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  • The "Forgotten Era"Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier
  • Rebecca S. Wingo

In the summer of 1860 the House of Beadle and Adams (HBA) launched their first dime novel, starting a genre filled with sensational, typically Western adventure stories woven with a delicate layer of romance and lessons about Victorian morality and racial stereotypes. The first among many rival dime novel publishers, HBA's inaugural novel, Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter (June 9, 1860) by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, chronicles the relationship between Malaeska and her mixed-blood son. Two days before Malaeska's release, the publishing house ran an advertisement in the New York Tribune: "BOOKS FOR THE MILLION! A dollar book for a dime."1 Before they shut down their printing presses in 1898, HBA alone published 3,158 separate dimes.2 Despite their significant contribution to the genre of Western literature, dime novels were replaced as quickly as they started by the cloth-bound book, leading some scholars to term the dime novel era from 1860 to 1900 the "forgotten era."3

Stephens contributed six more dime novels between 1860 and 1864, ending with The Indian Queen, the third novel in a trilogy about a mixed-race woman who returns to the Seneca Nation to assume leadership after the chief (her father) dies. On the surface, Stephens's first and last novels are extraordinarily similar: they are about Native American tribes in the Northeast during the colonial period, center on women, and discuss interracial sex. Since HBA published them in 1860 and 1864 respectively, one might even link them to Civil War era racial ideologies. However, this connection elides a more probing read of the racial subtext. Malaeska actually originated in 1836, not 1860, as a short story called "The Jockey Cap," published in Stephens's first magazine, Portland Magazine. Comparing Malaeska to The Indian Queen highlights the cultural and social shifts that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century America. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, racial theories began shifting away from the [End Page 121] belief that Native Americans could assimilate into "civilized" white society, favoring instead the idea that no amount of social uplift could separate Native Americans from their "savage" blood.4 While Malaeska reflects more of the 1830s mentalité, The Indian Queen reflects the growing emphasis on scientific racism. These two dime novels tell a national story as they reveal dominant American attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. They also illuminate the cultural importance of female authors who used the power of suggestion in their narratives, both to challenge and to confirm the confines of Victorian gender roles, using Native Americans as proxy stand-ins for white women's liberation.

ann stephens and the history of the dime novel

Before we can understand the narratives, we must first understand the author and the period in which she wrote. It is no coincidence that HBA chose Stephens's work as their first dime novel. Her prolific writing career with a wide audience made her the ideal choice to boost their immediate popularity and success. Stephens grew up in a solid middle-class family. Her father, John Winterbotham, worked a steady job at Humphreysville Manufactoring Company in Connecticut, which ensured that Stephens would receive an excellent education. She read voraciously at the public library in what her biographer Paola Gemme calls a "self-imposed literary apprenticeship." She married Edward Stephens, a local merchant, in 1831. The couple moved to Maine in 1834 and started their own regional magazine called Portland Magazine. Edward served as publisher, Ann as editor and main contributor.5 Stephens's initial foray into editing, literature, and writing launched her career. The couple moved to New York City in 1837, where she became the associate editor of publisher William Snowden's Ladies Companion, a monthly magazine. In addition to contributing literature to the magazine, Stephens increased circulation from 3,000 to 17,000 readers per month. Her work for Ladies Companion further propelled her success: she went on to hold an associate editor position at Graham's Magazine alongside Edgar Allan Poe in 1841; co-edited Lady's World of Fashion, which later became Peterson's Magazine (1842–53...

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