Anachronistic Imaginings: Hope Leslie 's Challenge to Historicism

The defiance voiced by Catharine Sedgwick's seventeenth-century Indian heroine Magawisca to a tribunal of Puritan magistrates near the end of Hope Leslie (1827) at once distills the novel's major preoccupation—with the nation's history and with historical authority in general—and recapitulates its primary narrative strategy—the self-conscious use of anachronism—in a single utterance: "I demand of thee death or liberty!" (309). This act of ventriloquy, throwing Patrick Henry's iconic eighteenth-century voice simultaneously into the seventeenth-century world of the novel and the nineteenth-century world of Sedgwick's readers, performs a double service. First, the quintessential expression of the spirit of the Revolutionary moment, Henry's famous locution is recontextualized when articulated by an Indian woman, just as the figure of the Indian woman is transformed by drawing on the power of American nationalist rhetoric. That is, the fervor of the Revolutionary fathers, their oratorical authority, suddenly appears autochthonous, as if somehow native to the land itself, while the native Magawisca becomes a protonationalist, less an enemy than a source of founding principles. This explains why Magawisca appears at her trial with her "national pride . . . manifest" (297) in her native Indian dress and why her first words to the judges echo the political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence: "I am your prisoner and ye may slay me, but I deny your right to judge me. My people have never passed under your yoke—not one of my race has ever acknowledged your authority" (302).¹

Second, by evoking simultaneously several distinct periods in time, the linearity of historical time becomes entangled, like a triple helix, a strand of DNA, as three different historical moments are woven together: within the present of the novel's colonial narrative instance its Revolutionary future is recalled, all from the vantage point of the third decade of the nineteenth century when Sedgwick wrote the novel. Yet, for reasons I will explore below, recent critics of the novel have overlooked Hope Leslie's complex reimagining of historical time, treating as authoritative only one of these moments: its time of production—the context that has become fundamental to the kinds of historicism that currently predominate among Americanist literary scholars.² As is by now well known, the historicist tendency is to treat literary characters and their creators alike as the property of the moment in history that called them into existence. In this sense, historicism is dedicated to precisely the obverse of the procedure Sedgwick here employs; not to contravening the linearity of historical time, but to keeping texts assigned to their proper place in history.³ Consequently, while the historicist procedure of reading a text in relation to its context often yields valuable insights, it also necessarily imposes a certain conception of history on the texts of the past—even when, as in the case of Hope Leslie, the text itself is intent on calling into question precisely that concept. To take seriously Hope Leslie's critique of conventional history's before-now-after sequence would be to allow the novel to put considerable pressure on any historicist frame (old or new) brought to bear on it.

This essay thus has two interrelated concerns: first, to offer a close analysis of Hope Leslie's metahistorical discourse, what we might call its de-formation of history. Not only do I take seriously the novel's many historical and temporal entanglements; I view them as its most salient feature. Hope Leslie provides an alternative conception of what history is. My second aim here is to explore the way in which the novel's implied theory of history engages and challenges current historicist practice. Because the novel's "historical" footing is always slippery and because it imagines history anachronistically, it seems to resist and confound that most basic of historicist moves: the attempt to place it "in context." This resistance, I want to suggest, is something that we historicists...