Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians (review)

Cari Carpenter’s Seeing Red sheds light on the “under-acknowledged connection between anger, sentimentality, and nationhood” by examining their expression in the writings of S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca (3). Noting that conventional sentimental forms rely on distinctions between “savagery” and “civilization,” Carpenter acknowledges that Native uses of sentimentalism were and are fraught, but reading within the contexts of nineteenth-century literature and Native American history, she demonstrates that unconventional sentimentalism allows these authors to articulate anger and assert indigenous rights. Of the three, Carpenter finds Winnemucca’s work most successful in ironizing sentimental direct address and tropes to critique the government, assert her Paiute identity, “challenge her audience’s expectations of ‘savagery’ and ‘civility’ and … affirm her nation” (25). Carpenter also responds to critiques of these authors as “unCreek” (Craig Womack on Callahan), assimilated (Paula Bennett on Johnson), or traitorous (contemporary Paiutes on Winnemucca, including Nellie Shaw Harnar and Lalla Scott). Noting the complexity of their positions in their dependence on white audiences, the limited scripts available to them, and Winnemucca’s acknowledgement of her role as translator for whites, Carpenter carves out space for these women in Native American literary history as writers of resistant texts while extending our notion of sentimentalism.

Carpenter argues that in Wynema (1997), Callahan was limited by sentimental scripts of Indian reformers in which whites express anger on behalf of indigenous people. According to Carpenter, Genevieve engages in this temporary state of “playing angry”; meanwhile, Wynema remains undeveloped, a childlike character in need of the protection of whites, representing the sentimental position of othered groups like Indians (see chapter 1). Only by breaking out of sentimental modes and romance plots and inserting narratives about Wounded Knee can Callahan represent an angry Indian woman. Carpenter points out that this break is temporary, giving way to scripts of Indian vanishing, suggesting that Callahan could not escape the power of available narratives.

In Johnson’s poetry, stories, and essays, Carpenter finds more sustained expression of indigenous anger, but she acknowledges that the righteous ire of a lady protecting her virtue appeared to her audience as the stereotypic sexy “fiery Indian maid” (55). While the sexual innuendo of those who thrilled to her recitations is open to interpretation, Carpenter follows biographers Victoria Strong-Boag and Carole Gerson in recognizing Johnson’s sexuality and notes the skill with which both she and Winnemucca negotiated the expectations of white women audiences in manipulating sentimental tropes to include indigenous women within the bounds of virtuous womanhood.

Winnemucca’s Life among the Piutes (1883) contains more opportunities for asserting Paiute nationhood and personal anger. Carpenter repeatedly shows Winnemucca’s active agency in shaping her text, despite a white editor and familiar language like the “Great White Father.” She further notes how Winnemucca complicates the individualistic notion of agency by speaking for her community. Carpenter concludes her chapter on Winnemucca by examining contemporary responses, including the work of a white activist, which allows for a brief reflection on her implication in the complexities of white women speaking on behalf of Native Americans. In the conclusion, Carpenter connects these nineteenth-century texts to twentieth-century resistant literature, showing, as Robert Warrior does for William Apes in The People and the Word (2005), that literary assertions of Native rights begin before twentieth-century indigenous activism. This well-researched and thought-provoking text is worth the attention of anyone interested in nineteenth-century women writers, sentimentalism, early Native literature, and Indian-white cultural interchange.