"A Tyrannically Democratic Force": The Symbolic and Cultural Function of Clothing in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie

In his study On Human Finery, Quentin Bell observes that "fashion is at best a tyrannically democratic force" (63). The phrase "tyrannically democratic" is paradoxical, of course, since it associates the idea of an absolute leader with the idea of majority rule. In early nineteenth-century America, the statement would have appeared especially paradoxical because the recent American Revolution was widely interpreted as the triumph of democracy over tyranny. Bell suggests, though, that, at least where clothing is concerned, democracy can be a form of tyranny. When a society imposes an official or unofficial dress code on its members and then attempts to impose that dress on other cultures, it is acting as a tyrant; subtly but aggressively, it is insisting on its own rightness and superiority. A strong cultural belief in the propriety of uniform dress may indicate a deeper conviction that one's ideology and customs are right. Bell's observation calls into question the degree of freedom posited by democracy, which can indeed become tyranny unless it contains a measure of respect for cultural or individual difference.

Interpretations of early nineteenth-century literature can benefit from an understanding of the connection between tyrannical democracy and clothing. Much of the recent criticism of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) has focused on the novel's ambivalent attitude toward Native Americans, which poses a historical challenge to the democracy that the United States held up as an essential nation-defining ideal in the wake of the American Revolution. Dana Nelson argues that "Hope Leslie is finally equivocal. While Sedgwick clearly sees the necessity of reenvisioning racial constructs, she is so clearly invested in Anglo-America's historical inheritance that she cannot resolve the 'Indian problem' in any meaningful way for her contemporary readers" (202). Douglas Ford also concentrates on the novel's "problematic nature concerning questions of race," using the ambiguity of Sedgwick's language to demonstrate the novel's "tension... contrary to the intentions Sedgwick outlines in her preface" and to underscore the novel's "complexity" (82). Both critics reveal the crisis of the contemporary reader who wants to locate a resolution to the problems of race that the novel embodies.

The novel's ambivalence applies not only to the conflict between Native American and Euro-American culture but to other parallel conflicts, notably the power imbalance between men and women. Hope Leslie is clearly a moral novel, but one with no clear moral. Any search to locate the book's moral center is frustrated by its shifting emphases: the reader doesn't even meet the heroine until nearly one-third of the way into the novel, after the narrative has been dominated by Magawisca, one of the most eloquent and richly drawn Native American characters in nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction. What would seem to be the "moral" in the last line of the story applies to Esther Downing's decision to forego marriage, a platitude more relevant to Sedgwick's own life than to the rest of the book. There are glaring inconsistencies in the way Hope develops, or fails to do so, and the narrator never fully accepts or rejects the ideology of any of the three cultures available to Hope: Puritan society, Native American society, or the Romantic individualism of Sedgwick's time. Using Foucault's writings, Ford addresses this interpretive difficulty by concentrating on "the plurality of discourses which produce power" rather than on the novel's moral resolution (83). I would like to continue this discussion by focusing not on the discourse of language but rather on the non-verbal discourse of clothing which functions as a multivalent symbol in Hope Leslie. Clothing in this novel carries its traditional moral significance, but it is also a symbol of power that subtly links the novel's race and gender issues to...