Collecting and Collected: Native American Subjectivity and Transatlantic Transactions in The Female American

This article examines The Female American as the product of an eighteenth-century British fascination with Native Americans and their cultural artifacts. It argues that the text borrows from the popular literary genre of the it-narrative in order to capitalize on widespread, public interest in Native Americans while simultaneously grappling with the place of Native American peoples in colonial hierarchies. Viewed both as sovereign subjects—especially in the cases of political envoys to Britain—and as traveling curiosities or spectacles, Native American persons occupied a liminal condition. The Female American thus represents a potential case study for British literary forms and interests transplanted to emergent American political and colonial discourses.