By Halley Lane
In 1827, Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her frontier romance novel, Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, which details the intertwined lives of several young men and women from Massachusetts’ Puritan colonial settlements and the indigenous tribe, the Pequots. The novel takes place in the late 1630s in the wake of the Pequot War, during which the colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, along with several other New England indigenous tribes, waged a genocidal war against the Pequots. When Sedgwick wrote her novel in the 1820s, relations between indigenous tribes and Americans were growing increasingly dire. Where the Pequots and the Puritans had once fought their battles, few Native American tribes remained to mourn their history. Later in 1830, President Andrew Jackson would sign the Indian Removal Act, forcibly exiling Native American tribes from the south to territories west of the Mississippi River. Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie moves sentimentalism from the domestic space to the frontier in order to sentimentalize the relationships between the Puritans and the Pequots during the mid-seventeenth century. Her message is informed by her own family lineage’s connections to the indigenous tribes of the northeast along with the political climate of the Jacksonian Era. While Sedgwick is well-intentioned in her attempts to persuade her contemporary audience to rectify their interactions with indigenous people, her work is ultimately reflective of a national white guilt.
Primarily, the sentimentalism I will be referring to throughout this paper refers not to the colloquial meaning of “sentimental,” as in feeling emotions of nostalgia, poignance, or sadness. Rather, I am referring to the literary style of using narration and plot events to inspire a degree of investment and care in the reader. In the introduction to her book, Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices, Mary De Jong describes sentimentalism as a literary style that embodies themes such as “idealized intimate bonds, love won or lost, scenes of suffering and death, and… human nature and morality” (De Jong 2). De Jong’s introduction also includes a brief history of sentimentalism. Though sentimentalism first came about in eighteenth-century European philosophical and literary circles amidst the “cult of sensibility,” sentimental values in American literature first appeared in seduction novels a few decades after their European counterparts’ debut (De Jong 2). The power of sentimentalism is in its ability to use common feelings and opinions to unify otherwise unlike communities into “families” (De Jong 1). The sentimentalist novel genre soon became allied with the domestic novel genre, as sentimental values of the power and pertinence of emotions became associated with women and the domestic sphere. Sentimentalism also discussed notions of family, nation, and class, which were all things that were “deeply wedded to domestic ideology” (De Jong 2). With the sentimental novel growing more popular with women, female authors used the genre to create social change, “[claiming] their right to help alleviate human suffering in society at large” (De Jong 3). Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie became a prime example of a sentimental novel with the aim of social change.
In order for Sedgwick to change how her audience views Native Americans, she subverts the idea of sentimentality as something that is purely domestic, bringing sentimentalism out of the home and into the frontier. Sedgwick must first sever sentimentality from domesticity by tainting the sanctity of the idea of the home. In her essay titled “Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance,” Carol J. Singley points out that, while there are various representations of the home throughout the novel, “no home is glorified” (Singley 4). This is first evident when Magawisca, a young woman from the Pequot tribe, tells Everell Fletcher, a young boy from a Puritan family, about how her tribe’s homes were destroyed by the Puritans. Magawisca tells a long narrative of how the Puritans, along with another tribe, the Narragansetts, ambushed the Pequot settlement with the help of a Pequot traitor, lighting the village ablaze while its inhabitants were sleeping, and its main protectors were away. She describes the terror of women and children being mercilessly attacked by the Puritans, who were either busy burning the village or picking off the Pequots who were trying to escape. Magawisca recalls with a great heaviness how, though no enemy had ever before set foot inside their settlement, “the strangers destroyed, in our own homes, hundreds of our tribe” (Sedgwick 29). Though the home of the Pequots was considered by their members to be a “fortress,” the strength of the home could not protect the home’s ideals of comfort and domesticity in the face of traitors and murderers (Sedgwick 28). This tragedy is mirrored soon after Magawisca tells her story to Everell, when her father, Mononotto, emerges from the woods by the Fletcher family home one morning, accompanied by several other Pequots in order to exact revenge on the Puritans and rescue his children from them. The attack ends with a Pequot warrior stabbing Mrs. Fletcher through the heart and another Pequot killing the Fletchers’ infant son. Moreover, Mononotto rescues his children, but also captures Everell and drags him into the woods along with Faith Leslie, who has grown close with Mononotto’s son, Oneco. Both ambushes end with families and homesteads being torn apart, never to be quite whole again. In the wake of these attacks, the notion of the secure, idyllic home is dashed, with the home becoming “not a comforting haven… but a precarious site of danger” (Singley 4).
After the home is proven to be dangerous and insecure, Sedgwick designates the frontier as an unexpected zone for sentimental interactions to take place. By doing this, Sedgwick allows the characters and the readers to experience emotional connections with the typically demonized Native American. Sedgwick’s protagonist, Hope Leslie, is an unconventional heroine for nineteenth-century literature “as she treks through nature, befriends natives, frees political prisoners, and eludes drunken sailors” (Singley 4). The adventurous and independent personality of Hope is one of the main forces driving the narrative into the wilderness. Hope feels drawn to nature, writing in a letter to Everell, her stepbrother who is living in England at the time, that she has “an irrepressible desire to go to [the mountains]” (Sedgwick 59). She begs Mr. Fletcher, her stepfather, until he relents to actually let her climb the mountain with him and her tutor (Sedgwick 61). After her tutor, Craddock, gets bitten by a rattlesnake, Hope pleads with him to let her suck the venom from his wound to save him. Hope’s courage allows her to put herself in situations that seem dangerous to her family, but it also enables her to interact more frequently with members of the Pequot tribe, who are feared by other Puritans. Since Craddock refuses Hope’s help in saving him from the venomous snakebite, Hope sets out into the forest to find the hut of Nelema, an old Pequot woman who Hope remembers to have medical knowledge. Hope does so despite the protests of the Fletcher family’s aides, Jennet and Digby. What with Hope’s boldness and solicitation of help from someone considered by the public to engage in witchcraft, Singley categorizes Hope’s actions as a subversion of Puritan ethics and behaviors (Singley 4). Hope’s yearning to be around nature along with her unflinching, benevolent urge to seek out the Pequots put her squarely between a typical Puritan woman’s place in the domestic sphere and the frontier, allowing her to be the main bridge of interaction between the Fletchers, as well as the Massachusetts Puritan settlement in general, and the Pequots.
Sedgwick sentimentalizes the Pequots by showing them engaging in sympathetic relationships with the Puritans, and by appealing to her audience’s religious sensibilities by having the Pequots exhibit religious values like virtue and self-sacrifice. Mononotto, typically seen as a savage chief, is importantly one of the few Pequots, save for Magawisca, who attempts to behave virtuously toward the Puritans. During the Pequot attack on Bethel, the Fletcher family home, Mononotto finds himself with the Fletcher infant at his feet, gazing up at him and perceiving “a gleam of mercy” in the eyes of the Pequot chief (Sedgwick 38). As the child reaches up to him, Mononotto’s “heart melted within him” (Sedgwick 38). Mononotto scoops up the infant, perhaps to protect him, as his internal feelings have implied. This action of trying to save an innocent child humanizes a man who has been painted as ruthless, aggressive, and hawkish. Sedgwick creates this moment of pity from Mononotto to make readers see he is more than a warrior; he is a father and a human who can act in a way that promotes goodness. Furthermore, Mononotto’s benevolence is exhibited when Magawisca extols her father’s attempts to make “peace and alliance” with the English, protect their trade, and even save and return their people who had been captured by the Pequots (Sedgwick 30).
Magawisca also engages with the Puritans in honorable ways that would appeal to the sensibilities of Sedgwick’s audience. Magawisca seeks out Hope to tell her that her sister, Faith, is alive, married to Oneco, and, to the relief of Hope, is a Christian. She also insists upon Hope reuniting with her sister, and the two conspire to make the reunion happen, though Faith has mostly assimilated into the ways of the Pequot tribe. However, Magawisca’s most notable benevolent act is when she stops Everell’s execution by Mononotto and thus loses her arm in the process, “[redeeming] his life with her own” (Sedgwick 56). She goes so far as to defy her father and potentially ruin her relationship with him to save this boy. Her self-sacrifice is based on her kindred connection with Everell and on the fact that she believes he does not deserve to be executed for the purpose of getting revenge. These aforementioned righteous undertakings on behalf of the Pequots are intended to liken their characters to religious values that should be aspired to by all pious people. It is also important to note that the Pequots behave virtuously toward the Puritans, rather than just toward their own tribe. Their actions serve as attempts to bridge the gap between the feuding factions, showing Sedgwick’s audience that the people they deem “savages” are actually capable of being selfless saviors.
Additionally, Sedgwick imbues the interactions between the Pequots and Puritans with sympathy in order to encourage compassion in her audience for Native Americans. In his essay titled “Under the Government of Sympathy: Sentimental History in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts,” David Watson says that “in the sympathetic economy of the novel, acts of compassion are repaid in kind… transcending colonial or national affiliations” (Watson 8). Members of the English settlements and the Pequots do not just help one another once but are continually repaying the other despite the feud going on between them, showing that peace is possible. Sedgwick first makes us feel sympathy for the Pequots by detailing the massacre of their stronghold by a group of Puritan colonists and their allied indigenous tribes. However, Watson notes that in actuality, the colonists had only attacked the Pequots at their settlement because the Pequots had killed several Puritan traders before (Watson 12). By strategically blurring history, Sedgwick paints the devastation of the Pequots’ home as a random tragedy inflicted by the colonists, forcing the audience to feel that, from the circumstances presented to them, the Pequots had done nothing to provoke this attack. Sedgwick actually writes into the story the fact that Everell, as an extension of the Puritan colonists and even the audience, felt sorrow for the Pequots, “[expressing] to Magawisca, with all the eloquence of a heated imagination, his sympathy and admiration of her heroic and suffering people” (Sedgwick 33). Sedgwick’s contemporary audience is more like the colonists than they are like the Native American tribes of their time, so using Everell as an emotional surrogate allows Sedgwick to force her audience to notice themselves in his apologetic position.
Though the through line of sympathy in the novel begins with an atrocity, the relationships between Hope, Everell, and Magawisca serve as an attempt to mend the rift between the two factions and further Sedgwick’s efforts to sentimentalize the Pequots. Everell and Magawisca’s sympathetic relationships can be traced back to when Magawisca sacrificed her arm so that Everell could be saved. Her actions are intended to remind Sedgwick’s audience of the Pocahontas myth, which was once thought to be a love story, therefore encouraging an emotional attachment in this potential romance. Though a romance between the two never comes to fruition, we are assured of the strength of their connection as it is reflected by the permanence of Magawisca losing her arm, Watson stating that their bond is “confirmed” when Magawisca saves Everell’s life (Watson 15). Everell cannot truly repay her for this act, so he is forever indebted to her, thus establishing a sympathetic and even kindred relationship between the two, with Everell “[pressing] her to his heart, as he would a sister” before fleeing as she urged him to (Sedgwick 56). Since Everell embraces Magawisca as a sister, and Everell is a stepbrother to Hope, then Hope and Magawisca also share somewhat filial ties.
Furthermore, Sedgwick takes the relationship between Hope and Magawisca to a higher level by establishing the two as doubles of one another. When Magawisca and Hope meet in the cemetery to discuss Hope’s and Faith’s reunion, Hope remarks on how strangely similar the two girls are, musing that their “destinies have been interwoven… in indissoluble bonds” (Sedgwick 108). Both of their mothers are buried in the same cemetery, both of them were adopted by the Fletchers because their mothers passed, both of them struggle for independence under a protective father, and both of them share strong connections to Everell Fletcher. They are largely the same character due to their similar backgrounds shaping them in similar ways, though they are from different groups currently at odds with one another. Since Magawisca and Hope are “bound indissolubly” to each another, Hope’s marriage to Everell at the end of the novel is also a symbolic marriage of Magawisca to Everell. This, along with Faith’s marriage to Oneco, signifies unity between the Pequots and Puritans. The fact that Sedgwick chooses to have Faith stay with the Pequots, rather than have her and Oneco rejoin the Puritans, implies that she is not necessarily supportive of Native Americans assimilating into white communities, but is instead supportive of a more general peacemaking. Additionally, Hope is representative of Sedgwick’s white, American audience, while Magawisca represents the remaining indigenous population of America. Their “indissoluble bond” reflects the intertwined destinies of indigenous Americans and white Americans (Watson 21). Therein lies Sedgwick’s ultimate sympathetic gesture; since these two young women are fundamentally the same, Sedgwick implies that Americans and Native Americans are meant to be treated like equals as well. Championing this ideal harmony, Everell encourages Magawisca to stay with him and Hope, saying, “the present difference of the English with the Indians is but a vapor, that has, even now, nearly passed away” (Sedgwick 190). Here, Sedgwick uses Everell as a model of peacemaking between white Americans and Native American tribes.
However, Sedgwick knows that Native Americans are not, in fact, treated as the equals of their white counterparts. Her final act to make her audience view the Pequots sympathetically is when she describes how “their story is lost in the deep, voiceless obscurity of those unknown regions” (Sedgwick 195). The Pequots and the other tribes they join becoming “lost in obscurity” indicates to the audience that they have failed the indigenous people in America. Magawisca being joined to Everell through his and Hope’s marriage is a promise of unity and respect between the colonists and Native Americans; the fact that the Pequots are still forced away is a sign that this promise was not honored. The stories of many indigenous tribes being lost in an “unknown” void directly reflects the steady expropriation of Native American tribes from their lands during the Jacksonian Era and the years leading up to it. Sedgwick urges her audience to rectify their relations with indigenous peoples, as the white man acknowledges his need for the Native American when Everell pleads with Magawisca to “come back to us and teach us how to be happy” (Sedgwick 191).
Sedgwick’s choice to write a novel with a theme of sentimentalizing Native Americans may seem out of place until we consider her family’s history and her ties to Native American removals in New England. In her New England Quarterly critical essay titled “Reading and Writing Hope Leslie: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Indian ‘Connections,’” Karen Woods Weierman explores Sedgwick’s lineage dating back to the early 1700s. Sedgwick became invested in the interactions between colonial and indigenous cultures when she learned the history of a distant relative, Eunice Williams, who was captured by Native Americans in the town of Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1704 (Weierman 419). Williams was spared by the tribe, and eventually married a Mohawk man named François Xavier Arosen (Weierman 419). This clearly parallels the marriage of Faith Leslie and Oneco, who Sedgwick uses to honor her distant relatives who got her interested in the plights of Native Americans. Williams’ descendants started a mission for Native Americans in the Massachusetts town of Stockbridge, which would later be used as a way for the merged Williams-Sedgwick family, as well as other families, to grab land from the tribes that would inhabit the mission (Weierman 422, 424). Weierman points out that Stockbridge is referenced in Hope Leslie as the place Mononotto takes Everell to execute him, as they go to a place “in the lower valley of the Housatonick” (Weierman 421). Sedgwick makes this reference to show a disparity between the morals of the colonists and the Native Americans. She extols the selflessness and bravery of Magawisca’s sacrifice at a site where colonists would one day turn against the indigenous people they are claiming to help. By blurring and forming history in this way, her audience is meant to once again feel guilt and shame for their ancestors and themselves failing to treat Native Americans with humanity.
Sedgwick also found herself connected to the Cherokee crisis, which certainly impacted her writing Hope Leslie at the time she did, in the mid to late 1820s. In the years before the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Sedgwick’s cousin, Harriet Gold, faced extreme difficulty and even persecution when trying to marry a Cherokee man, Elias Boudinot (Weierman 435). After being slandered by the public and labeled as criminals, Harriet and Elias married and moved to Georgia’s Cherokee Nation in 1826 (Weierman 437). Sedgwick had close family ties to one of the agencies, a mission school, that played a role in demonizing the relationship between Harriet and Elias (Weierman 437). Their marriage also reflects that of Faith’s and Oneco’s, so Sedgwick once again is trying to repair harm done by her family by honoring the interracial relationship that had to suffer.
Weierman states that many in the New England intellectual sphere saw the chance of remedying the Cherokee crisis as a chance for national redemption (Weierman 442). Sedgwick was included in this, but even more than that, she saw it as a chance to redeem the injustices committed by her family members and her countrymen over a period of nearly one hundred years. However, Sedgwick’s writing ultimately reinforces notions of native suffering for the advancement of white people, such as when Mononotto puts himself in danger to rescue several captured Puritans, when Everell begs Magawisca to “teach them how to be happy,” and when Magawisca sacrifices her arm to save Everell, willingly participating in her own subjugation for the sake of the white man. Even Sedgwick’s equivocation of her indigenous characters to her white characters in order to appeal to her audience is backhanded, almost as if to say that Native Americans should be grateful that they are being portrayed as “just like white folks.” So while Sedgwick means well, her story exhibits more about what white Americans can get from indigenous people, rather than how they can make actual strides to rectify the material conditions of indigenous people in this country.
Works Cited
De Jong, Mary. Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices. Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013.
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie: Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. Kindle Ed., Digireads Publishing, 2012.
Singley, Carol J. “Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie: Radical Frontier Romance.” Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier. Edited by Eric Heyne, p. 110-122. Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Watson, David. “Under the Government of Sympathy: Sentimental History in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts.” Journal of Literary Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, July 2013, pp. 6-18.
Weierman, Karen Woods. “Reading and Writing Hope Leslie: Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Indian ‘Connections’.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 3, Sept. 2002, pp. 415-443.