History, Memory, and the Echoes of Equivalence in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie

In the second volume of James Fenimore Cooper's Notions of the Americans, the narrator, a British traveler to America, gives this account of equality:

Equal rights do not, in any part of America, imply a broad, general, and unequivocal equality. . . . [The American] does not give political power to the pauper, nor to females, nor to minors, nor to idiots, nor yet even to his priests. All he aims at is justice; and in order to do justice, he gives political rights to all those who, he thinks, can use them without abuse.

(265)

Such is the contrarian quality of a national myth: nowhere in America does equality mean equality. Cooper's description differs from Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's and Benjamin Franklin's in the 1780s, as well as those written by such touring Europeans as Alexis de Tocqueville and Fanny Trollope in the 1830s.¹ In Notions, the visitor defines equality as a form of natural justice in which uneven distributions of goods and privileges reflect the harmonious and unbiased mandates of nature—fair, but rarely equivalent or same.² According to the bachelor's line of reasoning, American institutions attempt to replicate nature's equity by distributing civic rights and privileges along lines of such presumably natural and thus impartial categories as gender, age, intelligence, and race—all neatly capped off by the reassuring notion of merit: equality in America belongs to "those who, he thinks, can use [their rights] without abuse."

This version of equality, which I will refer to as equity, unites the nation in the face of impending dissolution at the end of the eighteenth century by ascribing differences among Americans to an impartial power—God, Nature, Reason. Equity does not erase the differences of social standing, race, or gender, but orders and harmonizes diversity, supposedly "equalizing" variety through the evenhanded application of justice. In contrast, equality as equivalence suggests an American fantasy at its most idealistic: equivalence describes versions of the American myth that recall a lost state of nature or a utopic, revolutionary condition—both distinguished by a universal sense of material well-being and a sameness in living. For the most part, notions of equivalence play second fiddle to those of equity in early American ideology, but the former never disappear altogether. When the contradictions that sustain equity prove too unwieldy, some among the nation's writers are sure to call attention back to images or arguments of equivalence, invoking the Declaration of Independence or a bygone yeoman pastoral.

This essay examines the literary response of early national writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick to what increasingly becomes an untenable contradiction for many middle-class white women: their self-identification with a nation that proclaims equality as a founding truth while at the same time subordinating women. I argue that one of the major accomplishments of Sedgwick's third and best-known novel, Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts, lies in its creative refutation of Federalist circumlocutions of equality that shape women's condition through the middle of the century. Sedgwick contends against a national myth of American equality that subordinates women under the sign of equity. In its stead, she reasserts through historical portrayals of national commitment the equivalence of women's and men's intelligence and moral capacity. Sedgwick's writing often runs counter to the prejudices of her upbringing,³ and her return to the rhetoric of equivalence implicitly raises a challenge to the preference for equity in fictions of male writers who were Sedgwick's contemporaries, such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge and James Fenimore Cooper.⁴ Sedgwick represents a transformative and perfectible self in place of essentialist portrayals of fixed race and class identities. Women and men in her novels project individual personalities—evolving through the cultivation of moral and intellectual faculties.

For Sedgwick, the notion of a perfectible self came chiefly from the Unitarianism to which she converted as an adult. As a friend and correspondent of the influential Unitarian minister Dr. William Ellery Channing,⁵ Sedgwick was well versed in the principles of...