Literature to 1800

The intersection of conflicting perspectives emerges as the most prominent theme in this year’s investigations of early colonial writings, while this year’s EAL roundtable “Historicizing Early American Race” brought one of the most explosive topics in the humanities to center stage. William J. Scheick is responsible for the first section of this essay, and Jim Egan for the second.

i The Early Colonial Period

Whether representing the New World, Europe, Native Americans, gender constructions, religious beliefs, or political ideals, the collision of narrative discourses in this year’s studies of early colonial writings was incapable of transforming volatile experience into a stable ideology.

a. Native Americans and First Encounters

Scholars have erred in trusting the accuracy of Native American treaty oratory, James H. Merrell argues in “ ‘I desire all that I have said . . . may be taken down aright’: Revisiting Teedyuscung’s 1756 Treaty Council Speeches” (WMQ 63: 777–826). In a tour-de-force demonstration of the importance of close textual analysis Merrell examines variant versions of one Indian’s addresses. While Merrell’s method is not definitive in recovering authentic Native American voices, it does suggest ways to extract something of what Indians might actually have said.

In The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh (No. Car.) Gordon M. Sayre tries to identify the common baseline of colonial and early national representations of Native Americans. Discounting the impact of both imperialist nostalgia and the vanishing Indian motif, Sayre claims that borrowing the form of tragic drama accounts for the appeal of both literary and nonliterary representations of Indians. Audiences presumably experienced fear and pity when responding to tragic renderings of heroic Indian chiefs and doomed Native American resistance. Susan Castillo reaches a similar conclusion in Colonial Encounters, a review of a wide range of early American Spanish writings relying on theatrical forms, especially dialogue. American cross-cultural identity or hybridity, Castillo contends, was the product of encounters conducted or imagined as if they were theatrical performances.

An emphasis on theatrical effect is also evident in documents collected in two outstanding anthologies. Captive Histories: English, French and Native Narratives of the 1704 Deerfield Raid, ed. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney (Mass.), ranges from Mohawk and Abenaki oral accounts (including “The Story of the Bell”) to John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive. In their examination of the Deerfield episode from multiple perspectives, the editors provide new materials and new translations. Equally valuable is Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America (Nebraska, 2005), a substantial collection edited by Brian Swann.

b. Colonial Poetry and Self-Portraiture

A Spanish nun’s poetry is highlighted in Margo Echenberg’s “Self-Fashioning in Self-Portraiture in Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz” (Feminist Interventions, pp. 27–41). Without violating artistic, social, or moral constraints, Sor Juana used various images and concepts to represent herself as authorized to speak publicly in spite of being a woman. Conventional monetary metaphors can become occasions of empowered speech, according to Alina Sokol in “Unequal Words: Sor Juana and the Poetics of Money in New Spain” (EAL 41: 455–71). The emphasis on money in the Mexico of her time, including the payment she received for writing, led Sor Juana to harbor doubts about the suitability of the customary economic metaphors of baroque poetic tradition to the conditions of the New World.

How Sor Juana’s and Anne Bradstreet’s allusions to trade and commodity are inescapably embedded in the fallacies of patriarchal power is Tamara Harvey’s topic in “ ‘My Goods Are True’: Tenth Muses in the New World Market” (Feminist Interventions, pp. 13–26). Instead of establishing their voices within a rhetoric of resistance, both of these poets authorized themselves by participating in the colonizing language of European empire formation. Bradstreet’s struggle with self-authorization is emphasized in Lisa Day-Lindsey’s “Bradstreet’s ‘The Author to Her Book’ ” (Expl 64: 66–69), which focuses on Puritan social anxieties associated with deformed newborns. Bradstreet’s expression of shame and guilt over the publication of her...