The Cultural Life of Feeling

Page 6 American Book Review Menely continued on next page Wilkinson continued from previous page critical eye on the rhetorical interaction between a Native woman writer and her white audience, an interaction that requires careful management. Her discussion of Callahan’s Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891) demonstrates the complexity of the rhetorical situation; Carpenter shows how the author, because of the limited narratives available to her as an Indian woman, must rely on investing her white heroine, rather than the indigenous title character, with righteous anger. Additionally, that righteous anger is only available by “drawing upon a white paternalism.” These kinds of concessions to audience pose an obvious danger: does a native writer like Callahan enfeeble the force of her resistance by flattering her white audience? Carpenter argues that Callahan partially side-steps this trap when she breaks from the conventional sentimental novel and uses that break to subvert the white heroine-Indian victim narrative by allowing her Lakota character, Chikena, an “indigenous anger” marked by “irony and sarcasm.” All three of the authors utilize sarcasm to critique white narratives about Native peoples. However, in contrast to Callahan’s displacement of emotion, Carpenter argues that Johnson explores two scripts of anger available to Indian women: the virtuous anger of the “fiery Indian maid” and a “savage fury” that separates Johnson from her white audience. One narrative works to allow her white audience to align themselves with righteous Native anger while the other challenges “a conventional sentimental resolution” and works to reassert Native nationhood over and above white society.Additionally, according to Carpenter, Winnemucca, in her nonfiction account Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), is most successful at wielding irony and sarcasm within the sentimental discourse in order to critique white “civilizers” and to resist their stereotypes of NativeAmerican “savages.” Winnemucca’s use of the language of domesticity “legitimate[s] [her] within the sentimental discourse,” and “gain[s] her readers’empathy” while simultaneously asserting “that Paiute morality is greater than theirs” and showing “whites’ mistreatment of the Paiutes…as an assault on domesticity.” Carpenter’s epilogue, a lengthy discussion of how present-day Paiute peoples view Winnemucca as both “an impressive representative” and “an object of suspicion,” enhances the value of this chapter, especially for those of us teaching Life Among the Piutes to non-Native students who believe American Indians only exist in the past. Carpenter’s observations connect white women reformers and Native American women writers and activists. Carpenter covers a great deal of ground in this text. Along with the aforementioned issues, she problematizes the binary of traditionalist versus assimilationist as those terms are applied to nineteenth-century Native American writers, and contributes to the discussion of race as a construction by both self and audience. Particularly interesting is Carpenter’s commentary on the idea of nineteenthcentury white women gaining a certain agency by “playing Indian”—that is, championing the rights of Native peoples and deploying a righteous indignation over the woes they are forced to suffer. Her observations are at the beginning of a rich vein of scholarship on the connections between white women reformers and Native American women writers and activists. In her concluding chapter, Carpenter deftly includes her experiences in the classroom, writing four “Case Studies.” Ending with these introspective moments works to connect the early texts discussed in the previous three chapters and the protest movements of the early and later twentieth century discussed in the beginning of the final chapter with the representations of history and of NativeAmerican peoples presented in the classroom. Carpenter’s decision to turn the “looking glass,” to borrow a phrase from early nineteenth-century Pequot writer William Apess, on her own teaching practices encourages us all to do the same. Elizabeth Wilkinson is an assistant professor of Native American literature at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is currently at work on a book focusing on Native American women’s transrhetorical fight for land rights. the Cultural Life of Feeling tobias Menely Affect has been the subject of a great deal of recent scholarly interest, and yet many of its qualities, particularly its qualities as a cultural phenomenon, remain...