The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (review)

The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects by Renée L. Bergland. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2000. Pp. 224. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Renée Bergland has provided an insightful reading of a particular motif in American literature that presents new perspectives for those interpreters of American literature who teach American Studies-grounded survey courses in high school and undergraduate college classrooms. However, one must accept Bergland's premise—which many, but not all, American Studies professors do—that American "land is haunted because it is stolen" (9) in order to accept her most compelling and unique conclusions. Her broad understanding of American intellectual history informs her initial discussion of the topic of "Indian Ghosts and American Subjects," and her frame of reference ranges chronologically in the balance of the text from Cotton Mather and Mary Rowlandson to Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Samuel Woodworth to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In the final chapter, she engages in a concluding discussion concerning the "Spectral Indian" which illustrates its argument through continuing reference to Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983) and to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977). Although her informed discussion deftly justifies the relevance both of King's popular culture and of Silko's work of high culture in the same paragraph (indeed, often in the same sentence!), her discussion of Ceremony is not as nuanced and insightful as her treatment of earlier American writers in the text.

Writing very consciously in a poststructuralist context, Bergland focuses on "the consistency and the centrality of the language of Native American spectralization" (21). Such language has its origin in the Puritan religious jeremiad, and such a perspective is familiar for teachers and critics who commonly accept the notion of the New England colonies as a City on a Hill, engaged in a significant religious battle against the Other/Evil yet with residual guilt for the indigenous Indian whose personhood and culture are necessarily marginalized by EuroChristianity. The ethical constitution of the Puritan, as Bergland notes, is structured along the lines of an individual and cultural continuing struggle against Satan, a dual perspective which Bergland accurately attributes to earlier critics in American Studies, most notably Sacvan Bercovitch in The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975). Bergland reads in Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative (1682) the very crux of this identity dilemma in early notions of American culture, since Rowlandson represents "a subjectivity that at once represses and requires, identifies with and despises the uncanny figure of the Native American" (34). Bergland understands the spectral Indian as a marginalized and subjugated yet haunting figure; the predominant EuroAmerican culture overwhelms both geopolitically and physically, demanding exile or co-optation, yet there is residual guilt, a "haunted" (34, 37 and passim) feeling, in Bergland's terms, about what the culture has done to the ghostly native.

As Bergland moves chronologically into the American Revolutionary War period, she notes a national obsession with "North American ghosts" in texts as disparate as the U.S. Constitution (1787) and the Philip Freneau poem, "Indian Burying Ground" (1787). Bergland correctly notes that as the American Enlightenment was coalescing into a democratic country, the status and plight of the Indian became worse or invisible or both. The insidiousness of the linguistic marginalization lies in the fact that: "By means of the metaphors of ghostliness, Native Americans, as a race, are absorbed into the white American mind as an aspect of American consciousness" (48). Such absorption of identity not only denies the Indian a place in the American future; it also muddles the various legacies of the past, since an invisible or haunted or otherwise limited identity generally forfeits any ability to convey a coherent narrative of the past.

As the discussion moves into the early years of the American Republic, Bergland locates in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntley (1799) and in various Washington Irving sketches examples of American Indians that serve as "ghostly...