Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians, and: Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (review)

Scholars have long recognized that there can be a racist edge to antiracist sentiment. Nineteenth-century writers who intended to fight racism (Lydia Maria Child, for example, or Harriet Beecher Stowe) used sentimental tropes and conventions that sometimes reinforced the stereotypes or practices they intended to counter. But sentimental conventions are not all bad. During the past decades, critics including Glenn Hendler, Mary Louise Kete, Marianne Noble, Susan Ryan, Shirley Samuels, Karen Sanchez-Eppler, and Laura Wexler (to name a few) have established that understanding sentimentalism is central to understanding nineteenth-century American literary and cultural studies, in large part because race and gender were often treated sentimentally. Even so, relatively little attention has been paid to the relation of sentimentalism to Native American writings and issues. Examining the convergence of Native American nineteenth-century literature and the discourse of sentimentalism proves remarkably productive for Cari M. Carpenter and Laura Mielke in their recent books. Although the two scholars approach sentimentalism differently, both expand its definition and both implicitly reject Renato Rosaldo's notion of "imperialist nostalgia" as an oversimplification. They are well aware of the dangers of "missionary zeal" (as Carpenter styles "non-Native anger on behalf of American Indians" [137]). Nonetheless, both Carpenter and Mielke seek to recuperate sentimentalism's potential for antiracist activism—Carpenter by emphasizing anger, Mielke sympathy.

In Seeing Red: Sentimentalism, Anger, and American Indians, Carpenter convincingly argues that sentimental tropes are effective vehicles for Native American women writers' anger. She contends that "sentimentality is a tactic through which anger may be articulated in the defense of an indigenous nationhood" (15). Her larger point, also quite important, is that anger itself is a crucial part of sentimentalism. Seeing Red examines works by three Native American women writers: S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. The book explores "how feeling is crucial to playing Indian—and female" (10). Carpenter's focus on Native American women writers at the close of the nineteenth century is praiseworthy in itself. Any book about this topic would be a winner because there is not enough scholarship about these writers. Further, Seeing Red shows why such scholarship is important—Carpenter's focus on anger, necessitated by the anger in the sentimental texts she discusses, expands the boundaries of sentimentalism. For example, in her reading of Zitkala-Sa, Carpenter points out that the tears we associate with sentimentalism do not necessarily preclude rage. In a passage that Laura Wexler has described as "anti-sentimental," Zitkala-Sa describes weeping and mashing turnips so hard that she grinds glass into them. Carpenter disagrees with the antisentimental label. Zitkala-Sa may be angry, she contends, but she is also a sentimental writer: "[T]he genre's emphasis on the power of tears remains intact" (131).

Angry tears are certainly possible—and writing that calls forth angry tears of sympathy with Native Americans enables (or even forces) its readers to "see red." Carpenter's book shows that studying Native American writers enriches our understanding of American literature more broadly. Seeing red, in this case, helps us to see clearly and to gain insight into both nineteenth-century Native American politics and sentimental literature.

Mielke's Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum America also redefines sentimentalism, as it "reconstructs a critical middle ground between a naïve acceptance of sentimentalism and a prejudiced dismissal of all sympathy as suspect" (10). The concept of a "critical middle ground" derives in part from Richard White's description of Native/White borderlands as a "middle ground" and offers another good example of why attending to Native American studies can be so useful. Mielke's central point is that even though sentimentalism may be double-edged, its absence—which necessitates the absence of cross...