The Sentimental Realisms of S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest

S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest (1891) opens with a romanticized and inaccurate image of the Muscogee people living in tepees.¹ Because the novel fails to establish either a canonical or a racially representative realism, it has been identified as sentimental, romantic, melodramatic, ethnographic, assimilationist, and even polemical; critics have tied it to temperance narratives, reform discourse, Native history, and the protest novel. Although associated with myriad genres, Wynema has not been located in relation to the centrally important late-nineteenth-century rise of realism. While the novel challenges canonical definitions of the genre, it engages both antebellum realist questions of ethnic difference and late nineteenth-century constructions of ethnic or racial realism. Wynema deploys forms of realism distinct from canonical literary or racial representational definitions of the genre, instead offering variations shaped by sentimentalism. The novel's realisms challenge the foundations of Scottish Common Sense moral philosophy and run counter to the perceived verisimilitude of Euro-American literary realism. Wynema's sentimental realisms disrupt sentimental/realist and assimilationist/traditionalist or resistant binaries and complicate the association of ethnic women writers with a sentimentalism that is presumed assimilationist.

Critics have defined Callahan's use of sentimentalism in contradictory ways. Beth H. Piatote, for instance, terms sentimentalism "protest literature" while A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff contrasts the "protest novel" and the "domestic romance" (a formulation often equated with sentimentalism).² Because Wynema emphasizes the connections its characters form, the novel consistently aligns with Joanne Dobson's definition of sentimentalism as "a written imaginative mode defined by a cluster of conventional subjects, themes, characterization modes, narrative and lyric patterns, tropes, tonal qualities, and linguistic patterns focused around relational experience and the consequences of its rupture."³ Like writings by other early Native authors including John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute), and Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin, Yankton Sioux), Callahan's novel works in relation to the Stowe-style sentimental discourse that arose in the antebellum United States as a way of confronting issues such as slavery. Paula Bernat Bennett argues that late-nineteenth-century American Indian women writers in particular "deploy[ed] the rhetorical strategies of high-sentimental sympathy politics … as did white and black women abolitionists in the antebellum period. That is, they use[d] them to make those who oppress aware of what they do."⁴ Wynema adopts the mode to this end, using two distinct sentimental realisms to argue against the mistreatment and dispossession of American Indians. In so doing the novel emphasizes the difficulties ethnic women writers faced when taking up sentimentalism.

The sentimental realisms of Callahan's novel take two forms: one based in the Scottish Common Sense moral philosophy underlying antebellum sentimental discourse and one shaped by late-nineteenth-century Euro-American expectations for ethnic realisms. Antebellum sentimentalism is often defined as unrealistic in comparison to the realism that followed the Civil War. However, the discourse "was considered in its time to be realistic" because of its roots in Scottish Common Sense moral philosophy and its construction in reaction to prior comparatively "less realist" ways of understanding the world.⁵ Gregg Camfield explains how writers such as Stowe drew on the teachings of "Common Sense philosophers, [whose name] hints at their solution to the epistemological problems raised by Locke's philosophy … [and who] expressed their disdain for deductive systems that sophistically denied the reality of a world outside of the mind."⁶ Yet their moral philosophy was grounded in a cultural relativism that undermined the efforts of ethnic authors who took up U.S. literary sentimentalism. Scottish Common Sense thinkers "allowed for the corroboration of knowledge by," in part, "emphasizing that the senses on which they relied were common to all normal human beings."⁷ The issue was that "few of the Scottish philosophers accepted the relativistic potential of their own technique; that is, when they found societies whose moral codes, for example, cast doubt on their idea of the moral sense, they dismissed those societies as abnormal or perverted."⁸ Ethnic authors who engaged antebellum sentimentalism thus engaged a discourse that...