Magawisca's Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie

It has now become something of a critical commonplace in American cultural and literary studies to argue that the conceptual division between public and private spheres—a paradigm which has been particularly influential in work on the antebellum era—is artificial, ideological, and largely designed to enforce a social hierarchy between the genders. It has even been persuasively argued that the repeated critique of this binarism by feminist and other critics has unintentionally helped to maintain its authority. ¹ But before doing away with this dualism as a frame of analysis, we might be wise to attend to our writers’ and critics’ continuing preoccupation with it (and with its deconstruction), one which I believe dates back to the earliest decades of the nation. By “preoccupation” I mean to emphasize the service these categories have provided for a rhetoric of fantasy, of imaginations of the self and its ability (or lack of ability) to act and to speak as a citizen, as an American self, in an American nation and culture. A particular branch of this genealogy of fantasy, usually found in work by liberal Euro-American writers, constructs people of color as mediating, critical figures in the always already problematic schema of public and private life. ² For a liberal, white writer, such a figure is embedded with deconstructive force, because he or she appears to wear the social on his or her skin—his or her very body is infused with a degree of cultural conflict which threatens the distinction between politics and the personal before s/he has uttered a word. Within this tradition, these characters of color, by means of the sensations and particularities that make up their selfhood, become the means of the author’s general critique of the national configuration of public and private.

This usually means, more nearly, framing an issue as confined to the private sphere of individual deliberation—a sphere which masks the fact that certain individuals’ deliberations are taken more seriously than others—and demanding the interposition of a public debate, a public conscience. Thus, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the horrific spectacle of whipped black bodies, especially Uncle Tom’s, is meant to dramatize the inappropriateness of leaving the slavery question up to individuals, individual families, or individual regions of the nation. Catherine Sedgwick’s 1827 novel Hope Leslie is a still earlier instance of a slightly different take on the private/public dualism. By investing remarkable narrative authority in an Indian woman, Magawisca, this historical novel of early New England dramatizes public issues, primarily the colony’s relations with native people, as foundational for the actualization of a model of private subjectivity suited to the proto-United States. The novel tells a revisionary history of the nation to its antebellum readership, one in which the privacy of Americans was secured through fascination with, and attacks on, the bodies of Indians. It thus attempts to ensure a place for corporeality, for embodied struggle, in the history of the nation.

Sedgwick, the daughter of one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Theodore Sedgwick, was intimate with the public life of the young nation, and grew up in a house which offered her many more opportunities for cultural growth than most families and schools of the time. ³ Influenced like many of her contemporaries by the writings of Maria Edgeworth, her first two novels followed the parameters of “literary domesticity,” a phrase coined by Mary Kelley to describe the interest of many antebellum female writers in fiction set in the home, often telling the story of a young girl’s rise into virtuous womanhood. ⁴ In 1826, perhaps buoyed by readings of Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) and the early volumes of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Sedgwick set out to write a novel of early America turning on the presence of native characters. While the novel is set in the colonial era that many writers of the antebellum era found so appealing, it also alludes implicitly to the debates taking place in her time over forced Indian removal, especially of the Cherokees...