and that of the white characters.¹⁹ The appearance of Magawisca conjures a description of her white male compatriot/pseudo-sibling Everell Fletcher's body and physical presence, which in turn flows into a delineation of Magawisca's corporeality, all in the space of two packed paragraphs. It is as if Magawisca and her will to maintain her “peculiarities” construct a lens through which the peculiarities, or at least particularities, of the young white male Everell come into view. Everell, “a fair ruddy boy of fourteen,” is noted for his frame, which lends him the “muscle of manhood,” his “quick elastic step,” which lends him the “spirit of childhood,” and finally for his dress, whose details include an “awkward space” of bareness around the forearms (22-23). Our picture of Everell emphasizes his brimming energy and adolescent esprit—a description not distant from the idyllic adolescent portrayals of Natty Bumppo in Cooper's later volumes of the Leatherstocking Tales. But it also places him within the discourse of bodily willfulness instigated by Magawisca's appearance.

The parallel between Magawisca and Everell is most evident when the text tells us, as she enters the Fletcher parlor behind him, that “she and her conductor were no unfit representatives of the people from whom they sprung [my emphasis].” In both characters, in other words, the wealth of psychic will and physical energy is meant to be identified with a wealth of signification—a degree of significance which makes them not simply instances of two “people[s],” but representative of them.²⁰ Sedgwick is here citing another antebellum inheritance of Puritanism, what Sacvan Bercovitch has identified as the notion of the errand, through which “to assert oneself in the right way, here in the American wilderness, was to embody the goals of New England” and later America.²¹ Sedgwick's text corporealizes this model, lingering over its “representative” characters' bodies as it prepares to use them as signs of a national symbolic.

In its initial description of Magawisca's physical presence, the text goes to great lengths to emphasize how much the girl is there to be read, and to keep being read. Whereas Everell was overflowing with erratic motion and energy, his Indian female counterpart is all harmony, stillness and solidity. Her arms are described as a “model for sculpture,” and the text makes further, repeated references to her as statuesque, placing her within the neoclassicist approach to representing Indians at this time in both visual and literary arts.²² More importantly, the passage shows just what is involved in rendering her “peculiarities” “innocent” to the white reader:

Her form … expressed a consciousness of high birth. Her face, although marked by the peculiarities of her race, was beautiful even to an European eye … there must be something beyond symmetry of feature to fix the attention, and it was an expression of dignity, thoughtfulness, and deep dejection that made the eye linger on Magawisca's face, as if it were perusing there the legible record of her birth and wrongs.

(23)

Despite the difference embedded in her racial “peculiarities,” and beyond the mere fact of their “symmetry,” Magawisca as a whole coheres as a representation of qualities like “nobility,” “thoughtfulness,” and “dejection” which are “legible” to a “European eye.” Her bodily surface, engraven with her past—“the legible record of her birth and wrongs”—is brought into being as an accessible text to be read, “perused,” by a Western gaze.

Magawisca is thus something of a known quantity in the cultural symbology of early-nineteenth-century America, what Robert Tilton has called the “Romantic Indian.”²³ She is aligned with a host of traits which on the one hand idealize her and on the other make her an aestheticized outlet for liberal guilt over the Indian removals taking place as Sedgwick was writing. What I want to press here, however, is the text's insistence on Magawisca's utility for figurative purposes, her capacity for making meaning by becoming a physical object of interpretation. She is not only the repository of a host of cultural stereotypes like those outlined by Tilton, Joy Kasson, Brian Dippie, and others. She is also an indicator of what becomes useful and compelling knowledge to the “European eye.” Indeed, the phrase “model for sculpture” fashions the girl not as sculpture itself, but as the medium through which the shaping of some object or symbol might take place.

Hope Leslie shows the attention Magawisca's physical appearance inspires in the “European eye” not merely as exoticism but as a determining factor in the formation of the modern American nation. The novel does this, mainly, in two ways: by positioning Magawisca, almost literally, as the national border dividing and marking the difference between the colonists' and the Pequots' communities; and by inducing a model of subjectivity, a mode of individual mediation between public event and private interiority, which fits the requirements of the modern Western nation. Because Magawisca's position in the text is so ambiguous—she is, as we have seen, a virtual sibling to Everell, a state reinforced when Hope, upon encountering Magawisca for the first time, utters the words “My sister!” (183)—she becomes an important locus of interpretation for determining what constitutes sameness and difference.²⁴ The early chapters of the novel most directly thematize this function, as the Fletchers, in their house on the edge of the settlement, await the possible appearance of Mononotto and his troops, bent (importantly, as we will see) on avenging the death of his son at the hands of the settler community. Magawisca spends much of this time moving in and out of the woods which extend from the frontier, where the Fletchers' domesticity is situated, into the “unknown.” Everell and the loyal white servant Digby ambivalently eye the girl's “abstractness of manner and … the efforts she made to maintain a calm demeanor” (40). Simultaneously, they debate the possibility that Magawisca's motives may be less than loyal to her adoptive family. Magawisca has taken a voluntary vow of silence with regard to her father, his plans, and his whereabouts. Everell and Digby can only attempt to determine, by surveying her countenance and general appearance, whether she is in fact a spy for her biological father. As if needing to physically locate the national border, Everell and Digby move to the very edge of the Fletcher house's grounds to watch for a Pequot attack, and begin to watch Magawisca's movements for any clue she may give as to the imminence of an attack. Digby's narration conveys her power as spectacle: “See how she looks all around her … Stand close, observe her, see …” (42).

Here and throughout the novel, Magawisca's relation to the Puritan power structure hinges on the question, “What does she know?” The actions and motivations of the white colonists continually turn on the question of what Magawisca knows about her father's plans to avenge himself on them. Throughout the book, she refuses to divulge this information, to empty her interiority into the waiting ears of white subjects (except, to some extent, Hope Leslie). Moreover, she refuses to allow her knowledge to betray itself on the surface of her body. Instead she skulks silently about the house like a more generally symbolic “bird of ill-omen.” Despite her love for the Fletchers and her very apparent fear for their safety, which bring renewed attention to her body, she refuses to become anything other than the ambiguous reading surface which defines the border of white knowledge.

Magawisca's resistance to the appeals made to her for knowledge, often by the members of her pseudo-family, permits the novel to use her as a critique of early-nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, privacy, and intimacy. When Mrs. Fletcher presses Magawisca for information on a rattlesnake skin and rattle mysteriously left in the house, the girl stays mute after merely identifying the tokens as symbols of approaching danger and death. “Why, Magawisca, are these fearful tokens given to me? Dost thou know, girl, aught of a threatening enemy—of an ambushed foe?” asks Mrs. Fletcher. The girl responds, “I have said all that I may say” (39). Although she has ostensibly become a member of the Fletcher family, she refuses to submit to the imperatives around privacy and publicity in the white bourgeois sphere. She will not address the symbols as they obtain individually to either Mrs. Fletcher or herself. She does briefly experience some inner turmoil, “but after a short struggle with conflicting feelings,” she proclaims: “That which I may speak without bringing down on me the curse of my father's race, I will speak” (39). The illocutionary force of this utterance constitutes her as outside the white domestic economy of intimacy and privacy. She makes clear that the enunciative conditions of her own relation to the public and the private are different from those of the settler community; there is no safety for her in the Fletchers' benevolent hearth. Magawisca's knowledge and the drama around her potential disclosure thematize for Sedgwick a manner in which privacy can become strategic. Individuality, interiority, and confession are not social imperatives. They are performative enunciations to be deployed, in the service of collective interests. Magawisca's liminal relationship to the Fletcher family thus allows her to become a fantasy of national, public efficacy constituted within the space and discourse of domesticity.

Magawisca is figured from the outset as the border of the white nation. She delineates its physical boundaries and frays the edges of its assumptions regarding the rights of domestic intimacy. A gap of seven years, during which Magawisca, Hope, and Everell become young adults, intervenes before the next series of events in the novel's narrative. This transformation mobilizes a number of energies in the plot. The adolescent spirit that characterized each character must now be made to make sense through the terms that dictate adult private life. Put directly, the issue of who is to marry whom must be resolved. This is, of course, not a question for Magawisca; although there was a subcategory of antebellum literature in which mixed marriages took place, Sedgwick's heroine was doubly marked—not only by her racial particularity, but by her amputation.²⁵ Magawisca spends much of the latter half of the novel inside a prison cell, arrested on the basis of suspicions concerning her role in another spate of Indian attacks on colonial settlements. But this confinement only works to bring Magawisca further into the center of the English community; it places her in a privileged space from which to continue to mediate the building of the young proto-nation. Granted access to one man's sexual secrets, she serves to channel the sexual energies of the white characters, energies which were largely dissolute in the first half, left to churn in an ambiguous mix of pseudo-sibling relationships. She helps bring Hope and Everell together, to make them marriageable.²⁶

The centerpiece of the latter half of the book is Magawisca's trial on suspicion of conspiring against the colony. However, what is supposed to be a disciplinary procedure addressing the political threat Magawisca has supposedly posed to the colonists quickly becomes focused on the privilege to hold sexual secrets. The seven-year gap allows the introduction of a new character, Sir Philip Gardiner, who has fled England to escape from a shady “series of ill-luck” and infiltrated the Puritan community, disguised as a devout, upstanding follower, with his former mistress Rosa in tow. The forlorn Rosa, whom Sir Philip has seduced and attempted to abandon, has insisted on making the transatlantic trip with him in disguise as his servant boy. Sir Philip, meanwhile, has transferred his affections—and marital hopes—to Hope Leslie, whose “generous rashness” arouses his interest. Judith Fetterley has usefully described this subplot as the novel's explicit effort to exile from its domain the dominant plot of the eighteenth-century novel—the seduction story.²⁷ But the novel also employs this subplot to scrutinize the privileges of privacy which make it possible for an individual male to act as seducer—privileges based on the entitlement to abstraction from one's physical, sexual behavior.

Convinced that her race and her precarious state will make her vulnerable to manipulation, Sir Philip visits Magawisca in prison with a deal to offer: he will give her a file to use on the cell bars if she will subsequently take his ex-mistress off to the Indian wilds. Of course, Magawisca refuses, on grounds of principle; significantly, though, the incident fortifies her with a piece of private knowledge to be strategically deployed, a privileged bit of information which has come her way specifically because of her bodily specificity. When Magawisca's trial for her role in the Pequot nation's attacks on the colony commences, the public spectacle around Indian national secrets allows, for Sedgwick, the figuring of a spectacle around the (supposedly private) sexual secret.²⁸ Shifting the grounds of what can constitute public discourse, or what can and cannot be discussed in public spaces, Magawisca inspires an inner crisis in Sir Philip, as he notices the reverence in which the trial audience seems to hold her. In a sense, she forces on him an unwanted degree of interiority, a process of deliberation over his personal situation, a type of mental processing which it has previously only been the burden of female characters to assume. He begins to worry that she might actually be taken at her word should she reveal the content of their prison interview, and plans an offense-as-defense strategy eerily reminiscent of that articulated in present-day legal cases of sexual harassment and rape:

He had no time to deliberate on the most prudent course to be pursued. The most obvious was to inflame the prejudices of Magawisca's judges, and by anticipation discredit her testimony; and quick of invention, and unembarrassed by the instincts of humanity, he proceeded … to detail the following gratuitous particulars.

(285)

The “particulars” the narrator refers to here are from a false tale told by one of the Fletcher servants of having seen Magawisca “kneeling on the bare wet earth, making those monstrous and violent contortions, which all who heard them, well knew characterized the devil-worship of powwows” (285-86). Philip's strategy is to re-embody and re-racialize Magawisca, to bring a set of corporeally excessive “particulars,” a term reminiscent of the “peculiarities” cited earlier in the novel, into a sphere in which utter disembodiment—the equal value of each individual's testimony itself—is the projected ideal. He attempts to discredit Magawisca on the basis of what has been serving her so powerfully in the novel, the power of her body as a spectacle.

Magawisca responds to Philip's attempt to scandalously embody her by requiring that he take an oath before his testimony, an act not typically mandatory for a “member of the congregation.” Although she has previously denied the jurisdiction of the court, and although the narrative itself credits the native “principle of retaliation” as responsible for this demand, it is important to note a specific message sent by the call for an oath: under oath, it is clear that the speaking subject is citing authority when s/he speaks. Sir Philip, the novel tells us, “was far enough from having one of those religious consciences that regard truth as so sacred that no ceremonies can add to its authority” (288). He requires the extra boost of authority to be persuasive. And Magawisca dramatically complicates this issue by producing a crucifix Philip dropped during his visit to her prison cell. The court is therefore thrown into a crisis as to which authority should be cited—secular or religious, court or church. The novel dramatizes a conflict of two types of traditional, male-dominated structures of authority. By this logic, the novel's confinement of its female characters within patriarchal structures becomes not so much retrograde, as some critics argue, as much as it is a mapping of the crises that ensue from the needs of all utterances to be authorized.²⁹ The trial scene thus becomes a crucial enactment of the drama of authority staged by Sedgwick, the author, at the beginning of the novel, as she sought to justify what some would surely take as a fantastic portrayal of an Indian woman.

But the authority most in play is that of the public—the spectators in the courtroom—whose “every eye was turned toward Magawisca, in the hope that she might make an explanation.” For the moment, the judges are aligned with this authority: “[the audience's] motions of curiosity coinciding with the dictates of justice, in the bosoms of the sage judges themselves, were very likely to counteract the favour any of them might have felt for Sir Philip” (289). Magawisca is able to turn the attention Philip has brought to her body back against itself, into a generative, submissive “curiosity.” She increases the authority of publicity when she dramatically unveils her amputation and paraphrases Patrick Henry: “I demand of thee death or liberty!” Through the process of unveiling, she once again stages a drama of embodiment. She juxtaposes nationalist discourse with the most peculiar “peculiarity” of her body. The eminently manipulable public responds with cries of “Liberty!” When Magawisca anachronistically alludes to Patrick Henry, whom Jay Fliegelman has identified as the most important early national icon of political oratory, she becomes not simply heroic, but more specifically an embodied voice in the young United States' discourse of nation-founding.³⁰

Her dramatic courtroom appearance in a sense instigates the system of privacy, of individuality that these fictional colonists will need in order to become a modern American nation. Having stuck a dagger in the once abstracted privacy of a respected Puritan male, Magawisca exits the courtroom “leaving in the breasts of a great majority of the audience, a strange contrariety of feelings and opinions.” It is as if the threat to Philip's privacy mobilizes interiority within the members of the public at large, the public which has begun to turn its judgment in Magawisca's favor. The following chapter further thematizes the degree to which Magawisca's performance in the public space of the courtroom has made it possible for the settlers to become individual, private selves:

The day of Magawisca's trial was eventful, and long remembered in the annals of the Fletcher family. Indeed, every one in any way associated with them, seems to have participated in the influences of their ruling star. Each member of Governor Winthrop's household appeared to be moving in a world of his own, and to be utterly absorbed in his own projects and hopes.

(301)

What I wish to emphasize here is the degree to which the novel employs the spectacle of Magawisca to bring into being the private life of its white subjects. She seems to be making the American nation possible, forcing the Puritan community to become a conglomeration of individuals who may very well each have their own opinions and, importantly, emotions about Magawisca's trial. As the novel moves at a rapid clip, from here on, to make marriage between Hope and Everell possible, and to seamlessly remove Magawisca from the fabric of the white community, it would seem that the novel's nation-making work essentially concludes with the trial scene. Indeed, the fate of Magawisca the character is that of her “real” referents—exile to the West, conveniently represented here as self-imposed. The single countering force to the novel's conservatism here, its need to expunge the emptied signifier of Magawisca's body, is the supplemental plot it produces, surprisingly, via the presence of Esther Downing, who is exiled from the heterosexual contract when brother and sister become man and wife.³¹ The unmarried Sedgwick seems to have found, in the recuperation of this unmarried character, a vehicle for making Magawisca's embodied performativity continue to work, this time in a form more fully available to white, female readers for identification.

Rejecting Everell's claim that “the present difference of the English with the Indians, is but a vapour that has, even now, nearly passed away,” Magawisca relinquishes her role as border guard and departs for an unnamed place. By leaving the place anonymous, the novel makes it clear that she is not exiled to some other national space existing in simultaneity with the colony; effectively, the colony has triumphed and already become America, a country which subsumes a continent, which leaves no space adjacent to it.³² Effectively, Magawisca dies. Her last performative act is to bless the marriage of Hope and Everell, turning over her authority to their bourgeois sexual contract:

“Oh! yes, Magawisca,” urged Everell, “come back to us and teach us to be happy, as you are, without human help or agency.”

“Ah!” she replied, with a faint smile, “ye need not the lesson, ye will each be to the other a full stream of happiness. May it be fed from the fountain of love, and grow broader and deeper through all the passage of life.”

(333)

When Magawisca leaves, her effects seem to have been memorialized through the double signs of the (hetero)sexual contract and the American nation. But the work the novel does toward this apparent culmination leaves a significant bit of residue at its very core. This is Esther Downing, who receives the lion's share of attention as the novel closes and comes to serve as heir to Magawisca, registering as she does the border of the marriage bond. Once a relatively minor character defined almost exclusively by her nervous, doomed passion for Everell, this young woman becomes the novel's most unlikely heroine. She gently berates Hope and Everell for their inattention to her feelings, and quietly leaves the town, only to return a few years later to reestablish bonds with her former companions, “without any other emotions, on either side, than those which belong to warm and tender friendship” (349). Given Esther's newly refined, attractive character, “[h]er hand was often and eagerly sought,” the narrator coyly informs us in the novel's final paragraph (which I quote in full):

but she appears never to have felt a second engrossing attachment. The current of her purposes and affections had set another way. She illustrated a truth, which, if more generally received by her sex, might save a vast deal of misery: that marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman. Indeed, those who saw on how wide a sphere her kindness shone, how many were made better or happier by her disinterested devotion, might have rejoiced that she did not “Give to a party what was meant for mankind.”

(348-49)

Staunchly refusing the demands of the bourgeois sexual contract, in the end, it is Esther who becomes most like Magawisca. She is the final embodiment of Magawisca's iconic ability to endure the demands of physical “peculiarity”; here, such “peculiarity” is associated with the desire to take on a permanent heterosexual mate. Esther illustrates the ultimate fantasy of the antebellum white woman, forced to have undergone a “vast deal of misery” in her sexual role, become safe, yet authoritative in a wide “sphere,” once her place in the community is mediated not by a husband or potential husband, but by a woman of color. And while that woman of color has also mediated and brought into being the traditional novel-ending-in-marriage, it is this Esther, this unrecuperated fantasy with which the novel leaves us.

The way most of us have read the nineteenth-century domestic novel, of which Sedgwick, in the U.S., was a founding figure, has been to imagine its characters as idealized representations of “real” selves, available for readerly identification. In his book The Letters of the Republic, Michael Warner opposes the dominant literary assumptions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America, finding in the former a focal, constitutive concern for the national public good, and in the latter a focus on individual, private experiences of fantasy and identification. In the early nineteenth century, he writes, it became possible to “be a member of a nation, attributing its agency to yourself in imaginary identification, without … exercising any agency in the public sphere.”³³ In other words, one was a citizen just in the personal, interiorized act of reading, the basis of what Benedict Anderson has famously called an “imagined community.” Warner's argument suggests a shift in the technology of literary narrative toward private readerly identification, essentially toward realism, toward inviting readers to locate samenesses between their selves and those portrayed in the fiction at hand.³⁴

The legacy of Hope Leslie's Magawisca should be to question the degree to which such identifications took place neatly and uncritically. Certainly, Hope, Esther, and Magawisca are all characters with whom readers, especially young, white, female readers, are asked to identify themselves. Yet Sedgwick's novel also maps the process by which Hope, and most surprisingly, Esther, come into being through Magawisca's presence as figures for identification. A liminal force, largely constituted through public histories and public events, and embodied in this Pequot woman, makes private identification possible for the white, female citizens of the antebellum republic. Although Magawisca certainly embodies idealized qualities with which most readers would like to identify themselves—emotional strength, physical stamina, adherence to principle, etc.—what the novel seeks to emphasize throughout is the preoccupation the “European eye” has with her. She is always signifying, even if what she signifies doesn't always make sense to the English characters. Thus she is not simply an icon of a woman who speaks and acts powerfully. She is a marker of Euro-American preoccupation with embodying national fantasy, and Sedgwick's novel uses her as such to retell the story of the nation. This would suggest that women's novels of the antebellum period ought to be evaluated as much for the ways they depict and critique the dynamics of fantasy, of “imaginary identification,” as for the ways they enact them.

Notes

1. See Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Antebellum Domesticity and Its Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), chapter one, and Cathy Davidson, “Preface: No More Separate Spheres!,” American Literature 70 (Sept. 1998): 443-63.

2. Here is a very preliminary working list of such characters/figures, beyond the one discussed in this essay: Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok, who sacrifices his marriage to a Puritan woman and the son they share, when her white husband, presumed dead, returns; Stowe's Uncle Tom, who, as a number of critics have shown, is essentially an emotionally overwrought domestic heroine writ large over the nation-defining issues of slavery and abolition; the famous tearful Indian of the 1970s anti-littering campaign, whose sentiment served to stand in for the loss of a supposedly once-pure national landscape; Latrell Sprewell, the once ostracized NBA player whose recent ad campaign spectacularizes his corn-rowed hair in the service of the slogan, “I'm the American dream.” Within recent work in cultural studies, Lauren Berlant's notion of the “diva citizen” can be seen both to expostulate on and embody something akin to what I am describing. See the chapter “Notes on Diva Citizenship” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

3. The best biographical work on Sedgwick to date is Mary Kelley, “Introduction” to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, ed. Kelley (Boston: Massachussetts Historical Society, 1993).

4. See Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

5. Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17.

6. It is important to note the degree to which Hope Leslie is still shaped by literary and political discourses of domesticity; I do not wish to argue that it is exceptional, or exceptionally politically engaged, by virtue of its historical and race plots.

7. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 207. Hereafter, page numbers of citations are from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the body of the text.

8. For the early history of this literary and intellectual legacy in America, see Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

9. Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 377-401.

10. The canon of critical work on middle-class female writers of the antebellum period has expanded dramatically in the past few years. The foundational works in this canon are generally taken to be Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); and Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). The most compelling critique of the shape this criticism has taken, and of the debates that have developed within it, appears in Romero, Home Fronts.

11. Also see Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History 1790-1860 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

12. Western Monthly Review I (1828): 289. Quoted in Mary Kelley's introduction to Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, x.

13. New-England Magazine 8 (1835): 489-90. Quoted in Maddox, Removals, 45.

14. The racist disavowal of Sedgwick's portrayal of Magawisca has been echoed as recently as the 1970s, when Edward Halsey Foster wrote that “Miss Sedgwick's ‘noble savages’ … are very much the creation of her own imagination; for there are few surviving records of the Puritan epoch which suggest that the savages were fully as noble as they appear to be in the novel.” See Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick (New York: Twayne, 1974), 77. Foster's comment is also remarkable in its resistance to recognizing the degree to which the novel throws into question the authority of the “few surviving records of the Puritan epoch.”

15. Quoted in Maddox, Removals, 45.

16. Philip Gould argues that this constitutes the book's criticism of the narrativization of history: “Sedgwick enacts exactly that which she calls Magawisca's narrative: a ‘recital’—a performance—of history … the text itself dramatizes the inevitability of historical relativism [Gould's emphasis].” See Gould, “Catharine Sedgwick's ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War,” American Literature 66:4 (Dec. 1994): 653.

17. For the most concise account of Sedgwick's researches in Puritan history, see Foster, Catharine Maria Sedgwick. For a reading of the relationship between Hope Leslie and the story of Pocahantas, see Robert Tilton, Pocahantas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 77-81.

18. That the absence is here inflicted by another Indian, Magawisca's own father, contributes to the degree to which the portrayal of Magawisca is at least partially informed by the myth of the “vanishing American,” the Indian who is always already dying and/or leaving, even before contact with white settlers. See Brian Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).

19. The nineteenth century is everywhere embedded in the novel, from the benevolent intimacy of the Fletchers' domestic hearth, to the smooth-around-the-edges liberality attributed to strict Puritan patriarchs like Governor Winthrop and the minister John Eliot, to forthright reminders from Sedgwick like: “We forget that the noble pilgrims lived and endured for us.” Maddox specifically upbraids Sedgwick for her “beatification” of Eliot, whose writings belie a fairly faithful upholding of Puritan orthodoxy in the matter of race relations. See Maddox, Removals, 109. The novel creates an imagined historical community by extending a narrative bridge from Puritan culture to that of her present-day, nineteenth-century bourgeois readership. This national present is explicitly built on the graves of those who died fighting in the Pequot wars.

20. The word “people” renders the referent of Magawisca's representativity ambiguous; it blurs the distinctions between categories such as family, nation, and race; it works toward the dehistoricization and decontextualization of her status as representative. It makes her available as representative of a host of qualities and ideals, and of a type of collectivity (this ambiguous notion of “people”) which she can share with Everell Fletcher.

21. See Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 33.

22. This mode of description is another strategy Hope Leslie shares with the Leatherstocking Tales.

23. See also Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

24. For an excellent reading of the novel as an imagination of “republican sisterhood,” see Judith Feterley's recent article, “‘My Sister! My Sister!’: The Rhetoric of Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” American Literature 70 (Sept. 1998): 491-516.

25. For a summary of such novels see Eric Sundquist, “The Literature of Expansion and Race,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 223-25.

26. The novel's plot here reverses the racial logic of the genre of the captivity narrative. For an insightful reading of Hope Leslie as caught up in, and critiquing, this genre, see Christopher Castiglia, Bound And Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, And White Womanhood From Mary Rowlandson To Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

27. Fetterley, “‘My Sister!,’” 495.

28. Berlant's essay “Notes on Diva Citizenship” describes “women who have sought … to transform the horizons and the terms of authority that mark both personal and national life in America by speaking about sexuality as the fundamental and fundamentally repressed horizon of national identity, legitimacy, and affective experience” (458). Although in a full study many differences would need to be attended to, I see Magawisca working within this tradition, which Berlant associates with Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, and Anita Hill.

29. Important readings of the novel's configurations of patriarchy appear in Maddox, Removals, and Dana Nelson, “Sympathy as Strategy in Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,” in The Culture of Sentiment, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

30. See Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

31. One might seek to establish a connection between this move and Sedgwick's own lifelong unmarried status. Such a possibility is worth musing upon, but I am hesitant to reinforce what I consider to be the burdensome autobiographical, experiential assumptions often placed upon women's writing of this era. For more on this see Judith Fetterley, “Commentary: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and the Politics of Recovery,” American Literary History 6 (Fall 1994): 600-611, and my dissertation, “Obscene Sentiments: Reading, Effects, and Sentimental Form in Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1997).

32. This firmly places Magawisca within what has been called the “cult of the Vanishing American” recurrent in antebellum literature representing native peoples. See Dippie, The Vanishing American.

33. Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 173. It could well be argued that Warner takes a counterposition to this overly simplified version of literary history in his “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in which he argues for the centrality of the mass public witness specifically to citizens who bear “embodied particularities.”

34. For different critiques of Warner see Fliegelman, Declaring Independence and Davidson, “Preface.”