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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

Problems of Knowing:
Constructions of 'Race' in American Literature,
16385T867

presented by

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Dana Nelson Saivino

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PROBLEMS OF KNOWING
CONSTRUCTIONS OF ‘RACE' IN AMERICAN LITERATURE,
1638-1867

BY

Dana Nelson Salvino

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1989

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ABSTRACT
PROBLEMS OF KNOWING:

CONSTRUCTIONS OF ‘RACE' IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
1638-1867

BY
Dana Nelson Salvino
This dissertation examines how a variety of early Anglo-

American writers attempt to apprehend the concept of ‘race,’ and
how they construct the racial other. The most specific
theoretical assumption of this study is that literature is
symbolic action with reference to a real world, and as such
should not be abstracted from its material context. Accordingly,
this study examines the various perceptual/representational
enterprises of the texts it considers as they posit, and position
themselves in, a social field (community) of race relations. Its
goal is ”sociological criticism," envisioned by Kenneth Burke as
a criticism of literature which would "seek to codify the various
strategies which artists have developed with relation to the
naming of [racial] situations" (1973, 301).

The primary texts considered are (in order discussed): John

Underhill's flexes figgm_5mg;1ga, Thomas Jefferson's Efltii Qn the,
511;; Qfi,yigginig,(sections XIV and XVIII), Cotton Mather's In;
m W, William Byrd'8 W at. the winding.
Ling, James Fenimore Cooper's Li:£.2£.£h§.fl2hl§ini, William
Gilmore Simm's Ihg,Xgma§§gg, Robert Montgomery Bird's High 91 the
Hgggfi, Catherine Maria Sedgewick's flgng Leslie, Lydia Maria

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Copyright by
DANA D. NELSON SALVINO
1989

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The past two years that I have spent working on this
dissertation have been rich, and full of important
relationships—-both professional and personal-—which have
sustained me and for which I am thankful. I am glad to have
the opportunity to mention some of my debts of gratitude
here.

First, I owe many thanks to the College of Arts and
Letters for a Dissertation Fellowship. The time off from
teaching responsibilites made it possible to finish this
dissertation in record time. With the stipend, I was able
to attend conferences and present versions of my work, which
provided intellectual stimulus and, I am convinced, enriched
my work.

Thanks also goes to Marcelette Williams, who listened
to and encouraged me, and who inspired me with her warmly
interested professionality. Thank you to Bill Johnsen, who
asked ”so what?” at a formative point in my dissertation.
Lorraine Hart, whose reputation deservedly preceeds her,
consistently offered invaluable information, help and
reassurance throughout my graduate years.

I am grateful to my committee members: Arnold E.
Davidson, Stephan Tchudi and Linda wagner-Martin. I

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inundated them with reading material throughout my
comprehensive exams and dissertation composition, which they
bore patiently. Moreover, each offered models for my
stholarship and teaching. I hope I can live up to their
examples.

For all the time she spent listening with interest, I
want particularly to thank Nadine Romero. She was an ideal
”outside listener" whose belief in my project and in me both
challenged and sustained me. Marcy Bauman gave endless
hours listening to the angst associated with a project of
this scope, calming me, encouraging me, and offering her
indispensibly level-headed perspective. Cecilia Farr
offered support in the form of the critical dialogue I
needed, and through her example inspired me to train my
writing style to a greater precision at a key point in my
work.

I owe special debts and thanks to my husband, John F.
Salvino, who has become an intrinsic part of my thinking and
being during our graduate/married years. If it is difficult
to tell where to begin, I know that I will never leave off
thanking him.

Finally, I offer heartfelt thanks to my dissertation
chair and friend, Cathy N. Davidson. It is hard to put into
words the ways I am beholden to her. From Cathy, I learned
more than just how to write a dissertation. She has been

the kind of "ideal mentor” that Annette Kolodny once

vi

outlined in an
pragram. Her'
prefessional;

better profess

vii
outlined in an NWSA session I attended early in my graduate
program. Her guidance has led me from undergraduate to
professional; her example has inspired me to be both a

better professional and a better person.

In a recent

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PREFACE

In a recent talk at Princeton University on the Afro-
American presence in American literature, Toni Morrison
prefaced her address with a complaint. She questioned the
odd circumstance that she is often asked to come to campuses
where there have been ugly racial incidents in order to
address primarily white audiences on the nature of racism.
Her difficulty with this, she explained, is that implicit in
such requests is an attitude that "we [blacks] are a problem
and it is our job to solve ourselves." She points out that
”the survivor [of racism] is assumed to be both patient and
physician," so that in many ways the victim is blamable for
his/her continued suffering. The accountability for the
phenomenon of racism in American culture, however, lies
elsewhere, and Morrison's suggestion here is pointed:
"Racism ihghlg be e1ucidated—-but from the point of view of
those who thggsgghg,its tortures"——understand the motives,
not the outcome (all comments delivered at Princeton
University, February 14, 1989).

While ”race" itself is now a properly "bracketed"
concept--bracketed to remind us of its fictionality, its
invalidity as a scientific category--L§gism is still a
widespread cultural phenomenon (and is not exclusive to

viii

these who do not
This racism, an:
in any racist f
inpclrtant area

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ix
those who do not understand "race" in quotation marks).
Thus racism, and the dynamic conception of "race" contained
in any racist formulation, is not only a valid, but
important area of study, both in its historical and
contemporary (and academic) contexts. It is the project of
this study to examine the construction of "race" in a
variety of texts written by white authors in America, from
1638 to 1867. As part of its project, the study will
discuss the dynamic relationship between literature and
culture, between text and reality.

Racism is a cultural, and therefore also a literary
issue. As Arif Dirlik observes, ”culture affords us ways of
seeing the world, and if the latter have any bearing on our
efforts to change the world, then it is essential that we
confront our ways of seeing" (13). It is historically and
pedagogically essential that we confront as well the ”ways
of seeing" represented in America's literary legacy.
Raymond Williams eloquently summarizes this imperative:

When the most basic concepts--the concepts, as it

is said, from which we beqin--are suddenly seen to

be not concepts but problems, not analytic problems

either but historical movements that are still

unresolved, there is no sense in listening to their
sonorous summons or their resounding clashes. We

have only, if we can, to recover the substance from

which their forms were cast (11).

 

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This study attempts to begin such a project in American
literature, reading closely eleven texts for their
formulation of "race," and placing the production of those
texts in their historical, social, and material context, of
evolving American colonialism and (internal) imperialism.

The most specific theoretical assumption of this study
is that literature is symbolic action with reference to a
real world, and as such, should not be abstracted from its
material context. "Literature makes something happen,"
insists Frank Lentricchia, "the literary is always the
taking of position and simultaneously the exercising of
position with and upon the social field" (1983, 156).
Accordingly, this study will examine the various
perceptual/representational enterprises of the texts it
considers, as they posit and position themselves in a social
field (community) of race relations. Its goal will be a
sort of "sociological criticism," posited by Kenneth Burke
as a criticism of literature which would "seek to codify the
various strategies which artists have developed with
relation to the naming of [racial] situations" (1973, 301).

Chapter One, then, will make explicit the necessity of
a sociological criticism of literature, examining a broad
historical outline and concentrating particularly on two

paradigmatic texts: John Underhill's ug3g3,£;gm,3mggiga,

and the slavery passages from Thomas Jefferson's Ng§g1_gh
Lbs. m 21 W. Chapter Two will discuss Cotton

 

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xi
Mather's "The Negro Christianized," and William Byrd's

film 2f the m Lined focusing particularly on

what I read as textual economies of morality and power. It
will discuss the imaginative hold of racial tropes--what
Abdul JanMohamed discusses as "manichean allegory"--which
undermine these writers' explicitly progressive attempts to

support African and Native Americans. Chapter Three will

turn to James Fenimore Cooper's 1h: has; 21 th ughiginfi,

Robert Montgomery Bird's Nigh_gj,thg,flgggs, and William

Gilmore Simm's 1h: Kgmggsge to discuss the sociological and
textual dimensions of the colonial representations of the
Self in opposition to the racial Other (following Mary
Louise Pratt's suggestion that as colonialists seek to fix a
notion of the racial other they are engaged primarily in a
need establish a fixed sense of Self). Additionally, it
will examine the authors' use of the novelistic form as a
purveyor of Anglo-American "tradition," in light of Mikhail
Bakhtin's discussion of the ideological function of language
in the novel.

Chapter Four will consider Catherine Maria Sedgwick's
fighg Leg; g and Lydia Maria Child's figmahgg g£,;he fighghlig,
examining the strategies employed by each woman to present
sympathetic versions of the racial Other, as well as their
conscious focus on the politics of history-making.
Distinguishing, after Tzvetan Todorov, between prejudice of

superiority, and prejudice of equality, this chapter will

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xii
question the efficacy of these sympathetic texts in
developing knowledgeable versions of Native and African
Americans. Chapter Five will read Edgar Allan Poe's Agghg;
gggfigh,gym_as a "racist" text that purports at its most
conspicuous level to affirm white superiority. This chapter
will study the narrative and imaginative structures of gym
and will argue that a marginalized level of the text
deconstructs its foregrounded racialist epistemology.
Chapter Six will focus on Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno,"
demonstrating that the text provides an incisive analysis of
the ideological (and dominative) underpinnings of racism.
Yet while "Benito Cereno" undermines the real value of
racial certainty (or racialism), it is finally limited in
its radical potential by suggesting the impossibility of
knowing the racial Other, given the paralyzing imaginative
power of racial tropes.

Finally, in the Afterword, I will summarize through a
reading of Harriet Ann Jacob's Incidents,iu Lh§,Lif§,gj_§,
§l§y§,QLL1. I posit this text as a counterpoint (after-
word) to "Benito Cereno" and the other texts considered. Of
all the texts considered in the study, thLQgh s most
effectively establishes the possibility of egalitarian,
interracial community. It does so by insistently linking
racial categories to their social definition, by positing a

common denominator--humanity--that links blacks and whites,

and by modeli

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xiii
and by modeling effective social action as a corrective to

the material structure of racism.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One
Introduction

Chapter Two
Economies of Morality and Power:
‘Race' Reform in Mather and Byrd

Chapter Three
Romancing the Border:
Bird, Cooper, Simms and the Frontier Novel

Chapter Four
W/Righting History:
Subversive Sympathy in Sedgwick and Child

Chapter Five
Ethnocentrism Decentered:
Colonial Motives in The Narrative of r ur

Mum —

Chapter Six
"For the Gaze of the Whites":
The Crisis of the Subject in "Benito Cereno"

Afterword
"Within the Pale of Human Beings":

Community in Ingigegts in the Life g£,i
filmfiifl.

Bibliography

xiv

49

90

151

207

251

299

320

 

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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

THE FUNCTION OF COLONIAL LITERATURE

Narrative, and the process of representation, are
powerful tools for conceptualization. As Thomas Leitch
notes, ”stories imitate a world of potential, of coming-to-
be” (Leitch, 16), and nowhere more than in the discovery of
a New World did the role of story as "coming—to-be" operate
formatively. Well before Europeans set sail for the newly—
discovered worlds, they were reading, hearing and telling
about what they would find. And even when what they found--
as in Columbus's case--baffled their expectation,
inevitably, as Tzvetan Todorov points out, they fit it into
familiar representative modes. Native Americans became
"Indians," the unknown brought in line with the known. In
this way, Columbus's early accounts of "Cyclops and
mermaids, [of] Amazons and men with tails," do no reflect
observed phenomena, but rather Columbus's "finalist strategy
of interpretation," the conclusions he formed before
beginning his travels (Todorov, 15). Todorov underscores
the importance of prior conceptualization to interpretation
and representation: ”In the course of the third voyage,

Columbus wonders about the origin of the pearls the Indians

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2
sometimes bring him. The thing occurs before his eyes; but
what he reports in his journal is the explanation given by
Pliny,” that oysters grow on trees by the shore, and pearls
result from the falling dew (Todorov, 17).

Like Columbus, the English colonists who contemplated a
voyage to the New World over a hundred years later sought
the comfort of previous knowledge to shape their
expectations of their future destiny, to tell their "coming-
to-be” narrative of life in America. Importantly, as Mary
Louise Pratt observes, promotionalist and frontier
literature operate as a "normalizing force" which "serves,
in part, to mediate the shock of contact on the frontier"
(Pratt, 121). Faced by a foreign environment, colonial
literature gained a measure of control by relying on the
familiar to explain the unfamiliar. What counted as
familiar governed interpretation of, and action in, the "New
World." Promotional tracts served a normative function,
offering the writer a sense of mastery and authorship over
the (often as yet unseen) New World, and modelling for the
reader/explorer a method for gaining material/physical
control. Colonial literature in this way both offered and
served as a strategy for dealing with life in the New World.

British promotionalists grounded their exploration
narratives in two interlocking discourses, religious mission
and capital accumulation. Their tracts recommended

strategies for converting the alien frontier into a

3
recognizable religious and market environment. The twin
goals, spiritual and capital advance, functioned
symbiotically, one justifying and supporting the other. For
instance, as John Cotton elaborates in his "God's Promise to
His Plantations":

”Some remove and travail for merchandise and gain-

sake: Daily bread may be sought from far, Proverbs

31:14. Yea our Savior approveth travail for

merchants ... The comparison from the unjust

steward, and from the thief in the night is not

taken from the injustice of the one, or the theft

of the other; but from the wisdom of one and the

suddenness of the other; which in themselves are

not unlawful” (Cotton, 8).

Cotton intertwines religious and economic discourse, relying
on familiar, biblical knowledge to devise a code of action
on the frontier. Strikingly, too, his ethical code here
applies to material gain, justifying actions that his own
account suggests might be unethical with an obfuscating
cloak of biblical rhetoric.‘

As ”God's Promise” highlights, religious mission
provided a certain security and justification to the
colonists. As they took, promotionalists reasoned, they
would also give: ”We shall come in with the good leave of
the natives," speculated John Winthrop, of his future

neighbors, ”who finde benefitt already by our neighborhood

 

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and learne of us to improve part to more use then before
they could doe the whole, and by this meanes we come in by
valuable purchase: for they have of us that which we will
yield them more benefitt then all the land which wee have of
them” (Winthrop, 1629, 423). Despite its apparent promise
of mutual benefit, their charity nonetheless records its
commoditized vision. Winthrop inscribes the Puritan's value
to the native inhabitants of American: they benefit by

their social transaction with the Puritans. But

alternately, the imagery of transaction and the purpose of
the tract itself traces the value of the "purchase" for the
Puritans.

As part of its normative enterprise, promotional
literature sought to fix a concept of the "Self" in relation
to the peoples already inhabiting the discovered world.
Promotionalists recognized the importance of America's
original inhabitants to the colony's spiritual and financial
success. Yet while Native Americans stood in a positive
relation to the former, to the latter goal, they presented a
significant barrier. Consequently, as Robert Berkhofer has
detailed, promotional discourse constructed a bifurcated
Indian, at once ”tractable” and "trecherous." John Smith's
5,1;hg,aglahigh,documents the typically split stance of the
colonists toward the native inhabitants of America. In the
space of two paragraphs at the opening of his narrative,

Smith portrays the local natives as vigilant and ruthless

attackers ,

followers

5

attackers, and, alternately, as generous and attentive
followers (see pp. 5-6, paragraphs three and four).

Similarly, though Winthrop portrays the natives of New
England as willing neighbors, the suggestion he obliquely
offers in his "Model of Christian Charity," the famous
sermonic exhortation delivered on the Ahhglla, contrasts
sharply with his earlier version. On the ship, Winthrop
speaks of enemies first as those to be loved according to
the dictates of the Old and New Testament, as well as by
nature: "The law of nature could give no rules for dealing
with enemies, for all are to be considered as friends in the
state of innocency, but the Gospel commands to love an
enemy" (Winthrop, 1630, 9). If the laws of nature do not
clearly dictate ethics toward enemies, the New Testament
does, Winthrop underscores, employing the more anaesthetized
connotations of ”enemy" as "stranger." Yet later, as he
reaches a high emotional pitch in his sermon, he uses
"enemy" in its most violently oppositional sense, promising
his listeners that "We shall find that the God of Israel is
among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand
of our enemies" (20). His message to his auditors is
mixed-~enemies are at once to be loved and resisted. Yet
the former reference clearly pertains to fellow colonists,
while the latter use of enemy is apparently in reference to
those outside the colonial community, and as such dictates a

stance toward the enemies "out there." Those most

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immediately present to the new colonists were exactly those
tractable inhabitants.

As Winthrop's famous sermon suggests, the sense of
religious destiny that the Puritan colonist created for
himself placed him in direct, and violent opposition with
anyone who interfered with his mission--religious or
economic. While the natives became the focus of the
Puritans' religious errand to the New World, they also
became an important obstacle, one that rightly had to be
overpowered to make way for the New Canaan. The fictional
contact between colonists and native inhabitants which
occurred in promotional and frontier literature shaped the
expectations of voyagers to the point that actual contact,
however much it contradicted the promotional tracts, managed
only to confirm their speculations. A member of Christopher
Newport's expedition up the James River in 1607 reported in
"A Breif (sic) discription of the People": the Indians "are
naturally given to trechery, howbeit we could not find it in
our travell up the river, but rather a most kind and loving
people” (Nash, 1972, 44). Like Columbus's obstinate refusal
to see the real source of pearls, American explorers and
colonists refused to see anything-but the Indian they had
fictively created in advance of contact with him. Thus, the
natives' friendliest gestures could only be represented as

evidence of their devious (non-English) nature.

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Perhaps influenced by the earlier stories of Spain's
conquest and genocide, afraid for their own survival in the
colonies, and concerned with the maintenance of an English
sense of self in an unfamiliar, un-English environment,
English colonists seized on the difference of the natives,
in order to establish firmly their relational superiority.2

This sense of superiority promulgated in the literature at
once justified their presence, predicted their success and
confirmed their English identity. 80 in 1620, Thomas Peyton
could confidently represent the Englishman's relative status
in the colonies:

The Libian dusky in his parched skin,

The Moor all tawny both without and in,

The Southern man, a black deformed Elfe,

The Northern white like unto God himselfe

(Vaughan, 920).

The finalist strategies of interpretation and
representation that the English colonialists brought to bear
on relations with Native Americans in many ways duplicated
those employed to justify growing involvement in slave
trade. At the same time Plymouth colony was established,
the first Africans were landing in Jamestown, to work as
servants and slaves.3 While actual policy toward natives
and Africans varied widely-~one race was to be assimilated
and (later) exterminated, the other separated and

cultivated—-they could be explained in similar terms. Like

Indians, A;
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8
Indians, Africans were depicted as lacking in culture and
religion, and so the English formulated their exploitation
as a humane enterprise, offering Africans a chance at
figurative, if not literal, enlightenment.

The evolution of the concept of race, of Indianness and
Blackness, in the "white” European mind is instructive.
Racialism did not emerge in full flower until the mid-
eighteen hundreds; indeed, as many carefully note, early
European representations of Native Americans had much more
to do with cultural, rather than so-called racial,
differences. Textual and artistic representations from the
period of early contact reflect much more interest in
personal ornamentation and social organization than in
physiognomy.‘ And while European representations of
Africans had virtually always focused on their blackness,
which carried a host of negative connotations in every
European mind (Vaughan, 920), still, early observers
depicted African blackness as something of a marvel, even
accepting the fact that the Africans themselves found their
blackness beautiful (Jordan, 9-11). The acceptance implied
by such observations was also reflected in speculations that
the hotter sun, or red-colored oils were the cause for
differences in skin color. "Black" and "red" at this early
juncture designated a metaphoric difference between groups

of human beings.

 

chysioi
ineradi
nl ’_ L.

wtlmaue
During

the set
frontie;

L

.F-F‘"

~-~J:fles

9

During the mid seventeenth century, however,
representations of both African and Native Americans began a
crucial shift from cultural and climate-imposed
physiological difference, to belief in profound and
ineradicable racial difference that originated not in
climate, but in the moral condition of Indians and Africans.
During this period, the tobacco enterprise began to boom;
the southern colonists needed more land and a fixed supply
of labor to work it. It is not coincidental that in the
frontier and colonial literature of this period, the Indian
becomes more hostile, while the African begins to seem
meeehhyeleelly black. The European thus created a sense of
religious justification for definitive and harsh action. As
Winthrop Jordan establishes, a new usage of the term "white"
arose as the Europeans began to see themselves in exact
opposition to the black slave, now defined not by social
status, but by moral condition (Jordan, 95). Alden Vaughan
convincingly demonstrates a similar lexical shift in the use
of "red" and ”tawny” as adjectives QQEQLLQLRQ the native, to
nouns that define the Indian during that period.5 Thus,
colonial literature at once reflects the changing attitudes
toward Indians and Africans at the same time it provides a
means for inscribing--making possible and permanent--that

difference.

SUPERIORI

As m
the New I:
be fruitf

legalistic

10

SUPERIORITY STORY

As many scholars have observed, race relations in
the New World were influenced by many factors, and can
be fruitfully, if not conclusively, viewed from
legalistic, economic, philosophic, sociologic, and
scientific perspectives.6 All of these perspectives
combined in early America in telling what would become
the Ur-narrative of white racial superiority. As
Reginald Horsman explains in his weighty study, Beee_ehg
flinifififit.flfifillnll these attitudes would reach their
fruition in the mid-nineteenth century. But an
important model for the story formed in the scientific
revolution of the middle Renaissance.

In 1543, Copernicus published 9; Celestial Motions.
This work upset the cosmography which showed man as the
focus of the beautifully orchestrated crystalline
spheres. Until Copernicus, astronomy had worked
together with theology in establishing man as the
physical and moral center of the universe. Copernicus,
dissatisfied with the inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic
system and the elaborate compensations which it forced
on astronomers, devised a new interpretation of the
skies which upset every supposition of heavenly
hierarchies, moving Intelligences and divine schemes to
date. Placing the stars at a distance beyond

imagination, Copernicus implied without explicitly

ll
positing an infinite universe (Giordano Bruno was soon
to burn at the stake for pursuing the logical
implications of this concept). Conceivably,
Copernicus's alternate map was the overturning of the
way Europeans represented man's place in relation to the
world, the heavens and God. This was, perhaps, the most
radical and devastating effect of all.

But Europeans were REL devastated by Copernicus's
theory. In pointing out the fundamental conservatism at
the heart of Copernicus's motivations and discoveries,
Herbert Butterfield emphasizes that "it would be wrong
to imagine that the publication of Copernicus's great
work in 1543 either shook the foundation of European
thought straight away or sufficed to accomplish anything
like a revolution" (Butterfield, 67).7 Copernicus
himself, Butterfield notes, relied more for his revision
on Ptolemy's LQRLEEQDLQELQR of the heavens than he did
on his own observation in devising his own system, which
was, in fact, only a "modified form of the Ptolemaic
system” (Butterfield, 36-39).' Hampered in his
theorizing by his reluctance to abandon what he had
learned to be "true" of the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian
universe, the revolutionary astronomer failed, along
with others, to pursue the most radical implications of
his helio-centric theory. Nearly three quarters of a

century passed before Kepler was able to add his

h v

aesthe:

We“

1'1

u
‘

12
mathematical genius to the chaos of interpretations and
data, devising a more advanced theory for a heliocentric
universe.
Even after Kepler, the Ptolemaic system maintained

currency among the Europeans. Well over a century after

Qi,§gleatlel,neeieheJ it was possible for Milton's
Eegeglee Lee; to depict a geocentric universe, and

mention heliocentricity only in passing.9 More than a
substitution of maps, the heliocentric universe required
a literal revolution in thought before it could gain
acceptance, which, opposed to the ornate and satisfying
aesthetics of the crystalline schemes, was especially
difficult to achieve. All of history had been devoted
to placing man at the center of God's creation.
Suddenly, European man was to understand that he was not
the nucleus, and was required to search for other means
of self-definition.

As Kepler's insight and Galileo's work became more
widely recognized early in the 1600's, the Jacobean
melancholy set in. Renaissance man reluctantly set
about redefining his place in the new order. In a
process of thought parallel to that which had attached
epicycles and eccentric circles to compensate for the
inconsistencies of the Ptolemaic system, Europeans began
working to reconcile heliocentricity with their desire

to be the focus of existence. It was an age of caution:

n:
..J
'1
m
(‘14
., lo
F)
n

was repla.

.4 ‘-
béi’enteen

13
all radical theorists met opposition, and persecution.
And eventually, though geocentricity was abandoned, it
was replaced by the Supreme Chain of Being.
Seventeenth-century philosophers reassembled forces and
turned their confusion into an ode to the complexity of
the world, which God had created for their use and
glory. The eighteenth-century enlightenment kept
European man rationally and squarely at the top rung of
the ladder, with or without the sanction of God,‘° and
androcentricity/Eurocentricity became entrenched as the
story of European man's hierarchical superiority became
‘common sense.'

It is this constructed notion of superiority which
was crucial to the way in which European man perceived
himself, and his role in this world. It is this
attitude which in fact brought him to the "new" world,
seeking to inscribe physically and textually his mastery
over the globe he claimed in his story of superiority.
As Edmund Morgan notes of the famous work of Richard

Hakluyt (the famous promotionalist who never himself

ventured to America): "Erin:inall.flaxisarieus. Moises:
and.nis§9xeries.cf the Ensllsn.uarieu was not merely the

narrative of voyages by Englishmen around the globe, but
a powerful suggestion that the world ought to be English
or at least ought to be ruled by Englishmen" (Morgan,

1972, 15).

 

Pratt succ.
MINI, fa:
in greater
There: EU:
but unfami

:00! Ul'lde:

14

The foundation of this story was a pervasive
conservatism. European action and representation sought
new frontiers only to confirm and assert the same
superior sense of identity, and their enterprise on all
fronts was always threatened by a sense of change. As
Pratt succinctly summarizes, "nowhere are the notions of
normal, familiar action and given systems of difference
in greater jeopardy than on the [colonial] frontier.
There, Europeans confront not only unfamiliar Others,
but unfamiliar selves" (Pratt, 121). Karen Kupperman,
too, underlines the basic challenge to social order that
the colonial enterprise presented: "Not only did the
colonial effort raise questions about the relevance of
traditional skills particularly those of a "better
sort," it also appeared to offer a chance for new
individuals and groups within English society to rise"
(Kupperman, 151). The high ratio of "gentlemen" to
common, working-men in the Jamestown settlement marks
high-level concern for the continuance of the social
order. All the colonies instituted policies to punish
individuals who threatened governmental stability:
commoners who spoke out against those of higher class
were often punished (Kupperman, 154). Despite strict
sanctions, there were numerous threats. Nash notes the
"frightening rapidity" of challenges to hierarchy issued

by ”Mortonites, Gortonites, Hutchisonians ... and

Quakers,"

damage to

While
policies c
worked qui
arrangeme:
boat loads
:iarry, ho;

social pat

15
Quakers," all rapidly taken up and defeated with little
damage to existing communal paradigms (Nash, 1970, 6).

While French and Spanish colonists adopted social
policies of assimilation, English settlers in America
worked quickly to duplicate traditional English family
arrangements. Colonial authorities quickly shipped in
boat loads of British women for the frontiersmen to
marry, hoping to lend stability by establishing familiar
social patterns. Seeking to ground themselves in a
sense of permanence and familiarity, the colonists were
particularly disconcerted by the transitory habits of
the natives, who were apt to abandon camp, disappearing
and reappearing with little warning. As Axtell sums up,
"surprise was the last thing the English wanted in the
New World" (Axtell, 138).

Some early writers, however, found much to admire
in the social arrangements of the natives. Alarmed by
the growing trends of mercantilism and commerce, these
writers turned to native life as model. Thomas Morton,
one the earliest to point to the Indian way, established
the general pattern which would culminate in the cult of
the noble savage:

In the yeare since the incarnation of Christ, 1622,

it was my chance to be landed in the parts of New

England, where I found two sortes of people, the

one Christians, the other Infidels; these I found

16

most full of humanity, and more friendly then the

other ... I have observed they will not be troubled

with superfluous commodities. Such things as they

finde they are taught by necessity to make use of,

they will make choise of, and seeke to purchase

with industry. 80 that, in respect that their life

is so voyd of care, and they are so loving also

that they make use of those things they enjoy, (the

wife onely excepted), as common goods, and are

therein so compassionate that, rather than one

should starve through want, they would starve all.

Thus doe they passe awaye the time merrily, not

regarding our pompe, (which they see dayly before

their faces,) but are better content with their

owne, which some men esteeme so meanely of (Morton,

123; 178).
Thomas Morton was no friend to the authorities of Plymouth
Bay, and it should be noted that his account was primarily
concerned with provoking and contradicting his Puritan
enemies. Yet as Richard Drinnon convincingly argues, it was
Morton's very respect for native ways that initially
triggered prosecution by the Puritans. Morton's he! Englieh
theeh, Drinnon says, ”represented an authentic and almost
singular effort of the European imagination to extract a
sense of place from this new surroundings or, better, to

meet the spirit of the land halfway ... Like the Indians,

17
[Morton] loved the wilderness the Saints hated" (Drinnon,
17). Thomas Morton's respect for the "Infidels" was real
and profound.

Even such obvious admiration needs to be seen in
context. If the "cult of the noble savage" was different in
sentiment from the ”cult of the ignorant savage,” it was not
so different in its final vision. Despite the various
exhortations to the virtues of savage life, it was clear
that Morton, and later writers of the "cult of the savage,"
never intended to model their society on that of the
natives. What these tracts lauded was the Rousseauistic
”pre—social" state, a state precisely from which European
society was perceived as having descended. The reforms
suggested were not a matter of adopting native social
patterns, but recapturing desirable traits that the English
had previously exhibited (cf. Kupperman, 147-148). This
backward-yearning was less a radical, than fundamentally
conservative, gesture.

If colonists' attitudes toward natives were governed in
part by a profound need to maintain traditional social
order, so too, argues Edmund Morgan, were their attitudes
toward slavery. The practice came into currency as recourse
to the flood of poor indentured servants sent by England who
increasingly threatened the social order (i.e., the
supremacy of the landed class). Recounting the struggle of

the landed class to deal with a growing populace of

it

‘Ul

redot

finis
ste‘c
tit

thab
teca:

Titre

tel.

18
"freedmen" (ex—bondsmen who were "without house and land,"),
Morgan suggests that the best available remedy was to stem
the influx of English lower-class servants by relying
instead on black slavery (Morgan, 1972, 20).

While most Africans were shipped to America as slaves,
in the early years of the colonies, "it is equally clear
that a substantial number of Virginia's Negroes were free or
became free,” says Morgan (see esp. 17-18). Freed blacks
redoubled the number of indentured English servants who had
finished their term, and together presented a mounting
problem for the ruling class. The landed gentry needed a
steady supply of labor to work their land, yet their social
position was threatened by this growing number of freedmen,
white and black, who without land or property, were becoming
increasingly restive. One solution was to put those without
property back into forced labor. The landed class realized,
however, that "to have attempted the enslavement of English—
born laborers would have cause more disorder than it cured."
The ”common-sense" path, then, was to "keep as slaves black
men who arrived in that condition," instead of granting them
the ”natural” rights of the Englishman. Thus, argues
Morgan, Virginia's magnates arrived at a "solution which
strengthened the rights of Englishmen and nourished that
attachment to liberty which came to fruition in the

Revolutionary generation of Virginia statesmen ... The

rights of
rights of

Whil
fundament.
coloniali
democracy
English, .

servants ,

l9
rights of the English were preserved by destroying the

rights of Africans” (25; 24).

While Morgan's argument does highlight how the
fundamentally protective world-view of the English
colonialist planted the seeds of liberal reform and
democracy, it does not adequately account for why the
English, who heretofore had treated Africans as indentured
servants, found them especially available for this new,
racial category of lifetime slavery. Morgan insists that
slavery grew as a result of economic necessity, not racial
persecution: "Winthrop Jordan has suggested that slavery
came to Virginia as an unthinking decision. We might go
further and say that it came without a decision. It came
automatically as Virginians bought the cheapest labor they
could get" (24-25). In support of this argument, Morgan
points to the Virginian's liberal treatment of African
slaves during the early years of colonization, when freed
blacks were allowed to take a place in the community at a
social and legal level apparently on par with that of freed
white men.

But the point that needs to be made in response to
Morgan's thesis is that something made the Africans
conceptually available as a solution for economic necessity.
Morgan's point that it was a recourse to "common sense" to
”keep as slaves black men who arrived in that condition"

overlooks the fact that those blacks (men end women) were

and 5

lot

80

.

,.
E

‘k

‘

n hi
rat
super
h‘fi

O
AL

20

originally free, and were enslaved mostly by Anglo merchants
and slave traders. Economic interest coincided with racial
discrimination, and the seeds of racism made the economic
solution of racial slavery feasible. As Edward Said notes
in his study of geieheeliem, the European's conceptual
strategies were always structured by a "flexible positional
superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of
possible relationships with the [Other] without ever losing
him the relative upper hand" (Said, 7). If, as Morgan
argues, Africans were treated more liberally during the
early colonial period, they were, as Morgan is himself
careful to observe, never regarded as equals. Morgan's
conclusion that economic pressure, not racism, led to the
development of a slave institution cannot account for the
fact that the white oppressors counted black Africans not as
human objects, but as exchange objects, which is precisely
why they were conceptually available as slaves. It may be
quite true that economic possibilities and social demands
gave impetus to racial persecution and enslavement. But it
was a cultivated and deep-seated sense of European (cum
”white") superiority which suggested African slavery as an
acceptable solution to Anglo/English economic woes.

As this discussion has suggested, the genesis of racial
discrimination and oppression in America rose out of both
psychological and economic factors, the two complexly

intertwined. Anglo attitudes and actions toward the racial

Other were
physical ar
Jefferson's
alternate];
83th are pg
assure‘P'Cion:
with the p'
KRRCY DID

John
Village Hy

hl5tor iCal

21
Other were defined by a need for superiority at once
physical and metaphysical. Two texts, John Underhill's
Heme m M, and sections XIV and XVIII of Thomas
Jefferson's neeee,eh,hhe_fi;e§e,ei,¥1;glh1e, foreground

alternately material and mental motivations of Othering.
Both are paradigmatic in their racist and racialist
assumptions, and in the ideological processes they share

with the promotional literature discussed above.

MERCY DID THEY DESERVE FOR THEIR VALOR

John Underhill's account of the Pequot massacre at the
village Mystic, Negee £19m Ameeiee, is an extraordinary
historical document that seldom receives attention by
literary critics. It is problematic in that it is
impossible to categorize neatly, at once historical (an
account of the Pequot War) and literary (a promotion of the
scenic Connecticut countryside). negee,geem,5me;1ee emerges
as textualized violence and appropriation, much as the
Pequot "war" itself emerged materially. The two levels of
Underhill's text, like the war, operate synergistically:
the need to vanquish antagonistic natives for ‘self—
protection,’ and ‘admiration' for the geography of the
Connecticut valley that the Pequots inhabit.

The Puritans' pretense for the Pequot war was patently
trumped up, as recent historians document. Ann Kibbey

explains in her excellent study of Puritan rhetorical

practice a
governance
the evider
than the E
Di Plymout
Puritans ]

Figuods" l

22
practice and its consequence for their actual policies and
governance, that "despite the Puritan claim of self-defense,
the evidence strongly implies that the Pequots, far more
than the Puritans, acted in self-defense. Even the governor
of Plymouth colony observed at the time ... that the
Puritans had "occasioned a war, etc., by provoking the
Pequods” (Kibbey, 100).‘1 One of the charges made against
the Pequots by the Puritans was against their murder of two
traders, Stone and Oldham. But as the Puritans clearly knew
according to their own records, Niantics had killed Stone,
Narragansetts, Oldham (see Jennings, 202-227). And, as
Alden T. Vaughan points out, Captain John Stone, notorious
among colonists for his hijacking/pirating adventures, had
been banished by the Plymouth Colony (Vaughan, 1965, 124).
To further the unfairness of the Puritan's consequent
warfare techniques, when fellow traders discovered Oldham's
body, they killed at least six "Indians."

Stone's death was a result of the Niantic warriors
confusing his relation to Dutch traders who only shortly
before had brutally murdered their sachem. The war that
ensued against the Pequots to "avenge" his and Oldham's
deaths was characterized, Kibbey asserts, by the "frequent
refusal of Puritan men to distinguish among ‘Indians,’
combined with their declared intent to exterminate the
Pequots" (Kibbey, 101). Underhill's text, in fact,

duplicates this refusal to distinguish between tribes. In

his a
"Bio
cent.
vari
““e:

VII-q

aurdt

23

his account of Oldham's death, Underhill refers only to
”Block Islanders," and ”Indians," while he seems perfectly
comfortable elsewhere in the text distinguishing between the
various groups. With no apparent sense of incongruity,
Underhill recounts an Indian ambassador's account of Stone's
murder. Dutch traders took the sachem hostage for a wampum
ransom; upon payment they returned the sachem, dead. The
ambassador explains to the Puritans that when Stone later
sailed up river, the natives took their revenge upon him and
his crew, and pleads, "Could ye blame us for revenging so
cruel a murder? for we distinguish not between the Dutch and
English, but took them to be one nation, and therefore we do
not conceive that we wronged you, for they slew our king"
(Underhill, 58. Either the ambassador or Underhill
apparently fails to recount a crucial aspect of this
explanation: these "murderous” Niantics gained passage to
Stone's ship only because he plotted to hold them for wampum
ransom. See Jennings, 189-90). To the ambassador's plea,
the Puritans answer was that "they were able to distinguish
between the Dutch and English, having had sufficient
experience of both nations" (Underhill, 58). Sufficient
experience, indeed.

Francis Jennings argues the specificity of the Puritan
focus on the Pequots, asserting that their motive was solely
economic and proprietary. All evidence points to their

knowledge that the Pequots were responsible for neither

Stone nor
complete \
fellow tr
vanquish ‘
remains t
looking f
refused t

Unde

the land

24

Stone nor Oldham's death; in fact, the irony becomes
complete when the colonists enlist Narragansetts--whose
fellow tribesmen apparently executed Oldham--to help them
vanquish their mutual Pequot enemies. The fact, however,
remains that the burgeoning Connecticut settlement was
looking for a chance to commandeer land that the Pequots
refused to relinquish.

Underhill's account makes the colonialists' interest in
the land explicit. He begins the text:

I shall not spend time (for my other occasions will

not permit) to write largely of every particular,

but shall, as briefly as I may, perform these two

things; first, give a true narration of the warlike

proceedings that hath been in New England these two

years last past; secondly I shall discover to the

reader divers places in New England, that will

afford special accOmmodations to such persons as

will plant upon them (49).
According to the explicit plan for Underhill's narration,
these two diverse accounts will be "interwlovenl ... in the
following discourse.” Inseparable issues in the colonialist
mind, the account of a brutal massacre and promotion of the
paradisiacal setting for English colonists dovetail for
Underhill.

The captain details how, on their way to the village

Mystic, the ”few feeble instruments, soldiers not accustomed

to war" 5
that he i
to settle
time to 54
if you we:
glance yOL
YEt named“
locations
IEluctantl
In re
all t.
Place
barreI
can he
thEre’
from t
encOUr
T
ConcOr
erectec

V111 C<

Pfilfltedly t
PeQuotS' is
3:52: c
a
‘L
file IoffiCi
InstEEd. Und
l

25

to war" systematically "burn ... and spoil" the very land
that he invites, in the next breath, his brethren Englishmen
to settle (54). "The truth is," asserts Underhill, "I want
time to set forth the excellence of the whole country; but
if you would know the garden of New England, then you must
glance your eye upon Hudson's river, a place exceeding all
yet named” (64). Proceeding to chronicle the various
locations that would afford abundant accommodation, he
reluctantly concludes:

In regard of many aspersions hath been cast upon

all the country, that it is a hard and difficult

place for to subsist in, and that the soil is

barren, and bears little that is good, and that it

can hardly receive more people than those that are

there, I will presume to make a second digression

from the former matter, to the end I might

encourage such as desire to plant there.

There are certain plantations, Dedham,

Concord, in the Mathethusis Bay, that are newly

erected, that do afford large accommodation, and

will contain abundance of people (65-66).
Pointedly, the Connecticut colony, a paradise depleted of
Pequots, is now ready for settlement.

uggg§_£;gm,5mggiga_makes little effort at documenting
the ”official" reasons for the war: Pequot savagery.

Instead, Underhill so much assumes the positional

d<

Cr.

26

superiority of the white as ultimate justification for their
actions, that the Indians he depicts are ineffectual
buffoons and laughingstocks. Underhill in fact seems very
intent on proving the superior potency of the Puritans:.
they aim to kill, whereas the impotent Indians resort to
ridiculous warring practices, hiding among the trees rather
than coming out to fight like men. Ironically, however, it
is an Indian interpreter voyaging with the Puritans who
offers a most pointed example of English virility. Dressed
in English clothes, and supplied with an English weapon,
this Anglicized Indian provides a "pretty passage worthy
observation.” When one of the Pequots questions him, "What
are you, an Indian or an Englishman?" the Indian translator
replies ”Come hither, and I will tell you," and as Underhill
recounts: ”He pulls up his cock and let fly at one of them,
and without question was the death of him" (54).

By contrast, in his scoffing reflection on Indian
warfare practice, Underhill asserts,

I boldly affirm they might fight seven years and

not kill seven men. They came not near one

another, but shot remote, and not point-blank, as

we often do with our bullets, but at rovers, and

then they gase up in the sky to see where the arrow

falls, and not until it is fallen do they shoot

again. This fight is more for pastime, than to

conquer and subdue enemies (82).

Yet he ger
death defe
Many

and 1

27

Yet he generously commends the warriors who are scorched to
death defending their flaming village:

Many courageous fellows were unwilling to come out,

and fought most desperately through the palisadoes,

so as they were scorched and burnt with the flame,

and were deprived of their arms--in regard the fire

burnt their very bowstrings--and so perished

valiantly. Mercy did they deserve for their valor,

could we have had but opportunity to have bestowed

it (80).
The Puritans, on the other hand, exercise physical,
spiritual and superiority, which accumulates in Underhill’s
flexes as textual authority. Underhill describes the
admiration of the horrified Narragansetts: "Our Indians
came to us, and much rejoiced at our victories, and greatly,
admired the manner of Englishman's fight, but cried Mach it,
mach it; that is, It is naught, it is naught, because it is
too furious, and slays too many men" (84).

The Puritan's divine mission, echoed later by William
Byrd II, was to "have blotted every living Soul of them out
of the World" (Byrd, 292). After the massacre of the
village inhabitants, the Puritans, out of ammunition,
returned to their ships. Ironically, the main body warrior
Pequots, who were camped some ten miles away preparing for
battle, arrived just in time to be useless in defending

their village, but to make themselves completely vulnerable

to the re‘
sold into
thicans .
appropria
Underhill
materiall
being an

promotion

28
to the reloaded Puritans. Two hundred surrendered, and were
sold into slavery in the Indies. Others fled to join the
Mohicans and Niantics. The Puritans returned home,
appropriating Pequot land as they erased their name.12 John
Underhill's text not only reflects this, but actively and
materially participates in the appropriation: as much as
being an account of a war, Nggg§_£;gm America is a
promotional tract, with Underhill as Indian breaker/land
broker.

Catherine Belsey argues that "the work of ideology is
to present the position of the subject as fixed and
unchangeable, an element in a given system of differences
which is human nature and the world of human experience, and
to show possible action as an endless repetition of
‘normal,’ familiar action” (Belsey, 90). One of the
important social functions of News: firgm,5mg;1§§,is to
normalize the action that might be contested as unjustified:
the slaughter of four to six-hundred sleeping Pequots, most
of whom were old people, women and children. Underhill
dances around this by recounting the charges made against
the Indians on behalf of Stone and Oldham; also, he dwells
briefly on the abduction (and recovery) of two English girls
by the Pequots. Only once does he explicitly confront the
issue in an extended passage worth quoting in full:

Down fell men, women and children; those that

scaped us, fell into the hands of the Indians that

 

 

were
them:
soul:
esca;
the I
neve
gasp
that
dame
haVe

and

29

were in the rear of us. It is reported by
themselves, that there were about four hundred
souls in this fort, and not above five of them
escaped out of our hands. Great and doleful was
the bloody sight to the view of young soldiers that
never had been in war, to see so many souls lie
gasping on the ground, so thick, in some places,
that you could hardly pass along. It may be
demanded, Why should you be so furious? (as some
have said). Should not Christians have more mercy
and compassion? But I would refer you to David's
war. When a people is grown to such a height of
blood, and sin against God and man, and all
confederates in the action, there he hath no
respect to persons, but harrows them, and saws
them, and puts them to the sword, and the most
terriblest death that may be. Sometimes the
Scripture declareth women and children must perish
with their parents. Sometimes the case alters; but
we will not dispute it now. We had sufficient
light from the word of God for our proceedings
(81).

Like promotionalist texts written before passage to America,

Underhill's text seeks confirmation in biblical precedent,

thereby normalizing, or making ‘ordinary' what might

alternately be read as extraordinarily brutal action.

What
(of savag
available
prescript
acts. Ke
"equipmen
Proverbs
situation
1“ genera
they esta
PGISpecti
“Oi-fledge
definitio
dramtica
{LentziCC
Effective
illustzat
Positions
Emldi‘i'rs
textual d
“Vice 0n
prWiding

encompds

30

What ugugg,fi;gm,5mg;1§§,offers is at once containment
(of savage Indians) and expansion (of possible action in
available land). Precisely, it is description and
prescription, telling of past action, and forecasting future
acts. Kenneth Burke argues forcefully that literature is
"equipment for living," that it functions socially as
proverbs do in that it offers ”strategies for dealing with
situations” (Burke, 296). Underhill's text, and literature
in general (as Burke argues), develop strategies in that
they establish a perspective on their object. These
perspectives are, as Frank Lentricchia proposes, "modes of
knowledge: not in its traditional, disinterested humanist
definition, but knowledge as power." And, as he
dramatically concludes, "to write is to know is to dominate"
(Lentricchia, 146). Thus, uggg§,fi;mm America suggests an
effective means of domination (Underhill in fact includes an
illustrated mapping of the attack, depicting the relative
positions of the village, its inhabitants, the Puritan
soldiers and Narragansett reinforcements) as it gn§g§;_a
textual domination. The representation thereby offers
advice on controlling a situation, while at the same time
providing a means of, as Burke would have it,

”encompassment.”

A Di?

of 51
Jeffe

Jorda
and it

vritiw
refer.
the s}
imPori
(429),
XVIII,
to the
aesthe
hidder
Perceg
Jeffe2
Many F
Janho)
dynami
displa
p‘ECis
that I
lanife

1
s‘aVer

31
A DIFFERENCE FIXED IN NATURE
One of the most pervasively influential considerations
of slavery and Africans in American history is Thomas

Jefferson's 89:35. 9.11 the State. of Zinnia. As Winthrop

Jordan notes, "against the backdrop of changing attitudes
and action: concerning Negroes and Nauru clnvnty, the

writings of one man became a fixed and central point of
reference and influence. In the years after the Revolution
the speculations of Thomas Jefferson were of great
importance because so many people read and reacted to them"
(429). In two famous passages, Query XIV, on "Laws"; and
XVIII, on "Manners," Jefferson attempted a rational approach
to the explosive issue, developing an argument ang,an
aesthetic based on ‘right-reason,’ and ‘common-sense.’ Yet
hidden in the empiricist rhetoric is a real
perceptual/positional dilemma. Critics often favorably cite
Jefferson's profound ambivalence over racism and slavery;
many point to passage XVIII as its manifestation. Yet, as
JanMohamed has observed, ambivalence is not necessarily
dynamic: it can be a privileged stasis, self-consciously
displayed as evidence for moral recognition, yet valued
precisely in that the ambivalence does not promote acting on
that recognition (JanMohamed, 60). Thus, the ambivalence

manifest in ugtgg_gn,;ng_fitgtg gt Virginig_over the issue of

slavery is finally less interesting than Jefferson's

attempts
society.
Dona
in Query
analysis
scientifi
(Robinson
regretful
culminate
Country ‘I
no atttit
ConteSt’.
careful 1
“Plate ,1
as “any r
to the 81
suffered

32
attempts to position himself in his discourse, and in his
society.

Donald Robinson, noting Jefferson's empiricist stance
in Query XIV, has suggested that "where the categories of
analysis [in Query XIV] are relatively static and
scientific, those (in Query XVIII] are dynamic and moral"
(Robinson, 92). Taking his cue, perhaps, from the
regretful, even apocalyptic tone of the passage, which
culminates in Jefferson's exclamation: ”I tremble for my
country when I reflect that God is just ... The Almighty has
no attribute which can take side with us in such a
contest,"*° Robinson is able to make a fair case. But a
careful reading might prove the opposite. Regret does not
replace moral action; Jefferson's concern in Query XVIII is,
as many have noticed, for "our people” precisely as opposed
to the slave. While he observes the moral degradation
suffered by the slave ("he must lock up the faculties of his
nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual
endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail
his own miserable condition on the endless generations
proceeding from him"), he is much more concerned for the
moral and physical threat produced by the slave system for
”our people” and ”our children"--his white compatriots. The
abrupt break in the text which follows his apocalyptic
forecast is indicative of his refusal to pursue the

consequences of his thought: "--But it is impossible to be

tezn1
con:
civ
int
eva:

equ

(Fei

33
temperate and to pursue this subject through the various
considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and
civil. We must be content to hope they will force their way
into every one's mind." The train of thought here is
evasive, not dynamic, his optimism (as well as his prose)
equivocal and tentative.

By contrast, the permutations that occur in the passage
on ”Laws" (XIV) provide much more insight into the depth of
Jefferson's real perceptual/conceptual.dilemmas on the
subject of race, and racial slavery. Jefferson's initial
empiric observations on the profound differences between the
black and white races come in response to his proposal for a
law providing for slave emancipation and distant
colonization, and indeed, as Robert Ferguson convincingly
demonstrates, Query XIV on "Laws" is the "central rationale"
of this text ordered on the philosophy of natural law
(Ferguson, 401). Its consequent failure (here, as
elsewhere) at "rational management" of the issue of slavery
is a signpost to the Enlightenment philosopher's profound
inability to ‘master' the incongruity between slave system
and legal contract, between power, and ‘natural' authority.
We see this most clearly in Jefferson's discussion of
thievish slaves (while lengthy, this passage is worth
extended attention):

That disposition to theft with which they have been

branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and

Jeffe:

5°! 1a

34

not to any depravity of the moral sense. The man,

in whose favor no laws of property exist, probably

feels himself less bound to respect those made in

favour of others. When arguing for ourselves, we

lay it down as fundamental, that laws, to be just,

must give a reciprocation of right: that, without

this, they are mere rules of conduct, founded in

force, and not in conscience: and it is a problem

which I give to the master to solve, whether the

religious precepts against the violation of

property were not framed for him as well as his

slave? And whether the slave may not as

.justifiably take a little from one, who has taken

all from him, as he may slay one who would slay

him? (142).

Jefferson here confronts the Enlightenment colonist's
dilemma, for he cannot reconcile the "social contract" basis
for law and authority, with the slave institution, which as
Ferguson underscores, ”exists outside the law," becoming, as
a consequence, "a structural incongruity in Notes?
(Ferguson, 491).

This passage in fact, abstracted from its context,
seems much more coherent and progressive than it actually is
in place. Indeed, it is not at all clear if this passage is
intended to refer to the black American slave. When prior

to this passage, Jefferson attempts to document the inherent

inferi
produc:
garner
more ha
'vere 0
were of
conclud:
which he
here or
Pronouns
further .
that natz
endOMnteri’c
She V111
the above
immediate
imperativ,

35
inferiority of the black race, signal in their inability to
produce poetry, he turns to the Augustan age of slavery to
garner support for his position. Roman slaves were much
more harshly treated, argues Jefferson, and yet these slaves
”were often the rarest artists." But, he emphasizes, "they
were of the race of the whites," which leads him directly to
conclude: "It is not their condition then, but nature,
which has produced the distinction" (142). He at no point
here or subsequently clarifies to which group of slaves his
pronouns refer--to white or black--as he proceeds: "Whether
further observation will or will not verify the conjecture,
that nature has been less bountiful to them in the
endowments of the head, I believe that in those of the heart
she will be found to have done them justice." Here proceeds
the above-quoted passage on thievery and laws, followed
immediately by a quote from Homer on the shifting moral
imperatives of a slave, to which Jefferson appends, "But the
slaves of which Homer speaks were whites" (142). What I wish
to suggest is that Jefferson dodges the inevitable conflict
of his arguments, alternating between declarations of
inherently or environmentally determined racial difference.
While he comes very near to an explicit repudiation of his
previous statement-~"The improvement of the blacks in body
and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with whites
... proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely

of their condition in life" (l4l)--he masks it, perhaps even

Ci

of

eque
See
not
Mm
“421

1an

emPi:

COan

36
for himself, in a tangle of pronouns, and an increasingly
vacillatory train of thought.

John Diggins persuasively argues that Jefferson was
caught in the contradictions of the Enlightenment principle
of equality:

The problem ... is not only that equality was, and

continues to be, a harsh doctrine that could be

used against the Negro as much as in support of

him--a conservative doctrine that demanded that the

Negro compete in a white culture and be rewarded

only for capacities and talents esteemed by that

culture ... The crucial problem is that the Negro's

"fundamental equality" --and the white man's for

that matter--could not be confirmed by the

empirical criteria of the Enlightenment (Diggins,

225).

Jefferson was caught up in the empiricist tautology of
equality: Man's equality is "self-evident" because we can
see it to be so in nature. As a matter of fact, blacks were
not empirically equal; Jefferson and other enlightenment
philosophers became trapped in supposing equality to be an
empirical proposition when it was in fact a moral
imperative.“

In this ”radical disjunction of ethical sentiment and
empirical science" Diggins locates Jefferson's inability to

confront the contradictions of slavery.. Yet in his

IE

VE

37
reflections on morality elsewhere, Diggins notes, Jefferson
was able to become "conspicuously subjective," and in his
various correspondence, the Virginian statesman represents
the quality of morality in a radically different way: ”It
is not what one believes [according to Jefferson], but how
one honestly avows and acts upon a belief that is held less
for its objective truthfulness than for its emotional
rightness." Despite this imperative, Diggins continues,
"Jefferson could not bring himself to extend his own dictum
to the slavery question." Instead, in confronting the slave
question, Jefferson, as we have seen, turns doggedly to
empiric observations, "becomes an empiricist par excellence"
(Diggins, 227-228). By this, he inscribes for himself, and
prescribes for his audience (white, European, male), a
position of static ambivalence, appealing to the authority
of ‘objective' observation to disguise his subjective
unwillingness to relinquish his social superiority and its
material advantages.

The function of Jefferson's text was to validate the
rightness of the American mission, the centrality of the
United States's role on the new continent. In this regard,
Netee en, the state gt W is colonial literature par
excellence, engaging, as it does, in the demarcation and
normalization of what we might call the "right of white."
Jefferson's Netee, like promotionalist tracts and frontier

literature, inscribed the central role of the Anglo-Saxon

Europe
new la
Jeffer
phenom
their

circum

WARD

A;
certai:
world,
are, h.
“diet:
is, abr
eStablj
aesthe1
CultUre
lonolos

38
Europeans in the world. Challenged by their encounters with
new lands and new peoples, the white Europeans, and
Jefferson in their tradition, worked to incorporate these
phenomena into the story of Euro-centricity, documenting
their right to dominate as they crossed the continent and

circumnavigated the globe.

TOWARD A SOCIOLOGICAL CRITICISM 0? LITERATURE

As Thomas Metscher observes, "certain ‘knowledge,’
certain contents of consciousness, a certain view of the
world, certain attitudes, values and norms--whatever they
are, however ‘right' and ‘wrong'--are articulated in and
mediated by art" (Metscher, 21). The aesthetic function
is, above all, a social dynamic, as Jan Mukarovsky has
established, which grows from cultural dialogue. Yet while
aesthetic cognition arises as a result of contesting
cultural ‘voices,' it is the drive of the aesthetic to
monologize, to make itself ‘universal,’ ‘common-sensical,’
in short, to conceal the social process which sustains it.

If a given culture gains access to control (both
symbolic and practical) through a normative process of
representation, it is through principles of the ‘aesthetic'
that it finds an avenue to mastery. And it is precisely the
aesthetic's reference to universality that lends it its

repressive, political power. In her brilliant analysis of

the W 91. mutation. Susanne Kappeler.

39

summarizing from Kant's ”From Critique of Judgement," argues
that "judgments of taste, of aesthetic quality must have a
subjective principle, and one which determines what pleases
and what displeases, by means of feeling only and not
through concepts, but yet with universal validity"
(Kappeler, 54). Such subjectivity, she further notes,
operates typically under the aegis of ‘common sense.' In
fact, it is ‘common sense' to which Thomas Jefferson refers
in his empirical observations in Query XIV on the ”beauty in
the two races." Jefferson argues:

The first difference which strikes us is that of

color. Whether the black of the negro resides in

the reticular membrane between the skin and scarf-

skin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it

proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour

of the bile, or from that of some other secretion,

the difference is fixed in nature and is as real as

if its seats and causes were better known to us.

And is this difference of no importance? Is it not

the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty

in the two races? (my emphasis, 138).
By establishing "nature" as his ultimate authority,
Jefferson grounds his aesthetic conclusions in a "difference
fixed in nature and as real as if its seats and causes were

better known to us” (138). His subsequent catalog of the

inferi
aesthe
A:
from ti
subject
subject
abstrac
politic
reminds
(155).
Pelitice
‘beauty.
between
e”COMpa5
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°“1Y dia
inv01Ved
(Lent-tic
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Jeffer50
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DDSSESSQ‘
“Mirna.
‘SelE‘EV

contradl‘

40
inferior ”beauty" of black slaves confirms his mastery
aesthetically, morally, and economically.

As Kappeler observes, "the claim to universality stems
from the fact of the disinterestedness with which the
subject regards the represented object" (Kappeler, S4). The
subject of representation is objectified, its qualities
abstracted; ‘beauty' in fact becomes a sanctuary apart from
political struggle. But in fact, as Frank Lentricchia
reminds us, "the aesthetic is always traversed by power"
(ILSS). ‘Beauty' can never be understood outside of its
political/social context. Kenneth Burke argues that
‘laeauty' must be conceived as the site of a struggle,
between a ”situation and a strategy for confronting or
eruzompassing that situation." Thus, as Lentricchia
Concludes, ”beauty cannot be conceived monistically, but
cualy dialectically as always an act in the world, always
involved in the administration of political medicine"
(Lentricchia, 156). When pained by the contradictions in
his own thinking (all men are created (un)equal), Thomas
Jefferson turned to the panacea of ‘beauty'--a universal
norm located outside of himself, but which he was happily
possessed of--for reassurance, and moral and intellectual
confirmation. Jefferson's natural law, that which he holds
‘self—evident,’ must, however, finally face its own

contradiction: his ‘common sense' is finally a moral dodge.

K2
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41

Representation, then, is the (concealed) intersectionv
of the aesthetic and the social. Its mission, argues
Kappeler, is ”not so much the means of representing an
object through imitation (matching contents) as a means of
self representation through authorship: the expression of
subjectivity" (Kappeler, 53). The foundation of Underhill
and Jefferson's enterprise is self-confirmation: as
authors, they explain and represent the Other and by this
act they establish their right/write to dominance. As
authors depicting and dominating the Other, they inscribe
and confirm their own (superior) identity. It is perhaps
worth noting, as Frank Lentricchia reminds us, that the
cornerstone of Western representational theory, Aristotle's
Eeetlee, grounds its discussion on the representation of
good character in a particular appeal to ‘common sense'--the
universally acknowledged inferiority of women and slaves.
The aesthetic of representation, as Lentricchia's example
highlights, is inevitably involved in, acting upon and
through, social circumstance.

It is this intrinsic connection between literature and
social action that Kenneth Burke explores in his essay
"Literature as Equipment for Living." In it, he casts
literature in a proverbial role, as an active mediator of
social reality, offering "§££§££SLEE.EOI dealing with

situations.” He makes here an explicit, even avowedly

sinistei
literati
SUI
so;
cix
org
ima
mov

liv

42
sinister connection here between the strategic value of
literature, and militaristic ”strategy":
Surely, the most highly alembicated and
sophisticated work of art, arising in complex
civilizations, could be considered as designed to
organize and command the army of one's thoughts and
images ... One seeks to ”direct the larger
movements and operations" in one's campaign of
living. One "manuevers," and the maneuvering is an
"art.”
Are not the final results one's "strategy"?
One tries, as far as possible, to develop a
strategy whereby one ”can't lose.” One tries to
change the rules of the game until they fit his own
necessities (1973, 298).
Chanceived as such, colonial ideology and its manifestations
1!! literature may be viewed as various strategies for
”winning” in the new world, a maneuver on the part of
”White” Europeans to reclaim and affirm a central role in
the universe. Intrinsic to this maneuver is a process of
Positioning, of naming situations so that they fit European
conceptual necessity or expediency. And equally intrinsic
to a critical apprehension of the social dynamics of
colonial texts is what Burke terms a ”calculus of acts," a

sociological criticism of literature.

Bu
Sociolo
the var
relatio
themsel
the the
of one
Place a
might O
Sometim
or abst
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Uh
its OWn
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strateg
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43

Burke suggests broad outlines for such an endeavor.
Sociological criticism, he proposes, "would seek to codify
the various strategies which artists have developed with
relation to the naming of situations." While the names
themselves may occasionally vary, he speculates, "beneath
the change in particulars, we may often discern the naming
of one situation." Importantly, the examination should take
place across a broad spectrum of literatures, although ”it
might occasionally lead us to outrage good taste, as we
sometimes found exemplified in some great sermon or tragedy
or abstruse work of philosophy the same strategy as we found
exemplified in a dirty joke" (1973, 301-302).

What Burke proposes is unconventional, but not without
its own rigor. His critical method will be based in
"classifications, groupings, made on the basis of some
strategic element common to the items grouped ... a method
of classification with reference to strategies." These
classifications, he further urges, must above all be
"active," seeking not to codify but to break down
traditional, specialized readings of literature:

The method has these things to be said in its

favor: It gives definite insight into the

organization of literary works; and it

automatically breaks down the barriers erected

about literature as a specialized pursuit ...

Sociological classification, as herein suggested,

Fin.

SUch
Fran!

Sflme‘

44
-would derive its relevance from the fact that it
should apply both to works of art and to social
situations outside of art ... These categories will
lie on the bias across the categories of modern
specialization (1973, 303).

Finally, and most explicitly, Burke has this to say:
What would such sociological categories be like?
They would consider works of art, I think, as
strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for
socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for
purification, propitiation, and desanctification,
consolation and vengeance, admonition and
exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of
one sort or another. Art forms like "tragedy" or
"comedy" or "satire” would be treated as equipments
for living, that size up situations in various ways
and in keeping with correspondingly various
attitudes. The typical ingredients would be
sought. Their comparative values would be
considered, with the intention of formulating a
"strategy of strategies," the “over-all" strategy
obtained by inspection of the lot (304).

Such a methodology would, in fact, be able to accommodate

Frank Lentricchia's assertion that "literature makes

something happen, that the literary is always the taking of

pos;

vitl

soc:
rep]
exar
fici
the;
writ
alte
Thrc
anal
the
in t
the)

°ffe

45
position and simultaneously the exercising of position
within and on a social field" (Lentricchia, 156).

In what follows, I will test the plausibility of such a
sociological criticism as it may be applied to the
representation of ‘race' in American literature. I will
examine ‘race,’ following Henry Louis Gates, as an always
fictional construction, a metaphoric trope. The subsequent
chapters will examine a diverse selection of writing and
writers from a variety of perspectives, concentrating
alternately on a single text, or on a grouping of texts.
Throughout, these questions will unify the range of
analyses: How do these texts "frame" the representation of
the racial Self and Other? How do they position themselves
in the social dialogue on "race," and what social action do
they mediate? In short, what kind of "social medicine" is

offered by the texts?

col
13:
com
the
Cot
Chr
to

46

NOTES

1. Cotton here justifies the profit-mission of
colonialism. Curiously, his example, taken from Matthew
13:44-46, reverses the direction of Christ's parable, which
compares the wise who recognize true value and sell all
their material belongings to attain it to good Christians.
Cotton utilizes this example to reverse ends, comparing good
Christians to those who are "wise... and ... sudden" enough
to seize material gain in the New World.

2. Cf. Nash, 1982, 27--39. Nash suggests that Spanish
accounts of native genocide may have "suggested that when
Europeans met ‘primitive peoples,’ slaughter was inevitable."

3. As Winthrop Jordan points out in White,Qge; enmug:
Attitudes. nears. the team. MIL there seems

to be a ”fog of inconsistency and vagueness enveloping the
terms servant and slave as they were used in England and
seventeenth-century America” (52-53), and that the evidence
surrounding the usage of those first Africans in Virginia is
sketchy at best. However, the wording of legal documents,
and evidence of freed Africans indicates an evolving trend
from treating Africans as servants, to their very definite
status as life-long slaves by the 1640's (see 71-76).

4. Kupperman provides detailed analysis of early
colonial writings on this subject. Cf. "Indian Appearance,"
133-144. She notes particularly that for the early colonial
ethnographers, "color itself was a manipulable attribute.
Writers mostly referred to the tan color of the Indians as
the "Sun's livery” ... However the color was produced [i.e.
by sun or walnut stain], the important fact was that Indians
were naturally white ... Their darker color was part of a
deliberately produced identity which the Indians chose for
themselves, because they considered it beautiful or to
protect themselves from the elements" (37).

5. Similarly, Richard Drinnon, in his Eeetng,We§t,
documents a lexical shift in the adjectival use of "brutish"
to describe Native Americans, to the nominative "brute"
during this period (50).

6. Jordan's comments here are representative: "The
concept of Negro slavery there was neither borrowed from
foreigners, nor extracted from books, nor invented out
of whole cloth, nor extrapolated from servitude, nor

genera
necess
any on.

7
5%
of the
scient.

8.
Coperni
desire
based c
appear
to his
and was
the Rte
35 a re
CUIlOus
call a

9.
Merritt
Hiltonl:
the“ h:
Sake of
QEOCEnt]

E im 2
188), p

mediEVal

“We

11.
i

47

generated by English reaction to Negroes as such, nor
necessitated by the exigencies of the New World. Not
any one of these made the Negro a slave, but all" (72).

7. See also, Thomas S. Kuhn, the attgetgge_gi
figientttie,fiexelettee, who offers a provocative account

of the fundamental conservatism at the heart of any
scientific ”revolution."

8. In fact, as Butterfield further notes,
Copernicus was perhaps driven as much by his personal
desire to usurp Ptolemy as he was by objective disputes
based on observation. Says Butterfield: "It would
appear that Copernicus found a still stronger stimulus
to his great work in the fact that he had an obsession
and was ridden by a grievance. He was dissatisfied with
the Ptolemaic system for a reason which we must regard
as a remarkably conservative one--he held that in a
curious way it caused offence by what one can almost
call a species of cheating." (37).

9. John Milton, Eetegtee,geet, VIII:65-172. As
Merritt Y. Hughs notes in his thorough introduction to

Milton's work, debate has long rage over whether Milton
threw his support to the geocentric camp, or, for the
sake of convenience and convention, depicted the
geocentric universe while theoretically acknowledging
the implications of heliocentricity (see especially 186-
188).

10. Carl L. Becker argues for the essential
conservatism of Enlightenment rationality and "natural
philosophy," establishing its epistemological roots in

medieval theological philosophy, in Ine,fleexenlyhgtty gt
the museum-Cerium Were-

11. For a very different reading of the Pequot war, see

Alden T- Vaughan, lieu England Runner: Earlene and
Indians. 15.2.1151; 134-138-

12. Cf. Drinnon, 55. John Mason records in his account
of the Pequot war that afterwards, when the number of the
surviving Pequots was reduced to somewhere between 180—200,
the Pequot sachems petitioned the Puritans for mercy in
return for their submission. Mason records that ”the
Pequots were then bound by Covenant, That none should
inhabit their native Country, nor should any of them be
called Pequots any more” (40).

13. All references to Query XVIII are drawn from
Jefferson, 162-163.

48

14. See Diggins for a fuller discussion, 224-228.

C01

CHAPTER TWO
ECONOMIES OF MORALITY AND POWER:
"RACE" REFORM IN MATHER AND BYRD

COLONIAL DISCOURSE AND RACIALIST MYTH

In a provocative essay, "The Economy of Manichean
Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist
Literature," Abdul JanMohamed comments on two principles
important to colonial/racial discourse: l) Perception and
representation of racial difference are always founded upon
economic motives; and 2) Racial discourse is always governed
by racial tropes, which turn on the economy of what
JanMohamed terms "manichean allegory." He explains:

The dominant pattern of relations that controls the

text within the colonialist context is determined

by economic and political imperatives and changes,

such as the development of slavery, that are

external to the discursive field itself. The

dominant model of power- and interest—relations in

all colonial societies is the manichean opposition

between the putative superiority of the European

and the supposed inferiority of the native. This

axis in turn provides the central feature of the

colonialist cognitive framework and colonialist

literary representation: the manichean allegory--a

49

 

fie
bet
and
int
ser
(63
Through
racial c
Cultural
ready to
Jan

ROland B

Schemati
exPlicat

On

Shot

Oppr

50

field of diverse yet interchangeable oppositions

between white and black, good and evil, superiority

and inferiority, civilization and savagery,

intelligence and emotion, rationality and

sensuality, self and Other, subject and object

(63).
Through the metaphoric function of manichean allegory, the
racial Other becomes depleted of its own historical and
cultural significance, and becomes a commodified entity,
ready for appropriation by the colonial discursive system.

JanMohamed's model for this process calls to mind
Roland Barthes' discussion of the mythologizing process in
Mytnetegtee. In his closing essay, "Myth Today," Barthes
schematizes the semiological system of mythology through his
explication of a cover on a copy of Ih§.E§Ll§.fl§LQhfi

On the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is

saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on

a fold of the tricolor. All this is the meaning of

the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see

very well what it signifies to me: that France is

a great Empire, that all her sons, without any

color discrimination, faithfully serve under her

flag, and that there is no better answer to the

detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal

shown by this Negro in serving his so-called

oppressors. I am therefore again faced with a

Fret

pres

(116
In order
signified
Successfu
dEhistori(
argues Ea:
behind; it
evaporates
soldier th
history. 1
(almoSt) an
to be imbue

FIEHCh Impe

Signifier b:

Negro

51

greater semiological system: there is a signifier,

itself already formed with a previous system (a

black soldier is giving the French salute); there

is a signified (it is here a purposeful mixture of

Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is the

presence of the signified through the signifier

(116).

In order for this final stage, "the presence of the
signified through the signifier" that is the myth, to
successfully occur, the signifier must undergo a process of
dehistoricizing and depoliticizing. It must become a form,
argues Barthes, where "meaning leaves its contingency
behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history
evaporates, only the letter remains" (117). The negro
soldier thus must lose his individuality, and his cultural
history. He becomes both generic and exchangeable, an
(almost) empty signifier in a system of communication, ready
to be imbued with the concept of the essential goodness of
French imperialism. Because of its prior emptying, the
signifier becomes transparent to the signified; the saluting
Negro etenge fie; French imperialism.

As Barthes is quick to observe, myth, as a "second-
level semiotic system" unlike the first level (language), is
never arbitrary or uninterested: "Motivation is necessary
to the very duplicity of the myth: myth plays on the

analogy between meaning and form, there is no myth without

motix
value
is ti

(123}

52
motivated form" (126). Myth, Barthes underscores, is a
value, never separable from the system that creates it. It
is the location of disguised power, "a perpetual alibi"
(123), a "type of speech defined by its intention" (124).

The subtext of colonialist racial representation is
always European superiority. The depiction of the native is
always "about" white, Western excellence. Through the trope
of manichean allegory, the racial Other is deprived of
individuality, culture and history, and thus the
mythologized form becomes an index to the white, authorizing
self, in the same manner that the saluting Negro on Ine
Eillfl.fli££h becomes the "very presence of French
imperiality" (128). The duplicity of colonial myth lies in
the nature of the mythologizing process: the subtext (of
Western superiority) becomes the teat through the depleted
signifier (the degraded racial Other, or the saluting
Negro).

This mythologizing process works always to naturalize
its subject, that is, to replace history with a natural
justification, to be read not as motive, but cause. Barthes
further elaborates:

In passing from history to nature, myth acts

economically: it abolishes the complexity of human

acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it

does away with all dialectics, with any going back

beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a

(
it is 1
colonia
m0tiVa1
maniche
"Myths
Drover:
Social
inVOlVe
IEIatic

Ca
motives
imagine
that it

Th

mo

53

world which is without contradictions because it is

without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in

the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity:

things appear to mean something by themselves

(143).

It is precisely through this process of naturalization that
colonial discourse disguises its interest, its economic
motivation. In this way, the mythologizing process or
manichean allegory of racial trope works as social medicine.
”Myths tend toward proverbs," says Barthes (154), and
proverbs function, as Kenneth Burke underlines, to chart
social relationships. Colonial discourse is above all
involved in the charting and naturalizing of social
relationships.

Can a colonial author ever write outside the power-
motives of colonial discourse? JanMohamed suggests that the
imaginative power of the manichean allegory is so dominating
that it can in fact override all conscious resistance:

The power relations underlying this model set in

motion such strong currents that even a writer who

is reluctant to acknowledge it and who may indeed

be highly critical of imperialist exploitation is

drawn into its vortex. The writer is easily

seduced by colonial privilege and profits and

forced by various ideological factors ... to

Even,
explo

of th

Chris
PM:
betWe
tende
thhc
are 1
isSuE
c103:
Part
each
the .

30C

54

conform to the prevailing racial and cultural

preconceptions (63).

Even, then, in writers who demonstrate sympathy toward
exploited racial groups, we should expect to find evidence
of the "master-discourse" of white, Western dominance.

Two colonial texts, Cotton Mather's "The Negro
Christianized" (1706), and William Byrd's utetettee et,tne
mmmmmmm (written
between 1728—1730), exemplify many of the manichean
tendencies outlined by JanMohamed, as well as the
mythologizing semiology of Barthes. Typically, both writers
are lauded as progressive and open-minded in the racial .
issues they address. This essay, however, will question
closely the motivations of each text, and will focus
particularly upon the economy of racial representation in
each. Governing the discussion will be two questions: Does
the author effectively undermine racial tropes? What

‘social medicine' does this text enact?

AN ESSAY TO DO GOOD
In 1706, Cotton Mather published a small pamphlet
entitled "The Negro Christianized." The theme of the essay,

"as we have opportunity let us Do Good unto all men" (6),
anticipates, in many ways, a lengthier pamphlet Mather would
publish four years later, "Bonifacius: An Essay to Do Good."

Both tracts function as an "essay" at two levels: as a

writte
prescr
good d
to'"Do

T
that h

EXplai

55

written text exhorting its audience to "Do Good," the text
prescribes social action; as a performance, it becomes a
good deed in itself that provides models for those seeking
tO'"DO Good." In this capacity, the essay Le social action.

The concept, "Do Good," that links both texts, was one
that had long before impressed the Puritan minister. As he
explains in his Preface to "Bonifacius," there was a
"passage, in a Speech from an Envoy from His Britanick
Majesty, to the Duke of Brandenburgh Twenty years ago; A
capacity to Do Good, not only gives a Title to it, but also
makes the doing of it a Duty ... To be brief, Reader, the
Book now in thy Hands, is nothing but an Illustration, and a
Prosecution of that Memorable Sentence" (v). It would seem,
from the subtitle of "The Negro Christianized," that this
earlier work was similarly motivated: "An Essay, to excite
and assist that Good Work; the Information of the Negroes in
Christianity." Mather's good intentions extended beyond the
writing of his text, as he recounts in his diary (May 31,
1706): "My Design is; not only to lodge one of the Books,
in every Family of New England, which has a Negro in it, but
also to send Numbers of them into the Indies; and write such
Letters to the principal Inhabitants of the Islands, as may
be proper to accompany them" (565).

The argument of "The Negro Christianized" is fairly
straightforward. "It is a Golden Sentence," Mather begins,

"that has been sometimes quoted from Chrisodem, That for a

man to know
Crowned wit
unto God, i
the Baskets
proposes, q
Christian 5
Mather appe
Yourselves

"POD you, t
RatiOnal Cr
Hither enum.
God require;
man does no
everythinq

Christian

Hathe
he Stutely
willingness
hr

56

man to know the Art of Alms, is more than for a man to be
Crowned with the Diadem of Kings. But to Convert one Soul
unto God, is more than to pour out Ten Thousand Talents into
the Baskets of the Poor" (1). In his tract, Mather
proposes, quite against public sentiment, that it is every
Christian slave holder's duty to Christianize his slave.
Mather appeals to his audience's reasonableness: "Show
yourselves Men, and let Rational Arguments have their Force
upon you, to make you treat, not as Bruits but as Men,.those
Rational Creatures whom God has made your Servants" (4).
Mather enumerates his reasons for such a proposal. First,
God requires that any man's servants also be His. Second, a
man does not deserve the title "Christian," unless he does
everything in his power to ensure that all his household are
Christian too. Third, Christian compassion requires that the
owner do something for the improvement of his suffering and
sinful slaves. Fourth, the compassionate owner will see the
"incomparable benefit" of Christian consolation for his
efforts. "A Good Man," observes Mather, "is One who does all
the Good that he can. The greatest Good that we can do for
any, is to bring them unto the fullest Acquaintance with
Christianity" (9).

Mather overtly works to break down racial tropes, which
he astutely perceives as a barrier to slave holders'
willingness to Christianize their slaves. After presenting

his arguments for Christianizing the negro as each slave

owner'
Han Li
and si
argume
souls,

color ‘

their ;

57

owner's duty, Mather asks, "And now, what Objection can any
Man Living Have?" Anticipating and answering to the "idle
and silly cavils" of his audience, Mather tackles two major
arguments of the day, that blacks do not have rational
souls, and that they are marked so completely different by
color that they are in fact irredeemable.

Mather answers to both charges simply by asserting
their irrelevance:

It has been cavilled, by some, that it is

questionable Whether the Negroes have Rational

Souls, or no. But let that Brutish insinuation be

inever Whispered any more. Certainly, their

Discourse, will abundantly prove, that they have

Reason. Reason showes it self in the Design which

_they daily act upon. The vast improvement that

Education has made upon some of them, argues that

there is a Reasonable Soul in all of them (23).
As for their color, which is also made an objection, Mather
scoffs: "A Gay sort of Argument! As if the great God went
by the Complexion of Men, in His Favours to them!" (24).
Mather takes a stance clearly in opposition to his
contemporaries who argued that dark skin color was an
external manifestation of moral and intellectual
degradation.‘

Despite Mather's good intentions and perhaps

revolutionary assertions contradicting determinist racial

theori:
much m<
establ:
and whi
opposit
basing
of his
efficac
markedl
them, 3
5001---
CQUtinu
Bu
be

as

fo
th
Uh
We
The neg
qualita
it is f
This Do
uncerm1

CQHC

58

theories, the text is more complicated, and, in the end,
much more conservative than it seems at first glance. While
establishing what seems to be a common ground between black
and white men, Mather yet places their capacity to reason in
opposition. Mather's text privileges white sensibility,
basing itself from its outset on the reasonable persuasion
of his white reader. Yet while Mather has faith in the
efficacy of reason upon white men's understanding, he
markedly does not expect the same effects upon negroes. Of
them, Mather says-~shortly after affirming their rational
soul--"Indeed, their stupidity is a discouragement," and
continues,

But the greater their stupidity, the greater must

be our Application. If we can't learn them as much

as we could, let us learn them as much as we can

.. And the more Difficult it is, to fetch such

forlorn things up out of the perdition whereinto

they are fallen, the more Laudable is the

undertaking: There will be more of a Triumph, if

we Prosper in the undertaking" (25).
The negro may have a rational soul, but it is certainly not
qualitatively the same soul as that of the white. In fact
it is fixed firmly in a relation inferior to the white soul.
This position, coming later in his essay, begins to
undermine his initial assertions. Winthrop Jordan is able

to conclude that "Mather was completely decided (i.e.,

favc
drea
JanH
prod
dupl
cont:
since

of so

59
favorably] on the Negro's essential nature ... despite his
dreadful punning on the Negro's color" (201). Yet if, as
JanMohamed urges, "any evident ‘ambivalence' is in fact a
product of deliberate, if at times subconscious, imperialist
duplicity" (61), we should analyze these apparent
contradictions, rather than discarding them as irrelevant,
since colonialist racial discourse often operates by means
of such contradictions.

The color imagery, what Jordan characterizes as
"dreadful punning," undermines Mather's explicit intentions
to discard categorization by color. The rhetorical device
rife through this text--in fact the only trope seemingly
available to Mather in distinguishing good from bad, saved
from damned--is dark and light imagery. He may affirm the
issue of the African's color a "trifle," but the figure of
speech he uses immediately after this discussion in
considering the difficulties of educating the black is
telling: "It may seem, unto as little purpose to Teach, as
to wash an Aetheopian" (25). Like the cover of the Bette
neten, with its seemingly benign signification of patriotism
masking a more insidious apology for imperialism, Mather's
text explicitly sponsors a liberal, humane reading of
‘blackness' while implicitly proposing a very conservative,
commodified figuration.

In fact, Mather's figurative language develops a covert

text that works against his overt text throughout. He

60

introduces slaves as "the Blackest Instances of Blindness
and Baseness," associating these qualities by alliteration.
And while he reminds his readers parenthetically that it is
not "yet" proven that the slaves are not decedents of Cham,
he leaves room for doubt, which reinforces rather than
undermines a persistent conceptual link in the text between
skin color and moral degradation. He continues, "Let us make
a Trial, Whether they that have been Scorched and Blacken'd
by the sun of Africa, may not come to have their Minds
Healed by the more Benign Beams of the Sun of
Righteousness," suggestively linking physical to moral
condition (1-3). In a stunning passage later in the text,
Mather blurs such distinctions, indeed, suggesting rather
their conflation:

We read of, People destroy'd for lack of knowledge.

If you withold Knowledge from your Black People,

they will be Destroy'd. But their Destruction must

very much 1y at your door; You must answer for it.

It was a Black charge of old brought in against the

Jewish Nation; Jer. 2.34. In thy skirts is found

the Blood of souls ... Surely, Things look very

Black upon us (16).
We see here particularly the full range of passion that the
color imagery is intended to evoke, and its confusing, even
counterproductive effects for Mather's argument. It is at

this point especially that Mather seems entirely trapped in

what

Under-
Cleazj
wUpper
querie
Creatu
means

SaiVat;
me, if

61
what JanMohamed describes as manichean allegory, as his
color imagery of light and dark acquires an apparent
momentum of its own which he cannot prevent from-taking over
his initial arguments.

The covert text of "The Negro Christianized" further
works against the overt text by displacing the ostensible
subject of the piece--the black--with his white owner as the
recipient of benefit. In other words, it is the white
Christian who clearly becomes the subject of the text, the
black heathen only a means by which the Christian can
advance himself on a cosmic scale. The act of
Christianizing the black is "the noblest Work, that was
undertaken among the Children of men" (2)--"children of men"
clearly excluding the African object. The black is an
"opportunity," a "trial," a "creature." "Who can tell,"
queries Mather, "but that God may have sent this Poor
Creature into my hands, so that One of the Elect may by my
means be Called; and by my Instruction be made Wife unto
Salvation! The glorious God will put unspeakable Glory upon
me, if it may be so!" (3). The white Christian accrues
eternal benefits, through his acting upon the black object--
by making them "objects for the Nobles of Heaven to take
Notice of!" (20). Important in this process, the "object"--
the Christianized negro--will in fact reflect the white
master, says Mather: "It cannot but be a vast accession

unto your Joy in Heaven, to meet your Servants there and

62

hear them forever blessing the gracious God, for the Day
when He first made them your Servants" (20). Like the
second level of Barthes' mythological semiology, the
signifying "subject" is emptied of meaning, becoming, in the
process, available for another meaning. Like the saluting
negro on the E§L11.MQLQD: Mather's slaves have no meaning of
themselves, but are rather an (eternal) index to white
superiority; they etenfi,tet their Christianizing master.

Colonialist racial discourse is never innocent.
Virginia Bernhard, in her essay, "Cotton Mather and the
Doing of Good: A Puritan Gospel of Wealth," observes that
Mather's fientfieeiee, unlike more somber English tracts which
focus on the thanklessness of Doing Good, "abounds with
optimism and constantly stresses both spiritual and temporal
benefits which accrue to the individual who does good"
(232). Temporal benefit likewise plays a crucial role in
"The Negro Christianized." "Benefits," "revenues,"
"accounts," "inheritances," "shares" and "recompense" are
all metaphors for the heavenly profits available to the
Christianizing white. But more emphatically, Mather
underscores the temporal, specifically monetary rewards the
plan will garner the reluctant slave owner: "Yea, the pious
Masters, that have instituted their Servants in Christian
Piety, will even in this life have Recompense" (20). The
slaves will be more tractable, more dutiful and faithful,

hence, more profitable. He observes that slaves "are to

enjo
Just
indi

the.

63
enjoy no Earthly Goods, but the small Allowance that your
Justice and Bounty shall see proper for them" (19), clearly
indicating that by contrast, the white man’s privilege is
the accumulation of worldly goods.

It is curious, then, when Mather at one point begins
ardently to chastise those who would object to his plan for
the reason that baptism will entitle blacks to freedom,
which will represent pecuniary loss for the owner: "Man, if
this were true; that a Slave bought with thy Money, were by
thy means brought unto the Things that accompany Salvation,
and thou shouldest from this tie have no more service from
him, yet thy Money were not thrown away" (26). He
reprimands the selfish owner/reader severely for several
more lines, and then there is a sudden shift: "But it is
all a Mistake. There is no such thing. What Law is it,
that Sets the Baptized Slave at Liberty? Not the law of
Christianity, that allows of Slavery; Only it wonderfully
Dulcifies and Mollifies and Moderates the Circumstances of
it" (26). Mather considers the possible laws that might
interfere, referring to English laws, which allude to the
governance of villains as "goods or chattel" and concludes,
"The Baptised then are not thereby entitled to their
Liberty" (27). Since the charm of Mather's proposal is the
financial reward that owners will gain by their benevolent
action, Mather's reassurance that such action will result in

neither loss of money or property is powerful, and only

barel
the s

upbra

ChIiS'
econor

owner,

64
barely disguised by the admonitory lecture. Safe money is
the spoonful of sugar that should mitigate the moral
upbraiding.

Strikingly, Mather's plan for the actual process of
Christianizing the Negro slaves also revolves around
economic considerations. He proposes that the busy white
owner, who may not have time to devote to schooling his
slaves in creeds and catechism, should "employ and reward"
(29) white children and servants to perform the task for
them. Further, as incentive for the negroes to learn,
Mather proposes the owner offer them some small, "agreeable
recompenses" as well. Throughout "The Negro Christianized,"
Christianity and the condition of whiteness are linked to
financial gain-~not only will the owner recognize a
metaphysical acquisition, he will see a physical, tangible
benefit as well. Mather's plan is, in short, a scheme of
cosmic capitalism. Money becomes the metaphor, ene_the
message. The black slave becomes a figurative as well as
literal commodity, becomes commodified in the act of
purchase as well as Christianization. Mather's message is
less a gospel of Doing Good unto Others, than a Doing Good
for the Self, only marginally a gospel of compassion, and
more a Gospel of Wealth.

As we have seen, Mather's linguistic choices--racial
tropes, loaded figures of speech, and a cost-effective

logic-~undergird the racialist economy of "The Negro

Chri

irre

Matt

was

Marc

65

Christianized." But larger, extra-textual economies are not
irrelevant to the racist subtext of his pamphlet. In fact,
Mather's motivation for writing "The Negro Christianized"
was neither self-effacing nor self—sacrificing. On 1
March, 1706, Mather records in his diary:

I am exercised, in my Family, with the want of good

Servants ... I plead, that my Glorious CHRIST

appeared in the Form of a Servant; and therefore

the Lord would grant good Servants unto those that

were alwayes at work for Him, and wanted the

Assistences of such living Instruments. I resolve,

that if God bless me with Good Servants, I will

serve him with more Fidelity and Activity; and I

will do something that not only my own Servants,

but other Servants in this Land, and abroad in the

world, May come to glorify Him. I have Thoughts,

to write an Essay, about, the Christianity of our

Negro and other Slaves (554).
In one of the bitter ironies of life, God apparently did
fulfill His end of the bargain: on 13 December of the same
year, Mather records:

This Day, a suprising Thing befel me. Some

Gentlemen of our Church, understanding (without any

Application of mine to them for such a Thing,) that

I wanted a good Servant at the expence of between

forty and fifty Pounds, purchased for me, a very

Sil'
earl
trad

Minis

66

likely Slave; a young Man, who is a Negro of

promising Aspect and Temper and this Day they

presented him unto me. It seems to be a mighty

Smile of Heaven upon my Family; and it arrives at

an observable Time unto me (579).

Mather named his slave Onesimus; in subsequent entries, he
dutifully notes his children's successful completion of
their catechizing the slave.

By no means do I wish to jump on the rickety, Mather—
bashing bandwagon. That should be impossible after Kenneth
Silverman's excellent biography which sensitively refutes
earlier portraits of Mather, for instance those in the
tradition of Vernon L. Parrington, who characterizes the
minister as "eccentric ... petulant ... garrulous
oversexed and overwrought" (i:107-108). I do mean this as
an example that points up the inevitably political and
economic motivation of any racial characterization in
colonial America (in fact, in egg colonial situation).
Mather sets out to undermine racial tropes; that his own'
text is undermined by the language available to him in color
imagery, and by his own pecuniary interest should clue us to
the ways in which discourse and institutions-~as Michel
Foucault points out-~constitutes the author, rather than
vice-versa. The compelling tension in "The Negro
Christianized" results from Mather's attempt to resist

colonialist discourse, and his perhaps unconscious

ach

com;

gest

fund

DIVI

disc

67
acquiescence to its financial motivations. His resulting
complicity should not obfuscate the difficulty of his
gesture: "The Negro Christianized" should be recognized for
the social good it proposes and enacts, QLQEQ.!1£D.1tS

fundamental prejudice and self-interest.

DIVIDING LINES

While Cotton Mather's text illustrates the imaginative
bondage of the manichean allegory, William Byrd's fliEEQLX gt
MWMWLV' iniasnfllemgexeliee
exemplifies the covert economy of power implicit in colonial
discourse. Byrd's public text was not published until
almost a century after his death in 1744; his more
controversial £221§§.fli§§2£1 had to wait until 1929 to
achieve public notice. Both texts, however, were circulated
among Byrd's friends and acquaintances during his lifetime,
and were read after his death by many, including fellow
Virginian Thomas Jefferson. Together, the two flietetlee
provide an interesting insight into Byrd's attitudes toward
racial issues, one intended for a selected circulation, and
one composed for a more general, public audience. Yet, as
Donald T. Siebert, Jr. cautions, "it is well to note ...
that neither account is purely public or private, that there
is no neat contrast in tone or intention between [the two
fltetetteel, as is often assumed" (537). Both texts provide

an account of Byrd's struggle for self-definition among his

poss
£12:
They
and ‘

the 1

68
fellows, and among the continent's natives; both serve as
well to define new territory for the colonies, and new
possibilities for action in those lands. Thus, both the
fleetet,and public fltetety function in a proverbial capacity.
They model strategies for social relations in the colonies,
and they offer seasoned advice to men setting out to conquer
the wilderness. And despite Byrd's apparently liberal
attitudes and jocular narrative style, both texts urge a
rigid, and finally even violently dominant social hierarchy,
which seeks not to modify but to maintain racial
distinctions.

At the most immediate level, the flietetlee,operate as a
scouting guide. Especially in the public version, Byrd
provides a detailed account of how to prepare for such an
undertaking in the wilderness, how to negotiate the terrain,
how to deal with dietary problems inherent to a backwoods
diet, and how to cope with soggy campgrounds. Byrd actually
goes to great lengths in the public fiietory to equip his
reader:

Because I am persuaded that very usefull Matters

may be found out by Searching this great

Wilderness, especially the upper parts of it about

the Mountains, I conceive it will help to engage

able men in that good work, if I recommend a

wholesome kind of food, of very small Weight and

He ;
that
help
that

all.

natic
bear
deir
Say.
the ,

fart)

had C

both
in th
Caref

69

very great Nourishment, that will secure them from

starving (252).
He proceeds to offer recipes for such "Portable Provisions"
that will best outfit the aspiring woodsman/explorer. To as
helpful an end, Byrd offers a treatise on the various pests
that might be encountered, again listing preventatives for
all. He gives trapping advice, hunting tips, and, to
improve the vigour of the backwoodsman, he urges eating
plenty of bear meat. The importance of promoting and
preparing such hardy adventurers are almost inestimable in
terms of economic advantage they can provide the burgeoning
settlement, as Byrd observes: "Such [continued] Discovery
would certainly prove an unspeakable Advantage to this
Colony, by facilitating a Trade with so considerable a
nation of Indians (i.e., the Cherokees)" (246). And the
bear diet, Byrd underlines, will not only facilitate
dominion, but will help populate it as well: "I am able to
say, besides, for the Reputation of the Bear Dyet, that all
the Narryed men of our Company were joyful Fathers within
forty weeks after they got Home, and most of the Single men
had children sworn to them within the same time" (252).

Perhaps more importantly, although less explicitly,
both flu§5g113§_are guides to the maintenance of social order
in the wilderness. As David Smith has noted, the flifitggigfi
carefully delineate a social and political hierarchy.

Previous scholars, presumably drawing on Byrd's request to

the legis]
twenty mer
a figure c
because tt
exceed whe
venture.
rather the
its divisi
Gentlemen
Others bel
(303). As
for settle
sacial 0rd
“POD the a
Addit
the native

White-1ndi

SEVEral ti
settlers h
natiVes:
there “as
NativeS Co
EnqliSh we}

1r‘Stead the

70
the legislature, have estimated the travel party at about
twenty men. Smith, however, has more carefully established
a figure of around fifty. This is important, insists Smith,
because the number of commissioners, surveyors and servants
exceed what we might reasonably assume necessary for such a
venture. The basis for such a large complement was social,
rather than technical or physical: "The hierarchy, in all
its divisions, was not to deteriorate in the Great Woods.
Gentlemen were still gentlemen, and needed to be served, and
others below that rank needed to see them being served"
(303). As the "Dividing Line" physically opened up new land
for settlement, it textually delineated and maintained
social order, "in relation to the meaning and value placed
upon the acquisition of land" (303).

Additionally, the texts offer advice for dealing with
the native population. The fligtgzlg§,have been often
remarked on for their unusual and candidly liberal focus on
white-Indian relations. Byrd feels, and discusses at length
several times in the Histories, that the original English
settlers had greatly erred in their stance toward the
natives: ”They had now made peace with the Indians, but
there was one thing wanting to make that peace lasting. The
Natives coud, by no means, perswade themselves that the
English were heartily their Friends, so long as they
disdained to intermarry with them" (3). Byrd suggests

instead that the early settlers might have found a better

way
by c

mear.

Like
aest]
wOulc
the r
inflt
5982115
the C
makes
nativ

“05:1

71

way to establish harmonious relations with the Indians than
by offering gifts of beads and cloth, and a more honorable
means of gaining native lands:

The poor Indians would have had less reason to

Complain that the English took away their Land, if

they had received it by way of Portion with their

Daughters ... Nor would the Shade of the Skin have

been any reproach at this day; for if a Moor may be

washt white in 3 Generations, Surely an Indian

might have been blancht in two (4).
Like Mather, Byrd establishes a conceptual link between the
aesthetic and civil (if not moral) value of whiteness. It
would, he indicates, have greatly dignified the legacy of
the original settlers to have shared their enlightening
influence, socially and racially. While this alternative
seems to have repelled those settlers, Byrd suggests that
the course is not as repugnant as generally depicted, and
makes an audacious comparison between the morality of the
natives and the first settlers who exploited Indian
hospitality:

The Indians are generally tall and well-

proportioned, which may make full Amends for the

Darkness of their Complexions. Add to this, that

they are healthy & Strong, with Constitutions

untainted by Lewdness, and not enfeebled by Luxury.

Besides, Morals and all considered, I cant think

In t
betw
leve
cont
dete
cont.
35811
3386]
theil

Chris

Cont:
with

who a
SaYs

Stren
as it
a“mm.
that n
deteti

Bird a

72

the Indians were much greater Heathens than the

first Adventurers, who, had they been good

Christians, would have had the charity to take this

only method of converting the Natives to

Christianity (3).

In this passage, Byrd strives to dismantle oppositions
between white Virginians and native inhabitants at two
levels: physical and moral. Byrd confronts powerful
contemporary arguments on racial heritage with the same
determination that we have seen in Mather. Though his
contemporaries accounted for the natives' failure at
assimilation as being due to their own deficiencies, Byrd
asserts that it is the English settlers who are at fault for
their absurd aesthetic scruples, and their immoral lack of
Christian honor.

Byrd then extends his argument to politics. He
contrasts the shortsighted course of the English settlers
with the more politically successful policies of the French,
who actually remunerated those who intermarried. By this,
says Byrd, "we find the French Interest very much
Strengthen'd amongst the Savages, and their Religion, such
as it is, propagated just as far as their love" (4). His
arguments explicitly contest the popular view of the day,
that miscegenation would lead inevitably to the
deterioration of the superior race. Racial characteristics,

Byrd asserts, are not fixed. Rather, such differences are a

factor of
Differenc
the Diffe
Desp
dignity a.
civilize
subtext o}
assertions
subtly Con
dominance,
CCHtinuing
Both Versi
Indians em
I[-‘NDrtraits
not liberal
excursion,
Saponi who ‘
Indian tell;
public reade
affinities t

B .

0f Natural RE

73
factor of material and cultural circumstance: "The principal
Difference between one People and another proceeds only from
the Different Opportunities of Improvement" (120).

Despite his emphasis on native physical and moral
dignity and his reassurances that intermarriage will
civilize the Indians without tainting the whites, the
subtext of his accounts runs counter to these generous
assertions. As the fllfitggigfi progress an alternate message
subtly conveys the importance of maintaining racial
dominance, even through means of violence, rather than
continuing to encourage any enfranchisement of the natives.
Both versions of the fi1§§QLLg§_pay close attention to the
Indians encountered on the survey, and invariably, these
"portraits of manners" observations reflect conservative,
not liberal attitudes. For instance, one Sabbath day on the
excursion, Byrd and his fellows question "our Indian"--a
Saponi who went by the hunting name of ”Bearskin"--about
Indian religion. Byrd relates Bearskin's comments to his
public reader with a mind open enough to see certain
affinities to the Christian religion, observing that
Bearskin's account "contain'd ... the three Great Articles
of Natural Religion: The Belief of a God; The Moral
Distinction betwixt Good and Evil; and the Expectation of
Rewards and Punishments in Another World." Still, he more
insistently finds in the religion a bent that is yet ”a

little Gross and Sensual," as much as "cou'd be expected

from a
Revela
accou1
cosmo
Bears
gates
admit
Derpe
women
of Tr
suffe
not a
Potai

Bcdy

74
from a meer State of Nature, without one Glimpse of
Revelation or Philosophy” (202). In fact, Bearskin's
account calls to mind the graphic and imaginative
cosmologies of Dante and Milton, as Byrd recounts it.
Bearskin describes a ”Venerable Old Man" who monitors the
gates to Paradise, judging between those who deserve
admitance, and those who should be sent to the land of
perpetual Winter. This land is guarded by a "dreadful old
Woman ... whose head is covered with Rattle-Snakes instead
of Tresses." Sitting on her "Toad-Stool," she oversees the
sufferings of the people there, who are "hungry, yet have
not a Morsel of any thing to eat, except a bitter kind of
Potato, that gives them the Dry-Gripes and fills their whole
Body with loathsome Ulcers, that Stink, and are
unsupportably painful" (202). At other points in the
Histggigg, Byrd is willing to consider trans-atlantic
cultural parallels which would dismantle racial Oppositions.
Even when Byrd discusses as repugnant a topic as the native
scalping practices, he draws a comparison to a similar
practice of the ancient Scythians, suggesting a European
(albeit distant) origin for the natives (308). Here, and
later, in recounting a native legend that bears striking
parallels to Christ's earthly mission, he markedly refrains
from drawing any significant connections between Bearskin's
story and Christian belief. Rather than using Bearskin's

testimony as an opportunity to further his initial tactics

of 11‘.

com

ane
Byrd

and

Indj
”It
like
Siti
the

Lab

75
of undermining racial distinctions by emphasizing
commonalities, his account of Saponi cosmology underscores a
perceived moral deficiency in the natives. In an account of
an enterprise which is often noted for its own sensual bent,
Byrd’s pronouncement on Bearskin's heaven ("a little Gross
and Sensual") contains its own irony.

Carefully, the public History in particular keeps
Indian nature in opposition to the white. Byrd notes that,
"It must b (sic) observ'd, by the way, that Indian Towns,
like Religious Houses, are remarkable for a fruitful
Situation; for being by Nature not very Industrious, they
choose such a Situation as will Subsist them with the least
Labour" (208). Later, he explains at length:

I never could learn that the Indians set apart any

day of the Week or the Year for the Service of God.

They pray, as Philosphers eat, only when they have

a stomach, without having any set time for it.

Indeed these Idle People have very little occasion

for a sabbath to refresh themselves after hard

Labour, because very few of them ever Labour at

all. Like the wild Irish, they would rather want

than Work, and are all men of Pleasure to whom

every day is a day of rest.

Indeed, in their Hunting, they will take a
little Pains, but this being only a Diversion,

their spirits are rather rais'd than depress'd by

it,

to
Unlike,
survey,
line, "t
done by

In
apparent
survey c
attest,
fact, we
hunting
hungry O
occasion.
the Sapo
lack as .
incidEnt
natiVe 5}
above: l1
hunting 1

fdt DOe ‘

76

it, and therefore need at most but a Night's Sleep

to recruit them (262).
Unlike, we should note, the industrious crew of men on the
survey, who hazard swamp and storm to stake an imaginary
line, "the little Work that is done among the Indians is
done by the poor Women, while the men are quite idle" (116).

In keeping with these observations, the public fligtggy
apparently downplays Bearskin's role as hunter for the
survey crew. Bearskin, as both secret and public fligtggigg
attest, supplies the party with an abundance of food. In
fact, we learn in the ”Secret History" that it is only the
hunting skill of Bearskin that keeps the party from going
hungry on several occasions. But the public fligtggy
occasionally blurs this reading, by suggesting first that
the Saponi's hunting skill was possibly due as much to good
luck as to skill (160), and then portraying particular
incidents in which the men want for food due to the Indian's
native shiftlessness. Immediately after the passage cited
above, in which Byrd accuses the Indians of not taking their
hunting seriously, he relates how "the Indian had kill'd a
fat Doe in the compass he took round the elbow of the River,
but was content to Prime it only, by reason it was too far
off to lug the whole Carcass upon his Back." He complains
that this bit of meat, barely supplemented by the two
turkeys his men (all seventeen of them) managed to kill

”could only afford a Philosophical Heal to so many craving

ston
unqe
the

DIOL
too

that
(275
conc

the

Ver:
inf:
Cree
dri‘

0n1

lies:
I

the

77
stomachs" (278-280). At the risk of being somewhat
ungenerous, we might note the less melodramatic language of
the parallel scene in the ”Secret History": ”The Indian
brought us the primeings of a Fat Doe, which he had kill'd
too far off for him to carry the whole. This & 2 turkeys
that our Men shot, made up our Bill of Fare this Evening"
(279). Because of this section's position relative to that
condemning native laziness, and the language hinting that
the Indian was "content" while the other men went hungry, it
seems that the public document somewhat distorts events in
order to bring them into line with a more conservative
version of "Indian”--one that clearly needs the enlightening
influence of the colonists. Insidiously, the fligtggigg
create a fictional, mythologized Indian that reflects the
drives of white colonial policy, nowhere better enacted than
on the survey itself.

As Roland Barthes observes of the mythologizing
process: ”The world enters language as a dialectical
relation between activities, between human action; it comes
out of myth as a harmonious display of essences" (142). The
fligtggigg' mythologized version of Indian essence contains
and naturalizes contradictions so that Indians can be
”essentially” lazy when they fail to provide food, and
"essentially” savage when they successfully furnish food.
For instance, when Byrd acknowledges in the public history

the Saponi's hunting prowess, he indicates that Bearskin's

 

succ
kill
(26E
are

goes

lazi

78

success is due to a savage nature: "Our unmerciful Indian
kill'd no less than two Braces of Deer and a large Bear"
(260). And despite his much-noted insistence that Indians
are only deficient through lack of opportunity, Byrd in fact
goes to some length to suggest the inherent, essential
laziness of the natives:

Tho' these Indians dwell among the English, and see

in what Plenty a little Industry enables them to

live, yet they chuse to continue in their Stupid

Idleness, and to Suffer all the Inconveniences of

Dirt, Cold and want, rather than to disturb their

hands With care, or defile their Hands with Labour

(116).
Contrary to his assurances to his white audience that racial
characteristics are not inborn, the sub-text of the
flistggig§_increasingly suggests the opposite, carefully
delineating an Indian identity that is distinct from and
inferior to the white, and ngt_altered by Opportunity.

It is quite possible, as evidenced above, to argue
that colonial discourse selects from the "available facts"
about the Native Americans only those which support its
general political and economic purposes. It is equally
possible to argue that every mention of ”Indian" in Byrd's
texts is politically or economically motivated, never, as
JanMohamed insists, innocent of colonial duplicity. The

enterprise of the survey itself--staking out new territory

by
and
Ind

pos

79
by demarcating an arbitrary ”dividing line"—-has an economic
and political basis. And Byrd's accounts are ever aware of
Indian presence, and, by his own admission, their right to
possession of the land. While he carefully avoids granting
that right directly in his account of the actual survey, his
initial comments about the failure of the earliest colonists
to gain title to native lands honorably indicate his
awareness of the issue. Given his earlier explicit
acknowledgement of that right, we might question Byrd's
later, complacent assumption of colonial dominion over the
lands he surveys. While he has paid lip-service to fair-
dealing with the native populations which occupy the land,
the fllfigggigfif account of the actual dealings of Byrd's
company with the various native Americans they encounter
indicates that domination, not fair-dealing, is an
acceptable means to "right.”

Although Byrd is always attuned to the "picturesque,"
the fllfigg11§§,are not merely a sight-seeing guide.
Throughout his survey of the colonies' boundary, Byrd is
attuned to the economic potential of the areas under survey.
Even through the awful Dismal Swamp, the vigilant
commissioner speculates at the feasibility of draining the
land in order to render it usable. And while he plans for
colonial appropriation, Byrd remains also aware of the
"Indian Menace.”2 Because of the colonists' aversion to

intermarriage, they will have to face Indian resistance.

Byrd poir
Indians,
against ’
on "those
But
relations
to regard
Virginian
depicts I
wonder in
Steadily
the same
depolitic
deCreasin
Indian Sa'
White dis.
pamphlet .
coincide“.

0n the Id]
depOpulat:
were form:

a Vex

freqt

India

80
Byrd points to the Carolinians' violent policy toward
Indians, and openly sympathizes with the native's revolt
against ”Tyrany and Injustice," almost applauding their war
on ”those little Tyrants” (304).

But his analysis does not extend to Virginia's
relations with the local natives. Further, he does not seem
to regard continued violence from the Indians against
Virginians as a serious threat; but given that he repeatedly
depicts Indians as a dying breed, there is perhaps little
wonder in his nonchalance. The fligtgglggj portrayal of the
steadily decreasing Indian numbers is worth note. In much
the same way that these two texts "fix" Indian nature,
depoliticizing and dehistoricizing, they also explain the
decreasing native population as the inevitable result of
Indian savagery and inter-tribal warring (helped along by
white disease and liquor). And, like John Underhill's
pamphlet which promises empty land while narrating
coincidentally the demise of the Pequots, Byrd keeps an eye
on the land which becomes available through native
depopulation. For instance, Byrd notes that the Usherees
were formerly,

a very Numerous and Powerful People. But the

frequent Slaughters made upon them by the Northern

Indians, and, what has been still more destructive

by far, the Intemperance and Foul Distempers

introduc'd amongst them by the Carolina Traders,

 

Inno
JanH
dupl
whil.
"Ind
sourr
need
land:

more

81

have now reduc'd their number to little more than

400 Fighting Men, besides Women and Children. It

is a charming Place where they live, the Air very

Wholesome, the Soil fertile, and the Winters ever

mild and Serene (300).

Innocent and apparently objective observations like this,
JanMohamed would argue, reveal the extent of colonial
duplicity. Byrd's description minimalizes ("little more")
while underscoring (”Fighting Men") the degree of the
”Indian Menace" at the same time it indicates the real
source of concern that motivates the colonists' conceptual
need for an "Indian Menace”: the availability of fertile
lands. The more the native population is "reduc'd," the
more "charming Placeisl” are made available.

At points, the public fi1§3g1y_seems a virtual catalogue
of the demise of the various tribes. The public version
notes that the Meherin Indians, who were decimated by the
Catawbas, had deserted their "Ancient Town" and taken refuge
among the English (106). Not that they should be pitied,
for ”they have ever been reputed the most false and
treacherous to the English of all the Indians in the
Neighbourhood.” The whole number of Indians in Nottoway is
reduced to about two hundred, including women and children;
these are, Byrd asserts, "the only Indians of any
consequence now remaining within the Limits of Virginia"

(116).

her

Hem

82

As for the Carolinian Tuscaroras, "these Indians were
heretofore very numerous and powerful, making within time of
Memory, at least a Thousand Fighting Men. Their Habitation,
before the war with Carolina, was on the North Branch of
Neuse River, commonly call'd Connecta Creek, in a pleasant
and fruitful country” (290). Their ranks were decimated,
according to Byrd, by their addiction to rum, and war with
the whites. Now, he observes, "there remain so few, that
they are in danger of being quite exterminated by the
Catawbas, their mortal Enemies” (290). For those natives
who remain, the public fllstgny outlines a course of action:
subjugate them through trade--particularly of firearms.
Thomas Morton may have been persecuted by the Puritans for
selling rifles to the Indians, but Byrd insists it is a good
idea, ”because it makes them depend entirely upon the
English, not only for their Trade, but even for their
subsistence” (116). And practically speaking, arrows are
silent, and therefore more dangerous--unlike the noisy rifle
shot, which alerts the unsuspecting white immediately.

Byrd's observations on the inevitability of Indian
extinction are backed in the public flustggy,by Indian
legend. Earlier skeptical of Indian religion, Byrd can
ascribe to it far enough here to relate that the race will
inevitably be killed off by "their God,” who, having sent to
the demoralized natives "a perfect Example of Integrity and

kind Behavior ... a holy Person” to redeem them from their

self-de
another
this na
and enc
popuiat
harasse
here n
the end
becomes
executi
never n
he Shal
World»
transce
the whi
BartheS
SYStem
PUblic
natlve
attribu
god to .
If
Virginia
other We
banter (

n
SloVen]

83
self-destructive behavior. Curiously, Byrd passes by
another opportunity to draw obvious Christian parallels from
this native legend of a perfect man sent to model behavior
and encourage harmony among a dishonest and impious
population. Like Christ, this messenger is scorned,
harassed, and finally impaled on a tree. The text works
here not to suggest Christian fraternity, but to prophecy
the end of a race. The text details how the native god
becomes enraged at his people's failure to reform, and their
execution of his messenger. As a result, this god will
never "leave off punishing, and wasting their People, till
he shall have blotted every living Soul of them out of the
World” (292). This account of native depopulation
transcends political, physical and economic interaction with
the whites, and becomes instead mythic. Yet, to return to
Barthes, myth is always a "value, never separable from the
system that creates it ... a perpetual alibi." Thus, the
public History offsets the colonialists' role in decimating
native population and habitat. Instead, Byrd ironically
attributes the demise of the natives to the vengeance of a
god to whom he does not ascribe.

If the natives are not a physical threat to the
Virginians, their dangerous influence manifests itself in
other ways. Despite his unreserved, and even mischievous
banter on intermarriage, his own discussion of the

"slovenly" and ”tallow-faced” backwoodsmen who have

 

in
cu

By

In
'1
an
ba
th
of
ob
Sm
no

Qu

US
fo

to

SE

ac.

84
intermarried among the Indians and have adopted their
customs and habits undermines his own contrary assertions.
Byrd suggests that the bounty of the land has lead to traits
of slothful sensuality he finds characteristic to the
Indians, and implies that the whites who live in the
"lubberland" must assert their racial heritage of "Industry
and Frugality” as the ”two Cardinal Virtues" which will
banish such undesirable traits (36).a Complaining against
the lack of hardiness evident in the backwoods settlements
of North Carolina, in the public flLfiLQLX Byrd notes that "we
observed very few corn-fields in our Walks, and those very
small, which sem'd the Stranger to us, because we could see
no other Tokens of Husbandry or Improvement" (54). Upon
questioning the residents, Byrd learns that they have no
urge to grow more than they need for immediate household
use. Even the cows and pigs are left to forage their own
food, a highly wasteful policy, Byrd notes with scorn. He
comments with contempt that ”some, who pique themselves more
upon Industry than their Neighbours, will, now and then, in
compliment to their Cattle, cut down a Tree whose Limbs are
loaden with ... Moss ... The trouble wou'd be too great to
Climb the Tree in order to gather this Provender, but the
Shortest way (which in this Country is always counted the
best) is to fell it, just like the Lazy Indians, who do the
same by such Trees as bear fruit” (54). The residents who

acquire what Byrd regards as affinities to the Indian way of

life seem
marks the
their lac
instead 1

Rich
his forme
by sugges
intermarz
the backm
however, 1
imProvemer
SUbtlY but
DUblic M
more COnsc
persiStEnt
superior w
against a ‘

The C:
3% lr
neither dyr
profoundly

85
life seem to Byrd degenerate and diseased, and he carefully
marks the scabs and facial deformities that some exhibit due
their lack of initiative in growing vegetables and relying
instead in their diet on pork (54).

Richard Slotkin tries to reconcile Byrd's account with
his former, more liberal assertions on racial intermarriage
by suggesting that Byrd had an agenda for a "proper" sort of
intermarriage, as opposed to that which had taken place in
the backwoods, among the frontiersmen (222). It seems,
however, that Byrd's comments on the honor for whites, and
improvement in Indians to be gained by intermarriage are
subtly but completely undermined by the subtext of the
public fliototy in particular. The public version is much
more consciously politicized, its subtext marked by a
persistent conservatism, a profound worry over any loss of a
superior white identity which must be rigidly maintained
against a distinctly inferior red one.

The concept of Indianness presented in the public
fliototy, in contrast to Byrd's explicit comments, is finally
neither dynamic or liberal, and we might rehearse here the
profoundly conservative undertone of Byrd's initial comments
on racial union. The scheme for intermarriage includes no
recognition of Indian culture or racial characteristics, but
instead a desire to ”bleach" them--wash them of color--while
at the same civilizing them so that they disappear into

European appearance and manner. Hand in hand with this

suggestf
end untc
Rather,
cost-ire
this sul
the rigi
JanMohan
dominant
discours
his inte
No:
time for
EithEr t
have bro
Alliance
this "a1
Public 5
in the S
990ple’
“athervs
ChriStia
philoSop
”“35 J.
Amtr1Can

more Of ‘

86
suggestion is the real motivation: assimilation is not an
end unto itself; it does not contain its own moral momentum.
Rather, assimilation is a means to peaceful and relatively
cost-free procurement of land titles. And, as we have seen,
this subtext quickly undermines Byrd's initial assertions of
the rightness of assimilation. We are here reminded of
JanMohamed's formulation of the manichean allegory as "the
dominant model of power- and interest-relations" in colonial
discourse. Byrd's stake in colonial acquisition subverts
his interest in racial fraternity.

More importantly, the public Histozy indicates that the
time for such action is long past: ".11 they intended
either to Civilize of Convert these Gentiles, they yooio,
have brought their Stomachs to embrace this prudent
Alliance” (3, my emphasis). And though Byrd alleges that
this ”alliance" would be "good-natured," the subtext of the
public flifitoty manifests its worry over racial intermarriage
in the subtle, yet pervasive disgust at the backwoods
people, who take on Indian characteristics. Like Cotton
Mather's admonition against placing pecuniary concerns over
Christian duty, Byrd's advice on racial integration remains
philosophical, at best. Byrd's comments, like those of
Thomas Jefferson on the subject of European and Native
American intermarriage, have to be ”put down as rhetoric,

more of the head than the bed” (of. Drinnon, 8S).

1
J

stance
the wt
the na
any me
compar
local
repugr
laugha
might:

I
Subvez
In Eac

Christ

D1

Dz

87

It is possible, indeed, important, to push Byrd's
stance on racial union one step further. Byrd notes that
the white man never could bring himself to intermarry with
the native women. Nor do the members of Byrd's company find
any marriageable Indian women in their venture. Yet, as the
company men take frequent and even violent advantage of
local "tawnies," it becomes clear that soyooi union is not
repugnant at all. Rather, what are portrayed as the
laughable antics of Byrd's cohorts reaffirm the right of
might: Why gain honorably what can be taken by force?

In the end, while both writers make bold attempts to
subvert racial trOpes of difference, neither fully succeeds.
In fact, the most generous impulses of "The Negro
Christianized" and the fliototio§,oi,too,Qiyioioo,Lino_are
subsumed to the power of colonial discourse and its economic
interests. Kenneth Burke suggestively postulates the
' "bureaucratization of the imaginative" which has striking
relevance to the process of subversion we have seen in both
texts:

All imaginative possibility (usually at the start

Utopian) is bureaucratized when it is embodied in

the realities of a social texture, in all the

complexities of language and habits, in the

property relationships, the methods of government,

production and distribution, and in the development

of rit

I

(1961:

By a carefu
impulse is
can achieve

dynamics of

 

88
of rituals that re-enforce the same emphasis.
(1961: 225)
By a careful examination of this process, whereby a utopian
impulse is corralled in the drives of a given discourse, we
can achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the

dynamics of racial representation in a colonial setting.

1. F0
color of At
especially

2. Se
"Indian Men
European He

3- Pa
associated
izl39-142.
BY‘d'S acco'
diver96$ so:

 

89

NOTES

1. For an excellent survey of early theories on the

color of Africans, see Winthrop Jordan's Whitg Qve; Bigot,
especially chpt. VI, ”The Bodies of Men," 216-265.

2. See Francis Jennings, who argues that the so-cailed
"Indian Menace" was in fact ”a boomerang effect of the
European Menace to the Indians" 37.

3. Parrington discusses the social levelling
associated with the lubberland in frontier literature,
1:139-142. Richard Slotkin, 218-220, provides a reading of
Byrd's account of lubberland that, while similar in focus,
diverges somewhat from my own.

REALITY V
”The
unequivoc
to poetry
Introduct
accurate
continent
to furnis
latter! C
realism;
have just
Two .
William S,
°Pp051nq <
Ihtioductj
PrefaCe tt
theorists.
novel Dur;
erroneousl

CHAPTER THREE
ROMANCING THE BORDER:
BIRD, COOPER, SIMMS AND THE FRONTIER NOVEL

REALITY VERSUS ROMANCE

"The business of a writer of fiction," states Cooper
unequivocally in his 1831 Introduction to to; Loot 2£.§h§
nonioooo, ”is to approach, as near as his powers will allow,
to poetry" (7). There is an unresolved tension in Cooper's
Introduction between his commitment to realism-—giving an
accurate account of "the Aborigines of the American
continent" (5)--and his attraction to romance--"poetically
to furnish a witness to the truth" (7). To achieve the
latter, Cooper acknowledges, one must fudge a bit on
realism: Cooper's Natty isn't quite so vulgar as he might
have justifiably been portrayed by a more realistic pen

Two of Cooper's colleagues in the frontier novel,
William Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird, wrestled with the
opposing demands of romance and realism in their novels and
Introductions. Simms's elaboration on romance in his
Preface to In: {omaggoo is still a touchstone for modern
theorists. But Simms also claims his share of realism; his
novel purports, he explains, to deliver a "correction" of
erroneously ”vulgar opinions" the reader might have had
concerning ”red men" (4). Bird's aims were avowedly the

90

 

opposite c
abhorred.
notions of
record: r
hand, he c
"sustained
Many
implicatio
in IE &
Emflbi. Fe
significan.
the case 0
could be Se
frontier it

conflict, t

Slide histc

Writer. St

thflit roman

COUntry.

91
opposite of Cooper's, whose depictions of Indians he
abhorred. By contrast to Cooper's and Simm's exalted
notions of historic Indians, Bird set out to right the
record: his Indians were "real Indians" (32). On the other
hand, he confesses, his Nick, while based in fact, is
"sustained" by ”poetical possibility" (34-35).

Many critics have discussed the formalistic'
implications of the dual impulse toward realism and romance
inmaflflmml flamendwflm
Woods. Fewer, however, have examined the socio-political
significance of this authorial/narrative ambivalence.‘ In
the case of the frontier novel, "realism" and "romance"
could be said to embody two paradoxical drives of the
frontier itself, one embedded in real, historical/ material
conflict, the other an ideological device which seeks to
elide historical culpability on behalf of the culture of the
writer. Strikingly, Cooper, Simms and Bird offer a
commitment to a realistic depiction of "Indians," while
their romantic urges tend toward compatriots in cause and
country. A study of historical frontier novels might
productively examine the de-historicizing, de-politicizing
effects of the "romance" imposed by members of the dominant

culture on the "reality” of the American frontier.

THE SIGNI
All.
historica
Brown, wh
mm an
ample mat
three aut
American :
Wake of a1
clarion ca
like Sydne
eStablish
indeed Suc
French-1nd
of 1715’

ex
1732.

All
dapth and C
America.

Native Alfie:

histOrical

demonStrate

   
  

ACCOrd:

mat, Sagas

92

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HISTORY

All three novels share an interest in America's
historical past. Following the lead of Charles Brockden
Brown, who "gothicized" the American landscape in 23231.
flontiy and found (despite popular sentiment of the day)
ample materials in America to draw on for his fiction, the
three authors under consideration here also turned to
American subjects and landscapes for their writings. In the
wake of anxiety provoked by the EQLLE.AE§L1£§B.E§XL§EL§
clarion call for a national literature and British skeptics
like Sydney Smith, these authors used American events to
establish a sense of past, and to prove that there was
indeed such a thing as an American book. Cooper drew on the
French-Indian wars of 1757, Simms on the Yemassee uprising
of 1715, and Bird set his novel in the Kentucky frontier of
1782. All three strove to create a sense of historical
depth and of national tradition for a young and anxious
America. Simms, in particular, recognized the value of the
Native American mythology in reinforcing this sense of
historical richness as his account of Yemassee mythology
demonstrates, but Cooper and Bird as well utilized the
textural value of the frontier legacy, and all characterized
the incipient republic in its (Anglo) frontier characters.

Accordingly, the main body of this country's critics
have treated these novels as chronicles of America's epic

past, sagas of the confrontation of civilization and

savagery

novels we
calls the
social pr:
an histor
fiction:

eighteentl
imPOSSibli
justifies
CUntradict
(54). The
5°1Utions

historical
are most t
SYRIboliZE

Ameeran f
eternal Co;

individUal

93

savagery or primitivism in a world that was, by the time the
novels were written, under the sway of what Richard Slotkin
calls the ”metropolis." The frontier novel's exploration of
social problems is interesting to these critics-—but only in
an historical sense, as Richard Chase explains of Cooper's
fiction: "Such a culture was momentarily possible in
eighteenth-century America. But since it had become all but
impossible in the time of Cooper, the myth that enhances and
justifies it has perforce to be nostalgic, ironic, and self-
contradictory ... its ultimate meaning is anti-cultural"
(S4). The three novels explore social problems, the
solutions of which are foregone, their legacy a matter of
historical record. As such, the novels' "larger meanings"
are most typically read as attempts to mythologize and
symbolize (Monioooo, tomooooo) or psychologize (Nick) the
American frontier experience which in turn embody larger,
eternal conflicts in human nature, or within the
individual.2

In Ino,E§toi_Enyitoomgnt, Richard Slotkin brings to his
earlier mythological thesis of the frontier a post-
structural and marxist frame of reference that sees myth in
a more socially mediative light. Frontier novels become
more than an account of the past that allows individuals to
contemplate eternal conflicts and values. Instead, they
form a tradition that suggests contemporary social action:

"These myths (of the frontier] not only define a situation

94
for us, they prescribe our response to that situation" (19).
Slotkin deftly argues that frontier novels create a myth
that is ideologically loaded: they "aim at affecting not
only our perceptions but our behavior--by ‘enlisting' us,
morally or physically, in the ideological program" (19).

In light of their socially mediative capacity, the
contemporary significance of these novels should not be
overlooked. Granted, New York, the Carolinas and Kentucky
no longer bordered "wilderness" at the time the novels were
written, but the frontier experience continued further west.
Moreover, the Native Americans were an on-going "problem"
for white Americans in areas that were now considered
"civilized.” These novels deal with historical situations,
but concomitantly suggest attitudes toward the frontier that
had a certain and immediate relevance to the period in which
the novels were written. While Slotkin argues the
importance of recognizing the importance of the frontier
ethos during the period that these novels became so popular,
he proposes that the frontier myth was tempered as settlers
reached Rockies, and that for this reason the contemporary
relevance of the novels written during the twenties and
thirties was diminished. The formidable range of mountains
was perceived, he suggests, as'a "permanent barrier," and
America believed, albeit prematurely, that it had reached
its ”last frontier" (110-111). Yet as Reginald Horsman

argues, the frontier spirit did not reach any kind of

impasse d
strengthe
before th
other pub
Last the 1
Quincy Ad:
America a;
Peopled by
general 53
accustomed
CUStOms" (
Prediction
may have 5
novels Vet.
Methans
narrat-We a
Manifest De
willia
the shape 0
literary f0
“*8 t:

15' n3]

95

impasse during this period, but instead continued to
strengthen. Horsman points out that in the years just
before these novels were written, statesmen, journalists and
other public figures were predicting the nation's progress
goat the Rockies. For instance, as early as 1811, John
Quincy Adams prophesied that "the whole continent of North
America appears to be destined by Divine Providence to be
peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one
general system of religious and political principles, and
accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and
customs" (quoted in Horsman, 87). Henry Clay made similar
predictions in 1820 (cf. Horsman, 93). While the frontier
may have slackened its forward march during the period these
novels were written, it did not lessen its expectations.
Americans in these two decades were forming a powerful
narrative about their progress across the continent:
Manifest Destiny.

William Dowling suggests that "the world comes to us in
the shape of stories,” underscoring narrative not as a
literary form, but as an "epistemological category":

Like the Kantian concepts of space and time, that

is, narrative may be taken not as a feature of our

experience but as one of the abstract or ‘empty'

coordinates within which we come to know the world,

a contentless form that our perception imposes on

the raw flux of reality, giving it, even as we

perce

exper
Thus, we Cc
literature
strategies
reality. E
American 1.
levels. F:
replaying ;

tradition.

 

certain per
'ith the c
tradition.
Indians was
SlaughtEr'
re5u1t Was

Douay towa

l
natural, ’0

96

perceive, the comprehensible order we call

experience (95-96).
Thus, we cannot underestimate the role of frontier
literature-—stories which order that experience, suggesting
strategies of ideological containment--in shaping social
reality. Edwin Fussell observes, "the West was won by
American literature" (11), a conquest which functions at two
levels. First, symbolically, the West was won in history by
replaying past victories and claiming them as national
tradition. Second, immediately, these stories offered a
certain perspective, and encouraged reader identification
with the characters who embodied a particular national
tradition. Whether, as with Natty Bumppo, the death of
Indians was inevitable and regrettable, or, as with Nathan
Slaughter, their death was necessary and laudable, the end
result was an acceptance of an historical aoo_on-going
policy toward living Native Americans, as though it were

"natural," and already graven in (tomb)stone.

STORY AND IDENTITY

It is important to examine the rhetorical function of
the frontier story in fashioning contemporary attitudes and
mediating social reality. Each novel under consideration
here demonstrates an awareness of its role in educating its
audience in the exigencies of frontier reality. In each

novel an important sub-plot is the education of a

zepre:
fronti
In thi
paradi
by whit
imports
social
America.
frontier

attitude

Sic.
Virginia:
Umir inh
fOrtune.

from each

freed by t
together 8«
PortzaYEd a
”“59 his w

hiMSelf and

 
 
   
   
  

scornfu1 of
Roland is n.
attitUdeS.
drunken Ind
temporal,”y

97
representative of civilization in the actualities of the
frontier, including the inevitable ‘removal' of Indians.3
In this respect, we might take Niot oi LEE.EQQQ§.BS
paradigmatic. It foregrounds a frontier story as the means
by which a nation forms its attitudes about Indians. This
important sub—plot details ooy_narrative can operate as
social medicine--how in fact the West oioot be won by
American literature-—and establishes the importance of
frontier literature to the shaping of contemporary
attitudes.

Niot_devolves around several convoluted plots.
Virginian cousins Roland and Edith Forrester are deprived of
their inheritance, and come to Kentucky to seek their
fortune. Edith and Roland are taken captive and separated
from each other by a band of warring Shawnees; Roland is
freed by the backwoods Quaker, Nathan Slaughter, and the two
together set out to recover Edith. Roland has been
portrayed as the city boy who comes to the wilderness to
nurse his wrongs. Sulky and imperious, he has foolishly led
himself and Edith into a compromising situation. Earlier
scornful of the frontiersmens' bloodlust for the Indians,
Roland is now in a situation that tests his haughty
attitudes. He has personally encountered the villainous and
drunken Indians he has heard tell of--in fact, his life was
temporarily in their keeping, and might quickly have been
extinguished but for Nathan.

(Jrit
lflmself;
weapon a<
explaiiri i
killeed ar
pose of “
proclaims
Nathan be
foolishne
Educate h
the "real.
behavior,

Natha
frontier,
lus mother
Shawnee Chi
indicative
came Onto h
Peace, Nath

Droceeded t

the family .
d

 

ramatican

   
  
 

EnaCtr.
Nathan into
powerful to

Roland, "ha'

98

Until this point his rescuer, Nathan, has represented
himself as a pacifist who steadfastly refuses to lift his
weapon against a human target. Now, however, he must
explain to Roland how the three Indians guarding him are
killed and Roland set free. At first he adopts a regretful
pose of "border necessity" (for which grateful Roland
proclaims him an international hero). But shortly after,
Nathan becomes so exasperated with Roland's citified
foolishness and vain scruples that he sits him down to
educate him properly. He tells him a story. Representing
the "real" motive behind the backwoodsman's curious
behavior, Nathan's story is an education on the frontier.

Nathan Slaughter's tale begins on the Pennsylvanian
frontier, in Bradford, when he was married and supporting
his mother, wife and five children. One day, the famous
Shawnee chief, Wenonga (of whom Roland has not heard,
indicative of his city ignorance) and a band of warriors
came onto his property. To show him that he was a man of
peace, Nathan handed Wenonga his gun and knife. Wenonga
proceeded to slay and scalp, with Nathan's weapons, all of
the family. He in fact scalped Nathan, as Nathan
dramatically reveals to Roland by pulling off his hat.

Enacting the story, reliving it in telling, sends
Nathan into an epileptic seizure. Its effects are nearly as
powerful for Roland. When he recovers, Nathan questions

Roland, "had they done so by thee, what would thee have done

to them?”
"Declared
”Thee is
(Quaker-e
would kil
true begj
Nathan as
Indian-h‘
a true:
Roland n
he learr
1“ and e
“hen he
Nathan.
Ke
identif
PeISuaE
functit
transs.

Roland

99
to them?" Roland, "greatly excited by the story," replies:
"Declared eternal war upon them and their accursed race!"
"Thee is right,” affirms Nathan and elevates the lesson to
(Quaker-esque) incantation: "Thee would kill, friend, thee
would kill, thee would kill!" (236). This episode marks the
true beginning of Roland's education. He now perceives
Nathan as heroic, and models his own behavior after the
Indian-hater's. As he declares in the end, "a braver heart,
a truer friend, never served man in time of need” (346).
Roland never becomes adept in the woods of the frontier, but
he learns to accept frontier ”necessity," and to participate
in and eventually to condone Indian slaughter. Moreover,
when he returns to civilization, he returns equipped with
Nathan's story and perspective.

Kenneth Burke discusses the rhetorical function of
identification in his anototio oi Motiyog as a means of
persuasion, an analysis which is relevant to the rhetorical
function of Nathan's story. Nathan's experience has
transformed his own life, and his narrative transforms
Roland's estimation of Nathan as he tells it--from cowardly
pacifist to righteous and heroic Indian-hater. Further,
Roland identifies himself with Nathan's experience--he too
is in danger of losing his beloved Edith to evil Indians.

He in fact models a vow of his own upon Nathan's--eternal
enmity--if Edith cannot be rescued. In short, Nathan's

story transforms Roland, too. Roland now shares Nathan's

perspeC'

Roland <

vicarior

l

with Nat
have hea
Shawnees
that was

reader a:
have done
herself ‘
alignment
around th
(or “arra
understan
Powerful 1
frontier 1

sense’ Off

is the POte

HOVelS nvo

exp8rjence

100
perspective of undying hatred against the Indians. Even if
Roland does not personally enact violence, he participates
vicariously by condoning and encouraging Nathan.

In the final step, the toooot is asked to identify
with Nathan and to consider him heroic. Like Roland, yo
have heard Nathan's tale, yo know it, know "what the
Shawnees have done to me--they have killed them all, all
that was of my blood!" Nathan's question is put to the
reader as well: "Had they done so by thee, what would thee
have done?” The question requires that the reader identify
herself with the narrator, in fact presupposes that
alignment, as the rest of ELEL.2§.§EQ.EQQQ§.15 oriented
around that approval. "Identification" embodies rhetoric's
(or narrative's) highest goal, that of "perfect
understanding and community" (Lentricchia, 148). Thus, this
powerful rhetorical device marks the character of the
frontier story as socially mediative in a contemporary
sense, offering a political positioning to the reader in the

”metropolis" of Bird's day.

TRADITION AS STORY

Frontier myth, as Slotkin argues, links past heroic
achievement with "another in the future of which the reader
is the potential hero” (19). Through this process, frontier
novels invoke "tradition" as a unifying force, an essential

experience that a certain group of people react to in a

101
certain way. As many critics have observed, these early
frontier novels self-consciously strove to establish a sense
of tradition for America. What those critics often overlook
is the contemporary situations that these novels seek to
mediate by invoking a distinctly American tradition, or
history.

Tradition, observes Frank Lentricchia, is "always
already a present and a future." It must never be
understood, therefore, as an "entity, a static thing, a
completed process," but must be seen as a dynamic and
political formation, an on-going formulation: "‘the
tradition' should be seen as techniques of psychic defense
against our own complicity," techniques that have further a
"marked disposition to suppress ... material conditions"
(124-5). Nathan Slaughter's story seeks to implicate its
readers in its drive for revenge precisely by absolving them
of complicity in political circumstance. Instead, it offers
them a reason to hate Indians that arises from a sense of
innocent personal loss. After all, Nathan was a Quaker,
living peacefully with his family on the frontier. His
story, however, elides the historical, material
circumstances that placed Nathan in Bradford on the
frontier, and neglects any mention of why the Shawnees were
in the area marauding local inhabitants.

Nathan's story is situated within a frame of historical

events, which, although not explicitly mentioned, would

102
indicate that Bird was aware of Shawnee history within the
Pennsylvania Region and the Ohio Valley.4 Briefly, in orderl
to enjoy a peaceful life under the benevolent auspices of
Quaker William Penn, a band of Shawnees had joined the
Delawares in the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania in the
early eighteenth-century. By mid-century however, as Gary
Nash documents, frontier families, eager to acquire and
cultivate the fertile lands of the region, were becoming
increasingly hostile and aggressive toward the native
population. Finally, to clear the land completely for
agrarian expansion, Pennsylvanian statesmen coerced Iroquois
leaders to force the Delawares and Shawnees to leave the
valley (Nash, 1982, 98-100). This dispossession would have
taken place twenty to thirty years before the action of the
story in 1782. Bradford, located in north~central
Pennsylvania and in the Susquehanna valley, may well have
been vulnerable to the attacks of angry Shawnees who felt
again betrayed and increasingly frustrated by white
incursion. Nathan's story, however, invites us to overlook
these factors, focusing instead on the innocence of Nathan,
who hands over his weapons, and the other helpless victims.
This rhetorical pattern recurs throughout much frontier
literature: historical consciousness of cultural dialectic
is elided and replaced with a mythologized Other. The

"Indian" is timelessly fixed in his role as enemy; the

103
author, the reader and their shared dominant culture are
relieved of responsibility and guilt.
THE TIMELESS PRESENT
At a basic level, IDS.L§§£.2£.£E§ Mobigons, loo
tomooooo and Niot_ot too Wooo§_serve to inform their white

audiences about the Indians that the stories dominate. Much
as Thomas Jefferson assiduously collected relics from the
dying tribes, these novels eternalize the Indians while they
sing a funeral anthem. In fact, all three novels feature
sections that serve as descriptions of manners and customs
of the various Indians under discussion. As Mary Louise
Pratt notes, such descriptions are a common feature of
frontier literature, and seldom occur as discrete texts, but
are contained within ”superordinate genre." The manners and
custom portrait is, she observes, a "normalizing discourse,
whose work is to codify difference, to fix the Other in a
timeless present where all ‘his' actions are repetitions of
‘his' normal habits" (Pratt, 121).

i This perceived quality of the "timeless present" in
Indian life was important to a society that prided itself on
its "march of progress," and sought to de—historicize and
de-politicize its opponents in order to prove a contrast.

We have an excellent example of a constructed "timeless
present" in Ibs.Laat.sf.tbs.n2hlcane- Richard Slotkin notes
the "mythic" qualities of the second volume or section of

uohioong, where Natty and company have pursued the evil

104
Magua to a Huron settlement. Slotkin argues in his
Introduction to the novel that here the novel leaves all
pretense of historicity, entering instead an "unchanging and
archetypal wilderness" for a fictional purpose (xx-xxxiii).
That purpose, he proposes, is to allegorize the course of
(Anglo) civilization: "Cooper's Indians are a metaphorical
rendering of our own civilization" (xxxiii). While
admitting the plausibility of Slotkin's reading, I would
like to suggest here an equally meaningful social (as
opposed to intellectual) function for the mythic tone of

volume II. Slotkin himself notes Cooper's dependence for

information here on John Heckwelder's ELELQLX: Manners.and.
W of. the Indian Karim (1818). Seen as a portrait of

manners, this section so effectively mythologizes the Indian
as a means of Othering, as to distract readers from seeing
how its timelessness served (and perhaps continues to serve)
the Anglo political agenda.

In their rendering of Indian villages, mythology and
'customs, each author abstracts his portrait from immediate
interaction or conflict with white intruders. Pratt
summarizes this "very familiar, widespread and stable form
of ‘othering'":

The people to be othered are homogenized into a

collective "they" which is distilled even further

into an iconic "he" (the standard adult white male

specimen). The abstracted "he"/"they" is the

105
subject of verbs in a timeless present tense, which
characterizes anything "he" is or does not as a
particular historical event but as an instance of a
pregiven custom or trait ... Through this
discourse, encounters with an Other can be
textualized or processed as enumerations of such
traits (120).
Portraits of manners, like all other communicative mediums,
are agents of social exchange. But in this case, the
exchange excludes the objectified Other, as Susanne Kappeler
outlines:
Social relationships are relations between
subjects: if there is exchange and communication,
each partner is and remains a subject or agent of
action, or a subject of speech and communication.
The roles are reciprocal, the situation is one of
intersubjectivity. In the structure of
representation, the two subjects are author and the
spectator/reader, the white man and his guest (50-
51).
Representation, argues Kappeler, implies a dominative
political structure. While theoretically, the subject
should be interchangeable with the object of representation,
this "has failed to be realized in the history of culture.
In the political realm of reality, very different values

adhere to the positions of subject and object: the role of

106

subject means power, action, freedom, the role of object
powerlessness, domination, oppression" (52). The very
nature of manners and customs, then, are dominative,
establishing intersubjectivity between white authors and
white readers who seek to "know" the native, not in a
humanistic sense, but instead as a means to power.
Literature as agent in the process is crucial, as
Lentricchia reminds us: "To write is to know is to
dominate" (147). With this perspective in mind, we may turn
to specific examples from the three frontier novels.

IE:.L§E§.Q£ tho nooiooo§,combines the genres of
travelogue, frontier romance, and novel of manners. In
fact, the opening pages of the story introduce all three
within as many chapters. In the third chapter begins the
portrait of Indian manners and customs that will pervade the
novel. As that chapter opens, Leatherstocking and
Chingachgook are engaged in a discussion, apparently over
the legitimacy of the white presence in America. The
narrator introduces and describes the physical appearance of
each character, immediately establishing himself as an
authority on Indians and the frontier life by footnoting for
additional detail exceptional and curious items of dress and
habit of the two characters--Chingachgook's scalp-lock,
Leatherstocking's hunting-shirt.

Indian (or, more precisely, Delaware) tradition is the

subject of discussion at the point that the reader "enters"

107

the scene, and notably, Leatherstocking (Hawkeye, Natty) is
summarizing it. From this early point, the narrator
apparently defers to Natty's expertise on "Indians." While
the footnotes continue, they are mostly reserved for what we
might term "frontier knowledge"--asides on mocking birds,
historical events, the nature of the forest-~while the
Indian asides are left to Natty, who is forever clarifying
to his white audience "Indian nature," "Indian skill,"
"Indian ways," and "Indian gifts." Natty's demonstration of
his expertise begins immediately, when Chingachgook subtly
questions Natty's use of Delaware tradition to make a point
in his (white) favor. Comments Natty, "there is reason in
an Indian, though nature has made him with a red skin!"
(22). While the actions and motivations of Uncas and
Chingachgook are clearly intended to be seen as noble, they
are always characterized by Natty as representative, not
exceptional, Indian action. For instance, when Uncas makes
what is presented as an exceedingly difficult shot with his
bow and arrow, Natty does not congratulate him for unusual
prowess, but comments, "twas done with Indian skill" (23).
In fact, the readers are given to know that there is nothing
exceptional at all about Chingachgook and Uncas. Whether
the Indian is ”good" or "bad," his "gifts" are the same.

Chingachgook is allowed to speak for his tradition, and
in his telling, the reader ‘glimpses' native history and

cosmology. But here, as in depictions of native life and

108
religious belief in the second volume of the novel, native
tradition is insistently called into question, either by a
reference to white knowledge, or even by the native
characters themselves. In this passage, Chingachgook is
explaining why the delta area of the river alternates
between fresh and salt water. In Delaware cosmology, the
explanation is fluid dynamics. The river runs out to the
ocean until an equilibrium is reached. Then the ocean water
mingles with the fresh water until the balance is again
offset, to the point where the river must run again. _A
feasible explanation by itself, Chingachgook's theory is
called into question by Natty's more authoritative
(biblically documented--"the truest thing in nature," 24)
tidal theory.

Without space to catalog or even survey the countless
occasions on which Natty expands on "Indian nature," we will
proceed directly to the most developed exposition on Indian
life and manners. Volume II of the book takes place in
Indian encampments. In short order, the reader is presented
with accounts of Indian village life, tribal government, and
social practice--gauntlet-running, executions, exorcism
rituals and burial practice. Prominent in this section is
what Pratt characterizes as "the very familiar, widespread
and stable form of othering." We see this clearly in the
first paragraph of chapter twenty three, which is worth

quoting in full:

 

Re
it
Dr
no
Dr
Uh
kn

g.

dlle

109

It is unusual to find an encampment of the natives,

like those of the more instructed whites, guarded

by the presence of armed men. Well informed of the

approach of every danger, while it is yet at a

distance, the Indian generally rests secure under

his knowledge of the signs of the forest, and the

long and difficult paths that separate him from

those he has most reason to dread. But the enemy

who, by any lucky concurrence of accidents, has

found means to elude the vigilance of scouts, will

seldom meet with sentinels nearer home to sound the

alarm. In addition to this general usage, the

tribes friendly to the French knew too well the

weight of the blow that had just been struck, to

apprehend any immediate danger from the hostile

nations that were tributary to the crown of Britain

(244).
Recall Pratt's definition of the Othering process: "The
iconic ‘he'/‘they' is the subject of verbs in a timeless
present tense, which characterizes anything ‘he' is or does
not as a particular historical event but as an instance of a
pregiven custom or trait." Here, the narrator presents
unchallengeable authority in an apparently objective, fully
knowledgeable and empiric description. The timeless
"general usage" is that the "Indian generally rests secure,"

due to his "knowledge" (albeit less "instructed") and

_ —I-—

110
position. We should recall, at this point, that Indian
knowledge according to the narrative is not a vaunted
empiricism. Rather it is an inherent feature of Indian
nature, as Natty exclaims of Chingachgook in the opening
pages: "These Indians know the nature of the woods, as it
might be by instinct!" (27).

The Indians Heyward encounters and the narrator
describes are clearly "homogenized into a collective ‘they'"
whose actions are often sudden and--curiously for all the
authority the narrator assumes--inexplicable. Heyward sees
native children as he approaches the village. But suddenly,
"the whole of the juvenile pack raised, by common consent, a
shrill and warning whoop; and then sank, as it were, by
magic, from before the sight of their visitors" (244). This
collective and uneXplained action prefigures a more
frightening and unanimous action to come, as Heyward's
negotiations with tribal members are interrupted by a
"sudden and terrible" cry. "At the same moment, the
warriors glided in a common body from the lodge" and
shortly, "the whole encampment, in a moment, became a scene
of the most violent bustle and commotion" (248). Unified by
their "nature," the Hurons' actions here can only be
described, not oxoioinoo,in any way that makes sense to the
white reader. In the same manner, Natty had earlier excused

Chingachgook's apparently unmotivated murder of the French

111

guard (140). It is significant that any action that
threatens whites is presented as being inexplicable.

Conversely, other less threatening aspects of native
life are perfectly explicable. Whereas earlier,
Chingachgook lent some authority to Indian cosmology by
preferring it to white accounts, the credibility of native
spiritual medicine is undermined by the natives themselves.
Heyward is called upon to express the good will of his
"Great Father" by healing the daughter of an elder warrior.
.Heyward, who after all has taken no Hippocratic oath,
consents to perform an exorcism of the evil spirit in order
to further his chances of finding the captive Alice. The
description of native belief is here given an odd twist, to
be performed by a white, and described through his
perspective:

The impatient Heyward, inwardly execrating the cold

customs of the savages, which required such

sacrifices to appearance, was fain to assume an air

of indifference, equal to that maintained by the

chief, who was, in truth, a near relative of the

afflicted woman. The minutes lingered, and the

delay seemed an hour to the adventurer in

empiricism (259).
Duncan's white, scientific perspective casts the ensuing
ritual as a fraud from the start; unlike Chingachgook's

earlier account of river and ocean currents, there is no

112
doubt left to the white reader that Indian medicine is sheer
"self-delusion" (279). The sham is amplified when Natty
appears, doubly disguised as a Huron medicine-man in the
costume of a bear. According to superstitious Indian
custom, the medicine-man-cum-bear is accorded the respect
and fear of a real bear. The two whites are easily able to
turn Indian beliefs against the ‘weak-minded' natives in
gaining strategic advantage.

But not all Indians are so easily fooled. The wily
Magua scorns Indian "superstition." He, the readers are
told, "is far above the more vulgar superstitions of his
tribe" (276) and disdains to humor the conjuror, whom he
associates with "women and children." And Hawkeye, so far
successful in his disguise, realizes as well its
limitations: "At the same time that he had presumed so far
on the nature of the Indian superstitions, [Hawkeye] was not
ignorant that they were rather tolerated than relied on by
the wisest of chiefs" (279). The integrity of native
tradition is subverted as the "wisest of chiefs," whether
good or bad, understands its fraudulent essence. This
strategy places the honor of all knowledge on the side of
the white author and reader. The "wisest" of Indians, in
other words, manages to know what the white author,
characters and readers already know.

As lnmhmgftbsmsans. new
establishes itself as an authority on Indian life and

113
manners from its opening pages. In his 1853 Preface, Simms
explains that "when I wrote, there was little understood, by
readers, generally, in respect to the character of red men;
and, of the opinions entertained on the subject, many,
according to my own experience, I knew to be incorrect" (4).
Accordingly, Simms sets out to correct these misconceptions,
to "remove that air of mystery which was supposed to
disguise their most ordinary actions" (4).

Among the most important to Simms was to correct the
"rude portraits of the red man, as given by those who see
him in degrading attitudes only, and in humiliating
relations with the whites." These, insists Simms, "must not
be taken as a just delineation of the same being in his
native woods, unsubdued, a fearless hunter, and without any
degrading habits, to make him wretched and ashamed" (4).
Simms' strategy for depicting the manners and customs of his
Yemassee Indians makes a curious departure from Cooper's,
whose Indians were relatively unchanging in their behavior.
This is not to say, however, that Simms' Indians had a
changeable nototg; they didn't. But their oohoyiot,was much
more flexible, and was influenced completely (for the worse)
by the superior whites.

The opening pages of Ibi.1§fli§ifi§ provide its readers
with an historical sketch of the Yemassee tribe. This
passage is marked with frequent footnotes, the first of

which sets an undeniable tone of authority: "We are

114
speaking now of authentic history only ..." (n., 9).
Subsequent notes document the narrator's extensive knowledge
of Yemassee language. (This authority is somewhat
undermined however, as Richard C. Shaner observes, when the
narrator characterizes the Yemassee tribe as being
indigenous to the Carolinas, since they were originally from
what is now Georgia and Florida.) Comparable in political
savvy to the Romans, the mighty Yemassees had strengthened
their own power "by a wise incorporation of the conquered
with the conquerors" (10). "Politic ... generous and
gallant" were the Yemassee when the whites first set foot on
the continent (11).

The Yemassee's astute political dealings with other
tribes could not-~and this seems to be Simms's sense of the
tragedy--extend to its relations with the whites. Sharing
the land to the new settlers was "improvident" (10), and
they remained for too long blind to their "inferiority to a
power of which they, at length, grew jealous" (11). This
jealousy, which arises as they realize their thoroughly
subordinate nature, marks a change in Yemassee behavior. No
longer noble and brave, "their chiefs began to show signs of
discontent, if not of disaffection" toward the whites, and
worse, "the great mass of their people assumed a sullenness
of habit and demeanor, which had never marked their conduct

before” (11).

115
The narrator is remarkably explicit in affixing some
sshare of blame to the white settlers. Characterized as
"bold and incursive" (11), the white backwoodsmen, "removed
from the surveillance of society, committed numberless petty
ilnjuries upon the property, and sometimes upon the person of
fiis wandering neighbor" (20). Further, the narrator
Cluestions the religious ideals of the early settlers:
An abstract standard of justice, independent of
appetite or circumstance, has not often marked the
progress of Christian (so-called) civilization, in
its proffer of its great good to the naked savage.
The confident reformer, who takes sword in one hand
and sacrament in the other, has always found it in
the surest way to rely chiefly on the former (20).
“To sum it all up in a little," the narrator later comments,
"our European ancestors were, in many respects, monstrous
great rascals" (221). But while the narrator may question
some of the actions of those European ancestors, what he
never questions is the absolute value of civilization which
places the white settlers in a relationship of superiority
to the natives. It is the natives' own consciousness of
this fact that brings out the worst in their ultimately
inferior nature.
Nearly every characterization of Indians in In:
xtmagzoo, then, is made in reference to white incursion, for

the debased Indian is in some sense a product of his contact

116
vvith the white. For instance, the narrator describes
£3anutee (the chief of the Yemassee who yet retains strains
<3f nobility although those are increasingly corrupted by
:jealousy): "The warrior was armed after Indian fashion."
fie carries a bow, and a tomahawk. Importantly, however, the
Juatter weapon is not "after the Indian fashion." Rather, as
tzhe narrator reveals, the "light weapon ... introduced by
t:he colonists," is a "substitute for the stone hatchet" the
Jindians had formerly carried. Similarly Sanutee's dress
"indicated a frequent intercourse with the whites ... The
‘varrior before us had been among the first to avail himself
<>f the arts of the whites in the improvement of costume;
Ilay, he had taken other lessons, of even greater value, from
t:he superior race" (15). The Indian's recognition of white
superiority is indicated in both the manner that he clothes
and defends himself. Thus the native is dominated by his
own recognition and unconscious consent.
Hierarchical relations are important in Yemassee life.
As we see in Sanutee's domestic life with his wife, Matiwan,
the husband expects complete subservience. Matiwan is
characterized as a "fawn" who is afraid even to touch or
speak to her husband uninvited (72), and Sanutee loves her
"as a child rather than a wife" (70). Just as rigid, but
less effectual, is the tribal structure. The tribe
government is superficially democratic, as the narrator

details:

117
The Yemassees were ruled by the joint authority of

several chiefs-~each controlling a special section
with arbitrary authority, yet, when national
measures were to be determined upon, it required a

majority for action. These chiefs were elective,

and from these the superior, or presiding chief,

was duly chosen; all of these, without exception,

were accountable to the nation (74).
Lest the reader affix positive associations to the account

of the structure, the narrator comments, "such

accountability was rather the result of popular impulse than

(of any other more legitimate or customary regulation" (75).

.Ahd in fact the government, now under the sway of the

‘vhites, is completely ineffectual. For example, when the
VVhites try to drive a bargain with the tribal government,
ENerosely avoiding the more powerful chiefs whom they know

‘Vlill oppose further land Sales, the Indians have a meeting

't€> discuss the deal. Unlike the tribal councils Cooper

depicts, this meeting verges on mayhem, with the chiefs who

are corrupted by the whites opposing the chiefs who are

Iiealous of the whites. In the end, the issue is resolved by

3resort to superstition and brute force.

There are very few individual Indians worth noting, and
as the novel progresses, the narrator more and more focuses
on the nature of the Indian mob which is characterized as a

degraded but dangerous force which can as easily turn on

118

itself as it can on the whites. The mob is quickly aroused

to wreak vengeance on the corrupted chiefs who signed a deal
with the whites. In a more pointed example, when the Indian
mob rushes out to punish the whites, in their enthusiasm,
they mistakenly attack one of their own: "they dashed him
to the earth, trampled and nearly tore him into pieces
before discovering the mistake" (92). Increasingly, the
Yemassee are characterized as an iconic "they" who can
easily be classified and understood. The narrator
summarizes, "the elements of all uncultivated people are the
same" (241).
Harrison, the gentleman-hero of the action, has the

(apportunity personally to experience the Yemassee mob. Like

lflatty, Harrison has an especially expert knowledge of the

"true nature" (98) of the natives, a familiarity so complete

tflmat when in their presence, his caution is characterized as
"13ndian instinct" (223). Discovered by the Yemassee mob
during their preparations for attacking the white

Settlement, Harrison notices "a generous degree of

fOrbearance ... on the part of the better-looking among the
E3pectators." This comes as no surprise to Harrison, who
‘Cnows that "the insolent portion of the rabble formed a
Class especially for such purposes as the present (i.e., his
torturel" (246). This emphasis on visible reflection of

inner character is important in establishing the continuity

of hierarchy among the natives, as well as between Indians

119
and whites. Just as the uglier Indians are inferior to the
better looking ones like Sanutee (cf. 16), so are the
"irritably red features" (223) of the Indians generally an
index to the superiority of the whites. Thus, while loo
Xomagfioo,directs some guilt for the denigrated Indian on the
whites, the guilt is of the most innocent kind. The whites
"do" nothing more than be naturally superior, a crime of
nothing more than coincidence.

Bird's Indians are much less complex than Cooper's, and
less dynamic than Simms'. Perhaps for this reason, Niot oi
tho,floooo devotes comparatively little space to developing
portraits of native manners and customs. Rather, Bird from
'the outset assumes a universalized and unchanging Indian,
cane who is thoroughly debased and completely savage.

At two points in the narrative the reader is offered a
czloser look. In the first, Roland, Edith and Stackpole are
Snarprised by the troop of Indians they thought they had
eScaped. Like the irrational Yemassees, these Shawnees are
a bloodthirsty mob. Angered at their own losses, the
Ilmdians rehearse their vengeance on the already dead bodies
(DE the whites by mutilating the corpses, "striking the
senseless clay repeatedly with their knives and hatchets,
each seeking to surpass his fellow in the savage work of
mutilation" (201). "Such is the red-man of America," the
narrator comments, generalizing a specific and motivated

action to an abstract and eternal Indian nature.

120

Although Bird emphasizes the repulsiveness of these
actions, they are at least attributable to grief and rage.
But like Cooper's Indians, Bird's Shawnees often act from
simple, irrational bloodthirstiness. An old Piankeshaw
warrior to whom Roland is given in the division of spoils
alternately threatens the captive with death and cajoles him
as a "brudder," with apparently no intervening motivation
(202-203). Indian religion, as when the Piankeshaw spreads
out the scruffy contents of his medicine bag while
performing some unaccountable ritual, is equally ludicrous
and unexplainable. Their torment of victims is capricious
and unpredictable. The narrator summarizes: "It is only
among children (we mean, of course, bad ones) and savages,
who are but grown children, after all, that we find malice
and mirth go hand in hand--the will to create misery and the
power to see it invested in ludicrous colors" (209). The
bad child-like Indian is sure to do only two things: drink
himself into a drunken stupor whenever possible, and kill
white people at every opportunity.

we might here posit a continuum of Indian statesmanship
among the three novels. The Indians in Monioon§,gather to
conduct debate political issues. In Ioo_xomo§§oo, the
Indians gather at least in an attempt to do so. However, in
Niot,oi,tno,flood§, the Indians gather only to form warring
parties, to divide plunder, and to boast. Predictably,

Bird's depiction of Indian rhetoric differs significantly

121
from that in the other two novels. No matter how
antagonistic Magua was to white interests, his oratorical
skills were undeniably admirable even to the whites. When
Magua spoke, he was persuasive to tribesmen and white

people, as in his much-noted speech before Tamenund. In The

 

zomooooo, the power of Indian rhetoric affects only the
natives, and functions only to incite the mob, as the
narrator notes of Sanutee's impassioned speech to prevent
further sale of Yemassee lands: "the rash, the thoughtless,
the ignorant--all were aroused by his eloquence" (84). In
3155, however, Indian speeches are only absurdly garrulous
performances. Those who have perceived the Indian as
‘taciturn should be better informed, observes the narrator.
£3ilence on the part of an Indian in front of the whites
(zones only from his wish to "cover the nakedness of his own
iriferiority" (264).a Among his own people, he gives himself
Owrer to "wild indulgence." The chief delivers a speech to
time victorious war band, very little of which Roland is able
't<> understand as the chief does not know much English:

His oration, however, as far as Roland could

understand it, consisted chiefly in informing him

that he was a very great chief, who had killed

abundance of white people, men, women and children,

whose scalps had, for thirty years and more, been

hanging in the smoke of his Shawnee lodge,--that he

was very brave and loved a white man's blood better

122

than whiskey, and that he never spared it out of

pity ... the whole speech consisted, like most

other Indian speeches, of the same things said over

and over again, those same things being scarce

worth the trouble of utterance (204-205).

Like the Indian speeches, the Indians themselves are in Niot
oi tho Woooo'"scarce worth the trouble of utterance," even
while their presence in the novel is what fuels its
narrative economy.

The reader's closest view of Indian life in Niot,comes
when Nathan enters the Shawnee village to rescue Edith. We
see in the narrator's observations the process of Othering
already discussed above. As Nathan scouts the village, the
reader is told of the "oppressed and degraded women" who
water the cornfields in their keeping with tears (264).
Nathan manages to avoid the Indian dogs by shaking a string
of bells at them. The dogs, expecting to be killed "in the
usual summary Indian way" run off immediately (268). When
Stackpole gives his white compatriots away, and he along
with Roland and Nathan are captured, the reader learns that
"we know of no instance where an Indian, torturing a
prisoner at the stake, the torture once begun, has ever been
moved to compassionate, to regard any feelings but those of
exultation and joy, the agonies of the thrice-wretched

victim" (329). The Indian is rendered monodimensional. To

123
know one Indian is to know them all, and by the same token,
to have reason to kill one is reason for genocide.

Despite (or, precisely because of) the authority
established by each of these narratives on their Indian
objects, such accounts are always dominative, and, as Abdul
JanMohamed argues, always suspect. "Since the object of
representation--the native--does not have access to these
texts (because of linguistic barriers) and since the [white]
audience has no direct contact with the native, imperialist
fiction tends to be unconcerned with the truth—value of its
representation" (63). Indeed, Simms' elaborate and extended
.renditions of Yemassee mythology are complete fakeries, as
ime passingly admits in his 1853 Preface: "That portion of
t:he story, which the reverend critics, with one exception,
Irecognised as sober history, must be admitted to be a pure
ilrvention--one, however, based on such facts and analogies

as, I venture to think, will not discredit the proprieties

of the invention" (4). Simms, amused at pulling one over on
hls critics, can at once admit that he made it all up, while
Still claiming a definite authority therein.

In all three novels, these accounts of Indian life are
(ievoted to developing a perspective on Indian extermination
that obscures white involvement. Dorothy Hammond and Alto
Jablow rightly point to a "unifying theme of confrontation"
between the white and racial Other in colonial and frontier

literature (17). Yet it is important to note in these three

124
novels that the dynamics of that confrontation are never the
directly determining factor in the demise of the racial
Other. Rather, responsibility is displaced onto the natives
themselves. In Niot, the Indians' savage quest to kill
whites demands their death through self-defense and revenge.
In Iho_1omo§§oo, the Indians, beside being completely

inferior and therefore subject to the "relentless onward

progress" of civilization (69), are by nature so
"capricious" that it is "doubtful whether they can, for any
length of time, continue in peace and friendship" (158).
Even though Simms earlier manages to locate some of the
guilt of the frontier violence on the part of the whites,
‘the ultimate reason for Indian wars rests with the natives

‘themselves. And when we see a white killing an Indian, the

eaction switches curiously into a passive voice. Harrison's

rxale as the "Coosah-moray-te," or Coosaw-killer (he has,

apparently almost single-handed, caused the extermination of

‘tlle majority of the tribe) is invoked only to explain the

Starviving Coosaws' unwavering resolution to kill him, but is

t\ardly accounted for otherwise. When Harrison gets the best

<>f the last Coosaw chief in the struggle, the Indian, lying

at Harrison's feet, urges him to strike. Apparently he

does: "The knife was in his heart. Vainly the eyes rolled

in a fruitless anger--the teeth fixed for ever a short

groan ... and the race of the Coosaw was for ever ended.

Harrison rose and looked around" (338). In this curious

125
passage, the reader sees the end of an Indian race without
actually seeing the agency of the white hand in the death.
Similarly, in Mohicans, the Indians are guilty of their-

own demise, but significantly here, oot_ot £h§.h§fli.2£ too
EELEE- In Mohicans we learn that the Chingachgook's lineage
is threatened not by contact with civilization, but because
of the constant enmity of the Delawares against other Indian
nations. As Natty recounts, "‘tis not often that books are
made, and narratives written, of such a scrimmage as was
here fou't atween the Mohicans and Mohawks, in a war of
their own waging" (127). The Hurons are similarly
ferocious; those taken on by the French commander Montcalm
(:are very little who they fight, so long as they can fight.
'They are a (presumably inhuman) "engine beyond the power of
lluman control" (176). Indian actions that threaten whites
Eire de-historicized, de-politicized and are therefore
it1explicable and mysterious, only attributable to "Indian
Aniiture." It is highly significant that the end of the
Hohican race comes at the hands of a Mingo, and is lamented
tDyevery white person present--including the French aid of
liontcalm. Thus, in Dowling's terms, these stories become
“strategies of containment," defensive psychic maneuvers

that guard the whites against their own sense of continuing

complicity.

126

A NATIONAL IDENTITY

Identifying and fixing the identity of the Indians in
frontier novels was prerequisite to another, equally
important enterprise: that of establishing a national
"white" identity. Pratt succinctly summarizes the
importance of this endeavor: "nowhere are the notions of
normal, familiar action and given systems of difference in
greater jeopardy than on the imperial frontier" (121). Roy
Harvey Pearce similarly observes that "the American before
1850--a new man, as he felt, making a new world-—was
obsessed to know who and what he was and where he was going,
to evaluate the special society in which he lived and to
know its past and its future" (135). White Americans were
simultaneously expanding their borders and trying to define
them. The power motive underlying border expansion and the
drive to codify a national identity was the same. Frank
Lentricchia argues that "we purchase and preserve our
identity beyond all change with the currency of a will to
power rooted in an ethnocentric idea of community (the
‘European mind" ...) that would exclude and silence the
voices in conflict with it" (130). Overcoming (without
eliminating) class boundaries to conquer and silence the
Indians was a fundamental aspect of creating a national
identity, and along with it, a national culture and

literature: in short, an American book.

127

As Perry Miller argues in his essay "The Shaping of the
American Character," the problem [of the new nation] was to
bring order out of chaos, to set up a government, to do it
efficiently and quickly" (8). Many scholars, like Miller,
have sensed the importance of literature to the project of
establishing a national identity, its role in establishing
an ideal for white, American readers to identify themselves
with--hence the profusion of studies of "the American
novel." In fact, the role of literature as social agent is
elemental. As Lentricchia elaborates, "to exist socially is
to be rhetorically aligned" (149).

Burke's comments on identification pertain directly to
the American enterprise in frontier novels. He argues that
"identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely
because there is a division. Identification is compensatory
to division. If men were not apart from one another, there
would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their
unity" (1969, 22). The three frontier novels discussed
here, while often acknowledging the borders of white social
hierarchy, work to resolve class and social discrepancies
under the rubric of a a national American or white identity.
White Americans become a unified front whose social,
material conflicts are displaced into a conflict of Progress
versus Nature, or White versus Red.

Henry Nash Smith discusses the relevance of Natty's

inferior social status in Ino,yiioin_ianfifl He argues that

although
nohigansy
revealing
technicai
in the fc
affinity
immortali
Certainly
eXploratj
Which are
NattY as
a nagging
for insta
every frc
"red" One
DOsitiOn:
Natt
beYo
aPpr
But
Spec
reSt
SYmb(

”Ever

128

although the issue is shunted aside in action of the
nonioooo, it created a "predicament for the novelist by
revealing to him that his most vital character occupied a
technically inferior position both in the social system and
in the form of the sentimental novel" (70). Cooper's
affinity to the aristocratic way of life has been
immortalized (and perhaps overdrawn) by D. H. Lawrence, and
certainly all of the Leatherstocking tales contain
explorations of social hierarchy--the ultimate meaning of
which are up for debate. It is possible, however, to see
Natty as a resolver of white social tensions, rather than as
a nagging reminder. Natty's firm insistence on white gifts,
for instance, delineates a universally "white reaction" to
every frontier situation, often fixed in opposition to a
"red" one. Richard Slotkin persuasively argues this
position:

Natty Bumppo is a commoner by birth who is lifted

beyond the limitations of class by his

apprenticeship to the Indians and the wilderness.

But unlike the squatters, he never presumes on his

special status, or on the peculiar freedom from

restraint provided by the wilderness ... he

symbolically renounces property ... hence he will

never become a competitor with his social superiors

... Instead, he ... facilitates the resolution of

social tensions (1985, 105).

A commor
whites l
a commor
help the
as the n
Duncan i
social r
Educates
pOlitica
Thi
w1th Chi
Closing
amDIVQle
also not
the Dela'
linEage
steadfas1
shuns its
delineate
occa510na
brotheIs,
of the di‘

wisheS Nar

differencE
categOIICa

”151!) this

129
A common feature in all three novels is different classes of
whites uniting against (and learning from each other about)
a common, Indian enemy. The lowly-born Natty is able to
help the obviously more cultivated Monroe daughters, as well
as the more cultivated and somewhat more capable men like
Duncan Heyward and Monroe himself. White men of different
social rank close ranks against the Indian menace, as Natty
educates Heyward and they work together for white social and
political interests.

This is obviously complicated by Natty's relationship
with Chingachgook and Uncas, affirmed at the opening and
closing of the novel's action. Without ignoring the
ambivalence this creates for the novel's stance, we should
also note that Uncas is nearly executed for treason against
the Delawares before saved by the revelation of his royal
lineage (cf. 326-328). Natty, on the other hand,
steadfastly refuses to betray white interest, even while he
shuns its effects. His identity revolves on strictly
delineated, specifically white "gifts." Even though he
occasionally expresses reservations about his racial
brothers' uses of those gifts, he insists on the importance
of the distinction. When Monroe, overcome with grief,
wishes Natty to express his sentiment that racial
differences will be overcome in the next life, Natty
categorically refuses to translate Monroe's hope. "To tell

them this," insists Natty, "would be to tell them that the

snows co
snow, mu
In
same, bu
the issu
Rather, j
White pr.
10wer-cle
This less
Governor
novel's a
HarrlSOn,
discover
their pot
in love w
3655 Hatt)
inability
no materia
a gentlema
BesS
backaOds 1
Harrison ar

bear ing’ as

130
snows come not in the winter" (371). White skin, like white
snow, must retain its integrity.

In Ing_lgm§§§§g, the message of white unity is the
same, but Simms does not sidestep the political aspects of
the issue as Henry Nash Smith accuses Cooper of doing.
Rather, Ihfi figmggigg contains an explicit lesson on the
white project of civilization which will be realized through
lower-class acquiescence to the leadership of the gentry.
This lesson is emblematized in the dashing and gentlemanly
Governor Craven, who is "disguised" during most of the
novel's action as the mysterious (and gentlemanly) Gabriel
Harrison. Craven has set aside his public personage to
discover any plotting of the local Indians, and to avert
their potentially devastating affects. Disguised, he falls
in love with (and is reciprocated by) the pastor's daughter,
Bess Matthews. While her father is upset at Harrison's
inability to document his lineage, Bess and her mother need
no material evidence to see that Harrison is "born and bred
a gentleman" (199).

Bess is also unknowingly the beloved of a lowly-born
backwoods boy, Hugh Grayson. Hugh, for his part, hates
Harrison and reacts vehemently against Harrison's noble
bearing, as he relates to his brother:

I cannot like that man for many reasons, and not

the least of these is, that I cannot so readily as

yourself acknowledge his superiority, while,

pez
fee
is

cor

You

131

perhaps, not less than yourself, I cannot help but

feel it. My pride is to feel my independence-—it

is for you to desire control, were it only for the

connexion and the sympathy which it brings to you.

You are one of the millions who make tyrants. Go--

worship him yourself, but do no call upon me to do

likewise (45).
Hugh is in fact clearly associated with the revolutionary
figure Thomas Paine when he later explains, "my own mind is
my teacher." Simms however tips his hand on the political
context of that association when Greyson adds, "and perhaps
my tyrant" (210). It is clear from the ensuing action that
the problem is not Grayson's concept of freedom-eHarrison
also confesses that ”freedom is my infirmity" (48). Rather,
the real problem is his prideful insubordination against his
social betters. Literally deranged by grief after he
witnesses a romantic interlude between Harrison and Bess,
Grayson attempts to kill Harrison. Harrison, who can
imagine no white harboring enmity against him, adamantly
refuses to believe that Grayson "has the right man." He
saves Grayson from himself, as it were, and enlists him in
the aid of the white settlement (215—219). When the threat
of the Yemassee uprising is realized, Grayson's better
nature asserts itself. Hugh Grayson, the narrator relates,

with all his faults, and they were many, was in

reality a noble fellow. Full of high ambition~-a

cre
it:
ima
ve:
the
USL
had
Grayson
discover
Unites h
later, C
learns f
Consciou
unqueSti
genuema
”man" by
Smeittij
PurifiCa1
Civic Dr(
““1 ms.
Iadian‘ha
similar:
my duty a
For]

killing 1‘

132

craving for the unknown and the vast, which spread

itself vaguely and perhaps unattainably before his

imagination--his disappointments very naturally

vexed him somewhat beyond prudence, and now and

then beyond the restraint of right reason. He

usually came to a knowledge of his error before it

had led too far (304).
Grayson learns to set aside his social pretensions, as he
discovers his duty to be a "man and a citizen” (305). He
unites with Harrison's cause against the Yemassee, and
later, chastised and purified by battle with the Indians,
learns further to submit to the wisdom of "that air of
conscious superiority .. that tone of command ... of a power
unquestionable” (347) which Harrison manifests through his
gentlemanly bearing. Greyson becomes a happier and better
"man" by playing his part as a "citizen"--recognizing and
submitting to the authority of his white betters. This
purification comes about, significantly, through the (white)
civic project of Indian-killing. Published the same year as
In: figmafiggg, James Hall's "The Pioneers" recounts the
Indian-hater William Robinson's boast in terms strikingly
similar: ”I believe that in killing the savage I performed
my duty as a man and served my country as a citizen” (86).

For Robert Montgomery Bird, the project of Indian-

killing is the same, but the thrust of the social lesson is

quite di
promises
the
dif
per}
of a
bas
Wi54
grea
van.
far:
and
These met
force in
influenCE
or Counse
and SeCuz
governmer
that Bird
after the

lmDOrtanC

narrative

ROIQnd F0

1

l

quellfies

13 certalr

133
quite different. ulgk_gfi_§ng,flggg§_was conceived, as Bird
promises in his Preface to the first edition, to portray
the character of men by whom--in the midst of
difficulties and dangers as numerous and urgent,--
perhaps more so than ever attended the establishing

of a colony in North America,--were laid, upon a

basis as firm as if planted by the subtlest and

wisest spirits of the age, the foundations of a

great a powerful State ... drawn from what, in our

vanity, we call the humbler spheres of life,--

farmers and hunters, the mountaineers of Virginia

and the Carolinas (27).

These men, indigent and ignorant, have been the shaping
force in American civilization, argues Bird. "Without the
influence of any great and experienced mind to impel, direct
or counsel, [they] succeeded in their vast enterprise

and secured to their conquest all the benefits of civil
government and laws" (27). While Robert Winston points out
that Bird's proclaimed interest in the common man wanes
after the Preface (76), a clear message about their
importance is yet a significant aspect of the novel.

While Bird is obviously more interested in the
narrative possibilities of his "gentlemanly" character,
Roland Forrest, than he is his Kentucky backwoodsmen, he
qualifies his endorsement of Roland on all counts. Roland

is certainly ”entitled to superior attention" (43) but he is

also sul)
the backi
Indians"
guidance
respect :
fight of:
though R‘
Civiliza‘
provides
SEttIEmel
the son I
Provide .

0f R018!“

134
also sulky, judgmental and foolhardy. He at first scorns
the backwoodsmen as ”but one degree elevated above the
Indians” (45), but his experiences in the woods under the
guidance of Nathan chasten Roland, and give him a healthy
respect for the hardy Kentuckians who make it their life to
fight off the Indians he cannot cope with. In the end,
though Roland is sent back to Virginia to populate
civilization with his gentlewoman cousin Edith, Bird
provides an equally valuable marriage in the Kentucky
settlement, between the renegade's daughter, Telie Doe, and
the son of the Colonel, Dick Bruce. They, presumably, will
provide the frontiersmen that pave the way for the children
of Roland and Edith.

NLQL gfi_1ng flggd§_emphasizes the elemental importance
of both classes to the American vision, and also provides an
explicit message on the cost of white disunity. Nathan
Slaughter is shunned by the Kentucky woodsmen for his
pacifist declarations. In another tale that he relates to
Roland (before his later revelation), Nathan explains about
a time when he encountered the tracks of an Indian party as
he was out hunting. Following them, he discovered they were
heading toward his "own little wigwam,” and fearing for the
safety of his neighbors, the Ashtons, he went to warn them.
"But verily,” he relates to Roland, "they held my story
light, and laughed at and derided me; for, in them days, the

people hardened their hearts and closed their ears against

me, becaus
Injuns as
Nathan goe
dispatch a
bloodthirs
Nathan, m
it, ”as I
allowed tc
Ashtons of
fa"1111’ har
Particula]
instancE’
we should
more forti
territory
instead 0
Despite t]
DartiCula:

135

me, because I held it not according to conscience to kill
Injuns as they did" (148). Turned away by the Ashtons,
Nathan goes to the Colonel Bruce, hoping to persuade him to
dispatch a force to save the Ashtons, whom he is sure the
bloodthirsty Indians will harm. Bruce not only scoffs at
Nathan, but takes away his rifle saying, as Nathan relates
it, "as I was not man enough to use it, I should not be
allowed to carry it” (150). Nathan rushes back to the
Ashtons only to see them massacred, as we later learn his
family had been. The dynamics of this scene become
particularly complex in light of the later revelation--for
instance, if Nathan has been killing Indians all along (and
we should assume that his chancing across the trail was no
more fortuitous than his choosing to settle in Wenonga's
territory), then why didn't he attempt to stop the Indians
instead of going to warn the Ashtons and Colonel Bruce?
Despite this, one lesson is driven clearly and with
particular force: whites must unify on the frontier. As
the narrator of In; figmggsgg notes, the "generally exposed
situation on the whole frontier occupied by the whites, with
the delay and difficulty of warlike preparation, rendered
every precautionary measure essential" (158). The cost of
white discord will be measured in "white" blood.

While the messages of the three novels differ in means,
the end is the same. .Not only are whites on the frontier

identified in a common cause, but that cause and identity

are car:
novel fe
frontier
Alice Mc
particul
marry an
Edith Fo
their in
Gabriel

by right
frontier

thESe tr.

136
are carried back into, and sustained by, civilization. Each
novel features some transaction between characters on the
frontier, and characters from civilization. In Mohicans,
Alice Monroe and Duncan Heyward, neither of whom proved
particularly adept (or adaptable) on the frontier, will
marry and return to civilization. Similarly, Roland and
Edith Forrest, rescued from the Shawnees and returned to
their inheritance, return to the now cultivated Virginia.
Gabriel Harrison/Charles Craven, in his role as governor and
by right of his noble birth, can move from civilization to
frontier and back, with authority and ease. Importantly in
these transactions, each group of whites is informed by the
mission of the other. The ideal, as Harrison puts it in The
Igmggsgg, is to form ”one community" (125). The project of
that community is, as Bird affirms in his Preface, to "wrest
... from the savage the garden-land of his domain,” and to
"secure ... to their conquest all the benefits of civil
government and laws" (27).

In Ihg,£§§§1,anyiggnmgnt, Slotkin argues that frontier
ideology succeeded by displacing white class conflict onto
an archetypal formulation that sees whites unified against
the forces of Nature. "Instead of interpreting history as a
competition for power and resources by classes of fellow
citizens, the Myth projects competition outward, and
imagines the strife as that between a fully human entity--

"civilization"--and an entity that is primarily inhuman”

 

(79). Ye
control"
must be c
civilizin
the front
and must
"metaphor
conflict,
POlitical
simplicit;
Each
exPanding
identificé
establishi
Indians Wt
link, thes
W
the novelS
Particmar
Cultural a1
they come
readers enc
imaginatiVe
“0's,

137
(79). Yet the "engine which ... exceeds human power to
control" is presumably not beyond white ”human power," and
must be controlled to guarantee the success of the white
civilizing mission. In order to accomplish this, whites on
the frontier and in the "Metropolis" must think in concert,
and must sustain the white mission on all fronts. This
"metaphorical substitution of Indian warfare for class
conflict,” as Slotkin summarizes, "reduces the moral and
political complexities of modern life to a terrible
simplicity" (80).

Each novel establishes a communicative link between the
expanding border and the cultural border that will allow
identification between the white people and will provide the
establishing of a common perspective on the frontier and the
Indians who inhabit it. As they portray such an historical
link, these stories also provide the possibility of a
gggtgmpggggy reader's identification with the characters of
the novels that will allow him or her to adopt the novel's
particular perspective. Thus, these novels are social and
cultural agents in a specifically material sense, in that
they could shape attitudes toward current situations that
readers encountered during the continued expansion of
imaginative and physical frontiers during the 1820's and
'30's.

138
readers encountered during the continued expansion of
imaginative and physical frontiers during the 1820's and
'30's.

TRADITION AND THE NOVEL

These novels, each in their own way, strive to create a
sense of American tradition. This tradition, in whatever
form, ultimately presents white Americans overcoming
social/class boundaries to identify themselves in opposition
to Indians/Nature. Epitomized in Nathan Slaughter's
frontier story, these novels remove whites readers from a
sense of historical or political complicity by localizing a
permanent and present guilt for the conflict onto the
Indians. The American tradition in frontier novels, as
Slotkin so eloquently puts it, is a "terrible simplicity"
that seeks to monologize the American experience, to speak
in only one voice while eliding the voice of social strife
between different groups of whites as well as eliminating
the voice of the Native American. As Lentricchia notes,
"the human costs of the rhetorical action of tradition-
making are grim” (131).

Yet if, as Lentricchia argues, "tradition-making
functions precisely to hide class conflict by eliding the
text's involvement in social struggle," this task is

compromised by the demands of the novel, which Mikhail M.

containn
traditic
simultar
essence

conclusi
of all r
If, as t
Social 1
frontier
Signific
then the
rhetOIic
Bakhtin.
D‘ESEnt,
CharaCte
eraSinq

eternal

0f its n
drive Of
Genres 1
argues,

unOEfiCi‘
disCOurs,
diverSIt‘

lnev1tab1

We

139
containment, it speaks to an absolute past of national
tradition. "Everything incorporated into this past was
simultaneously incorporated into a condition of authentic
essence and significance, but therefore also took on
conclusiveness and finality, depriving itself, so to speak
of all rights and potential for real continuation" (16).
If, as this chapter has argued, one of the fundamental
social roles of frontier novels was to g;gg§g_a sense of
frontier tradition and white unity for their on e a
significance during the period these novels were written,
then the epic genre could not be suitable to their
rhetorical purposes. Rather, the novelistic genre could, in
Bakhtin's words, provide a ”zone of maximal contact with the
present," even in an historical novel, which is
characterized by "a positively weighted modernizing, an
erasing of temporal boundaries, the recognition of an
eternal present” (11; 365). The novel could do this because
of its "folklore roots" (21), which subvert the hegemonic
drive of authority, and the containment of other, idealized
genres like the epic. The novel is, as Bakhtin persuasively
argues, ”associated with the eternally living element of
unofficial language and unofficial thought" (20), the
discourse of which is rooted in heteroglossia-—a "social
diversity of speech types" (263)--and is therefore

inevitably sedimented with the very social history frontier
tradition,seeks to repress.

It
embodies
were geo
cultural
that ope
language

At .

140

It might be argued, then, that the frontier £212;
embodies the contradictory urges of frontier ideology, which
were geographically and temporally centrifugal, and
culturally centripetal. Bakhtin argues that the same forces
that operate ideologically are also manifest in the "life of
language”:

At any given moment of its evolution, language is

stratified not only into linguistic dialects

but also-~and for us this is the essential point-—

into languages that are socio-ideological ... This

stratification and heteroglossia, once realized, is

not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but

also what insures its dynamics (271-272).
Alongside this expanding drive works the "centripetal"
forces of language, those that seek to unify, normalize.
These forces, suggests Bakhtin, "develop in vital connection
with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural
centralization" (270-271). The novel, unlike other genres,
embodies this struggle between the two antithetical trends
of ideology and language.

Bakhtin proposes that the "languages of heteroglossia

.. encounter one another and co-exist in the consciousness

of real people--first and foremost, in the creative
imagination of people who write novels" (291-292). In
outlining what he perceives to be the novel's (and

novelist's) ”dialogic imagination," Bakhtin argues that

141
unlike a poet, who seeks to eliminate the chaos of
heteroglossia and language diversity, the novelist welcomes
them, "not only not weakening them, but even intensifying
them" precisely in order to interact with them (298). The
novelist forms his or her own artistic vision from
heteroglossia itself. ”The prose writer makes use of words
that are already populated with the social intentions of
others and compels them to serve his own new intentions, to
serve a second master” (300).

But the author can never remove the traces of social
and ideological struggle from the words he or she
appropriates. Thus, sedimented in the artistic rendering of
heteroglossia in the novel is always a history of prior
intentions. Bakhtin summarizes: "Heteroglossia, once
incorporated into the novel (whatever the forms for its
incorporation) is another's speech in another's language,
serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted
way." This results in what Bakhtin terms "double-voiced
discourse," which "serves two speakers at the same time and
expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the
direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the
refracted intention of the author” (324).

The language of any character, then, despite the
author's intentionsfor it, contains the history of its
lived contexts. Thus, In; xgmasggefls caricature of the

language of the black slave, Hector, at once serves the

142

narrator's parodic and political intentions while it
contains its own history. In the novel's action, Hector is
the ever-faithful, obsequious slave. When Harrison notifies
Hector that he is being liberated for saving Harrison's
life, Hector comically and categorically refuses.

I d---n to h-ll, maussa, ef I guine to be free!

I can't loss you company, and who de debble Dugdale

[Harrison's Indian—eating dog] guine let feed him

like Hector? 'Tis onpossible, maussa, and dere's

no use for talk 'bout it. De ting aint right; and

enty I know wha' kind of ting is freedom wid de

black man? Ha! You make Hector free, he turn wuss

more nor poor buckrah--he tief out of de shop--he

git drunk and lie in de ditch--den, if sick come,

he roll, he toss in de wet grass of de stable. You

come in de morning, Hector dead--and, who know--he

no take physic, he no hab parson—-who know I say,

maussa, but de debble fine em 'fore anybody else?

No, maussa--you and Dugdale berry good company for

Hector. I tank God he so good--I no want any

better (355-356).
Charles S. watson observes of this passage that ”Simms is
skillful in having the black himself present the argument
[of white pro-slavery advocates] in his own picturesque
Gullah dialect” (341). Yet, however rhetorically effective

Simms' strategy may be for the pro-slavery stance, he cannot

143
obscure the historical and social circumstances that
populate the Gullah dialect--the history of white
enslavement and exploitation that are sedimented in Hector's
language. Simms can neither parody nor exploit Hector's
speech without the help of the Gullah dialect itself, which
is precisely what constitutes the "double-voicedness" of his
use of it. The two languages-~Gullah dialect, and Simm's
intentional rendering of it--enact dialogically: "it is as
if they actually hold a conversation with each other" (324).
Ihg,Xgma§§g§ presents Hector's speech to refute charges of
white oppression of black slaves; Gullah dialect contains
the history of that very oppression.

In the same manner, Bird's representation of Wenonga's
barely intelligible pigdin English portrays the novel's
desire to portray the Indian as debased, ignorant and
degraded. At the same time, Wenonga's pidgin details the
history of Native American/white relations. Roland, as the
narrator reveals, could understand the Shawnee warrior only
when he made some attempt to speak in English. The fact
that the Wenonga could speak English at all chronicles the
trail of Indian concessions to the whites, who for their
part, rarely reciprocated the favor. "The human being in
the novel,” argues Bakhtin, "is first, foremost and always a
speaking human being; the novel requires speaking persons
bringing with them their own unique ideological discourse,

their own language" (332). As we have seen, the novelist

144
may shape that language according to his or her
artistic/political purposes, but the heteroglossic nature of
the novel always "relativizes" the author's intentions
(316).

Thus, the novel is inevitably ambivalent, a "tension-
filled unity" (272). Each of the frontier novels considered
here manifest this ambivalence--between the monologic drives
of American tradition-making, and the heteroglossic nature
of their medium--in a different way. In ID9.L§§1 Q; the
Mohicans, Natty himself embodies what Frank Collins calls a
"faltering synthesis” (79). Natty enacts his political role
as a British scout, and his social role as a "resolver of
social tensions" (see above), but at the same time he
manifests a profound aversion to the political and social
system he espouses. In The Yem s ee, the ambivalence is
centered in the logical contradiction contained in the
novel's portrayal of Indians. The novel depicts a formerly
noble, and now debased savage as it seeks to locate the
responsibility for white violence against the Yemassee in
”nature,” and specifically, the inherently inferior "Indian
nature." Yet Simms cannot have it both ways. No matter how
Ihg,xgm§§§§g,attempts to displace white responsibility onto
Indian nature, it admits its guilt in its historicized
reading of Indian life before and after white contact.

Finally, in £195.91 the floods, Nathan Slaughter seeks

to expunge Indian violence from America's forests by

145
exterminating them entirely. Yet he cannot do so without
being unequivocally implicated in that very Indian violence.
Nathan takes on, more and more, an "Indian" way of life
precisely as he tries to eliminate it, as we saw above in
his characterization of his house as "my own little wigwam."
By the end of the novel, he is transformed into a striking
image of Wenonga, wielding an axe, covered in blood,
carrying a string of scalps, and whooping in the spirit of
"never-dying revenge" that parallels Wenonga's own
characterization (see 323--324; 344). Ultimately, none of
the three novels is able to sustain a unified vision of
white American tradition and history. The heteroglossic

nature of the novel inevitably subverts the ideological/

rhetorical drive of frontier literature to establish a

monologic American ideal.

THE SOCIAL VALUE OF FRONTIER LITERATURE

When Chingachgook questions Natty on the accuracy of
white accounts of border conflicts, Natty obliquely
acknowledges the monologic drive of white history books:
"My people have many ways, of which, as an honest man, I
can't approve. It is one of their customs to write in books
what they have done and seen, instead of telling them in
their villages where the lie can be given to the face of a
cowardly boaster and the brave soldier can call on his

comrades to witness for the truth of his words." (23).

146
Natty's concern with white bookishness is not so much that
the truth-value of the book will diminish, but that the
reader will be withdrawn from social action in his scholarly
pursuits: "In consequence of this bad fashion, a man who is
too conscientious to misspend his days among the women, in
learning the names of black marks, may never hear of the
deeds of his father, nor feel a pride in striving to outdo
them (emphasis mine, 23). That Natty speaks precisely from
the medium of the novel he excoriates allows Cooper a
double-voiced message purposefully turned to the motives of
frontier fiction. Cooper presents Natty as a figurative
frontier father--a pathfinder who paves the way for
America's civilized progeny. At the same time, Natty's
voice reminds Cooper's reader that the job is not done, that
sons of the frontier should not merely read of border
exploits, but should "strivtel ... to outdo them."

Without denying the contributions of earlier criticism
on the frontier novel, it seems important also to recognize
the ways in which these novels presented a history that
would shape contemporary white values, policy and action
while disguising the very basis for the same. Although the
novel's characteristic multi-voicedness may have subverted
the possibility for frontier literature to achieve a true
single-voiced tradition, that monologized vision of white
Americans versus Indian savages (however compromised) became

relevant to contemporary readers paradoxically through the

147

novelistic medium. That is to say, the novel at once
prevented a monolithic tradition from being fully realized
while it facilitated the impact of that fictionalized
tradition by providing a "zone of maximal contact with the
present" for the reader. And one reader, at least, was able
to find a real (and transatlantic) social application in
these fictive works. The British colonist and writer W.
Winslow Reade provided this assessment of Africa in his
travel account, Savage Africa (1864; quoted in Hammond and
Jablow, 73):

This vast continent will finally be divided almost

equally between France and England ... Africa shall

be redeemed ... in this amiable task they [i.e. the

Africans] may possibly become exterminated. We

must learn to look upon this result with composure.

It illustrates the beneficent law of Nature, that

the weak must be devoured by the strong ... When

the cockneys of Timbuctoo have their tea-gardens on

the Cases of the Sahara; when the hotels and guide

books are established at the Sources of the Nile;

when it becomes fashionable to go yachting on the

lakes of the great Plateau; when noblemen building

seats in Central Africa, will have their elephant

parks and their hippopotami waters, young ladies on

camp—stools, under palm trees will read with tears,

mmrarmmm.

148

NOTES

1. Jane Tompkins' work on Cooper represents an
important break from earlier critics who focus on the
archetypal or psychological experience of the individual on
the frontier. She argues, in her essay "No Apologies for
the Iroquois," that Cooper is a "profound thinker, one who
was obsessively preoccupied not with the subtle workings of
individual consciousness, but with the way the social world
is organized," and also with exploring the dangers of
sameness and difference within a given social order (99;
118). Tompkins urges us to see In; Lg§§,g§ L g Monig§n§_and
works like it as "agents of social formation" (119).

Richard Slotkin's second major work, Ihg,£g§gl
Engirgnmgnt is also an important contribution to socio-
political studies of frontier novels.

2. R. W. B. Lewis has said that Cooper's contribution
to American literature was to bring the hero to life by
taking him out of society ("the cities and cellars"),
instead "putting him where he belonged--in space" (98).

This comment applies more accurately to the legacy of Cooper
criticism (and frontier romance criticism in general).
Beginning with D. H. Lawrence, who, with a psychoanalytic
approach, discussed the "dream world" and "wish fulfillment"
dynamic of Cooper and his novels, criticism has tended to
focus on the abstract, or interior psychological values of
frontier romance that transcend immediate social concerns.
Most often, the action of the novel is considered a dramatic
tableaux against which the individual plays out eternal
conflicts and discovers absolute moral qualities. Lewis,
for instance, discusses Cooper:

The drama Cooper constructed for [his] actors on

the spatial scene resulted from his trick of

poising that scene upon the very brink of time. In

the characteristic adventure of a Cooper novel ...

the personality of the Adamic hero is made to

impinge upon the products of time: the villages

lying a little inland ... social institutions with

their precedents and established practices;

relationships inherited through the years (99).
Society, however, is just what the heroic individual avoids,
according to Lewis: "These are things the hero has to cope
with in the course of his dramatic life, but which he must
eventually stay clear of, if he is to remain faithful to the
spatial vision" (100). In the "space" of the frontier, the
Adamic hero must play out mythic conflicts, for instance, in

149

High, where the Adamic, "innocent man of love" meets, and is
transformed by a "collision with evil," becoming "the
outraged Adam" (107-109).

All three novels fall under the rubric of Richard
Chase's definitions of "romance," either the historical
romance which follows the lead of the British Scott, or the
darker, psychological strain of the genre which produced
such an influence on Melville and Hawthorne (20). For
Chase, romance as a genre under either definition is
ultimately anti-cultural. Instead, it defers to larger
truths: "the very abstractness and profundity of romance
allow it to formulate moral truths of universal validity"
(xi). Further, its characters "will not be complexly
related to each other or to society or to the past. Human
beings will on the whole be shown in ideal relation--that
is, they will share emotions only after these have become
abstract or symbolic" (13).

Leslie Fiedler rejects Chase's arguments in Love and_
Qgggn,inptng|5mgglgan ugvgl. "To speak of a counter-
tradition to the novel, of the tradition of ‘the romance' as
a force in our literature, is merely to repeat the
rationalizations of our writers themselves; it is certainly
to fail to be specific enough for real understanding” (29).
Fiedler's view is more monolithic, but if his arguments
differ from Chase's, the implications are much the same.
American literature does not have counter strains, but is
itself counter to the American social reality:

Our fiction is not merely a flight from the

physical data of the actual world, in search of a

(sexless and dim) Ideal; from Charles Brockden

Brown to William Faulkner or Eudora Welty ... it

is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic

fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and

melodramatic--a literature of darkness and

grotesque in a land of light and affirmation (29).
Fiedler, in his analysis of the bourgeois genre of the
novel, discovers a "turning ... from mythology to
psychology, from a body of communal story to the mind of the
individual" (40).

Fiedler acknowledges a concrete social reference for
Chingachgook, as the embodiment of communal (white) guilt
for the violence against Indians. The task of the
Leatherstocking Tales, he argues, is precisely to exorcise
that guilt (195). The contemporary value of that process is
abstracted into the mythic: "The primitive, good or evil,
Cooper never lets us forget is past history and a present
dream" (199). In the end, and despite a nodding
acknowledgement to the notion that Cooper might somehow have
addressed a social conflict between two cultures, Fiedler
discusses Cooper's Indians as interactants of a white
psyche.

Influential critics like Lawrence, Lewis, Chase and

150

Fiedler have established what A. N. Nikolyukin calls a
"subjective-idealistic conception of literary development--
Freudian, mythic, existential, and so forth" (575), which
persistently deflects attention from literature's
social/material inception. Even when a critic begins with
some attempt to foreground real social concerns, the
pressure to abstract the discussion seems irresistible.
Joel Porte, who pinpoints Cooper's racial consciousness as
centrally "American," notes that "Cooper commenced his
writing career at a point when the notion of race began to
have special interest for an American writer" (8), during
the Jacksonian era that saw Indian resettlement become
national policy and pastime. Yet Porte shortly makes an
astounding leap gut,of social reference when he argues that
"the notion of race ultimately became for Cooper ... a way
of meditating on good and evil" (9). Ultimately, according
to Porte, the issue of race for Cooper does not mediate an
actual social reality, but provides the artist with a means
to contemplate the Nature of Experience: "The American hero
is simply facing his own duplex nature--the light and
darkness within himself-~and the duplex nature of experience
generally" (10).

3. For example, Duncan Heyward in Mohicans, and Mr.
Matthews in nggfisgg,(who, although is currently living in
the country, is clearly inexperienced and ignorant of its
dangers, particularly the "habits" of its native
inhabitants). Interestingly, the motif of the ignorant
city‘dweller in frontier literature, especially in Mohicans
and High, reverses the "country-bumpkin" theme, producing a
type of "city witling."

4.Bird ambiguously claims remembrance of an actual
story that corresponds to Nathan's: "The author remembers,
in the published journal of an old traveller-—an Englishman,
and, as he thinks, a Friend; but he cannot be certain of
this fact, the name having escaped him and the loose
memorandum he made at the time having been mislaid—-who
visited the region of the upper Ohio towards the close of
the last century, an observation on this subject, which made
too deep an impression easily to be forgotten" (34).
Whether or not Bird fictionalized the event, his placement
of the Slaughter family in the northern region of the
Susquehanna valley does not seem to me fortuitous.

5.Simms makes a similar comment, with a double
emphasis. See pages 63 and 244.

CHAPTER FOUR
W/RIGHTING HISTORY:
SUBVERSIVE SYMPATHY IN SEDGWICK AND CHILD

THE POLITICS OF SENTIMENT

In her 1860 article, "How Women Should Write?" Mary
Bryan traces women's growing involvement in literary fields.
It is in response to men's demand "for intellectual food
through the length and breadth of the land ... they want
books for every year, for every month--mirrors to ‘catch the
manners living as they rise,’ lenses to concentrate the rays
of the new stars that dawn upon them" (quoted in Friebert
and White, 369). Woman, responding as always to man's call,
"steps forward to take her part in the intellectual labor,"
but then is strangely hindered by the qualms of the male
establishment. Bryan here incisively chronicles the course
of women writers in patriarchal society:

Thus is apparent what has gradually been admitted,

that it is woman's duty to write--but how and what?

This is yet a mooted question. Men, after much

demur and hesitation, have given women liberty to

write; but they cannot yet consent to allow them

full freedom ... With metaphysics [women] have

nothing to do; it is too deep a sea for their lead

to sound; nor must they grapple with those great

151

152

social and moral problems with which every strong

soul is now wrestling ... Having prescribed these

bounds to the female pen, men are the first to

condemn her efforts as tame and commonplace,

because they lack earnestness and strength (370).

Bryan herein argues forcefully in behalf of women writers
who have begun to confront the "earnest age we live in."
These women recognize that "there are active influences at
work, all tending to one grand object--moral, social and
physical advancement." These are women, Bryan asserts, who
have come to understand that "the pen is the compass-needle
that points to this pole" of social change (371).

Bryan presents an admittedly utopian hope that women
writers will become "God's chosen instrument in this work of
gradual reformation, this reconciling of the harsh contrasts
in society that jar so upon our sense of harmony, this
righting of the grievous wrongs and evils over which we weep
and pray, this final uniting of men into one common
brotherhood by the bonds of sympathy and affection" (373).
She perceives literature as a powerful agent of "gradual
reform" that might resolve the awful contradictions of
antebellum America. Her essay at once acknowledges and
projects the social mission of nineteenth-century women's
fiction.

Before we can analyze nineteenth-century women's novels

for the implications of reformist tendencies in their

153

construction of the Racial Other, we have to be able;ugyi
those novels as Bryan did, setting aside the implications of
the typically demeaning label "sentimental." The tradition
of nineteenth-century women's fiction that Bryan so
passionately argued for has only recently received any
serious attention. By and large, it has been scanted and
ignored by twentieth-century critics who have subsumed
nearly all of nineteenth-century women's fictive efforts
under the derided categories, "sentimental" and "domestic."
Henry Nash Smith's 1974 analysis of "The Scribbling Women
and the Cosmic Success Story," sums up nearly a century of
the generalized disdain which had characterized discussions
of nineteenth-century women's writing. Following the lead
of earlier critics who, like Alexander Cowie, find "domestic
fiction" to be generally "trite" and predictable, Smith
somewhat sweepingly concludes that "the best-selling novels
of the 1850's ... express an ethos of conformity. They
emphasize unquestioning submission to authority, whether of
God or an earthly father figure or society in general ... it
brings the realm of the ideal under the same system of law
and of implied covenants that prevails in society" (51).

Based as they are on just four relatively unanalyzed
passages from two novels (Susan Warner's Wide, Wide WQLL1
and Maria Cummin's Tng,L§mnlign;g;), Smith's generalizations
are of limited value. As recent scholars of "sentimental

fiction" have documented, there is a great variety among the

154
women writers of the nineteenth-century that refuses
generalizations.‘ In her Sensatiggal Designs (1985), Jane
Tompkins suggests that the problem of evaluation lies not in
the novels, but in the critical apparatus brought to them.
She argues that the criteria of aesthetics against which
these novels have been judged is not a permanent value but
is in itself political and changing. Further, she shows the
popular power of the novels labeled sentimental or domestic
lies precisely in their political dimension. Contemporary
literary values serve to aestheticize and dehistoricize the
political dimension of literature: "In modernist thinking,
literature is, by definition, a form of discourse that has
no designs on the world. It does not attempt to change
things, but merely to represent them, and it does so in a
specifically literary language whose claim to value lies in
its uniqueness" (125). Such theories, as Russell J. Reising
points out in his 1986 study of American literary criticism,
are finally unable to account in any way for a large portion
of American literature that declares for itself a social,
moral or religious agenda (cf. p. 13-48).

Any full reading of these works, Tompkins proposes,
must be placed in an insistently historicized context if we
are to "understand what gave these novels traction in their
original setting" (xv). In so doing, we must take seriously
their social agenda, to read them as "agents of cultural

formation rather than as objects of interpretation and

155
appraisal" (xvii). This establishes a different set of
literary standards by which to evaluate these works:

When one sets aside modernist demands-~for

psychological complexity, moral ambiguity,

epistemological sophistication, stylistic density,
formal economy--and attends to the way a text

offers a blueprint for survival under a specific

set of political, economic, social, or religious

conditions, an entirely new story begins to unfold,

and one's sense of the exigencies of narrative

alters accordingly (xviii).

Tompkins' approach allows us to reevaluate nineteenth
century women's writings seriously and more positively. Her
sociological mode of criticism, as she herself suggests, is
pertinent to a more general evaluation literature and
criticism. Sociological inquiry affords us a better
understanding of how a text functioned in its own historical
context, and enables us to question the particular (and
political) ends of our contemporary readings of a given
text.

Many women writers of the nineteenth century addressed
themselves clearly to perceived social ills, despite the
limitations that Mary Bryan observes were imposed on them.2
They in fact used the "sentimental novel" as a "political
enterprise, halfway between sermon and social theory, that

both codifies and attempts to mold the values of its time"

156
(Tompkins, 126). During a century of Indian removal, war
and massacre, and the equally insistent and perhaps more
immediate issue of slavery, women writers of the north,
south, east and west examined the problematics of racial
relations, many with intent to reform. Indeed, the far-and-
away best-seller of the century, Harriet Beecher Stowe's
gnele,gem;e,geeln (1852) was a powerfully conceived
"sentimental" redaction of the most explosive issue of the
decade. It would certainly seem plausible to argue (as
Tompkins does) that Americans of the nineteenth century
demanded social mediation (if not always reformative) from
their fiction, testified to by the predominance, and
popularity, of frontier romance, slave narratives, anti-
slavery and plantation novels.

Two works in particular, Catherine Maria Sedgwick's
B22§.L§§llg (1827), and Lydia Maria Child's A_Bemenee,e§ Lne
geeeelle (1867), take an historical look at racial prejudice
in order to mediate white society's racist and patriarchal
relations. Both works have been classed as women's, or
domestic fiction, in that they feature women protagonists,
and emphasize family and community relationships rather than
action/adventure. Both undertake an often unnoticed but
radical restructuring of historical and racial
understanding, making explicit the political drives behind
historical representation. Both novels mediate racial

barriers by presenting cross-racial friendships between

157
women: in gene Lee11e_between Hope and Magawisca; in~A
Remenee efi Que EQRRQLLQ between a network of black, mulatto,
octoroon and white women. Both novels argue forcefully, if
quite differently, for restructuring of racial understanding
by suggesting the fictionality of "race" and positing
cultural difference and arbitrary power motives as the real
focus for understanding.

Accepting H.993. £211.13. and 32mm fl Lbs. W on
their own terms, however, does not mean acquiescing
uncritically to their construction of the Racial Other. On
the contrary, I will argue in this chapter that the vision
of racial equality offered by these writers has its own
conceptual and political limitations. Specifically, in each
we see the effects of what Tzvetan Todorov calls the
"prejudice of equality." In his 1982 IRS Conquest e;
Amegiee, Tzvetan Todorov examines the narratorial and
material processes of "understanding" the racial Other.a He
suggests that unless "grasping is accompanied by a full
acknowledgement of the other as subject, it risks being used
for purposes of exploitation, of ‘taking'; knowledge will be
subordinate to power" (132). Versions of the Other as equal
can subtly participate in this exploitation, sometimes even
more thoroughly than those which posit the Other as unequal:
"If it is incontestable that the prejudice of superiority is
an obstacle in the road to knowledge, we must admit that the

prejudice of equality is a still greater one, for it

158
consists in identifying the Other purely and simply with
one's own ‘ego-ideal,'" and thus negates the Other's right
to difference. This "second great figure of alterity,"
while "incontestably more attractive," mistakes in negating
difference in order to establish equality. Such a
formulation, argues Todorov, is "even less valid" than
depictions that would at least grant the racial Other a
significant difference from the white Subject, even though
that difference would place the Other on an inferior
conceptual plane (167).4 Accordingly, the second focus of
the discussion will be to question the dynamics of the

racial equality articulated in each work.

FLOWERS WILD AND CULTIVATED

Catherine Maria Sedgwick's third novel, flgee,Leelie,
Q1, Kill! lime; Ln,§he_fleeeegheee§§e was published in two
volumes in 1827. The novel was probably written, as Sister
Mary Michael Welsh speculates, in response to a Neggn
Amegleen,flexle1 essay on her second novel, Beggeee, which,
while commending Sedgwick's effort, calls for an American
literary endeavor that would utilize American historical
materials (Walsh, 25; NAB; 245). In figge_LeelLe, Sedgwick
turns to America's Puritan legacy, not "to illustrate
history" but rather the "character of the times." Both
history and character are compelling subjects for Sedgwick,

and she hopes to inspire a similar enthusiasm in her

159
readers: "the writer would be fully gratified if, by this
work, any of our young countrymen should be stimulated to
investigate the early history of their native land" (6).

The plot, set roughly during the mid-sixteen hundreds,
turns, as Mary Kelley notes, on two themes: Pequot
dispossession and subjugation, and a "romance among the
Puritans" (Xxi). Hope Leslie and her sister Faith are
orphaned in England and sent to America to be adopted by
Puritan emigrant William Fletcher. The action is formed
largely around the friendships formed among Hope, the Pequot
servant/slave Magawisca, and William's son Everell.

As Welsh and Mary Kelley document, the work was well
received, and was compared favorably to Cooper's Lee; Qi.§h2
Mehleene. Sedgwick was herself somewhat abashed by the
overwhelmingly favorable reviews published in women's
magazines and in the H2:Lh.A£l§fl£i§.B§Yl§wo She was not
disconcerted, however, at the controversy which arose over
her depiction of Indians, the defense for which she had
already prepared in her original Preface:

In our histories, it was perhaps natural that [the

Indians] should be represented as "surly dogs," who

preferred to die rather than live, from no other

motive than a stupid or malignant obstinacy. Their
own historians or poets, if they had such, would as
naturally, and with more justice, have extolled

their high-souled courage and patriotism. The

160

writer is aware that it may be though that the

character of Magawisca has no prototype ... it may

be sufficient to remark, that ... we are confined

not to the actual, but to the possible (6).

Nor was she surprised by criticism of her less than
hagiographic view of the Puritans, which she carefully
qualified but refused to back down from in a private letter.
In the letter, Sedgwick insists that she bore only "filial
reverence" to the Puritans. However, "their bigotry, their
superstition, and above all their intolerance, were too
apparent on the pages of history to be forgotten" (quoted in
Walsh, 67).

Clearly, and despite the numerous textual apologies
regarding her humble inadequacies as historian and author,
Sedgwick had set out to redefine received opinion about both
sides of the racial border. Sedgwick's refusal to accord
Puritan historians de facto authority over her subject is
basic to her fictional design. Her critique of Puritan
racism is inextricable from her insistent attention to the
debilitating effects of patriarchy. As numerous critics
such as Lillian Schlissel, Susan Armitage, Glenda Riley,
Annette Kolodny and Leland Persons have now documented at
length, the frontier vision of Sedgwick and other frontier
novelists and diarists specifically counters the "Adamic
myth" and its valorization of white male conquest--conquest

over non-white males and women of any color.”

161

Indeed, the enterprise of racial re-visioning is
inseparable from a confrontation of patriarchal authority in
fleee Lfiilliv as the narrator's asides attest. For instance,
as she offers her readers a "formal introduction to the
government-mansion" (143), the narrator pauses to clarify
her unpretentious, lackey-like relation to the "mighty
master of fiction." Rather than attempting to "imitate the
miracles wrought by the rod of the prophet," the narrator
promises to rely for her description on quotations from "an
authentic record of the times" (143). Here, as in her
Preface, Sedgwick assures male authorities (and those who
are invested in upholding them) that she does not presume
upon their rank. In her Preface she avers in the first and
closing sentences: "The following volumes are not offered
to the public as being in any degree an historical
narrative, or a relation of real events ... These volumes
are ... far from being intended as a substitute for genuine
history" (5-6). Her repeated insistence, however, combined
with the content of comments sandwiched between these
apologies, might suggest that the apologies themselves are
less sincere than calculatingly rhetorical, designed to
assuage those who, as Mary Bryan insists, refuse to grant
women writers any "metaphysical" or political authority.

A closer examination of Sedgwick's strategy illuminates
her subversive political commentary on the patriarchal

assumptions of the Puritans end,her contemporary male

162
audience. Sedgwick promises the same kind of deference and
submission to male authority that she models in her novel
through Mrs. Fletcher, Esther Downing, and Mrs. Winthrop.
But fleee Leelie cagily qualifies the value of their meek
subservience, suggesting that such behavior breeds an
unthinking temper and frank servility. The novel presents
a paragon of Puritan girlhood in Esther Downing, who, the
narrator at one point reflects, "could not have disputed the
nice points of faith, sanctification and justification, with
certain celebrated contemporary female theologians" (135).
And sandwiched within her honorific depiction of Mrs.
Winthrop is a comparison of the Puritan first lady to a
horse on a bit, "guided by the slightest intimation from him
who held the rein; indeed ... it sometimes appeared as if
the reins were dropped, and the inferior animal were left to
the guidance of her own sagacity" (145).

As these narratorial evaluations suggest, the more
admirable course is the more independent. What Sedgwick
actually deee as the author of fieee,Le§lie is more akin to
the actions of the title character. Hope, following the
guide of her own heart and genius, often defies patriarchal
authority, secretly moving to assert a humane justice toward
people whom the Puritans would trample, like the unfairly
harassed Nelema. "It may be seen that Hope Leslie," the
author notes, "was superior to some of the prejudices of the

age" (123). While Sedgwick protests her reverent distance

163
from any actually historical enterprise, she in fact broadly
tackles it,.beginning in her prefatorial comments on the
"Indians of North America," and the (ad)vantage of
historical perspective (quoted above).

From the beginning of chapter four-~a central one to
this analysis--Sedgwick indicates her willingness to
confront authorized history. She takes as her epigraph a
modified version of one of the most censorial comments of
early Anglo-American historical legacy: "It would have been
happy if they had converted some before they had killed
any."‘ In the chapter that follows, Sedgwick delivers two
versions of the Pequot war, one based on actual Puritan
accounts, and the other fictionalized from a sympathetic
stance and wary re-reading of the same Puritan accounts.
While Natty Bumppo can acknowledge that "every story has its

two sides" (Cooper, 23), The Last 9; the Mohicane refuses

 

this opportunity to subvert authority. Instead, the Indian
Chingachgook tells only of the good days before white
contact, and how his tribe is coming to an elegiac end,
carefully avoiding placing direct blame for this on the
European invaders. fleee,LeelLe's two-sided history is
decidedly more confrontative.

One of the methods Sedgwick uses to explore racial
configurations is to stage debates between various
characters on precisely this subject. For example, Digby, a

veteran of the Pequot "war," is thoroughly suspicious of any

164
Indian: "They are a treacherous race ... a kind of beast we
don't comprehend" (41-42). He maintains a staunch party
line modelled on the historical accounts of the Pequot
massacre by Hubbard, Trumbull and Winthrop. In contrast,
Everell, who is decidedly attracted to Magawisca, holds a
more skeptical attitude and doggedly questions Digby's
defensive assertions. When Digby insists that "we know
these Pequods were famed above all the Indian tribes for
their cunning," Everell counters: "And what is superior
cunning among savages but superior sense?" (43). Their
dialogue reveals the power of representation, the way the
same incident can be interpreted differently depending on
the prejudices the interpreter brings to it. This point is
underscored by the narrator's comment on the authority of
the combined accounts: When Everell bests Digby, narrator
observes that Digby felt "the impatience that a man feels
when he is sure he is right, without being able to make it
appear" (43).

By a similar process of narratorial intervention,
Magawisca's account of the Pequot "war" is lent important
authority. Her "side" of the story focuses on the cruelty
of the Puritan's planned attack on sleeping women, old
people and children, by sneaking up and setting fire to the
village--fire "taken from our hearth—stone, where the
English had been so often warmed and cherished" (49).

Magawisca's story, supported by the narrator's consequent

165
expansion, thoroughly subverts the command of the male
Puritans' version. First, it insistently historicizes the
situation, emphasizing the causal, reactive quality of
"Pequod treachery" and subtly revealing EDIE: treachery.
Further, it recognizes the Indian foe as human, not
"beasts," emphasizing familial relations throughout.
Magawisca's account challenges the unexamined politics of
historical representation, focusing particularly upon the
persuasive power of narrative and narrator.

Magawisca prefaces her story with a warning for
Everell, which doubles as a meta-historical commentary for
the reader: "Then listen to me: and when the hour of
vengeance comes, if it should come, remember it was
provoked" (47). Like Fredric Jameson's caveat, "always
historicize," Magawisca's words comment on Digby's
dehistoricized observations on Indian "nature." The Indians
are not by "nature" vengeful, but are so in this situation
because of the wrongs they received at the hands of the
Puritans.

Magawisca and the narrator combine forces to
contextualize the conflict and to undermine Puritan
righteousness. Magawisca recounts the burning of Mystic and
the ensuing massacre of surviving women and children: "All
about sat women and children in family clusters, awaiting
unmoved their fate. The English had penetrated ... Death

was dealt freely. None resisted" (53). Everell is so moved

166

by this account that he weeps. When Magawisca finishes, the
narrator smoothly picks up the threads of the story to fill
in the "factual" and most gruesome background from Puritan
accounts, quoting Winthrop and Hubbard. While Sedgwick has
before protested that she merely follows the accounts of the
Puritan fathers, the narrator does not here hesitate to
direct their intentions to a different purpose. Of these
accounts, the narrator comments:

In the relations of their enemies, the courage of

the Pequods was distorted into ferocity, and their

fortitude, in their last extremity, thus set forth:

"many were killed in the swamp, like sullen dogs,

that would rather in their self-willed madness, sit

still to be shot or cut in pieces than receive

their lives for asking, at the hands of those into

whose power they had now fallen" (54).
The narrator highlights the unfeelingly prejudiced nature of
the histories available, and the apparent contradictions
between the Puritan mission and Christian humaneness. The
narrator implies that once conscious of the political aspect
of historical representation, quite different versions can
be constructed-~versions both more balanced and accurate.

The scene between Magawisca and Everell also reveals
the power accrued simply by being able to gel; the story.
Magawisca's alternative version of the Pequot war is

persuasive enough to transform Everell, whose imagination,

167

tmmmed by the wand of feeling, presented a very

different picture of those defenseless families of

savages, pent in the recesses of their native

finests, and there exterminated, not by superior

nahual force, but by the adventitious

cfircumstances of arms, skill and knowledge; from

that offered by those who "then living and worthy

ofcxedit did affirm, than in the morning entering

into the swamp, they saw several heaps of them [the

Pequods (CMS)] sitting close together, upon whom

they discharged their pieces, laden with ten or

twelve pistol bullets at a time, putting the

muzzles of their pieces under the boughs, within a

few yards of them" (54).

The narrator acutely perceives the dominative structure of

not only affirming the possibility of

representation,
but insisting on the inherent neeeeeiey

alternative history,

<1f it: "Here it was not merely changing sculptors to give

the advantage to one or the other of the artist's subjects;

but it was putting the chisel into the hands of truth, and

giving it to whom it belonged" (53). The patriarchal Author

of Puritan history, who in his story represents his own

political ends and thereby dominates the Pequods not once

in reality) but twice (textually), is not possessed of the

the narrator asserts, it is the

hands of truth." Rather,

 

 

168
silenced subject-~the Indian and the white woman--who are
possessed of the real right to truth.

Having issued a challenge to the authorized white
versions of the Pequot war, the narrator craftily moves,
full of authority, into an acute analysis of the Pequod
dilemma. Strikingly, the focus is here on the more
dangerous and less pitiable Pequot chief, Monotto.
Magawisca, narratively and sympathetically, has paved the
way for the narrator's commentary on the dispute between
Monotto and Sassacus. As Magawisca relates, she, her mother
and three younger siblings had all survived the village
burning in the shelter of a little cellar covered by a rock.
Later, they ventured out just in time to meet her father,
Monotto, the other sachem, Sassacus, and the village elders
returning from a "friendly council." When the men realized
what had happened, they all "turned with suspicion and
hatred on my father. He had been the friend of the English;
he had counselled peace and alliance with them; he had
protected their traders, delivered the captives taken from
them, and restored them to his people; now his wife and
children alone were living, and they called him traitor"
(50). Monotto is defended by the antagonistic Sassacus, the
sachem who had sworn enmity against the English and
counselled war long ago.

The narrator then relates that "Magawisca had said

truly to Everell, that her father's nature had been changed

 

 

169

by the wrongs he had received" (56), hereby historicizing

Mbnoto's behavior and refuting the received Puritan version

of Indians as "naturally" savage. While Sassacus manifested

"a jealousy of [the English] encroachments" and "employed

all his art and influence and authority, to unite the tribes

for the extirpation of the dangerous invaders," Monotto,

"forseeing no danger from them, was the advocate of a

hospitable reception, and pacific conduct" (50). It was

ironically Sassacus, as the narrator is at pains to

indicate, who was right about the "dangerous invaders" (and

"invaders" is doubly emphasized when repeated as the last

word of the chapter). Monotto is betrayed by his own

generous impulses: "He had seen his people slaughtered, or

driven from their homes and hunting—grounds, into shameful

exile; his wife had died in captivity, and his children

lived in servile dependency in the house of his enemies"
(51). Only "in this extremity," and not at all unreasonably
the narrator implies, is Monotto driven to revenge. Apart

from establishing sympathy for Monotto at a personal level,
the narrator also uses his story as a trenchant comment on
the broader predicament of the various Indian nations which,
(divided between those who counseled war and those who

advocated hospitality, were finally unable to forestall

English treachery. Sedgwick thus establishes an historical

<iLalogue that had been suppressed from the Puritan accounts.

Sedgwdck's construction of the other has important

 

 

 

170
implications at semiotic level as well. In his study of the
Spanish conquest of America, Todorov argues for a semiotic
analysis of colonial relations. Examining the underlying
characteristics of colonial discourse, he differentiates
between two "touchstones of alterity," one which is
structured around "a present and immediate second person"
(i.e., me vs. you), and one which revolves on "the absent or
distant third person" (i.e., me [us] vs. them). He argues
that it is at this point (where the Other is designated as
either present or absent) "that we can see how the theme of
perception of the other and that of symbolic (or semiotic)
behavior intersect" (157). Whether one regards the racial
Other as a second person, immediate preSence, or an third
person absence can profoundly affect the possible actions
conceptually available toward that Other.

This frame is most useful for an analysis of Sedgwick's
radically conceived fourth chapter, which by enacting
dialogue between English and Pequot characters, places the
relationship in a "me/you" semiotic frame. Within this
second-person symbolic relation, the narrator reveals the
cruelty of Puritan policy toward the Pequots, acted out in
the semiotic perspective of a third-person frame. From the
"us/them" vantage, the Puritans can act viciously and record
with no sense of irony the very passage the narrator quotes
from Winthrop: "It was a fearful sight to see them thus

frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the

 

 

171
same, and the horrible scent thereof; but the victory seemed
a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God"
(54). Such a perspective is impossible when one recognizes
the Other as an immediate presence, indeed, talks and
listens to the Other as Everell does.

Todorov's frame is also essential to explain a curious
passage that follows only two chapters later. After the
scene in which the Fletcher family is ruthlessly slaughtered
by Monotto and his accomplices, the narrator pauses to
address the reader directly. "We hope our readers will not
think we have wantonly sported with their feelings." The
narrator continues to explain that such events, "feebly
related," were common in early Puritan life. "Not only
families," the narrator elaborates, "but villages, were cut
off by the most dreaded of all foes--the ruthless, vengeful
savage" (72). The semiotic structure here-~the "touchstone
of alterity"--is suddenly not second, but third person. In
the passage that ensues, we witness the representational
implications of this switch, the violence now permitted,
easily effaced and rationalized.

"In the quiet possession of blessings transmitted," the
narrator elaborates, "we are, perhaps, in danger of
forgetting, or undervaluing the sufferings by which they
were obtained. We forget that the noble pilgrims lived and
endured for us" (72). Chronicling the sacrifices made, the

narrator then outlines their mission: "to open the forests

172

to the sun-beam and to the light of the Sun of
Righteousness." In reward, the Puritans "saw, with sublime
joy, a multitude of people where the solitary savage roamed
the forest--the forest vanished, and the pleasant villages
and busy cities appeared--the tangled foot-path expanded to
the thronged high-way--the consecrated church planted on the
rock of heathen sacrifice" (73). The implications of this
passage's semiotic structure are a stunning contrast to
those of chapter four. Here, the women, children, gemlllee
of Indians are transmuted (via the third-person frame of
reference) to a "single, solitary savage." The historical
context of the colonial conquest is effaced--the Puritans
are "rewarded" for sacrificing "the land of their birth
their homes ...all delights of the sense" (72). And the
historical struggle, textually elided, is sanctioned by the
merit of the Puritan's religion, their "enlightening"
influence on the land itself. The narrator continues to
make an oblique reference to the colonists' actions against
America's original population:

And that we might realize this vision-~enter into

this promised land of faith--they endured hardship,

and braved death--deeming, as said one of their

company, that "he is not worthy to live at all,

who, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his

country's service, or his own honour--since death

is inevitable and the fame of virtue is immortal."

173
If these were the fervors of enthusiasm, it

was an enthusiasm kindled and fed by the holy flame

that glows on the alter of God (73).
Here, we have a holy mission, not white treachery. We see
the traces of deleted historical content when we begin to
ask questions about this passage. What magnitude of service
could "the country" require against that "single, solitary
savage"? How much work can it be to build a church on a
rock--unless the expression is a metaphor that represses a
less pleasant meaning? Rather, this passage uncritically
highlights how the representatives of that "consecrated
church" built on the "rock of sacrifice" also have the power
to choose the terms by which their history will be written.
As Todorov ironically observes, "societies that employ
writing are more advanced than societies without writing;
but we may hesitate to choose between sacrifice societies
and massacre societies" (252).

It is, perhaps, impossible to explain the juxtaposition
of these two exceedingly divergent passages. Which one did
Sedgwick intend? Maybe both. Cultural hegemony is
pervasive, and enlightenment not always foolproof. Albert
Memmi emphasizes the imaginative difficulties of "the
colonizer who refuses": "It is not easy to escape mentally
from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while
continuing to live with its actual relationships" (20).

Certainly Sedgwick does not abandon her attempt to deal

174
fairly with her Indian characters at this point. As will be
discussed briefly below, Sedgwick establishes a modicum of
cross—racial understanding, indicating that the most serious
racial difficulties arose at the hands of the whites.
Further, she offers an alternative behavior model to the
received frontier wisdom of her day. But, finally, she does
not see clearly to a resolution of racial misunderstanding,
and instead establishes a metaphor which allows her to
peacefully--even beautifully--allow the Indian to fade into
the distance.

Tension and ambivalence mark the remainder of gene
Liilli- Sedgwick is at many points more successful than
Child will be in establishing cultural relativity between
whites and Indians. That is, Sedgwick allows her Indians
dignity in their difference. She reveals the Indians to be
governed by religious and moral principles, even though
different from the Puritans'. Magawisca, defending her
brother against Hope's outburst, responds, "Yes, an Indian,
in whose veins runs the blood of the strongest ... who never
turned their backs on friends or enemies, and whose souls
have returned to the Great Spirit, stainless as they came
from him" (188). Magawisca at one point clearly defends the
legitimacy of the Indian life-style. When Hope pleads with
her to stay in Boston, insisting that her "noble mind must
not be wasted in those hideous solitudes," Magawisca makes

it completely clear that such a life--though different from

175
Hope's--is equally valuable to her. Notably, Hope accepts
Magawisca's answer.

As Mary Kelley discusses in her valuable Introduction
to the Rutgers edition of fleee,;ee11e, Sedgwick goes a long
way toward suggesting cross-racial equality through her
"parallel" portrayals of Hope and Magawisca. Magawisca is,
Kelley notes, "the only Indian woman in early American
fiction invested with substance and strength" (xxvi). Her
character in many ways corresponds to Hope's, and in some
ways exceeds it. The respect her character accrues during
the narrative is not merely token. As Kelley observes, both
Hope and Magawisca defy their culture's patriarchal order.
Yet it is Magawisca who commits the "ultimate act of
resistance" when she prevents Everell's execution,
sacrificing her arm: "hers is the most heroic act in the
entire novel" (xxvii).

Sedgwick also demonstrates an awareness that, as
Todorov puts it, "each of us is the other's barbarian"
(190). When Magawisca initially reveals to Hope a
willingness to arrange a meeting with Hope's sister, Hope
cries that "if I could once clasp her in my arms, she should
never leave me" (188). Magawisca informs Hope of Mary's
marriage to Oneco, at which Hope shudders, exclaiming "God
forbid! ... My sister married to an Indian!" The narrator
demonstrates the relativity of the construction of barbarism

by relating how Magawisca recoiled "with a look of proud

176
contempt, that showed she reciprocated in full measure, the
scorn expressed for her race" (188). Importantly,
Magawisca's scorn is fully authorized, in light of her
version of the massacre at Mystic.

Further, Magawisca reveals that although she holds
white and Indian differences presently ineradicable, those
'differences arose historically because of white hostility.
At her trial, affirming her enmity toward white colonists,
she queries "can we grasp in friendship the hand raised to
strike us?" In this argument, the colonists' relations with
the Native Americans are again historicized. And in the
narrative's insistence on contextualizing Indian violence,
Sedgwick suggests, contrary to the cultural assumptions of
her day, an alternative to "Indian-hating." In their later
summaries of this cultural phenomenon, Robert Montgomery
Bird and James Hall would insist that white "Indian—haters"
responded "naturally" to the treachery and violence of the
Indian foes. Everell in particular, and also his father are
witness to the violent murder of the rest of their family.
Yet unlike Nathan Slaughter in N193.QI.EDQ.HQQQ§; the two
men in fleee,LeelLe,do nee swear "eternal vengeance" (cf.
Bird, 236). Instead, by relying on their religious faith,
and their sensibility, the two men continue in life without
becoming embittered toward the Indian race. Everell
applauds Hope's rescue of Nelema, and himself engineers

Magawisca's escape from Puritan punishment.

177

In the end, however, while Sedgwick goes far toward
suggesting a relative cultural standard to evaluate Native
Americans, she is not able to fully resolve the implications
of her critique for her contemporary audience. Instead, she
adopts a manichean allegory aesthetized by a garden metaphor
to dispense with the Indians at the end of her narrative.
Having earlier associated the Puritans with enlightenment
(they "open the forests to the sun-beam, and to the light of
the Sun of Righteousness,") Sedgwick has Magawisca herself
adopt those polar terms in her own defense: "Take my own
word, I am your enemy; the sun-beam and the shadow cannot
mingle" (292). Magawisca more frequently explains the
cultural incompatibility of the two peoples with a flower
metaphor. On two occasions, she elaborates, both in
relation to Mary's embrace of Indian life-ways. Mary is key
in this formulation. Through her, Magawisca is able to
emphasize that the differences are not inherent or racial,
but gnlfingel. This qualification, though revolutionary in
its own right and starkly opposed to Cooper's formulation of
white and red gifts, ultimately has nowhere constructive to
go. "The lily of Maqua's valley, will never again make the
English garden sweet" Magawisca says, preparing Hope for
their meeting (188). Pleasant though this figure may be,
Magawisca later reveals its full implications, this time as
she warns Hope of Mary's inevitable return to Oneco: "When

she flies from you, as he will, mourn not over her, Hope

178
Leslie--the wild flower would perish in your gardens--the
forest is like a native home to her~-and she will sing as
gaily again as the bird that hath found its mate" (331-332).
The Indian's destiny in Hepe,heelle is here made clear, for
the Puritan's mission, as the narrator has indicated, is to
QElLlléEE the forest. Indian destiny will for now be "lost
in the deep, voiceless obscurity of those unknown regions"
(339). The narrator here refers by "regions" to "far
western forests," but in Sedgwick's own lifetime, those
forests were being cultivated. Rather, the weight of the
metaphors relegates the Indians to a "deep, voiceless
obscurity" of (mostly unrecorded) history. The ultimate
"fate" of the Indians is never made explicit in flene,Le§llen
Rather, the text succumbs to the same processes of
historical representation that it formerly condemns in the
Puritan accounts of the Pequot massacre, in which Indian
genocide is something that happens outside the agency of

whites.

Romancing Readers

Lydia Maria Child also wrote a frontier novel, fiebgmgh,

A IQL:_QL EeLLx_I1me§, which was published in 1824, three
years before fleee Leslie. Child later read Sedgwick's

novel, and enjoyed it, as she indicates in a letter to her
close friend, Sarah Shaw, written late in her life. Her

esteem for the book itself was diminished, however, by her

179
regard for its author. The letter to Shaw was to
acknowledge the volume of Sedgwick's memoirs that Shaw had
sent. Child, while agreeing to read them promises also to
return the volume "as it is not the kind of book I care to
keep" (May 20, 1872; fig, 506). Elaborating, Child insists
that "any person who apologized for slavery must be

deficient in moral sense" and more specifically charges that

Sedgwick, while wishing "well to the negroes ... could not
bear to contend for them, or for anything else ... She was
very deficient in moral courage" (506). Sedgwick's work may

have been interesting, but apparently was of no enduring
value to Child. As she tells Shaw, she had several years
before contributed her copy of fl22:.L:§lL: to a library.

Child's charge against Sedgwick was a heartfelt one.
She herself had literally ruined her literary career to
"contend" for slaves in print—-both in scholarly treatise
and fiction. Time and again she braved public hostility and
censure to argue on behalf of emancipation and racial
tolerance- Animal in Essex. at that Class. at. Americans.
gellefi_5£gigene (1833) was a well-researched and copiously
documented study of historical and contemporary slave
institutions, including a careful analysis of African
history and slave trade's effects on that country. As she
notes, hers was the "first anti-slavery volume published in
this country" to set forth an argument for immediate

emancipation (an, 232). Her well—argued appeal for

180

emancipation and an end to anti-miscegenation laws earned
her the censure of many fellow citizens, resulting in the
Boston Athenaeum revoking her library privileges and a
costly decline in subscriptions to her ngegile Miscellegy.’
Despite the intimidation of what Caroline Karcher sums as
"social ostracism, economic boycott, and mob violence"
(1986a, 285), Child proceeded to edit the Nagiggel gee;—

Slevery Staggarg for two years (1841-43), and published

anti-slavery fiction and tracts like the ironic and incisive
mmmm,mwummm
(1860). Her least noted effort on behalf of black and white
relations came, interestingly, after the Civil War--an
intriguing novel entitled A_Rgmagge 9; fine Repuelig (1867).
A Remenee is in fact so little noted that it is
frequently altogether overlooked. Neither the Cambridge
Hengeeek,efi Amegleee Literetgre (1986) nor TQe Columbia
LIERLQLX.HLELQLX 9; egg gnlgeg_§t§te§ (1988) acknowledge the
novel in their summary of Child's work. Nina Baym, who was
responsible for the section in the Columbia.fllsterr on
nineteenth century women writers seems entirely unaware of
the book's existence. She neglects to mention it in her
study of WenenLe ELQLLen_and in her QelgmpLe filegeey essay
"The Rise of the Woman Author" states that after Hegemefi,
Child "wrote only two more novels," IQe Rebels (1825) and

agileEhee,(l836; 294). Nor does Patricia G. Holland, in her

181

essay on "Lydia Maria Child as a Professional Author" find
the book worth any mention.9

There is very little critical comment on the work.9
Alexander Cowie mentions it in his file: 9; the Ame;leen_
3912;, arguing that the book "should logically have been her
best fiction" but that, suffering in "the hampering grip of
propaganda" the novelist could not "emancipate her fictional
characters from ideological bondage" (182). In a more
extended analysis, William S. Osgood arrives at similar
conclusion. He professes to be surprised "that a woman of
Mrs. Child's intellect did not adapt her ‘novel-making' to
current literary tastes" (145). Arguing that "the material
for a realistic story was present in Child's novel," Osgood
complains that Child "chose to package it with sentiment and
suspense ... [and] preferred to embellish real life, thereby
magnifying the story out of proportion" (145). The
reviewers, as Osgood notes in conclusion, ignored the work,
and rightly so as Child neglected her opportunity, as he
asserts, to "comment frankly on the world around her," and
fails therefore to ‘discharge the universal debt ... [of]
making useful books'" (158).'° Notably, both scholars
criticize Child for egg pandering to the public taste, the
reverse of the charge levelled against sentimental or
domestic writers of the preceding decades. In actuality,
the book is much more worthwhile than its small body of
scholarly assessment would indicate. That the aemenee,was

182
relegated to oblivion by historical conditions antipathetic
to its message at severel levels (the least of which may
have been stylistic) should in no way preclude it from
serious treatment.

As Carolyn L. Karcher has convincingly established, a
publishing industry and reading public largely hostile to
abolitionist agitation put serious constraints on what women
writers could address in their writings, and accordingly
played a large part in shaping a new genre that could at
once satisfy the conservative reading public while
conveying--often through covert strategies—-abolitionist
concerns. Karcher argues that the enterprise was

fraught with contradictions: the conventions of

romance must serve to dispel the readers' romantic

illusions about slavery; a language shorn of ugly
details must convey the violence of flogging to an
audience convinced that abolitionists exaggerated

the cruelty of slavery; a code of gentility that

did not protects slave women against rape or white

women against their husbands' philandering must

govern fictional treatment of sexuality (1986a,

12).

While abolitionist tracts and slave narratives provided a
compelling and more authentic view of slavery, the public
could not be induced to buy them. Such material was

considered indecent by most, unscrupulous and dishonest by

183

many. 80, abolitionist fiction, softened and
conventionalized as it was, was the most effective
alternative to communicate to an otherwise deaf public.
Recognizing these factors should help us more clearly to
evaluate the genre's anti-conventional social mission.

Karcher argues that Child is one of the best examples
of a woman who tested the limits of this genre--often to her
own financial detriment. In a careful analysis of one of
Child's short stories, "Slavery's Pleasant Homes," Karcher
documents the radical yet careful craft of Child, manifested
nowhere better than in the passage where a quadroon slave is
flogged to death by her mistress's husband. In that
passage, Child's "feat ... is dazzling. With exquisite
rhetorical tact, she succeeds in evoking a scene whose every
element is unmentionable in polite society: a husband's
rape of his wife's foster-sister; a gentleman's sadistic
flogging of a ‘tenderly-nurtured' woman; a pregnancy
resulting from illicit sex; a miscarriage induced by
violence" ("Rape, Murder and Revenge," 18). But, as the
publishing history of "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" reveals,
Child's daring if tactful experiments were not successful.

The story was never reprinted. Later, even after the

publication of unele,IemLe thln, when she edited Harriet
Brent Jacob's Incidents. in the. Life 91 a 5.1m 9.11:1 (which

like "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" tested the limits of

propriety to reveal the atrocities of slavery) Child

184

encountered astonishing resistance from Boston booksellers
and publishers (24).11

In "Censorship American Style: The Case of Lydia Maria
Child" Karcher examines the opposition Child met with from
booksellers and publishers, and argues that while their
rejections of Child's manuscripts were often couched in
terms of "public taste" and "demand," the motives for the
dismissals were probably quite different. In a careful
analysis of sales figures and correspondence, Karcher argues
that, in fact, Child's more radical work was fairly popular
with the reading public, who frequently bought out what they
could get-~when they could get it. Rather, it was the
DQQLEQLLSLE who refused to promote the abolitionist works.
The public, Karcher suggests, may have been "more receptive
to radical views than the publishing industry" (1986a, 287).
Looking closely at this phenomenon, Karcher documents the
financial links between the publishers and booksellers, and
Southern and pro-Southern interests. Given this, she
suggests that the publishers' concerns were more for
"alienating powerful patrons rather than masses of readers,
North or South" (1986a, 296). This pressure drove Child,
who relied professionally and financially on her writing, to
modify her work to meet the covert censorship of American
presses.

Child wrote A_fiemenee_ei the Benefille six years after
helping Jacobs to publish Luelgenee. Her radical conception

185

of the role of the historian and fiction—writer as social
mediator led her to choose fiction as a vehicle more
effective than "the ablest arguments, and the most serious
exhortations" (quoted in "Rape, Murder and Revenge," 11).
The work represents her careful but continued commitment to
social reform. She returns to a more conservative but
publicly successful anti-slavery fiction subgenre--the
quadroon who falls in love with a white gentleman.
Importantly, she turns the genre carefully to her own
purposes of combatting racial prejudice and reexamining
American history in order to reconstruct post-war America.

As Child detailed in a letter to Sarah Shaw in 1865,
the end of the Civil War had not occasioned for her an end
to work on behalf of the now freed slaves. On the contrary:

I have been thankful to God for the wondrous

change; but, what with the frightful expenditure of

blood; and emancipation's being forced on us by

necessity, instead of preceding from the repentance

of the nation; and the shameful want of protection

to the freedmen since they have been emancipated;

there has been no opportunity for any out-gushing

of joy and exultation (fig, 458).
And as she later explains to Robert Purvis, who wrote
complimenting A,gemenee after its publication, "In these
days of novel-reading, I thought a Romance would take more

hold of the public mind, than the most elaborate arguments;

186
and having fought against Slavery, till the monster is
legally dead, I was desirous to do what I could to undermine
Prejudice ... I have tried to help on this good work ... and
sad as I sometimes am over the present state of affairs,
still, on the whole, I feel encouraged" (August 1868; fig,
482-83).

If publishers and public were antagonistic to
abolitionist writing before the Civil War, they gave an
equally cool reception to works that rehashed slave issues
after. Torn apart by the conflict, the nation wanted mostly
to rebuild and forget. Child's Remenee_steadfastly refused
this formulation. To rebuild without remembering was to
deny the lessons history had to offer, and to turn away the
redemptive possibilities of moral growth. Accordingly, like
fleee Leslie, e_gemenee insists on historicizing black and
white relations, looking backward in order to look forward.

The plot of A Eemeeee,focuses on two quadroons, Rosa
and Flora Royal. Raised in New Orleans by a doting but
ineffectual father, they are kept secluded and ignorant of
their slave status. When Mr. Royal suddenly dies, the girls
learn hard lessons about the slave world. The novel follows
their soon-separate paths through adulthood and final
reunion in the North just before the outbreak of the Civil
War.

The novel revolves on a double message of irony and

vision which is signaled in the title. It addresses itself

187
quite consciously to the genre of romance that Simms had
described in his 1853 Preface to Ihe,Xemeeeee, a "substitute
which the people of the present day offer for the ancient
epic," a genre that at once heightens reality (even to
extravagance) in utilizing the poetic possibilities of
America's history.

Child's title is ironic at two levels. First, while
the events of the novel do seem beyond the realm of
possibility, Child knew they were mostly grounded in actual
fact. With the exception of a subplot set in Italy, all the
other events of the novel are drawn from accounts documented
in countless newspaper reports and ads for runaways, which
Child had quoted in her tract, The,Beggiezenel,13eeleeelen.
Quadroon daughters were often unaware of their condition as
chattel until their father's death brought about their sale.
Innumerable runaway slaves were described as having "blond
hair ... blue eyes ... white complection ... Roman nose" and
were predicted to "pass themselves as whites.“2 And slaves
who ran away often met miraculously with family members in
the North. As one character comments on Flora's condition,
"I have long been aware that the most romantic stories have
grown out of the institution of slavery; but this seems
stranger than fiction ... it makes one anxious to conceal he
is an American (157).

Second, the poetic qualities that a "romance" of the

"republic" might be expected to emphasize were the most

188
embarrassing facts of the Republic's existence. Child's
epic topics are, no matter how genteelly narrated, the
scandals of slavery--lust, dishonesty, and even rape--in the
South, and weakhearted complicity to the inhumane practice
of capitalism in the North. The Republic's historical
legacy, by this account, is one of moral bankruptcy. A
gemenee 9; Lee fiepeplie,was hardly a "romance" at all.

At the same time, however, A Romegee suggests the
redemptive possibilities of this legacy. The novel ends on
a positive note, figuratively--as many of the white
characters acknowledge both sympathy and responsibility
toward the newly emancipated b1acks--and literally--as many
of the characters gather in a war's end celebration, singing
both black spirituals and patriotic tunes. The novel
reexamines the most negative facts of the Republic's
existence to show how they can be redeemed for a truly epic
future. Child thus puts "history" and "romance" to
specifically confrontative and mediative purposes in order
to provide a novel that is at once a revision of America's
history, and a re-vision of its future course.

Child provides a critique of the motives behind slavery
while she models a corrective course. She targets
patriarchal needs for authority and accumulation, and she
details the subtle and dramatic courses of corruption these
drives can lead to. The lust for capital accumulation leads

men into slave-trade, and traps them in moral dissolution.

189
Through the genealogy of Rosa and Flora, Child Chronicles
two generations of men who, in trying to become rich,
involve themselves in slavery, fall in love with black
women, and beget daughters. Both men neglect to manumit
their wives and daughters. The grandfather of Rosa and
Flora sells their mother--his beloved daughter--to Royal
when he faces a financial crunch. And Royal, who becomes
the devoted "husband" of Eulalia, is detained from
procedures to manumit her by his capital interests--as he
later feebly explains that "being immersed in business
[he] never seemed to find the time" to take his wife abroad
to legally marry and manumit her (21). Similarly, business
debts overrule his wish to free his daughters.

The text subtly questions Royal's apparently innocent
oversight through its depiction of Gerald Fitzgerald. When
we first meet Fitzgerald, it is in Royal's own house, which
is described as "the temple of Flora" (4), a paradise
secluded from the eyes of the world, a "fairy land" (21),
accessible only by the invitation of Royal himself.
Fitzgerald later that evening questions Royal King on which
girl he preferred and comments that "If I were the Grand
Bashaw, I would have them both in my harem" (13). His
remark reveals his own acquisitive motivations at the same
time it suggests that "the Temple of Flora" somehow
represents Royal's own pretensions to the Grand Bashaw's

harem. And when Fitzgerald "rescues" the daughters by

190
taking them to his plantation, his more sinister behavior
yet mirrors Royal's, in his shammed marriage to Rosa, in
keeping both sisters secluded and veiled in public, and even
in purchasing many of Royal's effects in order to recreate
the atmosphere of his "Temple of Flora."

Along the same lines, the novel comments on the need
for authority which undergirds the mentality of slave-
owners. When the creditors meet to discuss the division of
Royal's estate, the subject of the girls comes up, and two
creditors appeal for some arrangement to be made to honor
Royal's wishes. Suggesting that these appeals are made out
of self-interest—-an attraction for the girls--the other men
present insist that "the law is inexorable" (69). Later,
however, it becomes clear that their appeal to "the law" was
motivated by their own attraction to the girls, and their
desire to gen them. The text links acquisitiveness to a
psychological need for dominance, which the very structure
of slave laws is designed to conceal.

The slaveholder's need for authority, however veiled
and sanctioned by "law" is also more crudely expressed. As
was predicted by his comment to King regarding the Grand
Bashaw, Fitzgerald ultimately reveals his need to dominate
Rosa and Flora. When first Flora, then Rosa reject his
sexual advances, he triumphantly reveals to them the fact of
his purchase, and declares his total authority. As he tells

Rosa, "since I cannot persuade you to listen to mu

191
expostulations and entreaties, I must inform you that my
power over you is complete. You are my slave" (143). And,
as the narrator and several of Fitzgerald's slaves make
clear, Fitzgerald's need for sexual domination is not novel
or limited to the two beautiful quadroons. When Fitzgerald
ruminates on preventing the auction-block sale of Rosa, the
narrator comments that "he was familiar with such scenes,
for he had seen women offered for sale, and had himself bid
for them in competition with the rude, indecent crowds"
(66). One of Fitzgerald's house slaves ironically comments
that "Massa knows what's hansome. He's a good judge ob we
far sex" (132).

As the following passage details, Rosa's purity or
honor is Fitzgerald's concern only as it increases the
compass of his sexual dominance:

He seemed to see her graceful figure gazed at by a

brutal crowd, while the auctioneer assured them

that she was warranted to be an entirely new and

perfectly sound article,——a moss rosebud from a

private royal garden,--a diamond fit for a king's

crown. And men, whose upturned faces were like

greedy satyrs, were calling upon her to open her

ruby lips and show her pearls. He turned

restlessly on his pillow and muttered an oath.

Then he smiled as he thought to himself that, by

192

saving her from such degradation, he had acquired

complete control of her destiny (66-67).
Child here makes daring use of romantic images to lay bare
the psychological connections between patriarchy and
slavery. By "saving" Rosa, even from the "gaze" of other
men, Fitzgerald achieves the mastery of complete ownership
which allows him more fully to realize his dream of a harem.

Just as Child subverts sentimental language in a
passage almost breathtaking in its frankly sexual tone, she
also turns sentimental plot expectations to deliver a
pointed message. Nina Baym summarizes the paradigmatic
sentimental plot, which typically features a young orphan
who, through the aid of an older, exemplary mentor, learns
womanly, Christian virtues. But in A Remenee, it is the
mentors who are educated through their experiences with the
black characters. In particular, Mrs. Delano, who helps
Flora escape from Fitzgerald, is not at first sympathetic to
the abolitionist cause: "It was contrary to Mrs. Delano's
usual caution and deliberation to adopt a stranger so
hastily; and had she been questioned beforehand, she would
have pronounced it impossible for her to enter into such a
relation with one allied to the colored race and herself a
slave" (147). But her relation with Flora gradually alters
her perspective. Just concealing Flora's condition compels

a quick education in slave resistance, as Mrs. Delano seeks

193
help from prominent abolitionists and for the first time
pays serious heed to their arguments.

Mrs. Delano begins a crucial course of moral self-
examination which reflects the paradigm of the novel itself.
At one point remembering her youthful romantic acquaintance
with Rosa and Flora's father, Alfred Royal, Mrs. Delano
reflects, "I ought to do the same for them without that
motive ... but should I?" (222). She shortly has
opportunity to test herself on this point. During their
preparations for departure on a steamship after an
unsuccessful trip to the South in search of Rosa, another
slave of Fitzgerald's, Chloe, appeals to Mrs. Delano to
claim her and her two children as Mrs. Delano's own slaves
in order to aid their escape. With encouragement from
Flora, Mrs. Delano consents to the subterfuge, and later
describes it to an abolitionist:

I If ever a quiet and peace-loving individual was

caught up and whirled about by a tempest of events,

I am surely that individual. Before I met this

dear little Flora, I had a fair prospect of living

and dying a respectable and respected old fogy, as

you irreverent reformers call discreet people. But

now I find myself drawn into the vortex of

abolition to the extent of helping off four

fugitive slaves (266).

194
Later, Mrs. Delano details the revolutionary change in
aspect that Flora has provided: "As for my education, I
have learned to consider it as, in many respects, false. As
for my views, they have been greatly modified by this
experience. I have learned to estimate people and things by
their real value, not merely according to external
accidents" (278).

Mrs. Delano's moral growth conveys an important message
to the contemporary readers of A,gemenee, predicting the
possibility of a national progress modeled on self-
examination. As Mrs. Delano at one point meditates, "so
one wrong produces another wrong; and thus frightfully may
we affect the destiny of others, while blindly following the
lead of selfishness. But the past, with all its weaknesses
and sins, has gone beyond recall; and I must try to write a
better record on the present" (150). This, the narrator
underscores, will only be effected through a total
commitment to social eeg_racial reform. Mrs. Delano's
social peers gossip about her sponsoring a clerk and
allowing him to pay court to her adopted daughter, as well
as her attendance at abolitionist meetings. The narrator
comments that while Mrs. Delano was becoming "a black sheep
in aristocratic circles ... these indications passed by her
almost unnoticed, occupied as she was in earnestly striving
to redeem the mistakes of the past by making the best

possible use of the present" (283-84). Mrs. Delano in this

195

way becomes a model for post-Civil War America. She
provides an example of moral progress expressed through
social action that suggests the means by which America can
write its own record anew--a egee romance of the republic.

Mrs. Delano's growth also parallels the meta-historical
project of A Remenee. In the novel, Child rejects "history"
as a concretized and unreclaimable past. Rather, she turns
to historical examination as an active means of confronting
and counterbalancing the past. Her historical model--a
moral-historical perspective as a basis for contemporary
social mediation--responds consciously to post-war cynicism
by suggesting a means to redeem past mistakes. As Mr. King

prophesies, "we were all of us working for better than we

knew" (434). The answer is not in despair but in social
action. A_Romance insists on an alternative future,

grounded in a recognition of past wrongs, which purposefully
counters perspectives of cosmic futility and impotence such
as those portrayed in Stephen Crane's "The Black Riders" and
"War is Kind." Accepting the perspective of "futility," the
text implies, can lead to a continued prejudice.
A,gemeeee_closely questions the basis of racial
prejudice, revealing its economic motivation and
arbitrariness. While she utilizes the sentimental figure
of the "tragic quadroon" in a fairly conventional way, Child
takes a decidedly unconventional step in her reversal of the

two Fitzgerald sons. She plays out the radical consequences

196
of this subplot to offer a pointed lesson: people are
shaped by education and circumstance, not by racial
inheritance. Gerald Fitzgerald (one-eighth black) takes
after his father-—a proud and somewhat dissipated
spendthrift. "How much trouble these niggers give us!" he
reflects just weeks before learning of his own racial
heritage (312). George Faulkner ("pure" white), on the
other hand, while bearing a "wonderful resemblance to
Gerald," contrasts to the privileged brother in "a firmer
expression of the mouth" which is attributed to ”his
determined efforts to escape from slavery" (413). Child
illustrates the selfish absurdity of racist "reasoning"
through the merchant Mr. Bell. Informed of the switch, the
boys' maternal grandfather summarizes it as "a pretty
dilemma ... My property, it seems, must either go to Gerald,
who you say has negro blood in his veins, or to this other
fellow, who is a slave with a negro wife" (394).
Strikingly, Mr. Bell's concerns lay bare the economic motive
behind racial prejudice.

The dubious standard of outward appearance is pointedly
satirized by the white, working-class abolitionist, Mr.
Bright. As he explains to Flora's husband, his conversion
came when, looking through Southern papers in search of a
job, he came across an advertisement describing a runaway

slave:

197
"‘Run away from the subscriber a stout mulatto
slave, named Joe, has light sandy hair, blue eyes,

and a ruddy complexion; is intelligent and will

pass himself for a white man ...'

"‘By George!' said I, ‘that's a description of
me. I didn't know before that I was a mulatto

(322).

Bright goes instead to Vermont, and successfully passes
himself as a runaway slave. This experience is a powerful
education for him; "Blue-eyed Joe," as he dubs the man
described in the ad, "seemed to bring the matter home"
(322). Child here makes an entirely unconventional
suggestion-~instead of talking about "blacks" who look
"white," Child proposes that "whites" can in fact look
"black." In this way, she brings home to her white readers
the fictional and arbitrary basis of racial tropes and
racial prejudice.

The mainstay of the plot in A gemeeee is the "tragic
quadroon." As Susan Koppelman was the first to note, Child
introduced this figure to American literature, and made it a
successful vehicle which could at once reveal the sexual
plight of women slaves and satisfy the refined tastes of
white readers. Koppelman also credits Child for being "the
first white writer to grant black and racially mixed women
the right to be ‘ladies.' Child portrays the enslaved woman

as partaking with grace and virtue in the life typically

198
reserved for the mistress" (2). But Karcher is concerned
with the limitations of the figure: "As a vehicle for
protesting against racism ... and as an instrument for
probing the connection between white supremacy and male
dominance-~the archetype of the "tragic quadroon" proved
highly ambiguous" (25). Karcher observes that in the long
run, the statement that the quadroon makes against the
sexual exploitation of women slaves is qualified by "the use
of the genteel, near-white heroine to personify the wrongs
of slavery reinforce the very prejudices antislavery fiction
sought to counteract" (25).

As Karcher highlights, we have to question Child's
reliance on the "near-white black" in remaking cross-racial
understanding. Todorov proposes a three~dimensional
analysis of racial relations and representations that will
be useful to our consideration here. He argues that "we
must distinguish among at least three axis on which we can
locate the problematics of alterity" (185). The first,
"axeological," level entails value judgement, a statement on
whether the Other is good or bad, loved or hated, equal or
inferior. At the second, "praxeologic," level, the speaking
subject positions him or herself in relation to the Other.
That is, the subject embraces or identifies with the Other,
or identifies the Other with the subject, imposing the
subject's values upon the Other. The third, "epistemic,"

level, determines whether the subject knows, or remains

199
ignorant of the Other's identity, largely determined by the
first two levels. As Todorov points out, here there are no
absolutes, "but an endless gradation between the lower or
higher states of knowledge" (185).

Todorov's scheme illuminates the limitations of Child's
"tragic quadroon" and the ways in which the values that
underlie this figure inform her depiction of the other black
characters in A Remeeee. Child clearly grants all her black
characters dignity and equality. At the axeologic level,
then, she values the racial Other positively, indeed
modeling several levels of loving, cross-racial
relationships--between Flora and Mrs. Delano, Rosa and Mr.
King, George Faulkner and Harriet, for instance. At the
praxeological level, while it can be said that A_gemenee
"embraces the Other's values," this observation must be
carefully qualified. The black characters' values are
embraceable only as (and precisely because) they are
identical to white values of virtue, chastity and
republicanism.

Child quite effectively makes her point that outward
appearances should not be the basis for judgement. But in
proposing an alternative, she eradicates what Todorov terms
"the touchstone of alterity," completely identifying her
black characters with the enlightened white characters who
have abandoned racial prejudice. When Alfred King overcomes

his original scruples over racial difference to finally

200
marry Rosa he realizes that "Rosabella must be seen as a
pure, good soul, in eyes that see as the angels do" (246).
Child is at pains here and throughout to establish the
igehhieel qualities of the blacks' and whites'
psychological, emotional, and intellectual states.
Child does this in order to eliminate categories of

geeiel difference. But what she fails to allow--a positive

evaluation of alternative ggituzei or sociai configurations—
effectively prevents A gemehee e; the Repghiie from

establishing any tolerance or understanding of difference at
ehy_level. As Karcher is careful to observe, Child's black
characters are not representative of slave experience in the
South, where the predominant number of slaves were employed
in the field. The characters in A fiemehee efi the geeehlie
represent that small proportion of slaves who lived closest
and most often aspired to white society. While A gemehee
effectively employs these characters to undermine concepts
of ‘race,’ it is not able to recognize the cultural
differences produced by the intersection of African cultural
heritages and slave quarter life. Consequently, its
contributions to cross ‘racial' understanding are qualified
in that it fails to confront and mediate eheehe;_alternative
past--slave quarter experience and culture.

The "prejudice of equality"--identifying the racial
Other with one's own "ego-ideal"—-while in many ways more

hemehe, is finally no more effective in creating real

201
heegleeee (Todorov's third, "epistemic" level) of the
constructed Other than the "prejudice of superiority."
Child is adept at questioning the drives of power and
authority in patriarchy, and their role in creating "false"
and "prejudiced" education. But in her formulation of a
future culture formed solely on reformed white values she
overlooks alternatives to white cultural expression and '
thereby prevents a fuller questioning of the biases in
American culture that permitted slavery and patriarchy, and
continued to permit ‘racial' prejudice. Despite this
important limitation, however, Child must be given credit
for paving a way toward attaining such knowledge by
privileging values in A Remehee that tolerate, assist, and

communicate with, the Other.

Sedgwick and Child successfully undermined concepts of
racial difference, emphasizing the cultural basis underlying
race categories. Yet both were limited in their racial
restructuring, unable to envision eelheeei alternatives to
their own social values that might have made their
revisioning even more effective. While Sedgwick can allow
racial difference to some degree, she so fully embraces
white America's historical legacy that she cannot resolve
the "Indian problem" in any meaningful way for contemporary
readers. And Child, by fully identifying blacks with

socially reformed whites and failing to acknowledge the

202

predominant slave experience, denies a valuable opportunity
to increase cross-eeleegel understanding by repressing the
ground it could take place on. Each novel self-consciously
end unconsciously provides "social medicine" to their
contemporary audience--a difficult mix of progressive vision
and complacent oversight reminiscent of Mather and Bird.

Yet, fleee Leeiie and A Remahce e; ehe Repubiie provide
powerful alternative readings that challenge and revision
contemporary historical and racial formulations, and their
reformative "sentimentalism" must be closely examined for a
full understanding of their socio-political emphasis.
Clearly, Osgood's charge against Child, that she failed to
make a useful book, is untenable. As we have seen, these
novels argue for cultural change which could have a profound
and humane influence in oppressively constructed "racial"
relations. Sedgwick provides a model for an alternative,
dialogic history which has practical as well as theoretical
implications. Child offers a model of moral self-
examination and growth which encourages post-Civil War
whites to shoulder responsibility for racial compensation
and harmony as a means to redeeming their negative past.
Both authors set forth commanding and plausible alternatives
to patriarchal and slave society, and authorized history,
which despite their limitations offer constructive cultural
options. For these reasons, both novels (and others like

them) are valuable to any understanding of the social

203
context of American literature. Remarkable for their
alternative social vision and marked by their limitations,
the novels are important voices in the literary dialbgue on
racism and racialism that engrossed nineteenth-century

America.

204

NOTES

1. More recently, scholars of "sentimental fiction"
have taken up the challenge of Helen Waite Papashvilly's
ground-breaking Aii_§he,flepey Engine; (1956), which
discovers not conformity but "handbooks of another kind of
feminine revolt." Subsequent studies have found a rich, and
often highly subversive, diversity. See for instance Nina
Baym's Wemen'e Eietien. and Friebert and White's higgeh,
fleQQe_Ahehelegy, Both studies argue against generalizations
about "sentimental" literature, pointing out the wide
variety of themes and styles among nineteenth-century women
writers. Friebert and White urge adopting categories such
as domestic, seduction, melodrama, realistic, satire and
humor, frontier romance, education and polemic. Their
anthology accordingly excerpts from novels that document the
inadequacy of blanket summaries such as Smith's on the
"conformity" of "the scribbling women."

2. These limitations were imposed, as Nina Baym
painstakingly documents, by a male literary establishment
devoted to taming women writers' radicalism on all fronts.

See Baym. Seeders. Sexieeere and Nexus. 659- 369-73-
3. See section three, "Love," 127—167.

4. Deborah Root incisively analyzes the imperialist
implications of Todorov's own argument in her article "The
Imperial Signifier: Todorov and the Conquest of Mexico."

In it, Root argues that "Todorov would maintain the Aztec
radical ‘Otherness' to serve a pedagogy cleansed of
imperialism," which rather than hehegelizihg,difference
d32211§l§i§§i.1t- As a result, Todorov is uncritical of his
own reductive generalizations, and the ways in which his own
analysis reduplicates colonialist discourse, particularly in
its desire to master and silence the racial Other: "Despite
Todorov's claim to have engaged in a dialogue with the Other
(and to have expressed a neutral acceptance of difference
and a recognition of equality), in The thgeeee e; Ameeige,
the voice of the Other is evoked only to be, again,
silenced" (197, 219). In this way, it would seem that
Todorov's own analysis of the "prejudice of equality" might
be fruitfully turned on itself.

Todorov obliquely defends his stance in "‘Race,'
Writing and Culture." In it, he clarifies his position that
"whereas racism is a well-attested phenomenon, ‘race' itself
does not exist." His focus is rather the attribution of

205
cultural differences to "race," and the difficulties of
assessing the importance and import of cultural difference:
Racialism has affinities both with relativism and with
universalism ... The excessive universalism takes the
form of refusing cultural differences in the name of
the unicity of the human species and the diversity of
individuals. We are so busy battling stereotypes in
the description of Others that we end up refusing these
Others any specificity at all ... the restricted
universality of the past should be opened up as much as
possible, until it is able to account for both the
diversity of cultures and the differences which exist
within one and the same culture (174-5).
Collette Guillaumin finds such a stance, however generously
intended, as problematic. She finds that Todorov's "anti-
racist" school, which uses as its "central argument culture
and the right to cultural identity" is not so far removed
from what it counterposes. Such a stance, she argues, still
means "postulating some being specific to human groups, and
it is of minor importance whether that being is to be
encouraged or saved: the fact remains that groups are being
regarded in light of essences and not of relationships" (63-
64). Hazel Carby would agree: "Culture is the terrain of
struggle between groups ... there is no whole, authentic,
autonomous black culture which lies outside of these
relations of cultural power and domination" (1989, 43).

5. The work of Kolodny and Persons in particular have
been formative to my analysis of Sedgwick.

6. As Mary Kelley notes, the epigraph is taken from
John Robinson, quoted in William Bradford's fiistery 91

mm Elentatien (41, 357).

7. As Carolyn Karcher notes, Child's argument against
all kinds of racial discrimination, including anti-
miscegenation laws, was a bold move for a woman in the
nineteenth century and signaled her continuing commitment to
"avant-garde ideas about race and gender" ("Rape, Murder and
Revenge," 4).

8.Holland does record her awareness of the book's
existence in the notes to her essay; see 166, n. 28).

9. Since writing this essay, and shortly before
submitting the draft of my dissertation to the department, I
was able to procure a copy of filexe;y_enfi,§he_hi§e;egy
Lmegihehien (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), which
contains yet another excellent essay by Caroline Karcher,
this one dealing directly with Bemehee,e§ ehe fieeehlie, In
"Lydia Maria Child's Remenee ... An Abolitionist Vision of
America's Racial Destiny," Karcher focuses on Child's use of

206

miscegenation in the novel, and the vision and limitations
of its critique of racial prejudice. While our approaches
are substantively different, many of our conclusions about
the novel's strengths and limitations are similar.

10. It should be noted that Osgood's summary
conclusions are often qualified, and occasionally
contradicted, by his own analysis. For instance, after
faulting the work for sentimentalism, embellishment and lack
of adherence to reality, he comments that "Romance is
written with a rather steady hand ... for the first time
Mrs. Child creates truly believable characters" (151).
Osgood compares Fitzgerald's character to "Faulkner's
anguished young men of Yoknapatawpha County" (153). As for
its lack of social relevance, Osgood admits that the work
functions as "an ironic commentary on the wrongheadedness of
men's conventions" (152). And while he criticizes Child for
failing to provide her readers with the type of story they
preferred, "stories that revealed the harsher realism of
American life, even the uglier aspects of American
character" (145), he does parenthetically note Child's
apparent "endorseiment of) miscegenation, a ‘catastrophe' no
more acceptable in America in the 1860's than it was in the
1820's"--apparently an aspect of ugliness the American
reader did he; prefer (154).

11. In fact, the company that finally contracted with
Jacobs to publish the book went bankrupt, at which point
Jacobs herself purchased the plates.

12. For a full range of examples extracted from
pamphlets and newspapers of unfortunate "white" slaves, see
Child's 1860 tract.

CHAPTER FIVE
ETHNOCENTRISM DECENTERED:

COLONIALIST MOTIVES IN me W gr; garnge eomon em

"RACE" IN EXM,AND POE

In the last thirty years, The_Nar;ative e; Arthur
Goggeh Eym,has become one of the most popular and
controversial texts among Poe scholars. It would seem, as
Douglas Robinson suggests, that Poe's eccentric narrative is
"an interpreter's dream-text ... a textual vacuum begging to
be filled with a reading" (Robinson, 47). The striking
variance of conclusions on The Meaning of Eym contributes to
current curiosity over the work. Readings of Eym_range
widely, from psychoanalytic exploration to social satire,
from self-referential commentary on writing (or reading) to
a metacritical demonstration of utter absence of meaning.
Commentary on the text apparently refuses to find any
consensus or "thrust toward uniformity" (Robinson, 52).1

One early commentator, Harry Levin, examined the
racial dynamics of the text, arguing that Eym played out
Poe's racist phobia. Leslie Fiedler expanded on Levin's
suggestions in his psychoanalytic approach to gym, and
shortly after, Sydney Kaplan elaborated on the specifically
racist content of the hieroglyphics in his introduction to a
1960 edition of gym, Evelyn Hinz offered careful

207

208

qualification to these readings in 1970, pointing out the
error of attributing Pym's racist phobia to Poe himself. In
1975, Eric Mottram presented a provocative analysis of the
social implications of racial dynamics in gym, and the
narrative's relevance to the racial upheaval of mid-
seventies America. Recent analysts, however, have focused
on the narrative's metatextual suggestiveness, largely
abandoning a pursuit of Eymhe social or racial dimensions.

On the other hand, Poe scholars are once again battling
over Poe's own racial attitudes. This dispute focuses
largely on one unsigned review in the April 1836 Sogtherh
Lihehehy heeeeheeh, The review, published during Poe's
tenure as editor, cites favorably two pro-slavery books,
3112112 in hhe,uhihed,§hehee,(James Kirke Paulding) and The,
MWMWMWQW
Abglltlgn (probably William Drayton). Early Poe scholars
attributed the essay to Poe, who commonly contributed the
book reviews while editor of 5L5, But in 1941, a
dissertation by William Doyle Hull challenged this
assumption, instead proposing on the basis of an ambiguous
but suggestive letter from Poe to Beverly Tucker, that
Tucker in fact wrote the review. After several decades of
sometimes heated debate, Bernard Rosenthal published an
impressively thorough examination of the issue. In his
close reading of the Poe-Tucker letter, his meticulous

reconstruction of printing and transportation schedules, and

209
his scrutiny of other ghh correspondence, Rosenthal traces
the impossibility of attributing the essay to Tucker on the
basis of extant evidence.

More importantly, however, Rosenthal refocuses the
discussion of Poe's racist attitudes. Poe's disputed
authorship of the review, he insists, is a straw man: "The
authorship problem in regard to the Paulding-Drayton review
has unnecessarily obscured Poe's pro-slavery views" (30).
Whether or not Poe wrote the review, Rosenthal points out,
he elsewhere expressed pro-slavery sympathies, in, for
instance, his reviews of Robert Montgomery Bird's fihehhegi
hee, Anne MacVicar Grant's Memeieee,efi,eh Amegleeh,heey, an
unpublished review of John L. Carey's hemeehie slavery, and

particularly in his stance on works by the noted Southern
defender of slavery, Thomas R. Dew (cf. 30—31). If he
didn't write the review, Poe elsewhere made clear his
sympathy to its views: "His politics in regard to slavery
and social structure ... embodied the kind of mythology
about slavery to be found in the Paulding-Drayton review"
(31).

Some fifteen years after Rosenthal's important essay,
the controversy has again arisen.2 Based, it seems, on no
new evidence, the dispute perhaps reveals more about the
agenda of the critics than any new insight into Poe. G. R.

Thompson, for instance, in his essay on "Edgar Allan Poe and

the Writers of the Old South" in the ghlhmhie Lihegehy

210

dieters; of the united States (1988) asserts parenthetically

that ”the notorious review of two books defending slavery in
the heeeeheeh in 1836, upon which some critical
interpretations of Poe's Narretive e; ALEDEL.§OIGQD gym_have
been based, was written not by Poe, but in all likelihood by
Beverly Tucker" (269). Thompson minimalizes Poe's concern
with slavery, asserting that only in his review of James
Russell Lowell's A.Eé§l§ he; Cgitics does Poe take "any kind
of stance on slavery" (269). Thompson's evident agenda,
however, is to exonerate Poe from any "regionalist
sentiment":
Rarely does he employ Southern locales or character
types; he does not embroil himself in the issue of
slavery; he does not address matters of Southern
autonomy and separatism; he does not confront
Southern with Northern personages; he does not cast
Southern leaders as knights in the quest of glory
(277).
Thompson is at pains to establish Poe as a "major national
writer" (262) and in order to do that he must prove that
Poe, as the "one original voice out of the Old South"
deserves continued esteem precisely because he transcended
Southern values--including any intellectual involvement with
slavery. In order to save Poe for a canon increasingly
skeptical of texts that support human oppression, students

of Poe like Thompson have depicted a de-politicized and

211
de-historicized Poe oeuvre. Instead, they argue for an
essentialist Poe, a "true man of letters" who "focuses on
the integrity of the work of art in terms of the ...
metaphysical ideal" (Thompson, 277), or a true man of our
deconstructionist times, whose works point only to
"frustrating indeterminacy ... or a useless and contrived
‘unity'" (Rowe, 94).

My discussion will not attempt to resolve the dispute
over Poe's racism. It will, if it is possible, make any
discussion of Poe's racial views even more problematic by
arguing that while at one level, Eym_ie,a racist text,
another, marginalized aspect of the text provides a reading
that counters colonial ideology. The he;;ehige_efi ALEEEL
gehgeh,gym is thus a colonialist text which collapses on its
own structure of racial knowledge. To understand this
dynamic, we must examine the systematic relationship between
what the text foregrounds--the literal level of Pym's
narrative as well as the concluding editorial comment--and

the elements it attempts to shadow, or marginalize.

WHITE La RIGHT

In his study of Reee.end.Menife§t Deehiny, Reginald

Horsman notes that "America's sense of mission ... always
embodied an outward thrust" (82). The "enlightening
influence" that white America imagined it provided the world

justified its passport in return. Setting out over the

212

seas, the colonialist purpose was, as naval scientist
Matthew F. Maury would put it in 1850, to "revolutionize,
and republicanize and Anglo-Saxonize" (quoted in Horsman,
281). Horsman underscores the crucial link for America's
imperialist ideology between the white presence and
progress, as evidenced in the views of Simeon North in 1848.
The Anglo Saxons were elemental to "civilization," for they
were the ones "whose enterprise explores every land, and
whose commerce whitens every sea" (quoted in Horsman, 289).

The Anglo-American's drive to expand his knowledge of
the world was inseparable from his investment in capitalist
expansion. Even when knowledge was ostensibly most
disinterested, like Pym's apparently irrelevant elaborations
on wildlife in the south Arctic sea, every bit of
information was potentially profitable. We can throw this
fact into bold relief when we pose the minimal questions
about the political/social/ material context of knowledge
which James Berlin outlines: "what are the effects of
knowledge? Who benefits from a given version of truth? How
are the material benefits of a society distributed? What is
the relation of this distribution to social relations? Do
these relations encourage conflict? To whom does
knowledge designate power?" (489).

These questions bear acutely on an analysis of Pym's
narrative. While Pym gives an impression of an individually

motivated quest for adventure, he in fact took part in a

213

wide-spread and well-sanctioned cultural phenomenon, and
that his "adventure" was possible only because of existing
and far-ranging white presence on the world's oceans. The
text itself participates in the antebellum dialogue on white
destiny, colonial expansion, and racialism,a and this
dimension deserves close consideration.

Eym immediately establishes itself as travel/adventure
narrative, and as part of a colonialist tradition:

Upon my return to the United States a few months

ago, after the extraordinary series of adventures

in the South Seas and elsewhere ... accident threw

me into the society of several gentlemen in

Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all

matters relating to the regions I had visited, and

who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty,

to give my narrative to the public (150).
Pym's fictional adventure was situated squarely in a
colonialist context, driven by capitalist ideology. Pym
delivers his narrative in public form at the urging of a
"society of several gentlemen"--men of a certain class-
interest--who "felt deep interest" in Pym's story and urged
him, "as a duty," to share his story with the American
public. These opening remarks reveal that just as colonial
exploration was initiated to expand the white/Western
capitalist world system, the colonial travel narrative, as

Mary Louise Pratt summarizes, joins "the knowledge edifice

214
of natural history" with capitalist expansion (125),
documenting a "natural" basis for white domination. It
becomes Pym's "duty" as a citizen of the United States to
share his knowledge with his fellow citizens. This
knowledge is emphatically heh for disinterested speculation,
but rather pecuniary speculation, as the "interest" felt by
the "gentlemen," as well as the content of the narrative
itself make clear. Pym's account will map white access into
regions previously inaccessible, as well as informing the
consumer public on the materials and lands available for
use/exploitation.

Pym disguises the motives for making his journey and
publishing his account in colonialist rhetoric. As he tells
it, his motive for publication is duty; his reason for
travel is "melancholy." After the AeieT incident, in which
Pym and Augustus capsize in a storm and nearly die, Pym
recounts his renewed interest in sea-going: "For the bright
side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions
were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among
barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and
tears upon some gray and desolate rock in an ocean
unapproachable and unknown" (162). No suggestion of fame
and fortune enter into his account. But, as Albert Memmi
points out in his landmark monograph The,geiehiee;_ehg,;he_
Qelehizeg,(l957), the material position of a "usurper"

colonist guarantees his "interest" in the economic aspects

215
of the situation. A colonizer is fundamentally aware of his
guarantee to superior economic rights in usurped lands based
on his exploitation of that land's material and human
resources (passim 45-89). Pym's narrative records his
famine and fears among "barbarian hordes," yet it also
documents the "profitable speculation" he hopes for in
"discovery," his eagerness to be "the first white" on an
island, and his participation in exploitation on Tsalal.
His cooperation with the unnamed gentlemen in Virginia, and
the material production of his account further mark his
complicity and profit in the colonial enterprise. His
protesting rejection of "the bright side of the painting"
should be viewed as a legitimizing rhetoric for the real
motives of colonial exploration, a rhetorical tactic which,
as Pym points out, was a "common" feature of discourse "to
the whole numerous race of the melancholy among men."
Importantly, this rhetoric did not obscure the "destiny"
which he "felt ... in a measure bound to fulfill" (162) in
his privileged role as a white colonial explorer/adventurer.
Pym admits that he resorted "intense hypocrisy" to "further
his project"--deceiving his relatives in order to leave on
The,§;emhhe, His deceptive actions here might be taken as a
symbol of Pym's own rhetorical strategy in his narrative
and, at a larger level, of a culturally sanctioned policy of

subterfuge.

216

Similarly, Pym's record of his travels with Ih£.l§E§
reflects colonial ideology and rhetorical strategy. Pym
situates The Tehe Car's mission in the South Seas as part of
an international colonialist endeavor of "discovery." The
lehe was a trade ship of a "peculiar service"-ea trade ship
vested with the "powers to cruise the South Seas for any
cargo which might come most readily to hand." To this end,
as Pym notes, "it is absolutely necessary that she should be
well armed," although The lehe itself was not so well armed
and equipped as "a navigator acquainted with the
difficulties and dangers of the trade could have desired"
(263-264). Clearly, "trade" is a euphemism for The Jehe'e
real mission, which might more accurately be described as
"conquest." The cargo carried also reveals the agenda of
the ship, which "had on board, as usual in such voyages,
beads, looking-glasses, tinder-works, axes, hatchets, saws,
adzes, planes, Chisels, gouges, gimlets, files, spokeshaves,
rasps, hammers, nails, knives, scissors, razors, needles,
thread, crockery-ware, calico, trinkets and other similar
articles" (263)--construction tools and baubles of minimal
worth. In proportion to what they carry, as Pym's account
makes clear, the crew of The,1ehe expect an astronomic
return on their investment.

Recording who first discovered each island and where
its most convenient points of access are, Pym catalogues

his observations in the manner of promotional tracts. He

217
notes the wildlife and fauna of each island The Tehe passes,
and records facts essential to potential settlers, such as
his observation on the largest of the Tristan d'Acunha
islands: "plenty of excellent water may here be readily
procured; also cod, and other fish, may be taken with hook
and line" (272). As he makes these observations, Pym
occasionally slips into second—person--"Proceeding on
eastwardly from this anchorage you come to Wasp Bay ... into
which you can go with four fathoms"—-authorizing his
American audience to identify with the explorer/colonizers.
This rhetorical strategy includes the reader in the colonial
enterprise, making him a "trading partner" in the text.
(267).

Possession is clearly at stake as Pym recounts the
various voyages and claims of other explorers, noting two in
particular (Jonathan Lambert and "an Englishman of the name
of Glass") who seized sovereign authority over their
"discoveries." Pym himself eagerly anticipates laying
similar claims: "Of course a wide field lay before us for
discovery, and it was with feelings of most intense interest
that I heard Captain Guy express his resolution of pushing
boldly to the southward" (281). Pym's "intense interest"
(an echo of the Richmond gentlemen's "deep interest") belies
the apparently objective and disinterested tone of the

information recorded in his narrative.

218

It is with this same "intense interest" that Pym
manages to persuade the captain of The gehe to continue
southward, despite evident danger. Pym expresses regret for
the consequent deaths of all the crew members. Yet he
qualifies that regret, explaining that "I must still be
allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been
instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of
science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has
ever engrossed its attention" (287). Scientific penetration
was, however, predicated on economic propagation. That is,
colonial science would hardly be "intensely excitied)” over
areas that did not somehow stand to benefit the economy of
the colony. Pym's pursuits deliver to the "eye of science"
not only the news of a temperate and productive zone, but
several "natural" proofs of racial hierarchy. Each of these
in turn pertain directly to white economic interest. While
the first documented material and human resources ready for
exploitation, the second provided a theory which would
legitimize that exploitation, would "naturalize" white
domination in metaphysical terms.

Mary Pratt observes that "regardless of an individual
traveler's own attitudes and intentions, the Europeans in
this domain of struggle [i.e., the colonial frontier] were
charged with installing the edifice of domination and
legitimizing its hierarchy" (127). One of the functions of

travel/adventure narratives was to rationalize the

219
colonialist "right" to "discovery" and subsequent privilege.
Not surprisingly then, racial hierarchy becomes the dominant
subtext of Pym's account of the island Tsalal--an island
which is particularly well-suited to The gene's purposes.
"Well wooded," apparently unmapped and undiscovered, the
island "occasioned us great joy." Excited by the potential
for profit on Tsalal, Pym has a clear investment in
characterizing the natives of the island as "savage" (288).
Accordingly, he characterizes their language as "harangue"
and "jabbering" (289), their actions as "ignoranltl" and
superstitious (290).

Racialist polarities structure the island of Tsalal. A
manichean world where black and white dominate but do not
mix, Tsalal underwrites the color line of the antebellum
south. Pym's observations of the island feature its
segregated nature. Most immediately, he calls attention to
the curious water, which was not "colourless, nor was it of
any one uniform color." Pym elaborates on its striking
character:

Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to

settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass

of liquid was made up of a number of distinct

veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did

not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect

in regard to their own particles, and imperfect in

regard to neighbouring veins (293).

220

Pym underscores the significance of this evidence of a
natural principle of color segregation, describing it as
"the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent
miracles with which I was destined to be encircled" (293).

Tsalal itself, according to Pym, replicates the natural
apartheid evidenced in the water. "Indeed," he writes, "we
noticed no light-colored substances of any kind upon the
island" (325). He details the dark rocks, dark-skinned
animals, birds and fish. More significantly, he suggests
that the all-black Tsalalians instinctively avoid anything
white. Their surprise at sighting the crew of The Tehe
signals to Pym "that they had never before seen any of the
white race." Their response--they "recoil"--indicates a
"natural" aversion between races, shared by black and white
alike. Manifesting a "degree of ignorance for which [the
crew of Ifl§.liflil were not prepared," the Tsalalians
inexplicably refuse to approach anything white-~"the
schooner's sails, an egg, an open book, or a pan of flour"
(290-91). Unlike flhhe Leelie, Pym does not acknowledge the
possibility that Tsalalians might regard the crew of The,
gene as "savage." Rather than exploring the relativity of
values (i.e., isn't it interesting that the Tsalalians seem
to consider white as evil and dangerous as we consider
black?), Pym uses this example to reinforce a stable,

hierarchical opposition between white and black, equating

221
the former with civilization, the latter with complete
ignorance and savagery.

Pym's account after his escape from Tsalal continues to
document this binary opposition. As Pym, Peters, and their
hostage Nu-nu continue southward, the environment becomes
increasingly white--"pallidly white birds" negotiate the
"milky water" and sky, and "white ashy material" covers the
men. Nu-nu, taken captive to aid Pym and Peter's escape
from the island, is likewise critical to the meaning the
final chapter of Pym's account. The all-black Tsalalian
provides a point of contrast and a pointed message. When
Pym and Peters innocently try to gain his help with a piece
of white linen, Nu—nu shudders and shrieks (330). Later,
when the linen sail flaps in his face, Nu-nu "became
violently affected with convulsions" (332). From this
point, he "obstinately lay in the bottom of the boat,"
refusing a "rational reply" (333). His only response, in
fact, is to lift his upper lip, showing his black teeth.

These events offer a segregationist parable: in the
state of nature, black doesn't want to mix with white. Nu-
nu provides a direct affirmation of this, obligingly
convulsing and expiring in the face of an increasingly white
environment. The unaccountable monochrome of water, air and
wildlife, counterpointed by Nu-nu's presence and death, all
provide Pym and his readers with a fantastic confirmation of

the goal of Manifest Destiny. If the Anglo-Saxon colonist's

222
project was to "whiten every sea," the "truth" objectively
recorded by Pym revealed that the white colonist's right--

physically and metaphysically--to the South Sea is already

guaranteed: it ie white.

OF BIRDS AND MEN
Tzvetan Todorov observes in a recent article that
"whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, ‘race'
itself does not exist" (171). Collette Guillaumin, in her
seminal essay "The Idea of Race and its Elevation to
Autonomous, Scientific and Legal Status," clarifies
Todorov's statement:
The crucial fact is that the present century has
seen the idea of race given legal status, alongside
the older categories such as property, sex and age.
The idea has emerged from the area in which it was
only an effect of social relationships (and thus
still an ideological form), and become in its turn
an independent cause. This change has been to some
extent underestimated ... Today the question raised
by the notion of race, if not of racialism, is
generally thought to have been settled. The notion
is supposed to correspond to self—evident physical
fact; to be beyond debate, and thus something it is
unnecessary or ill-bred to discuss. But the whole

point is that race is not a material fact which

223

produces social consequences. It is an idea, a

mental fact, and so a social fact in itself. And

if we really want to, we can find out where ideas

come from. They certainly do not fall out of the

sky (41).

Guillaumin emphasizes the concept of "race" as a
progression, where the "rationalization came after, and not
before the initiation" of social domination (52). Despite
modern beliefs that there are "biologically specific groups"
of humans that exist in naturally-defined hierarchical
relationships, Guillaumin's analysis documents that we must
regard "race" as a "practical relationship which has been
crystallized in a pseudo-scientific form, the form of racial
taxonomy and its successive historical implications" (57).
Likewise, readers should not accept Eye's fictional premise
of "race" as a biological or metaphysical category.4 The
HQLLQLLXQ Q£.ALLDQL gehgeh gym questions and undermines this
biological/metaphysical reading by revealing race as a
practically useful interpretive construct governed by
political motives.

The incidents of the Tsalal episode call to mind the
colonial exploitation of Native Americans, in the sense that
Europeans invade Tsalal and exploit the Tsalalians,
bartering, as did the early North American Anglo settlers,
with trinkets and beads. The scene has links as well to the

Southern system of African slavery. Captain Guy, we are

224
told, "was a gentleman of great urbanity of manner, and of
considerable experience in the southern traffic" (264). The
white crew of The léfli acts on Tsalal out of the complacency
of their historically proven superiority. Like their
ancestors roughly two hundred years before, they take for
granted, for instance, their right to take fuel and refuge
on Tsalal, as well as their right to forcefully exploit the
apparently friendly natives.

Significantly, the pretense of the crew at negotiating
with and compensating the natives for their goods and
service is a tacit admission of European bad faith.

Clearly, they are not establishing mutual trust or equitable
exchange; nor do they intend to do so really. Captain Guy
assures Too-wit of "his eternal friendship and good—will,"
at the same time knowing that the crewmen will
"sacrificIeI... him immediately upon the first appearance of
hostile design" (297). In return for a complete supply of
food, as well as permission to establish a commercial
industry on shore, the natives are presented with "blue
beads, brass trinkets, nails, knives and pieces of red
cloth." That the exchange is merely a token mask for the
real structure in play is admitted by Pym in the next
sentence: "We established a regular market on shore, just
under the guns of the schooner, where our barterings were

carried on with every appearance of good faith" (299, my

225
emphasis). The "appearance" is "faith"; the operative
dynamic is force.

Just as power, not good will, is the rule of the
market, so power is the interest that rules Pym's perception
of the natives. Pym assumes, for instance, that because the
Tsalalians recoil from the "complexions" of The Jane'e crew,
"it was quite evident that they had never before seen any of
the white race" (289). It is important that Pym be able to
believe that the crew of The_1ehe are the first white men
the Tsalalians have seen in order to lay their claim to the
island. And, when the Tsalalians express apparent
willingness to be exploited by the white crew's proposed
system of exchange, Pym unquestioningly believes what he
perceives as their ignorance, "they being fully delighted in
the exchange"--an exchange which Ifl2.£éfli crew clearly knows
is unfair (hence their pleasure in the "arrangement"), and
which Pym's narrative emphasizes by detailing the precise
value of the beche de mer on the Chinese market. Pym's
knowledge of Tsalalian behavior is never free or objective,
but always shaded by his own investment in the
interpretation. 1

The investment of Pym and the crew actually constitutes
a dangerous blind spot in their observations of the natives.
The crew members feel assured in their assumptions about the
Tsalalians' ignorance because of their confidence in their

superior force (white [is might] is right). Indeed, they

226
cling cognitively to their superiority as they cling
physically to their guns. They assume that the Tsalalians
"took [their guns] for idols, seeing the care we had of
them, and the attention with which we watched their
movements while handling them" (290). Since the crew did
not demonstrate "the certain efficacy" of their weaponry to
the natives, they conclude that the "savages" are unaware of
their function-—despite (indeed because of) the evident
"awe" and fear the natives manifest in the presence of the
"great guns" (304; 290). The guns, however, prove to be the
ghiheef idol, useless in the rock slide attack despite the
great faith the crew places in them. While Pym protests
that the "perfidy" of the natives--their "great... decorum"
and "extravagant demonstrations of joy"-—disarm the crew, it
is, finally their own blindness which ambushes the crew of
tireless.-

It is impossible for Pym (and unnecessary for the rest
of the crew) to reconcile the Tsalalians' "deeply-laid plan"
of ambush with their supposed ignorance. This event in fact
negates all colonial representational certainty and
undermines Pym's textual authority. Pym sidesteps the
issue, by shifting his cognitive framework from "ignorant"
to "treacherous" to explain the event, but another level of
the text suggests an alternative explanation. When, for
instance, Chief Too-wit witnesses the cook accidentally

gashing the deck of the ship, his actions demonstrate a

227
"sympathy" in what he apparently considered "the sufferings
of the schooner, patting and smoothing the gash with his
hand, and washing it from a bucket of sea—water which stood
by." His actions, Pym remarks, evidenced "a degree of
ignorance for which we were not prepared," Yet it was
precisely heeehee they are prepared to arrive at this
conclusion that they fail to perceive the possibility of a
cultural system of beliefs determining Too-wit's behavior
which would help the colonizing crew gather more precise
knowledge about Tsalalian culture. That is, rather than
noting Too-wit's extravagant ignorance, they might have
observed that he displays a reverence for wooden objects.
Inexplicable as that might be, the information could have
also been useful.

Indeed we can only speculate, based on the limited
observations of Pym, at the ways in which the ship's crew
violated Tsalalian cultural norms. The "great astonishment"
that the natives evince when the crew members quickly clear
a flat area of timber might indicate not pleasure, but
displeasure--a possibility which Pym never entertains.
Pym's assumption that the Tsalalians regarded the guns as
idols overlooks the suggestion that the natives knew their
use, and were never fooled by the crew who everywhere
proceeded "armed to the teeth" (303). This is to say that

the "awe" of the Tsalalians can read two ways: as wonder

228
(at having never seen such a thing) or as fear (at having
seen precisely such a thing).

Ironically, while the shipmen are all very poor at
reading the Tsalalians' belief-system, the obverse is
apparently not true. The Tsalalians manage to dupe the
crewmen by turning their sense of security against them.
The Tsalal natives face their visitors unarmed, with a
simple assertion: "there was no need of arms where all were
brothers" (304). The statement is ambiguously double-
barreled: while at one level--the level the crew accepts--
it can mean "we don't need arms because we feel like your
brothers," it can also be a warning, that "if we were
brothers we wouldn't need arms." Furthermore, it pointedly
defines their visitors as enemies-~men who are "brothers"
gehhhhcarry arms. Pym's account suggests that the
Tsalalians were never duped by the crew, but rather acted on
their knowledge of the use of firearms ehg_the crewmen's
sense of security with them in order to trick them into
their death. Thus, these marginalized elements of Eym
calculate the possible ramifications of the self—blinding
basis of colonial "knowledge."

While the Tsalalian episode questions the social
dynamics of colonial interaction, another seemingly
unrelated episode suggests alternative behavioral
possibilities. Before his arrival at Tsalal, Pym pauses to

describe a rookery--the curious living arrangement developed

229
between albatross and penguins. TheSe "coloniiesl" are
described as a social system. They are carefully planned,
"trace[d] out, with mathematical accuracy." Each resident
must contribute to the colony's construction, which is "just
sufficient size to accommodate easily all of the birds
assembled, and no more--in this particular seeming
determined upon preventing the access of future stragglers
who have not participated in the labour of the encampment"
(269). Most importantly, it is integrated. The penguins
and albatross live cooperatively, admitting even "a variety
of other oceanic birds." Pym himself signals its
importance, commenting that "in short, survey it as we will,
nothing can be more astonishing than the spirit of
reflection evinced by these feathered beings, and nothing
surely can be better calculated to elicit reflection in
every well—regulated human intellect" (271).

The birds' collectivity reflects negatively on Pym's
ethnocentric attitudes, which seek not cooperative
integration, but exploitative segregation of humans. Pym's
description of the birds also throws into relief the motives
behind his delineation of human characters. Pym describes
the royal penguin as a stately blend of grey, white, black,
gold and scarlet, whose variegation symbolizes the
integration of his community. Pym also calls attention to
the penguin's "striking ... resemblance to a human figure"--

so striking in fact that it "would be apt to deceive the

230
spectator at a casual glance or in the gloom of the evening
(268). He suggests an eXplicit comparison between the two
groups in this passage and opens up at the same time an
opportunity for comparison between his reading of birds and
men.

His appreciation of social mixture that he sees mapped
in the rookery and symbolized in the penguin does not extend
to humans. Dirk Peters is a "hybrid" of red and white, not
"stately" but "half-breed," not "beautiful" but "deformed"
(209; 150; 189). Peter's conduct, unlike that of his
presumably rational white companions, "appeared to be
instigated by the most arbitrary caprice alone" (205). Some
Eym_scholars have attributed the narrator's curious remark
after the Tsalalian ambush that "we [i.e. Pym and Peters]
were the only white men on the island" to a technical
mistake by Poe.a It seems appropriate to suggest, however,
based on his post-narrative introduction of Peters as "half-
breed" that this classification is one entirely in keeping
with Pym's prior cognitive strategies. As Evelyn Hinz has
suggested, Pym needs an ally when faced by an island of
angry "blacks," and thus his arbitrary racial delineation
shifts to include Peters in the exclusive white club. Once
back in his comfortably white-dominated world, however, Pym
relegates Peters to a "half-breed" caste. Peter's changing
status illustrates the social basis of racial

categorization.

231

TO BE SHADY/TO BE WHITE

Another level of The,Na;;e§ive 2L.AL£DHL.§QLQQB.EXE
reveals the general failure of Pym and his colonial
epistemology to represent Otherness as "radical," to
inscribe a stable opposition between "black" and "white," as
well as between "art" and "nature" which would support
colonial knowledge. Rather, what colonial knowledge Legheee
to know becomes its structuring dynamic. The foregrounded
level of meaning in gym is caught in its desire to reach
some sacred, final point of knowledge that would confirm the
legitimacy of colonial motives. This aspect of Eym, then,
reveals the terminal instability of colonial knowledge and
identity, while it lays bare the repressive means through
which colonial subjectivity and authority operate.

"The transference of knowledge," notes Barbara Johnson,
"is no more innocent than the transference of power, for it
is through the impossibility of finding a spot from which
knowledge could be all-encompassing that the plays of
political power proceed" (1980, 107). As I have suggested,
the colonial motivation to know the nature of various races
of men in The NQLL1L1¥£.QL.ALLBEL QQLQQD.Exm arises from a
complex symbiosis of political, economic and psychological
needs. The second half of the narrative in particular
concerns itself with essentialist racial categories, but is
finally unable to support any such certainty. How racial

knowledge collapses upon itself in 32m becomes evident in a

232
close reading of the narrative's system of binary opposition
between white and black.

Pym imposes a racial interpretation immediately upon
meeting the Tsalalians. Noting almost immediately that the
"savages" who greet The lehe ghy are "jet black," he also
notes their black accouterment: clothing, clubs, and black
stones on the bottom of the canoes. Pym also establishes
their contrast to "the white race," semiotically linking
white sails, eggs, books and flour to the crew of The lehe.
Seamen are not, of course, notoriously white in complexion.
(It is difficult to imagine that every crewman on board The_
lehe_was albino.) Yet it is evidently Pym's priority to
identify his group as white, in direct contrast to the "jet-
black" Tsalalians.

This initial perceptual identification allows Pym to
develop a useful conceptual binary which structures his
knowledge of both groups. Just as he arbitrarily represents
an outward opposition, he depicts correspondingly
antithetical behavior in the two groups. Pym, as well as
the author of the Note, relies unquestioningly on these
perceptual and conceptual oppositions. Closer examination,
however, reveals these binaries as self-collapsing at an
epistemological level-—insupportable fiction, not stable
opposition. Pym's arbitrary classification of outward
appearance ignores, as we have seen, contradictory evidence-

(i.e., even if we grant Pym the "blackness" of the

233
Tsalalians, we know that "whites" are not hhihe).
Similarly, in order to construct a convincing essentialist
argument for racialism, Pym must transform difference Within
human behavior, into difference hehweeh arbitrarily drawn
groups of humans; he must turn, as Johnson puts it in The
ggihleel Qiifezenee, ambiguity into binarity.

The conceptual strategy of binarity, as Johnson further
observes, "presupposes that the entities in conflict be
knowable" (1980, 106). But it is precisely to combat the
unknowable that Pym creates these categories. The colonial
knowledge-structure must codify difference, Pratt has
convincingly argued, in order to stabilize both the identity
of the Subject/Self and Object/Other. Pym's epistemological
certainty about hheh,"black" Tsalalian and "civilized" or
"white" nature fails because he must know in,3 va ce of
knowing. In other words, he must know the Tsalalians to
know how the white colonizer differs, and he must know these
things before he sets eyes on the Tsalalians, in order to
assume the superior right of colonizer--a right assumed from
the moment he began his journey. He must construct a
fiction about knowing that inevitably discloses its actual
failure to know.

The rigid system of color imagery in the text collapses
in a similar manner. As John Carlos Rowe observes, the
black/white polarizations of imagery "are only apparently

oppositions" (100). Paul Rosenzweig perceptively elaborates

234
on the significance of Pym's apparently "insignificant
footnote" in the opening of the Tsalal section. In the
Note, Pym explains that his descriptive use of the terms
"morning" and "evening" are not to be "taken in their
ordinary sense." This is because the daylight is continual,
it still being fall in the southern hemisphere (287).
Comments Rosenzweig: "Something so basic to man's sense of
reality as the cycles of day and night is here revealed as
relative, a mere fiction of artistic license for much of the
narrative" (143). Pym's complacent admission that he can
neither distinguish day from night, nor dates, nor location,
and his continued use of all distinctions, raises
difficulties for other apparently stable oppositions. "How
seriously," asks Rosenzweig, "are we to take Pym's similar
light-and-dark divisions of landscapes and races? Mere
figments of the mind, too?" (143).

Other aspects of the text undermine the strict
black/white imagistic distinction. The final phase of the
southward trip, which relies heavily on light-white/dark-
black imagery, gradually erodes the strict disparity
commonly acknowledged between the two. The vapor from the
south is in fact repeatedly described as "gray"—-a blend of
white and black. Eventually the antithetical sense of the
two words merges into a union. While Pym records the
increasing whiteness of the environment—-the "milky hue" of

the water, the "fine white powder" that falls over them, he

235
also describes the "materially increased" and "sullen
darkness." Like the behavioral opposition that
disintegrates under close scrutiny, the perceived opposition
of black/white color imagery also dissolves in gym,

It would seem that any perceived opposition is
inherently unstable, as Pym himself suggests earlier in the
text. Reflecting on the quality of his experiences through
various stages of his adventure, Pym notes that "so strictly
comparative is either good or evil" that one day's suffering
is another's relief (253). It is, in fact, Pym's nagging
awareness of the unreliability of human perceptions,
compensated for only by an interpretive will, that leads him
late in the narrative to construct another binary, between
art and nature. J. Gerald Kennedy has observed that in the
"Flying Dutchman" scene, in which the mutiny survivors hope
to be saved by a death—ship, interpretation is revealed "as
flagrant self-delusion" (1987, 155). Pym and his crew—
members see what they want to see: a rescue ship. They
persist in their interpretation, accounting for the brig's
wide yawing by adding interpretive epicycles and eccentric
orbits to the providential delivery they believe is coming.
"She yawed so considerably," reports Pym, "that at last we
could think of no other manner of accounting for it than by
supposing the helmsman to be in liquor" (233). Even when
irrevocably confronted with the fact that the ship will not

provide a rescue, Pym and his mates do not relinquish their

236
interpretation: "We plainly saw that not a soul lived in
that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the
dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg" (235).

Pym arrives at a new formulation which will compensate
for human shortsightedness while still confirming colonial
desire for self-confirming knowledge. He comes to suspect
what John Irwin calls "the larger epistemological problem

of whether the mind is a self-verifying apparatus." His
solution is to turn to "the book of nature [as] a self-
evidential text" (Irwin, 93). In Pym's account of the
Tsalalians, his lingering doubts about the apparent nature
of the Tsalalians, although never acted on, prove, like the
Flying Dutchman, that the colonist's interpretive will must
always remain suspect. In hindsight, he muses:

I believe that not one of us had at this time the

slightest suspicion of the good faith of the

savages. They had uniformly behaved with the

greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our

work, offering us their commodities, frequently

without price, and never, in any instance,

pilfering a single article, although the high value

they set upon the goods we had with us was evident

by the extravagant demonstrations of joy always

manifested upon our making them a present (303).

Yet he had noticed evidence to the contrary, with some

discomfort, for instance the systematic reinforcements of

237
Tsalalians on their first march into the village, and the
contempt with which Too-wit greeted the captain's gift of
blue beads. When he and Peters emerge from the gorge after
the avalanche, Pym reports that "luckily a half suspicion of
foul play had by this time arisen in my mind, and we forbore
to let the savages know of our whereabouts" (308). Although
Pym tries to rationalize the deception as being the
Tsalalian's fault ("we should have been the most suspicious
of human beings had we entertained a single thought of
perfidy on the part of people who had treated us so well,"
303), clearly, the crew's fate was the result of their own
self—deception. They had, as Pym "half" suspects, seen what
they wanted to see. Their knowledge, as Pym backs away from
conceding, is not absolute.

To allay his fears, Pym constructs a more sophisticated
binary at this point in the narrative, privileging self-
evident Nature over manufactured art. In so doing, he is
able to displace responsibility for interpretation--the
selfeverifying apparatus of the mind--onto the eternally
inscribed text of the world. This explains his interest in
finding the hieroglyphs "altogether the work of nature,"
even while (and especially because) he recognizes an
indenture that "might have been taken for the intentional,
although rude, representation of a human figure standing
erect, with out-stretched arm" (321). Pym ignores evidence

of human agency--the "vast heap[s]" of "arrowhead flints" as

238

well as the Tsalalians' demonstrated ability to effect
chasms in the rock formation—-to conclude on the basis of
"several large flakes of marl" that the hieroglyphs must be
"the work of nature" (321). He assiduously documents their
scientific interest, an action which reveals the importance
he attaches to their shape.

Similarly, when Peters and Pym enter a ravine, where
"the surface of the ground in every other direction was
strewn with huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some
gigantic structures of art," Pym concludes that "in detail,
no semblance of art could be detected" (325). As with his
evident fascination with the significance of the Tsalalian
water, Pym looks for "natural" evidence of segregation and
order. To accept the hieroglyphs and surrounding ruins as
the product of art--the work of man--means that they are at
once suspect. The product of art ie the product of the
interpretive will, and therefore anything they "reveal" is
as partial (in both senses of the word) as Pym's
interpretations of the Tsalalians. If, on the other hand,
the hieroglyphs can be shown as the work of nature, with the
hieroglyphic figure gesturing to the white figure at the
pole, then all the natural world can be seen working in
concert to confirm colonial desire: the right of white. The
natural domination of the "white" race of man will be

guaranteed not by their own limited and suspect knowledge,

239
but instead inscribed in the Nature of Things, irrefutable
and divinely ordained.

Yet this binary proves no better at sustaining itself
than that constructed between white and black. Merely
discerning between art and nature is exposed as an act of
will when Pym persuades Peters on the basis of ambiguous
evidence that the chasms are the work of "nature":

I convinced him of his error, finally by directing

his attention to the floor of the fissure, where,

among the powder, we picked up, piece by piece,

several large flakes of the marl, which had

evidently been broken off by some convulsion from

the surface where the indentures were found, and

which had projecting points exactly fitting the

indentures; thus proving them to have been the work

of nature (321).

The lacuna signaled by the semi-colon marks the site of
interpretive will. Pym here refuses to consider the fact
that the Tsalalians had demonstrated their ability to render
such chasms in the wall of marl. He denies the significance
of the heaps of (white) arrowheads. In this break, he
imposes his interested intention to interpret the
hieroglyphs as he; the work of man, an intereretetien.which
collapses the structure of the binary as it reveals that

every act of cognition is "art." "Knowledge" is inseparable

240
from the knower's "interest." The distinction Pym wants to
make between art and nature is, finally, artificial.

In uehhhe, a confident Ralph Waldo Emerson observes of
"man" (presumably western, European) that "one after another
his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things,
until the world becomes at last only a realized will" (20).
The Negzetive 2£.ALLDEL.QQLQQE.EXE exposes the process by
which colonial knowledge achieves this exclusive "realized
will." As Emerson aptly suggests, it succeeds only by
reduction: both in its willful blindness and in its attempt
to repress cultural/narrative heterogeneity. The last
chapters and the Note emphasize that authority is
established in colonial literature by limiting the structure
of representation to a speaking, white Subject and a
voiceless, dark Other, and by naturalizing this arbitrary
division and silence.

Richard Drinnon has suggested in his impressive study
Eeeih3,Teeh that for Western colonial civilization, the
dispossession of native peoples became a "defining and
enabling experience," the means by which they "conquered an
identity for themselves" (461). The death of Nu-Nu in the
closing scene of Pym's narrative naturalizes the colonial
structure of representation as it emblematizes colonial
desire. Notably, Nu-Nu's expiration is preceded by the loss
of speech in the increasingly white environment. As Pym

records, "This day we questioned Nu-Nu concerning the

241
motives of his countrymen in destroying our companions; but
he appeared to be too utterly overcome by terror to afford
us any rational reply" (333). The next day, he remains even
more passive: "he breathed, and no more" (333). Nu~Nu
cannot (and must not) tell his story in the white world.
His silence and death provide another proof for racialism as
it confirms "white" identity.

Pym's story is authorized hy,Nu-Nu's silence as well as
by that of Dirk Peters. There are no other versions to
contradict his. By a default that cannot be seen as
coincidental since Pym carefully discredits any version
Peters might offer in his Introductory Note, Pym provides
the author-ized version of the journey. In a sense, then,
the white identity constructed in Pym's narrative demands
the silence of the Other.

The concluding Note similarly assumes interpretive
authority by repressing other voices. Although Pym is dead,
the mysterious author promises that Peters "may hereafter be
found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a
conclusion." Yet the Note itself stands for this
conclusion, offering a redaction that supports Pym's
original colonial intents. Strikingly, the interpretive
strategies of the author of the Note duplicate Pym's even as
he assumes the responsibility of pointing out Pym's
oversights. Like Pym, the author ignores the contradictory

evidence contained in the narrative in order to assert that

242
"nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing
otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region beyond"
(336). And, also like Pym, he fills in gaps with certainty-
-literally--as he notes that while the hieroglyphic
characters of the lower range "are somewhat broken and
disjointed; nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that, in
their perfect state, they formed the full Egyptian word
‘the region of the south'" (336).

The author's interest in documenting the opposition of
white and black becomes apparent in his willingness to
assume that an intentional opposition is inscribed by the
hieroglyphs. There is, in fact, nothing to indicate that
only "to be white" obtains in "the region of the south, or
that "to be shady" is excluded. As we have seen above, the
actual region of the south documented by Pym's narrative
contains both light and darkness, white and shade. Further,
these terms exist in relation to each other (like bad and
good); one is meaningless without comparison to the other.
The conclusion suggested by the author of the Note, however,
that the two are opposed rather than intrinsically related,
exposes the author's own investiture.

The author has indeed an "interest" in his
interpretation. "White" becomes the obsessive emphasis of
the Note, as we see in the last sentences:

Tekeli-li was the cry of the frightened natives upon

discovering the carcass of the white animal picked up

243

at sea. This also was the shuddering exclamation of

the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white

materials in possession of Mr. Pym. This also was the
shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds
which issued from the vapoury white curtain of the

South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and

nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the

region beyond ("author's" emphasis, 336).

The author here focuses upon white nearly to the exclusion
of black. The structure of representation authorizes ehTy
whiteness, just as the interpreted hieroglyphs "point"
solely toward whiteness—-the final sanction of colonial
domination. The text must silence and repress the Other
even as it maintains the negative presence of the Other as a
point of comparison ("nothing white ... nothing otherwise").
Like the black/white binary, colonial authority is
meaningless without reference to the other.

The litany of "white" establishes the point of colonial
subjectivity and authority. This subjectivity is
constituted through its comparison to the Other, precisely
as that Other is excluded from subjectivity. Susanne
Kappeler outlines the repressive structure of
representation:

The ... project of constituting ... subjectivity is

a serious business that has nothing to do with

fictional and playful fantasy. It is the means by

244
which the ... subject convinces himself that he is
real, his necessary production of a feeling of
life. He feels the more real, the less real the
Other, the less of a subject the Other, the less
alive the Other. And the reality he creates for
himself through his cultural self-representation is
the Authorized Version of reality (62).
Colonial subjectivity and authority, as both the ending of
Pym's narrative, and the appended Note make clear, is
premised on the presence of the Other, only under erasure:

the continued death of the Other.

THE (Poarimomo or am
The Nerretixe at w t Mn am finally offers a

negative social medicine, in that it subverts the basis of
the model it represents without proposing an alternative.
Its conclusion, however, is not "frustrating indeterminacy."
The narrative emphasizes the material effects of colonial
ideology while it undermines the pretensions of colonial
knowledge to disinterested objectivity. Colonial knowledge,
as gym reveals, is nothing if not "interested" and willful.
Two comments of the author of the Note underscore this
dynamic. First, he announces that "it would afford the
writer of this appendix much pleasure if what he may here
observe should have a tendency to throw credit, in any

degree, upon the singular pages now published" (335). And

245
in outlining the "white" confirmation contained in Pym's
narrative, the author writes, "Conclusions such as these
open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture"
(336). The ambiguous words "afford ... credit" and
"speculation" all highlight the pecuniary motive of colonial
literature. "Interest" initiates the text, and
"speculation" on whiteness provides the "conclusion"——a
fiction crisscrossed by the traces of the colonial will to
power.

Despite a wide range of fairly promising reviews,
Burton Pollin documents the surprising failure of gym on the
market.6 It was, perhaps, the refusal of The_Narrative e;
ALLBEL.§QLQQE gym,to resolve its own issues in any specific
way that frustrated some of the contemporary readers of the
work. An unsigned notice in the he! Tent flexLeh calls the
book "perplexing and vexatious" (Quoted in Walker, 98), and
a London Speegeho; review complains that the book is
"without any definite purpose" (Quoted in Walker, 103).
Sales of the book apparently dwindled in the critical
irresolution over its intentions. As one reviewer spoofs,
"Arthur Pym is the American Robinson Crusoe, a man all over
wonders, who sees nothing but wonders, vanquishes nothing
but wonders, would, indeed, evidently, scorn to have
anything to do with wonders" (Quoted in Walker, 105).

Exm}s intellectual stalemate may be, however, precisely

246

what makes it so attractive to modern theorists of American
literature. As G. R. Thompson summarizes,

Despite the astonishing range of readings, what

emerges from all the critical attention is that

there is in gym a coherent and symmetrical

structure of events that generates a haunting

ambiguity. Once regarded as an unfinished or

hastily finished mistake, the arabesque romance of

Aether G on gym exemplifies Poe's method of

resonant indeterminateness and his affinities both

with modernism and postmodernism (174).
The "affinity" that Eym_shares with these modes of theory is
not, however, unproblematic. Nancy Hartsock has highlighted
some important pitfalls in modernist and postmodernist
theory in a recent article, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority
vs. Majority Themes." As she summarizes, postmodernist
theorists propose a "social criticism that is ad hoc,
contextual, plural and limited" as a counter against
"totalizing and universalistic theories such as those of the
Enlightenment" (190). But, she argues, the theoretical
agenda of postmodernism has more in common with
"Enlightenment paradigms and values" than postmodernists
would care to acknowledge. "Somehow," she observes, "it
seems highly suspicious that it is at this moment in
history, when so many groups are engaged in ‘nationalisms'

which involve redefinitions of the marginalized Others, that

247
doubt arises in the academy about the nature of the
‘subject,’ about the possibilities for a general theory
which can describe the world, about historical ‘progress'"
(197).
gym may suggest doubt, as current post-structuralist
critics claim, about the nature of the Self and its origin.

But there is no doubt expressed in The Narrative 2£ Aethur

 

Goggen gym_about the relation of the Subject/Self and
Object/Other in colonial ideology. The final pages of the
narrative and the Note epitomize Hartsock's model:
The philosophical and historical creation of a
devalued Other was the necessary precondition for
the creation of the transcendental rational subject
the creation of the Other is simultaneously the
creation of the transcendental and omnipotent
theorizer who can persuade himself that he exists
outside of time and space and power relations (191;
195).
As Hartsock perceptively indicates, the construction of the
colonial Self is predicated, as we have seen in gym, upon
the devaluation, the domination and the continuing
destruction of the racial Other.
Russell Reising has recently warned against theoretical
tendencies to derealize literature, to denature its social
basis and agenda. As he notes, "for many contemporary

theorists, the question of American literature's social or

248
historical significance is not so much engaged and
transcended as it is ignored" (200). Overlooking Eye's
broadly social basis wrongly implies the unimportance of
these connections between literature and material reality.
Such criticism also overlooks the important challenge that
it makes to any critical enterprise. gym is not finally
about "the willed incoherence of the text itself"
(Kennedy,176), "the duplicity of the sign" (Rowe, 107), the
origin of the "writing self" in the "uncertainty between
body and shadow" (Irwin, 234) or the fact that "the ultimate
secret is not to be found" (Thompson, 274). Although the
novel is to some degree about all those, what it most
clearly emphasizes is the problematic, even violent basis of
colonial knowledge (theory), subjectivity and authority. It
is not solely about absence of meaning, but about the
impulses--social, political, economic--that undergird the
construction of any system of meaning. The haggegjve 2i
Ahhhh1,gehgeh_aym offers a serious examination of the
questionable motives behind the interpretive will and very
real material ramifications of those interpretations. As
such, it should pose a difficult question to contemporary

theorists about their own theorizing activity.

249

NOTES

1. As Paul RosenZweig notes, "most seem unable to
resist the lure of ascribing an illuminating meaning to both
the figure and ending" (137). Conclusions on the meaning of
Pym are various, and any summary would be lengthye-a quick
categorization will suffice here. By far the most
thoughtful and extended analysis of Eye is John Irwin's
nearly two-hundred page treatment in Aheeieeh hieeeelyhhiee.
Here, he considers Pym as a metaphysical exploration of the
relation of being, knowledge and death. For analyses of Eye
as death wish, see, for instance, William Peden; as hoax,
David Ketterer (1978; 1979), Richard Kopley, J.V. Ridgely;
bildungsroman/mythic journey, Leonard W. Engel, Roger
Forclaz, Richard Levine, Kathleen Sands, John Stroupe, Grace
Farrell Lee; metaphor of artistic process, Daniel Wells;
metaphysical negation, Paul Rosenzweig (1980), Joel Porte;
metaphysical affirmation, Curtis Fukuchi; metacommentary on
origin of reading/writing, Jean Ricardou, J. Gerald Kennedy
(1987); social satire, Evelyn J. Hinz, Hinz and Teunissen,
J. Gerald Kennedy (1973); social commentary, Harry Levine,
Sydney J. Kaplan, Edwin Fussell, Eric Mottram;
psychoanalytic treatment, Marie Buonaparte, Leslie Fiedler;
epistemological search for knowledge, Paul John Eakin, John
Carlos Rowe, Joan Dayan, A. Robert Lee; epistemological
negation of knowledge, Paul Rosenzweig (1982). For a more
thorough consideration of trends in criticism on Poe, see
Douglas Robinson's useful article.

2. Many thanks to Professor Bernard Rosenthal for
extensive personal correspondence outlining the history of
the controversy since the publication of his essay in 1974.

3. Racialism, as Tzvetan Todorov formulates it, is the
attempt to establish a scientific or natural basis for
racism. Racialism as a movement in the scientific community
saw extended currency from the mid-eighteenth through the
mid-twentieth centuries. While racism is still operative,
racialism is discounted, and 'race' is no longer an
acceptable biological category. See 172-175.

4.Many readers have uncritically made this mistake.
The comments of John Stroupe here indicate the general trend
of such analyses: "Pym does not die, and it is not
necessary that he die to escape the savages of Tsalal, who
are black (i.e. evil) ... Thus, if the Tsalalians do not
only appear evil, but are evil, then, by contrast, the white

250

figure who destroys the savage is a representative of good--
an affirmation. Perhaps Poe is suggesting that Pym comes to
an affirmation of life through the confronting of evil ..."
(320). Similarly, Fukuchi observes that the "Tsalalians
exemplify greed and primitive ignorance [and] are condemned
to live in darkness" (155), while Richard Levine comments
that "Tsalal is the island of blackness, the sphere of total
depravity. The island is strange and the natives exist on
an animal level ... depraved individuals whose very teeth
are black" (31). By the same standard, critics like Joseph
Moldenhauer characterize Dirk Peters as "an important
embodiment of the perverse, dramatizing the imp in all its
ambiguity" (269).

5. Burton Pollin, in his impressive annotation of gym,
suggests that "perhaps Poe had vaguely intended to revise in
earlier portions Peters' Indian ancestry and neglected to do
so" (335, n. 21.78). He elaborates in his Introduction that
"the instinctive workmanship of Poe ... prevented him from
constructing an entirely artless book" but that "without
question, in style gym is Poe's least careful, least
polished work (14; 12).

6. See Pollin, 1974, 1975, and particularly 1978, in
which Pollin queries, "Considering the total two dozen
American reviews by now found and recorded,the question
again arises: Why did Harper and Brothers have to
acknowledge that their sales of so promising a book by so
‘accomplished' writer were so low?" (10).

CHAPTER SIX
"FOR THE GAZE OF THE WHITES":
THE CRISIS OF THE SUBJECT IN "BENITO CERENO"

INVOLUNTARY CHOICES

Like The_Nar;ative e; Arthu; gogdeh gym, "Benito
Cereno" participates in the antebellum dialogue on white
destiny, colonial expansion, and racialism. Allan Moore
Emery, who applauds recent scholarly recognition of
Melville's political engagement, insists that "Benito
Cereno," not hehy high, is the "primary piece of evidence"
for this case. In the story, Melville created a "political
tale with timeless implications," the most important concern
of which was (as in gym), "American expansionism" (48-50).
Delano's actions on the San Dominick foreshadow the policy
of "interventionism of mid-century Americans"; his rhetoric
of charity, like that of Manifest Destiny, is merely
"camouflage for a largely ‘piratical' enterprise" (53, 55).
Sandra Zagarell likewise argues that "Delano's smugness is
characteristic of the prevailing American political and
cultural climate of the 1850's" and that the story "lays
bare the elaborate ideology by means of which Americans
denied the historical implications" of slavery (245). She
finds that "in the traditions Melville's Delano carries
forward, exploration is inseparable from colonization, free

251

252
enterprise from slavery, profit from plunder" (256).
Through his trenchant expose of Delano's "sentimental
racism" as capitalist self-interest, Melville questions (and
exposes) the "inadequate histories and hierarchical
ideologies" of nineteenth-century Americans (247, 255-57).

Various other readers have shared Zagarell's concern
with how "Benito Cereno" reflects on Melville's own racial
stance. Melville scholars such as F. O. Matthiessen,
Charles Neider, Joseph Schiffman and Sidney Kaplan have
argued that "Benito Cereno" reveals Melville's racism,
however unconsciously. Other critics, including Carolyn
Karcher and Charles Swann, through close reading of this
text and other's in Melville's oeuvre, maintain that
Melville's intention in "Benito Cereno" was quite the
opposite.‘ They argue that in the story, Melville questions
and even radically subverts American racism of the
antebellum period. While the diverse conclusions of these
scholars either preclude or problematize any pat conclusions
concerning Melville's own intentions for the text, they do
confirm that "Benito Cereno" has something important to say
about the operations of racism.

It is the argument of this chapter that in "Benito
Cereno," Melville questions the dominative structure of
Western conceptualization, epistemology and representation.
Through its presentation of the slave revolt on the San

Dominick, and the ensuing legal process, "Benito Cereno"

253
effectively brackets the concept of ‘race,' disproving its
ontological basis and recognizing the political/social/
economic genesis of racial oppression. Yet while portions
of the text undermine racialist polarities, it never seems
to beyond questioning to a countervening anti-racist
account. On the contrary, the story is finally arrested in
a consuming sense of horror that may well supersede the
earlier questioning. In the end, "to rush from darkness to
light was the involuntary choice" (292). Babo, at last, is
"the black," defined, punished, and emblematized by "the
whites."

To account for this arrested dynamic, we need to look
more closely at the epistemology which undergirds Delano's
reading of events on the San Dominick and after.2 We might
begin first by noting the conceptual structure Delano relies
on, opposing black in every instance to white. Second, we
should examine the evident, indeed, overwhelming relief he
feels toward Don Benito when the "truth" of the matter
overcomes him. It is this "infinite pity" which he feels on
behalf of his "host" that provides the clue to Delano's real
crisis. A careful reading of the implications following
Delano's crisis will concomitantly illuminate the full
significance of that final, horrific image of Babo's impaled
head, and the complicated structure of racial representation
that at once delimits "the gaze of the whites," and

paralyzes "Benito Cereno."

254

THE GRAYNESS OF EVERYTHING
Through the eyes of the (self-proclaimed) well-

intentioned Amasa Delano, we see the essentialist knowledge—
structure of the slave economy. The order of nature is, for
the captain of The Bachelor, self-evident. Despite the
narrator's observation that, on the day described in the
story, "everything [was] gray," Delano insists on seeing in
black and white. Even when he cannot discern the nature of
the curious ship he sights (it "showed no colors"), he
imagines that he sees a "whitewashed monastery after a
thunderstorm," inhabited by "dark moving figures ... as of
Black Friars pacing cloisters" (241). Similarly, once
aboard the ship, Delano persists in forcing all evidence
into his conceptual,framework, despite his growing
discomfort at the uneasy fit.

Just as Delano's perception is controlled by a

conceptual binary, black and white, so is his interpretation
of events governed by his assumptions about the essential
character associated with each color. Taking the slaves
"genially," he relies on his certitude that "whites" are "by
nature the shrewder race" and that "blacks" are "too stupid"
to worry about (279; 270). Accordingly he attributes the
ominous sight of the six Ashantis sharpening hatchets to
"the peculiar love in negroes of uniting industry with
pastime," explaining their threatening activity to himself

as "unsophisticated" cymbal-crashing (243). By the same

255
token, he wonders at Don Benito, "this undemonstrative
invalid ... apathetic and mute," of whom "no landsman could
have dreamed that in him was lodged a dictatorship beyond
which, while at sea, there was no earthly appeal" (246). It
is impossible for Delano to entertain the notion of black
power; it is equally impossible for him to envision a fellow
"white" without it. Where The Neggahive e; ALLDEL.§QIdQD
Eym_describes an attempt to naturalize racial opposition and
hierarchy, in "Benito Cereno," it is fait accomplis. Like
the negro saluting the French flag in Roland Barthe's
analysis of "Myth Today," Babo's evident devotion to Don
Benito signals to Delano the "beauty of that relation"
between black and white, "a spectacle of fidelity on the one
hand and confidence on the other" (250). Babo's particular
history, the particular history of slaves on the San
Dominick, and the more general history of slave oppression
and Western trade are elided in the image of devoted slave
and master.

Zagarell observes that "when Delano finally discovers
the true nature of the blacks' position, he shifts
effortlessly from sentimentalizing them to brutalizing them
as monsters" (248). Like Pym, then, Delano's recognition of
the slaves "with mask torn away ... in ferocious piratical
revolt ... like delirious black dervishes" (295) is still
grounded in racist essentialism. He has learned nothing

about the slaves, but has merely substituted one

256

essentialist label for another: blacks are now not by
nature innocent, but depraved. The result of this is to
deny the slaves on the San Dominick any historical or
subjective dimension, which is to say that the conceptual
strategy which structures his "revelation" prevehts him from
ever realizing the "true nature of the black's position."3
By denying them historical cause, Delano denies the slaves
subjectivity. Thus, he keeps them safely objectified, never
having to regard them as any more than animals, either
Newfoundland dogs or wolves (279, 299).

We see the instability of this racist conceptual
strategy, however, in Delano's reflections on Don Benito.
As Emory observes, American cultural prejudices against the
Spanish were rife throughout the periods during which
"Benito Cereno" was both set and composed (61-62). While
the American Delano is eager to be welcomed by the
"gentlemanly" Don Benito as an equal, the more uneasy he
becomes, the more he is drawn to reflect on Benito Cereno's
"yellow hands" and "dark" complexion and moral character
(243, 251, 263). Thus he is alternately torn between
considering "Spanish" as an essentialist category, or a
national appellation. Increasingly disturbed by Don
Benito's apparent coldness, Delano wonders about a Spanish
conspiracy: "might not that same undiminished Spanish crew,
alleged to have perished off to a remnant, be at that very

moment lurking in the hold? On heart—broken pretense of

 

_‘

 

257
entreating a cup of cold water, fiends in human form had got
into lonely dwellings nor retired until a dark deed was
done" (245, 262). The collapse of moral nature and physical
appearance that distinguishes racist thought becomes
complete when Delano laughingly muses on "the dark Spaniard
himself, the central hobgoblin of all"--despite his earlier
observations on the "pale invalid" (263; 258). The tension
between his twin impulses to essentialize Don Benito, and to
recognize him as equal becomes evident when he reflects that
"these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard
has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it. And
yet, I dare say, Spaniards in the main are as good as folks
as any in Duxbury, Massachusetts" (273-74).

The ultimate infirmity of racist conceptualization is
highlighted in Babo's replacement of the ship's figurehead
with the bleached-white bones of Don Aranda, and his
question, "whether, from [the] whiteness [of the bones], he
should not think it a white's" (304—305). Essentially, as
Babo's gesture graphically affirms, when you get down to the
bare bones, there is no difference. Racial difference is,
then, demonstrably superficial, its significance,
artificial. This is a recognition that Don Benito refuses
to countenance and Delano does not comprehend. Like every
other Spanish crewman aboard the San Dominick, Don Cereno
"covered his face" when Babo tries to make him look on

Aranda's skeleton (305). As in gum, then, the "whites" must

258
systematically blind themselves to large portions of their
experience if they are to maintain their conceptual
dominance.

While Delano relies on a rigid conceptual opposition
between white and black, it is important to note that they
are pegeephueiiy interchangeable in certain instances. The
narrator underscores Delano's quirky manipulation of
characterization in a passage where Delano decides to accost
one of the sailors directly. Despite his earlier musings on
the sailors' darkness, Delano here regards them as "whites":
he proceeds onto the poop, "curiously surveying the white
faces, here and there sparsely mixed in with the blacks,
like stray white pawns venturously involved in the ranks of
chessmen opposed" (265-66).‘

It is curious, given the perceived opposition here,
that Delano proceeds to identify the first white sailor he
observes with darkness. The narrator describes the sailor's
contradictory appearance:

The mean employment of the man was in contrast with

something superior in his figure. His hand, black

with continually thrusting it into the tar-pot held

for him by a negro, seemed not naturally allied to

his face, a face which would have been a very fine

one but for its haggardness. Whether this

haggardness had aught to do with criminality, could

not be determined; since, as intense heat a cold,

259

though unlike, produce like sensations, so

innocence and guilt, when, through casual

association with mental pain, stamping any visible

impress, use one seal—-a hacked one (266).
Appearance, the narrator pointedly underscores, is
equivocal, and as such, is insufficient evidence for
evaluation. Delano's reflections on the sailors, then,
reveal not only the inadequacy of his perceptions, but
suggests political motives for them. The generosity he

holds out to Don Benito does not extend to his crewmen,

whom

Delano repeatedly associates with darkness, vice, thievery

and subterfuge:

Because observing so singular a haggardness

combined with a dark eye, averted as in trouble and

shame, and then again recalling Don Benito's
confessed ill opinion of his crew, insensibly he
was operated upon by certain general notions which,
while disconnecting pain and abashment from virtue,
invariably link them with vice.

If, indeed, there be any wickedness on board

this ship, thought Captain Delano, be sure that man

there has fouled his hand in it, even as he now
fouls it in the pitch (266).

"It is charity," observes Zlatic, "that prevents Delano

from

harboring any suspicions of Cereno, but that same remarkable

charity leads him to suspect this innocent sailor, since the

260

alternative would be to admit there is unmerited misery in
the world" (332). In order for Delano to affirm his own
dominance, his "progress as king-at-arms" (265) as deserved,
he must perceive those whom he dominates as deserving of
their less fortunate position. Accordingly, he seizes.
clearly tenuous "evidence" of their inferiority, associating
it here and elsewhere with darkness.

Tellingly, Delano sees the white sailors as "pawns"--
social inferiors and as such, objects for his purposes.
This is a revealing point, for Delano's position of
dominance and authority is not constructed on solely racial
terms. Earlier, when Delano is musing on Don Benito's
indifferent reception of Delano's aid, he notes that "even
the formal reports ... made to him by some petty underling,
either a white, mulatto or black, [Don Benito] hardly had
patience enough to listen to" (247). The category "petty
underling" conflates racial categories, and, significantly,
whites are an interchangeable term within the overall group.
This is to say that Delano's epistemological structure does
not simply oppose white to black, but rather opposes a
certain group of whites to a much larger group composed of

whites, mulattos and blacks.

A PRIVILEGED SPOT
As Sandra Zagarell notes, of all Delano's worries while

on board the San Dominick, "uppermost ... is a strong—minded

261
devotion to preserving a highly vertical institutional
organization" (249). Delano is troubled, in part, by what
he perceives as a lack of proper authority on the San
Dominick: "What the San Dominick wanted was, what the
emigrant ship has, stern superior officers. But on these
decks not so much as a fourth-mate was to be seen" (247).
The captain of the Bachelor's Delight expects a reflection
of "good order" in "armies, navies, cities or families, in
nature herself" and his mental appeals to providence and a
higher order mark his faith in the natural sanction of such
hierarchy (244; cf. also 272, 293).

In particular, Delano is disturbed by Don Benito's
reluctance to command. "I know no sadder sight," Delano
muses, "than a commander who has little command but the
name" (253). He is reassured, though, when offered evidence
of his counterpart's dominance. Atufal's padlocked figure
provides a recurring comfort to Delano, along with other
"signs" of order:

Atufal's presence, singularly attesting docility

even in sullenness, was contrasted with that of the

hatchet-polishers, who in patience evinced their

industry; while both spectacles showed, that lax as

Don Benito's general authority might be, still,

whenever he chose to exert it, no man so savage or

colossal but must, more or less, bow (288).

262
These markers of Don Benito's authority remain nonetheless
"equivocal," and Delano alternately attributes his doubts to
Don Benito's "icy though conscientious policy" of command
(246) or ill-health.

Delano's continuing unease with Don Benito is
compounded by Benito's apparent refusal to grant some sort
of fraternal recognition of Delano's authority. Assuming
from the first that his "host" will appreciate "a brother
captain to counsel and befriend," Delano is "not a little
concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to
be Don Benito's unfriendly indifference toward himself"
(245). He is eased somewhat to note the "pervading reserve"
of Benito's manner, extended to all on board and not
manifested in particular toward himself (247). Markedly,
Delano is only marginally aware of his reception among the
others on the ship. The only opinion that counts is Benito
Cereno's, as we see when Delano muses just before leaving
the ship that "after good actions one's conscience is never
ungrateful, however much so the benefited party may be"
(293). While many of the others on board have clearly
manifested their appreciation of the relief provided by
Delano and the crew of the Bachelor's Delight, Delano is
only interested in the recognition of Don Benito.

Expecting relations of "hospitality and business"
(291), he welcomes every sign of intimacy between himself

and Cereno. He seeks constantly that "privileged spot"

263
where two captains can converse on equal footing, such as
"sociable plan" Babo proposes for the two captains to
continue in conversation while Don Benito is shaved (248,
277). Delano is anxious to establish a mhtuei relationship,
as when he invites Don Benito to board his ship: "Come, all
day you have been my host; would you have hospitality all on
one side?" (290). And when Don Benito at last displays a
willingness to bid a courteous farewell to Delano, that
captain registers a "pleased surprise," and "reciprocally
advanced ... with instinctive good feeling" (293). The
tension between Delano's need to recognize Don Benito's
authority, and his need to have Don Benito recognize his
lends a crucial insight to the dynamics of the power at
stake in Delano's world.

Eric Sundquist has suggested that the most compelling
aspect of "Benito Cereno" is that "authority ... is caught
in point of crisis and held in precarious suspension" (1987,
87). Delano, as Sundquist explains, in his role as guest
must defer to the authority of his host, Benito Cereno. Don
Benito's exercise of power, however, is enigmatic, and
therefore problematic for Delano, whose position on the ship
is suspended then between guest and victim. Increasingly
worried that rather than recognizing his guest's authority,
Don Benito seeks to usurp it, Delano begins planning to
withdraw the command from Benito Cereno, who "evidently, for

the present ... was not fit to be intrusted with the ship."

264
Relieved of his duties, Delano reasons, Don Benito will "be
in some measure restored to health, and with that he should
also be restored to authority" (264). This line of
reasoning allows Delano to assume that Don Benito's curious
actions stem from a temporarily displaced authority, not a
malign use of it, that once rested and restored, all will be
aright, the proper relation between the two captains
restored. These thoughts, according to the narrator, are
"tranquilizing." Ironically echoing Delano's penchant for
black and white, the narrator observes that "there was a
difference between the idea of Don Benito's darkly pre—
ordaining Captain Delano's fate, and Captain Delano's
lightly arranging Don Benito's".(264). The difference is,
of course, that he suspects Cereno of malign motives, while
Delano only seeks to restore "good order." But does he?
Clearly, Delano has "no small interest" invested in his
transactions--social and business--on the San Dominick
(239). He is looking for compensation at least for his
generosity, as he politely intimates after his meal with Don
Benito. And finally, his pursuit of the renegade ship
belies his "interest." Despite Don Benito's warnings,
Delano appoints his chief mate, suggestively described as a
"privateer's man," to head up the capture. To encourage the
sailors he explains that the ship's captain "considered his
ship good as lost; that she and her cargo, including some

gold and silver, were worth more than a thousand doubloons"

265

(297). His assumption that Cereno has surrendered
responsibility for the ship is apparently based on Cereno's
warnings against pursuit; at any rate, his hasty conclusion
here underscores his primary motive--money--and his
eagerness to participate in system that exploits human life
for profit.

We might recall that earlier, Delano "cannot call" Babo
a slave, rather he terms him "friend"--a term, we might
note, he also applies to Don Benito (250, 290). He pleads
on behalf of Atufal, and reflects, with pity for Babo's cut
cheek, "this slavery breeds ugly passions in man!" (256,
283). Yet despite his protestations of cross-racial
sympathy and friendship, it is unthinkable to Delano that a
"white" could be "so far a renegade as to apostasize from
his very species, almost, by leaguing in against it with
negroes" (270). Delano also offers to buy Babo, a curious
gesture for a man who cannot call Babo "slave"--apparently
not, at least, until he owns him (265). Further, when
Delano realizes what is Leelly taking place on the slave
ship, he turns violently against Babo. This moment is
important: Delano realizes that Babo is not trying to kill
him, but Don Benito, and he is ehgeleh because of that
realization. Why is Babo more dangerous to Delano as Don
Benito's assailant?

The answer to this lies in how Delano formulates his

sense of self and relation to others, which is, as this

 

 

 

 

266
discussion has suggested, based on a model of domination.
Questions of power, as Nancy Hartsock has observed, are
intrinsic to questions of community, and concomitantly,
questions of epistemology. Hartsock explains:

Theories of power are implicitly theories of

community. To examine ... theories of power is to

involve oneself in the questions of how communities.

have been constructed, how they have been

legitimized ... perhaps more important, efforts to

explain how power operates inevitably involve

larger questions as well, and different theories of

power rest on differing assumptions about both the

context of existence and the ways we come to know

it (3).

By looking more closely at Delano's understanding of power,
we can understand his model for interpersonal relations, how
he constructs a sense of Self in relation to community--en
route to an epistemological understanding of just what is at
stake for Delano on the San Dominick.

Delano's first moments on the ship indicate his
expectations, as he overlooks in a "first comprehensive
glance ... those ten figures, with scores less conspicuous,"
seeking impatiently "whomsoever it might be that commanded
the ship" (243). Delano awaits Don Benito's account of
events as the authorized version: "the best account would,

doubtless, be given by the captain" (247). We later see

267
that for Delano, issues of authority, command and power are
tied intrinsically with issues of ownership, as when Delano
asks of Don Benito, "You are part owner of the ship and
cargo I presume" (254). Relations between the two, the
construction of community among ship captains, is ultimately
based on economic issues. Delano boards the ship to offer
assistance. Once he does so, he prolongs his visit in order
to discuss economic arrangements. And he is frankly
surprised that Don Benito "appeared to submit to hearing the
details more out of common propriety, than from any
impression that weighty benefit to himself and his voyage
was involved" (286). Benefit and profit, apparently, are
the bottom of the matter for Delano. Hospitality, then, is
but a prelude to business, the real reason for interrelating
in Delano's world. Community, for Delano, is constructed by
and through economic relations, constituted by selected and
isolated individuals seeking profit. Interrelation occurs
through "a brief association on the basis of [a] momentary
conjuncture of interest": Delano has what Don Benito needs
(44).

But community formed on the basis of capital or market
exchange can only be, in Hartsock's words, "instrumental and
arbitrary" (44). Delano's model is what Hartsock would term
a "fragile community." Its fragility is compounded not only
by its instrumental temporality, but its exclusivity. In

Delano's model for community, the slaves are part of the

268
cargo, not part of any potential community. Nor are the
sailors accorded equal status as members of Delano's
community, as we see when he begins wondering "how come
sailors with‘jewels?--or with silk-trimmed undershirts
either?" Ownership is intrinsically connected with
command; sailors are not in command. Therefore they must
have stolen the valuables: "has he been robbing the trunks
of dead cabin-passengers?" (261). The sailors are closer in
status to the captain than the slaves-~Delano does consider
consulting various sailors when Don Benito is not
forthcoming. Yet they are just as easily overlooked. The
main body of people on the ship are, in short, "pawns"--
objects used by the captain of a ship for profit and gain.
An asymmetrical Subject/Object structure is erected, where,
in Kappeler's words, "the role of subject means power,
action, freedom, the role of object powerlessness,
domination, oppression." Clearly, as Kappeler observes,
"the two roles are not equally desirable" (52). Nor is
there any basis for intersubjectivity. Delano does not
expect to relate with any of the men on board the San
Dominick except Don Benito, and when he does so, he speaks

to sailors at last resort.

A BACHELOR'S DELIGHT
Within Delano's epistemology, then, the status of

Subject is derived from supremacy, not intersubjectivity.

269
Community is constituted along three axis of domination:
race, class and gender. While "Benito Cereno" scholars have
long focused on racial dynamics, only Sandra Zagarell has,
to my knowledge, commented on the aspect of gender in the
construction of power in this story. Observing that
commentators have traditionally referred to the "homoerotic
coloring" that Delano attributes to the relationship of
Cereno and Babo, Zagarell argues instead that "grounded as
it is in a reversal of power, the relationship actually
reveals the literal instability of gender." Melville makes
this point to prove that not only are race and gender
cultural constructs, but "all meaning in his readers' world
derives from convention" (251).

While it may be true that ultimately the point is the
instability of meaning, it is equally true that a stable
relationship and set of expectations are associated with the
concept of gender, particularly in "Benito Cereno." It is
important that while women are hardly present in the action
of the story, they are imaginatively present in nearly every
instance of domination, and their metaphoric significance
cannot be overestimated here. The Subject-position is
equated with male status, the Object with female. We see
this imaginative system at many points in "Benito Cereno."
Most often noted, of course, is the scene where Babo has
just appeared, bleeding from a cut he says was inflicted by

Don Benito. Delano ruminates on the ugliness of slavery,

270
but when the master and slave reappear, "as if nothing had
happened," Delano thinks, "but a sort of love-quarrel, after
all" (283). As Zagarell points out, Babo's behavior toward
Don Benito blends "feminization with domestication" (251),
behavior which Delano finds reassuring.

Delano also derives a great deal of satisfaction from
viewing a negro woman and her infant. The sight not only
provokes a philosophical reflection on "naked nature" and
the reproductive traits of "uncivilized women," but it
"insensibly deepened his confidence and ease" (268). It
seems obvious at this point to suggest that the sight
deepens Delano's confidence and ease--both shaken by his
doubts about his position on the San Dominicke-because they
reconfirm his status as Subject. The "slumbering negress"
is doubly objectified in Delano's epistemology: both woman
and African, she is two times a servant. Similarly, Delano
is "charmed" by the sight of the chained Atufal (292).
While Atufal himself is an undoubtedly masculine figure,
"like one of those sculptured porters of black marble
guarding the porches of Egyptian tombs," his role is
feminized by the symbolic value of his chains, and his
subservience to Don Benito (287). Babo elucidates for
Delano: "the slave there carries the padlock, but master
here carries the key" (256). Delano absorbs the
significance of the key "suspended by a slender silken cord

from Don Benito's neck," and with a smile, observes "So, Don

271
Benito-—padlock and key-—significant symbols, truly".
Delano is offended this time at Don Benito's reaction. Don
Benito, it seems, either didn't get, or did not appreciate
the joke, Delano's "playful allusion to the Spaniard's
singularly evident lordship over the black" (257).

Relations of gender domination are also symbolically '
present in Delano's musings on the mulatto servants. In a
patriarchal, capitalist system, miscegenation had only one
permissible (i.e., legal) equation: white (Subject) owner-
male plus black (Object) slave-female. In this context,
Delano's interest in seeing improvement in the offspring of
this interaction is ironically revealing: "for it were
strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins,
if a little of our blood mixed with the African's, should

have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black
broth" (284). Even the imagistic metaphor he chooses is
suggestively gendered.

Woman, as a gender category, is most clearly
objectified in metaphors for the ships in "Benito Cereno."
The name of Delano's ship is plain enough, The Bachelor's
Delight. The use of gendered pronouns, an "accepted"
practice among seamen, coupled with dominative verbs,
reinforces cultural praxis. Delano surveys the stranger
ship in the opening passages of the story with uncertainty:
"she" is indecisive, and "it seemed hard to decide whether

she meant to come in or no—-what she wanted or what she was

272
about." Delano at last comes to a decision. "Surmising
that it might be a ship in distress, Captain Delano
prepared to board her, and at the least, pilot her in"
(240). Elsewhere, Delano tellingly compares his boat to a
"New-foundland dog," a comparison he has earlier made to
blacks, completing the association between women, blacks and
service-objects (271).

These aspects of gender metaphors and domination
combine in "Benito Cereno" to confirm what Hartsock explains
as the "symptomatic ... cultural confusion of sexuality,
violence and domination" (165). More specifically, she
explains sexuality as a "gendered power relation" (164).

The association of power and maleness with Subject-status in
"Benito Cereno" thus become most clear in the court
deposition when it focuses on the role of the "negresses" in
the revolt. These women, who unlike their male countrymen
remain unnamed, audaciously attempt to declare Subjectivity
through assertion of power and violence. Their actions are
apparently so excessive that the women are restrained by the
(presumably male) "negroes" (310), as the deposition
records. Perhaps worse than their physical actions, the
African women use the power of their voice willfully to
inflame the violence. These women who vocalize and act with
violence are arguably the largest threat to the system
ascribed to by Delano and Don Cereno, and reproduced in the

legal documents, for they most radically call into question

273
the racist and sexist underpinnings of the legal and social
system that has enslaved them.

As Zagarell notes, there are only two positions in
Delano's ideological system: victor or victim. All
relations are based on dominative and gendered power
relations, but the only exercisers of power are those
accorded status as Subject--that is, as male, non-African
owners of capital. That Delano expects power-plays between
Subjects becomes evident in his persistent suspicions of Don
Benito. But the largest threat to his epistemological
system is precisely the one that is unthinkable: the
challenge issued by Objects in the system, black "cargo."
Th1e_provides the answer to the question posed earlier, of
why Delano becomes angrier to realize that Babo is trying to
kill not Delano, but Don Cereno. If Babo is defending Don
Benito by trying to kill Delano, his actions provide direct
confirmation of Benito's subjectivity, thereby upholding
Delano's epistemological system. If, however, Babo is
trying to kill his "master," he is directly challenging the
system that affords him only Object status; that is, he is
acting to seize his own Subjectivity. As such, his actions
are profoundly threatening to Delano as well as to Benito
Cereno. Delano's reaction-—both the physical and mental
blow to Babo along with the "infinite pity" he feels toward
Don Benito--at once reestablishes his Subjectivity and

community.

274

The problem for Don Benito is somewhat larger and more
destructive. He has been forced to exchange places with
Babo: Babo is in actuality the thinking/acting Subject and
Cereno is the Object of the ex-slave's manipulations.
Further, Babo makes a travesty of Don Benito's former
Subject-status by §2££lflfl.him to assume the
role he once eemmeheee, While Delano perceives Don Benito's
"lordship" over Atufal and Babo, the worst indignity he
apparently suffers, as many commentators have observed, is
being emasculated via his secret status as Object, signified
by the "artificially stiffened" scabbard that he sports, not
a real sword at all. Rather it is Babo who carries an
"alert ... dagger" (306), which he shows Don Benito to
command his submission. While Delano only momentarily
recognizes a real threat to his status as Subject, and is
able to quickly overpower the danger, Cereno is fully robbed
of his, a horror which is clearly, from his subsequent
actions, unbearable and ultimately fatal. For this reason,
Don Benito cannot stand to face Babo, living evidence of the
arbitrariness, the temporality of the racist ideology he
shares with Delano and the court of Lima. He cannot
identify Babo, since that power-~the power of naming, of
authorship--is the power of the Subject. All he has left,
as Carolyn Karcher astutely notes, is blame for the

inadequacy of the Subject community upon which both he and

275

Delano have relied. "You were with me all day," he accuses
Delano,

stood with me, sat with me, talked with me, looked

at me, ate with me, drank with me; and yet, your

last act was to clutch for a monster, not only an

innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To

such degree may malign machinations and deceptions

impose. So far may even the best man err, in

judging the conduct of one with the recesses of

whose condition he is not acquainted. But you were

forced to it; and you were in time undeceived.

Would that, in both respects, it was so ever, and

with all men (314).
Cereno still clutches at racist essentialism, at Subject
community. Denying the historical dimension of the
situation, and, ergo, his responsibility, he whines of
abstract "malign machinations." Just as Delano expected
interrelation between Subject-captains, so did Don Benito
rely on Delano's understanding. Ultimately, however, Don
Benito realizes the frailty of his power, his Subjectivity,
his community, his epistemology, testified to by the
modality of his last sentence, "E221Q.Lhé£.--~ it was so
ever, and with all men."

More and more, Don Benito retreats into silence,
silence being in "Benito Cereno" the marker of Object—

status. Delano, upon first boarding the ship, notes the

 

 

 

276
"noisy indocility" of the slaves: whenever the Object
speaks without the command of the Subject, she/he speaks out
of turn (245). Even Babo's "conversational familiarities,"
clearly in service of Don Benito, begin to annoy Delano
(256). Indeed, though Atufal's muteness is sign of his
resistance (he will not beg pardon), it is also a sign for
Delano, combined as it is with his complete obedience,
respect and general docility, of "royal spirit." In short,
though he will not ask forgiveness, his silence marks him as
a good slave. Because Delano cannot comprehend the reversal
of roles on the San Dominick, he does not understand that
silence can be subversion as well as submission. Likewise,
he does not comprehend the reversed dynamics of
communication between sailors and slaves, for instance the
"old Barcelona tar" whom he decides to consult for
information. The sailor at first attempts to escape
attention, then reluctantly confirms Delano's queries. The
narrator notes that "the negroes about the windlass joined
in with the old sailor; but as they became talkative, he by
degrees became mute, and at length quite glum, seemed
morosely unwilling to answer more questions, and yet, all
the while, this ursine air was somehow mixed with his
sheepish one" (267). Robbed of his Subject-status (relative
as it is in comparison to the captain's), he by degrees
loses his voice, his position an unfamiliar combination of

dominant bear and powerless sheep. Much in the same manner,

277
unable to recover from his trauma,” Don Benito by degrees
sinks into silence. The communication systems utilized by
the patriarchal epistemology which dominates Don Benito's
world are inadequate--as they are for the Objects of the
system--to communicate his experience. Yet, patriarchal
communication systems are upheld and reconfirmed by the
legal and aesthetic discourse in "Benito Cereno." Indeed,
these two systems of communication actively sustain and
propagate the power-structure ascribed to by Delano--a
structure which reproduces the power of the white male

Subject.

THE BEAUTY OF THAT RELATIONSHIP
Arguing that Western representation is a sexist and
racist system of communication, Susanne Kappeler observes
that within the traditionally conceived Western
representational system, there "is the structure of
production and consumption represented by two white men"
(15). She elaborates:
there is collusion between the two white men of the
picture. They look at each other. One is the
host, the other his guest. There exists a
structure of identification and solidarity, a
common purpose, a shared understanding, a
communicated pleasure between them. What is more,

there are further white men: in the courts.

278

While the interrelation or mutual confirmation of power and
Subject-status that should have happened on the San Dominick
between Delano and Don Benito fails initially, this failure
is recouped by the Lima Court. As Kermit Vanderbilt has
observed, the Lima court "succeeds Delano's crew as the
narrowly vindictive ... instrument of white oppression"
(318). The court documents duplicate and magnify the
impersonal, ahistorical and essentialist tendencies of
Delano's epistemology. "Race," in the court deposition, is
an appendage, a marker of less-than-Subject (or human)
status. "The negro Babo" rings repeatedly through the text,
"negro" brought to fore as the court in effect re-names the
slave, his "legal identity" confirmed by the "testimony of
the sailors" (315). Conversely, Don Aranda and Don Benito
are identified racially only in the context of Babo's quoted
remarks; otherwise, they are named simply Don Aranda and Don
Benito. The linguistic structure of naming in the court
document becomes reminiscent of a common feature of
language: man/(wo)man, where the prefix marks essential
Otherness, and Object-status. Thus, in every instance
identified as "the negro Babo," the slave is denied
Subjectivity and historicity, and is instead essentialized.

Strikingly, too, as Vanderbilt points out, the court
views the blacks, but not the whites, as "defendants in a
‘criminal cause'" (318).‘ As Object-Others in a white, male

legal-system, the slaves are silenced; nowhere is their

279
testimony solicited, except through the medium of white male
hearsay (read authority). It is significant, then, when a
peculiar phrase appears near the end of the extract from the
deposition: "that all this is believed, because the negroes
have said it" (310). Confirming as it does the acquiescence
and willful participation of all the slaves, both male and
female, in the revolt, this "testimony" is strategic. The
voice of the defendants is (indirectly) invoked only in
terms of self-indictment.7 The passive construction of the
sentence is no accident, conveying a universal and objective
judgement on behalf of a very limited, very interested
group.

The power of legal discourse is recognized by the
slaves as well. Halfway through their revolt, they seek to
draw up a "paper," a legal contract between the slaves and
Don Benito and his crew, promising not to kill any more in
exchange for a safe voyage to Senegal and the ship and its
material cargo. Legal language, then, is one of the many
patriarchal/capitalist apparatuses that the slaves seek to
subvert and manipulate to their purposes, having recognized
its efficacy in the "master's" system. Charles Swann
discusses Melville's fascination with the active power of
legal discourse. "Here is a language," Swann notes, that
unlike the powerlessness of novelistic discourse "does,
frighteningly, have effect, that can speak--and enact--

‘capital sentences'" (10).

280

The court of Lima both figuratively and literally
enacts a sentence on Babo, which confirms the purpose of the
trial. We should note, however, that the purpose of the
trial was not to find the slaves guilty--that is a given.
Rather, the sentence is enacted to prove that the "whites"
on the ship were in every way responsible to the community
of fellow white male Subjects, as the deposition at one
point observes: "these statements are made to show the
court that from the beginning to the end of the revolt, it
was impossible for the deponent and his men to act otherwise
than they did" (311). Babo's punishment is thus the emblem
of white guiltlessness.

In sentencing Babo's head to be affixed to a pole for
the "gaze of the whites," the legal discourse of the Lima
Courts merges with another kind of discourse prominent in
"Benito Cereno"--that of the aesthetic. The two types of
discourse exist in a symbiotic relation; legal discourse
sanctions power for an elect group, while aesthetic
discourse defines pleasure. Babo's head as a legally
produced artistic object both symbolizes this power and
provides its viewers a pleasurable sensation of power and
life. To understand how this is so, we must first turn to
Delano's seemingly benign reflections on "beauty" in "Benito
Cereno."

As the court's language employs a mask of disinterested

universality, so do Delano's aesthetic observations reflect

281

a sense of beauty emanating spontaneously from the object.
Beauty, that is, is an object-function; it does not arise in
the interest of the viewer-Subject. Delano's attention "had
been drawn to a slumbering Negress." He is passively led to
notice her, to recognize her as an object of beauty: "Ha,
there now's a pleasant sort of sunny sight." As Delano
watches her, she "started up, at a distance facing Captain
Delano." "Not at all concerned at the attitude in which she
had been caught," she proceeds to ignore Delano and kiss her
child (267). The language in this passage is important,
suggesting as it does a certain artistic setting. "Facing"
the viewer or artist, the object of interest, the "mother,"
is "sight[ed]" and "caught." This scenario establishes the
artistic vantage point: apparently unconscious of Delano's
gaze, the mother continues in "maternal transports." He
sees her, she remains oblivious to him; he has "caught" her
unaware, much as an artist recognizes and captures his
artistic object.

The scene continues:

There's naked nature, now; pure tenderness and
love, thought Captain Delano, well pleased.
This incident prompted him to remark the

other negresses more particularly than before. He

was gratified with their manners: like most

uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of

heart and tough of constitution; equally ready to

282

die for their infants or fight for them.

Unsophisticated as leopardesses, loving as doves.

Ah! thought Captain Delano, these, perhaps, are

some of the very women whom Ledyard saw in Africa

and gave such a noble account of.

These natural sights somehow insensibly

deepened his confidence and ease (268).

Delano recognizes the other women as objects of admiration
and beauty, just as did Ledyard before him. Like the sight
of the original "slumbering negress," these other "noble
women," commonly (if speculatively) viewed by both men
afford pleasure, "insensibly."

Jan Mukarovsky has discussed extensively the social
function and construction of aesthetic norm and value. He
argues that there is a "relation between social organization
and the development of the aesthetic norm" (49). That is to
say that "aesthetic value is not inherent in an object: in
order for the objective pre-conditions to be effective,
something in the arrangement of the subject of aesthetic
pleasure must correspond to them" (28). The subject--
artist/viewer--must be either individually or socially
motivated to "discover" beauty in any object. For this
reason, then, although any particular aesthetic norm
"strives to attain universal validity, it can never achieve
the force of natural law" (26), simply because it is a

social, and therefore dynamic, construct.

 

 

 

283

Mukarovsky comments also on the pleasure associated
with the aesthetic: "Another important feature of the
aesthetic function is the pleasure which it evokes. Hence
its ability to facilitate acts to which it belongs as a
secondary function, as well as the ability to intensify the
pleasure connected with them; cp. the use of the aesthetic
function in child-rearing, dining, housing, etc." (22).
Using Mukarovsky's comments as guidelines for our analysis
of Delano's reflections on the "slumbering negress," we can
now begin more clearly to understand the social dynamic of
the aesthetic function for Delano in "Benito Cereno."

As Delano revealingly notes, the "sight" is "sunny
[and] quite sociable, too" (267). While the language of the
passage, in its passive construction, pretends to a
universal and disinterested recognition of beauty in the
women, it conceals evidence of its political and social
agenda. I suggested above that part of the appeal of this
sight for Delano rests in its confirmation of his superior
racial, gender and class position. Another part of its
appeal is the community it constructs between Delano, and
another man, Ledyard, in their common (disinterested and
therefore objective) recognition of beauty. And, as
Mukarovsky delineates, another part of the aesthetic value
of the scene Delano views lies in its imperative to certain
types of action, its naturalization of certain kinds of

social relationships. Thus Delano aesthetically idealizes

284
and naturalizes the woman ("naked nature") as "uncivilized"
in her position as social inferior, "negress," in her role
as slave, and "mother," in her reproductive (and therefore
profitable) capacity.

Clearly the focus is less on the O/object than the
advantageous social arrangements and sensations that result
from viewing her for the artist/viewer/Subject. Kappeler
suggests that this is because the picture or artistic Object
is always "the true icon of its author" (52). She
illustrates her argument by using language as a metaphor:

As a speaker, I am always present as the subject of

my speech: I may represent myself by means of the

pronoun ‘1' within my utterance, or I may never say
‘I' or ‘me' at all, and yet I am implicitly

present, the author of my speech, the speech the

token of my presence (52).

Likewise, the artist is the "speaking I" of the
representation, communicating to "another subject--the
spectator or reader," his "guest." Artistic representation,
like language, is a structure that creates and confirms
community between the artist and viewer, speaker and
listener, between two Subjects. Through aesthetic
recognition, then, the viewer identifies himself with and
confirms his place in the Subject community.

We can see the structure of this community if we

analyze another of Delano's reflections on beauty. Shortly

285

after Delano boards the San Dominick, he prods an
explanation of the ship's plight from Don Benito. As Don
Benito attempts to recount the exemplary behavior of the
slaves on board, he falters repeatedly, apparently weak. He
finishes by commending Babo above all the slaves, whereupon
Babo humbly protests that "what Babo has done was but duty."
Here, Delano congratulates Don Benito on such a "faithful
fellow," and pauses to reflect:

As master and man stood before him, the black upholding

the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of

the beauty of that relationship which could present

such a spectacle of fidelity on one hand and confidence

on the other. The scene was heightened by the contrast

in dress, denoting their relative positions (250).
Once again, we have an artistic "scene," an objective and
passive recognition of "beauty." This time, the important
difference is the physical presence of a white in the
"scene." We should observe, however, the position of Don
Benito. He may be physically supported by Babo, but to
Delano, this is further proof of Don Benito's Subject—
position relative to Babo's placement as Object. If we re-
examine the verbal transaction just before this "snapshot,"
this dynamic will become clear. Don Benito has just
testified to Babo's efficacy in subduing the other slaves.
This is to say that at a point of incipient rebellion among

the Objects on the ship, Babo alone remained submissive to

286
his Object status, acting on behalf of his "master" in
maintaining the Subject—status of Cereno. In the face of
this compliment, Babo does not assume authority; rather he
is self-effacing, confirming his passiveness, accepting his
powerlessness. Delano responds to this PX.§QEQ£§LEL§£1£Q.
th hehihe, cementing the Subject-community by acknowledging
Cereno's dominance and ownership of Babo. Thus, in the
scene that Delano admires, Don Benito is the artist; he has
created the "beauty of that relationship." Delano joins
with Cereno in admiring the Object that he has created, the
happily dominated slave Babo.

Kappeler comments incisively on the relation between
representation and reality, fact and fiction. Rather than
being disjoined and mutually exclusive, Kappeler argues that
they exist in symbiotic relation, one feeding the other.
Representation ie_acting in the world. Further,
"subjectivity of viewing goes over seamlessly into agency in
the world" (58). Critics have made much of Delano's
"repudiation" of slavery (when he reflects on Babo's cut
cheek) and the subsequent irony of his offer to buy Babo.

As I hope this analysis would indicate, there is no irony in
his offer to buy Babo. He very clearly identifies himself
with the position of Cereno, occupies the same Subject space
as privileged, dominant, owner-master. It is not
contradictory, then, for him to offer to buy the slave from

Don Benito. Rather, it is only the seamless extension of

287

his appreciation of "the beauty of that relationship," the
validation of his Subjectivity.

We are now in a position to return to a consideration
of that final image of the impaled head of Babo as a
repgieei of the scene just analyzed above. As I have
argued, Babo's head is placed on the pole by the Lima court
as an ehhijeeh, a re—presentation of his sentence, as an
emblem of white guiltlessness. His punishment, then, is
marked by a structure of representation strikingly similar

to that suggested above, and to another which Kappeler
presents as part of her framing argument in The_Eh;hhh;ehhy

BSELQESELQELQE- In a section entitled "Fact and
2t

Fiction," Kappeler analyzes the photographic evidence of the
torture and death of black South African Thomas Kasire.
Kasire, who was recently employed on the farm of the white
van Rooyen, was accused by him of being a supporter of the
South Western People's Organization. As Kappeler
summarizes, van Rooyen one weekend took Kasire hostage,
invited his drinking pals to the farm, and for two days
systematically tortured and eventually killed Thomas Kasire.
The photographs, which were used as evidence in van Rooyen's
trial, were, argues Kappeler, an intrinsic part of the
torture:

The coincidence of this kind of violence and its

representation is no accident. It is no curiosity in

the domain of representation. The pictures are not

288
documentary evidence, snapped by a journalist or
observer by chance in the right place at the right
time. The pictures are compositions, deliberate
representations, conforming to a genre. The victim is
forced to ‘pose'; the perpetrator of the torture
positions himself in the other picture with reference
to the camera. Another white man is behind the camera,
framing the picture (6).
Like the photographs of Thomas Kasire, the impaled head of
Babo is also part of a "genre," a recognizable structure of
representation which carried a certain host of associations,
and a certain positioning of participants. Babo's torture
and death, like that of Kasire's, plays out a sophisticated
structure of representation: through that re-presentation,
the whites re-affirm their dominance, enact the structure of
representation in their viewing, and carry it seamlessly
into their realities. Just as Delano recognized the
"beauty" of the master/slave relation and offered to buy
Babo, the white audience identifies with the scenario
constructed by the court of Lima. They enact its sentence
physically, as they participate in Babo's torture, and
metaphorically, as they "gaze" on his head, the "gaze"
constituting their Subject-community. Thus the "final
tragedy" of "Benito Cereno is not, as Eric Sundquist would
have it, that Delano cannot identify with Cereno (Sundquist,

1987, 100). Rather, it is that neither Delano nor Benito

289
Cereno can identify with the humanity of Babo. Both men,
Delano only momentarily, Cereno much more fully, experience
the dehumanization of being subversively rendered
Object/Other under Babo's authority. But neither the
Spanish nor the American captain are able to recognize the
horror of dehumanization when it is reimposed on Babo
through the legal authority of the Lima court. To the
contrary, both men reassume their place as Subjects and
participate in asserting the universality of Subjectivity.
The Africans' subversion of the power structure is rendered,
through legal discourse, an abeggetion; the power structure
itself remains intact and unquestioned. Slavery and racism,
as Western institutions, are heh the horror of the story for
Delano and Cereno, rather, it is the specter of the possible
assault on their status as Subjects presented by one
anomalous African. As such, Babo's severed head embodies
this horror for them while it reifies white Subjectivity and

its essentializing structure of representation.

HIS VOICELESS END

The narrator's horror is different. His horror might
be described as an overwhelming sense of helplessness
against the effectiveness of the racist system which
reproduces its dominance by beheading Babo. Of all the
texts under consideration in this dissertation, "Benito

Cereno" is the most incisive in its recognition of the

290
conceptual, epistemological and representational structures
that support the racist economy. As diverse commentators
have noted, however, in "Benito Cereno" the text of the
narrator reaches a point of paralysis, where "past, present
and future seemed one."” "Black" and "white" may be
artificial and even dangerous conceptual constructs, but
gray, for the text, is a state of irresolution, of
uncertainty. In the "voiceless end" of Babo, "Benito
Cereno" acknowledges the inadequacy of the racist,
patriarchal and capitalist structure of communication in
representing the experience of the Object of that system.
The narrator, echoing the silence of Babo, is not able to
voice an alternative to the essentialist dilemma. Though
the text lays bare the insidious motivations of the racist
system, it does not offer a final redeeming solution, or a
promise of progress, but only a despairing collapse of
history into timeless and repeated oppression.

The narrator's dilemma in "Benito Cereno" is many ways
paradigmatic of the texts examined in this study. Alongside
the narrator's acute analysis of racial persecution and a
capitalist system of domination is his inability to think
freely outside that system. Like Mather, the narrator is
unable to escape assigning a metaphysical significance and
unchanging opposition to "black" and "white." Like
Sedgwick, the narrator analyizes the terms of the

perceptual/semiotic problem, yet cannot free himself from

291
relying on those very terms. Like Poe's Eym, the text
offers a negative medicine--a critique, but no imaginative
alternative. "Benito Cereno," like the other texts
considered, is governed by an economy of contradiction which
echoes that of racist thinking. Whether supporting or
subverting racism, these texts are ultimately suspended by

their own contrary urges: either, like high 21 the Teege,

they collapse distinctions of Otherness in the process of
enforcing Difference, or, as in Romence‘hfi LE2 Bepubiie,
they refuse to confront cultural difference in order to
declare Sameness. Replaying rather than reforming their
society's ambivalence about "race," these texts, like
"Benito Cereno," may have dissipated their own alternative
social vision, enforcing instead what JanMohamed aptly terms
a "privileged stasis." Thus, it might be said that the
activity of these texts in the world was as much to mediate
Anglo-American guilt about inequity, as to change Anglo-

American society in fundamental ways.

THE MEANING OF "RACE"

"The meaning of race," as David Brion Davis observes in
a recent review essay, "remains curiously elusive." He
questions, "to what extent is race an ideological
construction?" (34). The project of this study has been
not to answer Davis's question definitively, but to suggest

the texture of the Anglo-American literary dialogue which

292
concerned itself with the issue of "race." It has not been
my goal to reduce these texts to their least common
denominator; rather, I have been concerned with exploring
the variance between these texts, to investigate the
literary uses of "race" as--to use Raymond Williams's words-
-an "active history, made up of the realities of formation
and struggle" (210). My approach is meant to highlight the
active role that literature has played and plays in shaping
material and social reality, in conceiving of and suggesting
strategies for dealing with "race." As Williams argues, "to
see the full social dimension of [literary] ... production
is to take it more seriously and more seriously as itself
than has been possible in more specialized political or
aesthetic perspectives" (210).

It seems difficult to generalize about a group of texts
as diverse as those represented here--texts chosen, in fact,
for their diversity. Their similarities were only in that
they addressed the issue of "race," and that they
functioned, as I have argued, rhetorically, as "social
medicine." One last common feature that must be
acknowledged is their common appeal to what they variously
construct as a "white" audience. hegee iLQE America
enthusiastically extolled the opening of new land to its
British audience; "Benito Cereno" incisively castigates the
dominative social structure of its Anglo-American audience.

Each text considered here, no matter what its political

293

ends, establishes a rhetorical structure between a "white"
author and a "white" readership.

Kenneth Burke argues that the function of "rhetoric" is
"to confront the implications of division" between "men"
(22). While the subject matter of each of these texts
addresses the divisions between racial groups in America,
each text rhetorically addresses divisions between "ghihe"
readers over the issue of race. Clearly there was no
consensus; each text proposed a kind of model, a perspective
on race for its conflicted readership. And finally, this
common rhetorical positioning, white author to white reader,
seems to lead to an ineluctable conservatism. No matter how
progressive the impulse of the text, in discussions of
"racial" intermarriage from Byrd's fliehogies to Child's
Eomance for example, the perspective always failed to
relinquish some last vestige of "white" privilege. As a
result, texts with progressive missions like "The Negro
Christianized" nonetheless affirm the superior right of
white accumulation, and likewise, A.Bemenee.et.the.Be22blie.
unquestioningly endorses white class-structure and culture.
This trend might suggest the inevitable conservatism of what
Todorov would term a third-person structure of
representation: the racial Other, in this
rhetorical/representational structure, remains an Object.
Perhaps the only truly constructive confrontation of this

subject comes in direct dialogue with that objectified

294
Other, authorizing the voice, as Sedgwick suggested, of the
victim of American racial history and representation.
Perhaps the Anglo-American failure to do so--both in

literature and action-—was the problem from the very start.

 

 

 

295

NOTES

1. Matthiessen pays only brief notice to "Benito Cereno."
While he regards it highly ("one of the most sensitively
poised pieces of writing [Melville] had ever done" 373), he
faults Melville for a certain naivete in his "theatrically"
drawn slaves: "Although the Negroes were savagely
vindictive and drove a terror of blackness into Cereno's
heart, the fact remains that they were slaves and that evil
had thus originally been done to them. Melville's failure
to reckon with this fact within the limits of his narrative
makes its tragedy" (508). Seven years after Matthiessen's
comments, Charles Neider argued that in altering Delano's
actual account of the mutiny, "Melville glosses over
extenuating circumstances in his effort to blacken the
blacks and whiten the whites, to create poetic images of
pure evil and pure virtue" (10).

In 1962, Sidney Kaplan was to formulate this position
most explicitly in response to the question he posed for
himself: "what did Melville mean?" (16). For Kaplan,
"Benito Cereno" represents a regression from Melville's
earlier, more liberal and humane stances on racial issues.
"The reverse symbolism of hehy Qich, it must be concluded,

is simply not present in "Benito Cereno ... looked at
objectively, the tale seems a plummet-like drop from the
unconditionally democratic peaks of Thite Jaeheh and heby

Qiehfl (23). For a time, Kaplan's arguments seemed powerful
enough to persuade Joseph Schiffman, who had earlier argued
for "Benito Cereno" as a condemnation of slavery (1950). In
his 1962 introduction to "Benito Cereno" in Three §h°£t§1
helele e1 hehmeh_heTTTTTe, Schiffman equivocates on his
earlier stand, concluding that "in highlighting the savagery
of the rebellion, Melville sullied his tale with racism--an
element which detracts from the stature of ‘Benito Cereno'"
(235).

In her exhaustive study of Melville's attitudes toward
race and slavery, Carolyn Karcher argues that "Benito
Cereno" is foremost "an exploration of the white racist mind
and how it reacts in face of a slave insurrection" (128).

In this, she takes up Joseph Shiffman's suggestion in 1950
that "‘Benito Cereno' as a story flows from two sources:
first from Don Alexandro's mistaken belief that his slaves
were tractable, and, second, from Delano's inability to
perceive that a slave rebellion was occurring under his very
eyes ... In depicting the short-sightedness of those who
thought slavery was acceptable to other people, Melville was
condemning slavery" (321). Karcher, discovering a deep

296

ambivalence in Melville, carefully qualifies her own
conclusions: "while disputing the claim of some critics,
that Melville champions the cause of slave revolt in ‘Benito
Cereno,' one can nevertheless exonerate him from the charges
of racism that others have leveled at him for having
exhibited slave revolt in such an appalling light" (143).
Scholars since have generally accepted and followed
Karcher's careful historical and contextual analysis.
Charles Swann's recent work (1984; 1986) tackles the issue
again, qualifying the findings of both Kaplan and Karcher.
He finds that Melville's "deconstructs" his racist readers,
"unmasks by unbalancing the ideology" of racism (10). "The
more the Southern reader accepts Melville's picture of the
blacks--that the smiles of servitude may be masks and that
one cannot tell the difference--the more unstable his world
picture becomes and the more destabilizing Melville's
seeming assent to the dark part of that divided world
picture" (12). While "Benito Cereno" is not a radical
gesture, Swann concludes, it is a "nudge in the right
direction."

Two books provide a representative sample of this
debate through 1964: nelxillete."Eenite.2eteee." John P.
Runden, ed. (1965); and A ”Benito gegehg" heheheeh, Seymour
L. Gross, ed. (1965).

2. Zlatic describes a naive if obtuse Delano, who "is
faithful and has confidence in an optimistic and rational
view of an orderly and beneficent universe," whose
consequent "faith makes him incredulous of anything which
does not conform to that view" (335). For Zlatic, then,
Delano "is not mercenary nor ruthless, but he nonetheless
exploits the docility of the blacks, not so much for
monetary gain but for corroboration of his moral and
metaphysical outlook" (339). Somewhat differently, Emery
sees Delano's mentality as the embodiment of "the
interventionism of mid-century Americans," describing him as
"jaunttyl" and "bold" and motivated finally by "a simple
desire for financial gain" (53-54). Sandra Zagarell expands
Emery's reading of Delano in her analysis of Delano's
ahistorical and apolitical ideology. "Elaborating a complex
ideology, [the story] also dramatizes the epistemological
fancy footwork Delano must perform in order BEL to

understand what is amiss on the San Dominick" (246). In
rewriting Delano's Neggehive, Zagarell argues, Melville

"reverses the real Delano's portrait of himself as a moral
innocent, recasting him as a minor originator of the self-
celebrating hypocrisy that allowed Americans to think
themselves historically unique" (247).

3. Zagarell makes this point in her essay somewhat
differently. See esp. 248.

297

4. Ironically, Delano relies on a conceptual strategy
that opposes white to black in a power-play without
considering the logical extension of his metaphor, that the
black side too must have a king contesting for dominance.

5. And much like a rape-victim, as Sandra Zagarell
astutely observes (251).

6. While Vanderbilt's essay is interestingly argued, I
have to state at this point that I have profound
reservations about his conclusion, that the point of the
story is the "merging intimacy and identity" between
oppressor and oppressed (316), that through their actions on
the San Dominick, the slaves implicate themselves in the
same structure of domination and oppression as that which
they seek to overthrow. Superficially, this conclusion
seems sound, but to find slaves therefore complicit in their
slavery (or the slavery of history, see 319) is a process of
rationalization much like that seen in the court documents
of "Benito Cereno," where the voice of the blacks is
credited only where it indicts them. It seems much more to
the point to historicize the motives for action on either
side; where the whites in the story act clearly for economic
gain, the blacks strike from a very different motive: they
desperately want their freedom.

7. We might also speculate that in this usage, as just
previously, "negroes" is only intended to refer to the male
members of that group, in contrast to the "negresses,"
thereby allowing the male slaves to confirm their
subjectivity over the females (who are thereby doubly
silenced) by voicing their condemnation.

8. Commentators have long marked Melville's "realistic"
approach which refuses simple resolution (see, for instance,
Miller and Phillips in Cross). More recently, critics have
studied Melville's text less for its stylistic than for its
epistemological implications. Edgar Dryden observes that
"if the theme of ‘Benito Cereno' is in part the
fictitiousness of social, political, and religious forms,
its method is a demonstration of the illusory nature of the
architectonic fiction. As the limited point of view in the
first part of the story reveals, the intricacies of human
life can never be revealed by the carefully rounded and
self-contained fiction ... the subversive nature of truth
forces all meaningful fictions to end in ‘disappointing
sequels'" (208-209). Both Zagarell and Emery elaborate on
Melville's historic vision, which was "less pleasantly
‘progressive,’ more grimly repetitious" (Emery, 67).
Vanderbilt concurs that in the end, the vision of "Benito
Cereno" does not transcend to an alternative strategy, but
"coils endlessly" on "inquisitorial" violence and oppression

298
(322). Karcher's observation that Melville was "as
tragically paralyzed as most of his contemporaries in the

face of the nation's most pressing moral and political
"Benito Cereno."

dilemma" (143), extends equally to the text of

AFTERWORD
"WITHIN THE PALE OF HUMAN BEINGS”:

COMMUNITY IN W 111 THE. HEEL QB am GIRL.

In his recent discussion of "the political
responsibility of the critic," Jim Merod argues that "texts
are records not only of verbal or conceptual possibilities,
but no less of communal and interpersonal possibilities"
(100). Each of the texts considered in this study
constructs a vision of community in different ways, some
including, some excluding the racial Other that it
discusses. Yet in every vision of community, segregated or
integrated, "white" privilege remains entrenched. I have
suggested that perhaps this is because of an inevitable
conservatism in the rhetorical structure of white author
addressing white audience. While it would take book to
explore this possibility fully, it seems appropriate to
consider briefly another text, this one addressed by its
"black" author to a "white" audience: Harriet Ann Jacobs'
mummuamxem.

Given the signal failure of the texts discussed here to
model strategies that would effect a truly egalitarian,
integrated society, it is important not to overlook the
achievement of a work like Jacobs'. Evidencing, in Abdul
JanMohamed's words, a "sustained negation of the attempted

299

300

hegemonic/ideological formation" (246), incigents Th the

Alfie e; e iLilQ gig; effectively undercuts racialist theory

of the pre-Civil War era. It does so by insistently linking
racial categories to their social definition, by positing a
common denominator-~humanity—-that links blacks and whites,
and by modeling effective social action as a corrective to
the material structure of racism.

iheieehte acutely perceives that the political
structure of patriarchy was sustained by both racial and
gender domination. This awareness is manifest in the
rhetorical structure of the text, as well as in the analysis
and narrative strategies of the narrator. Linda immediately
positions her text as an appeal to Northern white women:

I have not written my experiences in order to

attract attention to myself; on the contrary, it

would have been more pleasant to have been silent

about my own history. Neither do I care to excite

sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do earnestly

desire to arouse the women of the North to a

realizing sense of the condition of two millions of

women at the South, still in bondage, suffering

what I suffered, and most of them far worse (1).
Later, in a direct address to her "Reader," Linda identifies
herself as part of a slave "sisterhood," referring to "my
sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once

suffered" (29). More importantly, however, Linda situates

301

her white Northern readers as part of that sisterhood,
encouraging them, through subtle narrative strategies, to
confront their own oppression in and complicity with the
patriarchal social system.1 In the same passage in which
Linda refers to her "sisters," she tells a tale of two
sisters, "one ... a fair white child; the other ... her
slave." She briefly chronicles their lives:

The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman.

From childhood to womanhood her pathway was

blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny

sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded

when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning.

How had those years dealt with her slave

sister, the playmate of her childhood? She, also,

was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of

love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin,

and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race

are made to drink (29).
Linda here forces in her reader a recognition of an
unspoken, unspeakable "sisterhood," between women of both
"races," master and slave. In doing so, she at once evokes
moral indignation against this "illicit relation" while she
breaks down the racial binary (black vs. white) by depicting
a social relationship where they are opposed only in

circumstance. Notably the slave sister, in contrast to the

302
"fair child" her owner, is nowhere identified by her skin
color, but only in terms of her social status.

Linda's vision of interracial sisterhood is
sophisticated and complex. While the tale above concludes
with a beautiful marriage for the fair child, projecting a
happy future for her if not for her slave sister, Jacobs is
at pains elsewhere in Theleehhe to disburden her reader of
this illusion. While the Southern woman slave owner is
privileged in many ways, she too is a victim of patriarchy.
Linda elaborates several times in her narrative on how white
women are exploited; at one point she makes the issue
particularly real for her Northern reader. Northerners, she
observes, "are not only willing but proud to give their
daughters in marriage to slaveholders." They are fostering
a destructive illusion, as Linda explains:

[They] have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and

of the flowering vines that all the year round

shade a happy home. To what disappointments are

they destined! The young wife soon learns that the

husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness

pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of

every shade of complexion play with her own fair

babies, and too well she knows that they are born

unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred

enter the flowery home and it is ravaged of its

loveliness (36).

303
If the sentimental novel, ending typically with the marriage
of the heroine, contains an ironic acknowledgement that
perhaps no happy days would follow, Theieehhe makes explicit
that irony.2 Jacobs emphasizes that the form to which she
refers her own story-~the sentimental novel-~is inadequate
to describe women's life as slave or mistress under a
patriarchal slaveocracy.”

Linda's account focuses insistently on women, and
women's experiences. She highlights their related (but
unequal) entrapment in a vicious system, depicting, for
instance, a woman who was so kind to her slaves that when
she offered to free them just before she married, her slaves
loyally refused to leave her. Her new husband unfortunately
did not share his wife's generosity, and cruelly exploited
the slaves. Legally unable to intervene, the wife endured,
and died "glad to close her eyes on a life which had been
made wretched by the man she loved" (51). This example and
others underscore an unacknowledged hierarchy of power in
patriarchal slaveocracy: if slaves are subject to their
white masters (of both genders), the white mistresses are
subject to hhei; (white) master as well.

Linda's assessment of the victimization of Southern
white women extends even to Mrs. Flint, her violently cruel
mistress. Without excusing her atrocities, Linda sets Mrs.
Flint's motives in a social/historical context. In a

chapter entitled "The Jealous Mistress," Linda details how

304
Mrs. Flint becomes aware of her husband's pursuit of Linda.
Forcing the story from Linda herself, Mrs. Flint weeps and
groans, so that Linda "was touched by her grief." The
sympathy is pointedly not mutual, as Mrs. Flint's "emotions
arose from anger and wounded pride. She felt that her
marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she
had not compassion for the poor victim of her husband's
perfidy" (33). Still, Linda refuses to blame her,
explaining that "slaveholder's wives feel as other women
would under similar circumstances" (34). Theieehhe assigns
Mrs. Flint's jealousy and hatred, and her perverted thirst
for power over other humans to the "patriarchal institution"
(cf. 146). The cruelty Mrs. Flint manifests toward Linda~~
grown from her jealousy of Mr. Flint--and her desire to have
control over her husband's licentious behavior is but a poor
mirror of his depraved lust for Linda and his desire to
"master" her.

Linda's analysis explains (without vindicating) the
Southern white woman. Theidehhe offers no such excuse for
white men, casting them as culpable for the oppression both
genders of the "master race" inflict on their slaves. By
her account, white men in slave society are actively
ruinous; white women partake in cruelty because of the
emotional suffering inflicted on them by white men. Yet
Linda's analysis is not reductive here, either. While white

men uphold and enforce patriarchal slavery, and benefit the

305

most from it, they too are victims of the system they

create. Linda explains about the cruel husband from the
example above: "Had it not been for slavery, he would have
been a better man, and his wife a happier woman" (51). The

text's refusal to oversimplify, to overlook social and
historical cause, is the mark of its achievement. Nowhere
does ihcigehts essentialize: black slaves are no more
inherently stupid/lusty/tractable than their white owners
are inherently cruel/licentious/greedy. Rather, at every
point, the text emphasizes that humans are shaped by social
factors, and that the patriarchal slave institution has a
deleterious effect on members of any race or gender.“

Linda's more insistent focus, however, is on the
victimization of women, and most particularly, on the
victimization of slave women. If patriarchal slavery, as
Theieehhe suggests, is fueled by the oppression of blacks
and women, then the profoundest victim, as Linda's narrative
emphasizes, is the black woman. Gloria Wade-Gayles
elaborates on this historical "double jeopardy":

Unlike other groups in white America, black women

are twice burdened. Because they are black, they

are denied the pedestals and petticoated privileges

a racist and sexist society assumes to be

appropriate "gifts" for women. Because they are

women, they are denied the power and influence men

enjoy as the "natural" (or God-decreed) heads of

306

families and leaders of nations. Black women are

thus confined to both the narrow space of race and

the dark enclosure of sex. This "double jeopardy"

has created a complex, painful, and dehumanizing

reality in which they have struggled for both

freedom and selfhood (4).
Linda's narrative and commentary highlight this "double
jeopardy" of sexism and racism most particularly in her
reaction to Flint's sexual threats. Flint harasses Linda
with sexual innuendoes and (presumably) pornographic
letters. Because of the vigilant jealousy of his wife,
Flint is prevented from acting out his obsession for Linda.
Consequently, he devises plans to build a house for Linda
several miles away, where she will live in exchange for
light labor (cf. 53, 83). His "promise," to "make a lady"
of Linda by keeping her as a private prostitute, exposes the
social construction of "lady," and how its fluctuating
definition inevitably serves white male interest: "white
ladies" are valued (by white men) for their sexual chastity;
"black ladies" are valued (by white men) for their
permissiveness. Linda responds by taking the white Mr.
Sands as lover and father to her two children. Her
observation that "it seemed less degrading to give one's
self, than to submit to compulsion" ironically underscores
the fact that her action only redistributes her bondage; she

is in fact exploited by hhhh,men.

307
The mixture of race that Linda's union with Sands
highlights--the "tangled skein" of slave genealogy (78)--
provides a point of resistance to racial definition. Linda
notes her grandmother's father was a South Carolina planter.
Linda's uncle Ben, as she describes him, is "nearly white;

for he had inherited the complexion my grandmother had

derived from Anglo-Saxon ancestors" (6; cf. 4). From the
first moments of ineidehhe then, the perceptual opposition

of black and white is shown to be unreliable and thus both
ontologically and perceptually invalid. Linda drives this
point home when she relates how Ben is able to escape from
slavery: "For once his white face did him a kindly service.
They had no suspicion that it belonged to a slave;
otherwise, the law would have been followed out to the
letter, and the thing rendered back to slavery" (24).
Theieehhe suggests that in a slave-system, material
circumstance dictates perception, that such perception is
self-interested and dehumanizing.

While slaves like Ben might be able to use their fair
complexion as a ticket to freedom, within the South's social
system a white complexion was the slave's badge of dishonor,
a dishonor which negated his or her self-worth. It was the
sign of the slave mother's transgression, taken by the white
social arbiters as evidence of her lustful and acquiescent
"nature" (and justification of her continued debasement).

The force of this (white) social standard worked to make

308
slaves themselves complicit in negative self-judgement, to
acquiesce to their own inferiority. As JanMohamed explains,
"the hegemonic formation of minorities is itself based on an
attempt to negate them--to prevent them from realizing their
full potential as human beings and to exclude them from full
and equal participation in civil and political society"
(1987b, 246).

Linda chronicles how she for a time accepted slave
society's logic in "A Perilous Passage."” In this chapter,
too complex to treat as fully as it deserves here, Linda
details the emotional crisis and course of action that
Flint's sexual overtures force her to. She insists that "I
wanted to keep myself pure; and under the most adverse
circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect"
(54). Linda repeatedly apologizes to her Northern audience
for this lapse in her moral character, for her loss of
virtue in accepting Sands as lover and father. She for a
time accepts the white reading of "virtue." When she
reveals the fact of her pregnancy to Flint, Linda remembers
that she "felt wretched ... my self respect was gone! I had
resolved to be virtuous though I was a slave. I had said,
‘Let the storm beat! I will brave it till I die!’ And now,
how humiliated I felt!" (56). She is at this point
compliant with the slave system's attempt to negate her
selfhood, accepting patriarchy's version of her corrupted

virtue and debased self-worth.

309

Yet underneath the apologies, she details how
conventional (white) morality fails the slave woman. In
fact, this passage provides an alternative reading which
suggests that Linda has maintained her virtue precisely
through her liaison with Sands.” Linda had hinted earlier
in her narrative a reading that resisted the one imposed on
her by white patriarchy when she observed that "it is deemed
a crime in [the slave girl] to wish to be virtuous" (31).
JanMohamed proposes that "the most crucial aspect of
resisting the hegemony consists in struggling against its
attempt to form one's subjectivity, for it is through the
construction of the minority subject that the dominant
culture can elicit the individual's own help in his/her
oppressions" (1987b, 247). In "A Perilous Passage," Linda
details her successful resistance of Flint, and patriarchy
in general, through an act of self-assertion. "I knew what
I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation" (54).

Though she wavers during the actual event (rather than
the "triumph" over Flint that she expected, she feels
shame), the mature Linda who narrates Theieehhe is able to
counter her negation (as a worthy human) by negating the
basis on which it was formed. "The condition of a slave,"
she argues in retrospect, "confuses all principles of
morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them
impossible" (55). Barbara Johnson observes that "if

identities are lost through acts of negation, they are also

310
acquired thereby" (1987, 4). If the constituent elements of
slave society are "the slave's ‘social death,’ his utter
powerlessness and his overwhelming sense of dishonor,"
Linda's "Passage" powerfully marks her revision of self and
claims her honor, counter to the self-negating imperatives
of white social hegemony (cf. JanMohamed, 1987b, 248).7

Linda's ability to resist white cultural hegemony comes
in part from her insistence on contextualizing,
historicizing every consideration of racial interaction.
Theidehte refuses to consider "race" in metaphysical terms.
From the perspective of social formation, Linda is able to
counter manichean formulations of "race" with such
observations as, "no matter whether the slave girl he as
black as ebony or as fair as her mistress" (my emphasis,
27). By this strategy, Linda encourages her reader to
expect a typical racist opposition (black as ebony, white as
snow). But she subverts their expectations by reminding
them of the social circumstances that have in fact already
eradicated the ontological possibility of the opposition-—
the slave girl might be as "fair as her mistress" because
they share a white father.

She notes that whites seek to legitimize their
oppressive system by mythologizing it: "They seem to
satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created
the Africans to be slaves" (44). Accordingly, they can

justify their views of blacks as inherently inferior. "I

311
admit the black man is inferior," Linda answers. "But what
is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white
men compel him to live." And, she concludes, again
insisting on a recognition of the social operation of racial
perception, "who are the Africans? Who can measure the
amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of
American slaves?" (44).

Linda's striking use of black and white imagery
highlights her message that the two are opposed only in
terms of social setting. Theleehhe frequently relies on
light and dark imagery but rather than enforcing a natural
opposition, the narrative demonstrates that a dark or bright
destiny is a factor of perspective, choice and circumstance;
As Toni Morrison puts it, "we are not, in fact, ‘other.’ We
are choices" (9). When Flint explains to Linda his offer to
"keep" her, he says "But I must let you know that there are
two sides to my proposition; if you reject the bright side,
you will be obliged to take the dark one" (84). Linda
undermines the imagistic opposition by clarifying that from
her position either choice was "dark" and resolves that "out
of the darkness of this hour a brighter dawn should rise"
(85). In this, she rejects Flint's categories of white and
black, defining and choosing her own in their stead. Where
the narrator of "Benito Cereno," could not envision anything
other than a stable and even eternal opposition between

black and white, the narrator of Thelfiehhe shows this

312
opposition as imagistically and imaginatively useful, but
always perceptually and socially contextual.

iheidehhe uses this binary imagery to subvert social
binarity. The text repeatedly demonstrates how the lives of
both black slaves and free whites are metaphorically
"colored" by the patriarchal slave institution. Rather
than reinforcing their social polarity, (i.e., blacks have
"dark destinies" while whites have "bright" ones), Linda
emphasizes that hemeh life encompasses both kinds of
experience. As she pointedly comments, "lives ... receive
their hue from circumstance" (60). Ihcigenhe in this way
brackets "difference," and turns instead to a consideration
of eemeheee. "Human nature," Linda insists, "is the same in
all" (54)- Lnslfientemthetfieetemwthus
creates an imagineeive space for identification between the
whites and blacks while it opens up a eemmuhigetive space in
its rhetorical structure.

The text likewise works to collapse categorizations
across racial boundaries, showing that people of every
gender and culture can be seduced by the benefits of an
oppressive system. White men and women provide models for
corruption, but black men are also willing to profit by
cruelty, like the "free colored man who tried to pass
himself off for a white, and who was always ready to do any
mean work for the sake of currying favor with white people"

(119). Nor were slave women exempt from these temptations,

313
as we see when Linda castigates Jenny: "She was one of
those base characters that would have jumped to betray a
suffering fellow being for the sake of thirty pieces of
silver” (154).

Conversely, representatives of all peoples can
transcend material influence to a recognition of "the cause
of humanity" (30). Theieehhe,models humane and communal
action that can counter the oppressiveness of a sexist and
racist society. Linda's escape most particularly
demonstrates such action, from the kind slave-owner's wife
who not only hides Linda but lends Flint money to search for
her up North, to the free black Peter who aids her removal
to the "loophole of retreat," to the captain of Linda's
escape ship who confides his abhorrence of slavery.
lflQlQQflLi demonstrates the existence of community between
such people, and the power it can wield: through this
community, Linda effects her escape.”

Theigehhe works to include its reader in this
community. It makes this attempt through a powerful
rhetorical framework that insistently addresses the reader
directly. "What would you be," Linda asks her reader to
consider, "if you were born and brought up a slave, with
generations of slaves for ancestors?" (44). Her rhetorical
strategy serves imaginatively to reverse the place of white
reader and slave narrator. incidents thus provides a point

of identity between the two "races," replacing ontological

314

difference with socially—defined difference. Otherness, as
this text underscores, is never radical. Just as there is a
point of difference between any peoples, there is always a
basis for intersubjectivity. She repeatedly highlights
their common "human nature" and invites the Northern white
woman to compare their experience: "0, you happy free
women, contrast your New Year's day with that of the poor
bond-woman!" When Linda queries, "Oh reader, can you
imagine my joy [at being reunited with her son]" (173), she
invites her reader to participate, like her, as a woman long
separated from her child. But more to her point, she
continues, "no you cannot, unless you have been a slave
mother" thereby emphasizing how difference is constituted by
institution, not nature.

The narrative also exhorts its reader to act upon this
identification. "Surely," she urges,

if you credited one half the truths that are told

to you concerning the helpless millions suffering

this cruel bondage, you at the north would not help

to tighten the yoke ... In view of these things,

why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the

north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance

of the right? (28, 29-30).
lflQLdQflLfi.in this respect does more than talk. It at once
assumes, models and encourages an active social response

among whites to correct the injustice of a system they

315
underwrite. iheigehhe is thus a powerful text which
constitutes a site of interracial identification at the same
time it exposes "race" as an arbitrary social formation. It
models an empathetic and constructive community among whites
and blacks, and through its rhetorical structure offers its
reader imaginative ehg_active access to this community. It
is this aspect of lflQlQiflLi which most clearly highlights
the imaginative limitations of the other texts discussed in
this study.
*‘k'k
"If it were easy to remain grounded in the morally
good," as Barbara Johnson has recently observed, "the
history of the twentieth century would look quite
different." She continues, "it is not enough to decide that
we now recognize evil in order to locate ourselves
comfortably in the good" (1987, xvii). In incidents,

Harriet Jacobs insists that recognition is not enough, that

 

action is required before we can rest, complacent that we
have done our part: "In view of these things, why are ye
silent?" Many critics today, like Johnson, Lentricchia and
Merod, are echoing Jacobs' call to action. As Merod
eloquently argues:

Not at all clear, still, is the degree to which the

self-contestation of critical writing will continue

to perpetuate theory without political commitment

to exploited peoples who sustain intellectual work

316

by their labor, and their poverty, while remaining

without political representation. If professional

intellectuals relinquish just that self-concern

which prolongs insularity and spoke to one another

as people who have power to challenge violent

authority and authority's violence (which they do),

demoted people everywhere would have representation

in the only culture capable of changing the world's

material order (195).
This is, precisely, the accomplishment of Ihgigent§.ih The
hige e;,e,§Tege Qi;T--its commitment to challenge and change
"violent authority and authority's violence," along with its
representation of "demoted people" as humans and as equally
entitled American citizens. It offered an important
challenge to its nineteenth—century audience; it seems that

its message might be equally relevant still.

317

NOTES

1. The role of this interracial "sisterhood," both in
a general historical sense, and as it is suggested in this
particular text, is an issue hotly debated among feminist
scholars. Gloria Wade—Gayles sees a "problematic
assumption" in a recent "tendency to see black and white
women as ‘sisters' in oppression." She elaborates on this
general issue:

The difficulties here are obvious. White women

have participated actively, and without coercion, «

in the oppression of black men and women. They

have been "ladies" who lived in leisure because

black women have been "mammies." They have been

protected and pampered, while black women have been

dehumanized, brutalized and devalued as blacks and

as females ... White women were victims of the

peculiar institution of slavery, but they were

beneficiaries as well, and it is as beneficiaries

that black women see them (9).

Many recent Theidehhe_scholars have argued that Linda's
perspective is coincident with Wade-Gayles' conclusion: as
a black woman, Linda (and Jacobs) does not see (and perhaps
does not hope for) a "sisterhood" between the white and
black women in the novel. For example, Minrose Gwinn argues
that Theieehhe is a "vehicle of rage directed toward her
former mistress," in which "Jacobs flogs her powerless
former mistress over and over throughout her narrative"
(65). In her sensitive analysis of Ineidenhe,

Hazel Carby argues that "many of the relationships portrayed
between Linda Brent and white women involve cruelty and
betrayal ... Jacobs' appeal was to a potential rather than
an actual bonding between white and black women" (1987, 51).
Most recently, in an impressive reading of "black and white
women in the old South," Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has used
Theigente to confirm her argument that "slave women did not
see their mistresses as oppressed sisters" (48; cf.
Epilogue).

Bell Hooks, however, suggests that the perspectives of
black feminist scholars like Wade-Gayles, Gwinn and Carby
come out of the soCial context of the 1960's, where black
women, from both choice and a sense of exclusion, turned
against the largely white feminist movement and focused on
race oppression. Hooks points out that

unlike us, black women in 19th century America

participated in both the struggle for racial

equality and the women's rights movement. When the

318

question was raised as to whether or not black

female participation in the women's rights movement

was a detriment to the struggle for racial

equality, they argued that any improvement in the

social status of black women would benefit all

black people (1981, 2).
Jean Fagin Yellin, a scholar who has extensively researched
Harriet Jacobs' life, and has recently edited a new edition
of ineigents, concurs with Hooks' analysis. She argues that
a vision of interracial sisterhood is the focus of
Ineidents: "A central pattern in Theieehhe shows white
women betraying allegiances of race and class to assert
their stronger allegiance to the sisterhood of all women"
(1987, xxxiii). William Andrews also agrees: "Iheidehhs
... was written as much to assert the power and potential of
women's community in the South and the North as to denounce
the state of commonage under which all resided under
slavery" (254).

2. See for instance, Catherine Maria Sedgwick's short
story, "Old Maids," which wryly suggests why happy stories
must ehe with marriage, in advise to a "story teller to
close the tale when he comes to a happy day; for ... it is
not probable another will succeed it" (26).

3. Hazel Carby elaborates on the ways in which Linda's
account of Mrs. Flint "utilized the conventions of an
antebellum ideal of womanhood," and makes them "appear as a
corrupt and superficial veneer that covers an underlying
strength and power in cruelty and brutality" (see 54-55;
also 24-34).

4. Linda also briefly acknowledges the function of
class in the social structure of the antebellum south.
Commenting on the rabble-rousing whites who raided the
houses of slaves and free blacks during the time of the Nat
Turner insurrection, Linda observes that, "it was a grand
opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their
own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a
little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the
slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled
on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty,
ignorance and moral degradation" (64).

5. This chapter's title, I think it is worth noting, is
a suitable pun. It deals with a perilous time in the
narrator's life, and at the same time, it represents a
perilous attempt of the narrator to explain her decisions to
her white audience.

319

6. Yellin notes here that "Jacobs's narrator does not
characterize herself conventionally as a passive female
victim, but asserts that--even when young and a slave—-she
was an effective moral agent" (xxx).

7. See also Valerie Smith's discussion of Jacobs'
narrative in Seif-Dieeovegy ehe Authogihy Th Afge-Amegicah

Nagretive. Smith observes that despite the limitations
imposed by Jacobs' use of the sentimental novel and her
address of a white audience, "yet she seized authority over
her literary restraints in much the same way that she seized
power in her life" (28).

8. While I believe that the rhetorical project of
lflEiQQflLi is to construct such a community between whites
and blacks, I do not believe that it is a naive project.
Linda's gratitude to whites for their actions on her behalf
is often tempered by her acknowledgement that those actions
are yet impeded by continued privilege and blindness on the
part of the whites. Of the ship captain, for instance,
Linda notes that "he was sorry, now that he had brought us
to the end of our voyage, to find I had so little confidence
in him. Ah, if he had ever been a slave, he would have
known how difficult it was to trust a white man" (158).
William Andrews, in his extended analysis of the narrative
in Te,Tell_e_E;ee,§he;y, notes the double entendre of
Linda's exclamation upon learning her confident Mrs. Bruce
had bought off Mr. Flint against Linda's wishes. "So I was
sold at last!" evokes, as Williams observes, the
"nineteenth-century colloquial sense of being cheated or
duped" (261). Williams sensitively explicates Linda's sense
of betrayal at this act which she must publicly acknowledge
as "generous": "was it not an ironic trick of fate that,
after all she had been through [to evade the imperatives of
patriarchy], a female friend, with the best intentions, had
broken confidence with her and secretly negotiated with the
patriarchal institution on its own terms?" (261).

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