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6/01 c:/C|HC/DfleOue.pfifi-p.15

RACI

RHETORICS OF REPRESENTATION: .
RACE, GENDER, AND INTERMARRIAGE IN THE FRONTIER FICTION
OF ANN s. STEPHENS, 1838-1865
By

Teresa Trupiano Barry

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
American Studies Program

2001

RACE. G

 

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Stephens is 6)
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ABSTRACT
RHETORICS OF REPRESENTATION:
RACE, GENDER, AND INTERMARRIAGE IN THE FRONTIER FICTION
OF ANN S. STEPHENS, 1838-1865
by

Teresa Trupiano Barry

Intermarriage between whites and Indians in the frontier fiction of Ann S.
Stephens is examined in this dissertation. Stephens was a popular and prolific
American author of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote in many genres from
magazine serials and social novels to poetry, essays, and literary criticism.
Because she represents race, gender, and intermarriage differently than either
authors of the male canon or recently recovered women writers, her inscriptions
add to the picture literary scholars have of the variety of views held by
nineteenth-century Americans on these controversial social issues. Stephens'
frontier stories of intermarriage appeared as dime novels, and thus, her notions
were promoted to larger audiences and were possibly more influential than those
of canonical writers. As a leader in mainstream literature, as both editor and
author during her fifty-two year career, she was also an arbiter of public opinion.

Ideologies of race, gender, and family, all of which underwent severe
scrutiny in the mid-nineteenth century period of foment and change, inform
Stephens’ inscriptions. In six dime novels she portrays interrnarriages - some
successful, some not. Stephens provides examples of successful marriages

between an Indian woman and a white man and between a white woman and an

lndian man. Ir

 

the lhreal of _

Stephei
whsewaiive ,
histoncal con:

IOf an end lo I

 

This study USI
the complex ;
exigenoes 0.
stereofypes .
on Which sq
SIIU8IIOII TEE
achieved I
imeISECIIor
repreSQMS
She
maiefleqti
Dosh a mo
SteDI‘lens
reaGErs w
gendel. as

AmETICan
"Dimer an

Indian man, indicating that she was undaunted by patriarchal assumptions about
the threat of American Indians to the purity of white women.

Stephens was no protofeminist, but she was neither racist nor
conservative on gender issues as recent critics have charged. Read in the
historical contexts of the situation in which she wrote, Stephens ardently pleads
for an end to racial prejudice and for a more active role for women in society.
This study uses Kenneth Burke's rhetorical approaches to literature to unravel
the complex and often conflicting inscriptions in her fiction arising from the
exigencies of the social situation in which Stephens wrote. Stephens chose
stereotypes to describe Indians, even as she attempted to break down the biases
on which such beliefs rested because the discursive contexts of her writing
situation required a sense of verisimilitude if her subversive purpose was to be
achieved. Because Stephens' heroines are Indian rather than white, the
intersections of race and gender are especially significant. Stephens frequently
represents lndianly behavior as masculine, further complicating her inscriptions.

She inverts many of the plot scenarios and characterizations typical of
male-centered frontier fiction to create stories that befit female experience and
posit a more active role for women. In these female myths of the frontier,
Stephens creates larger-than-life Indian women characters and provides women
readers with thrilling tales of female adventure. Her representations of race,
gender, and intermarriage add to our understanding of nineteenth-century
American literature, expanding the range of literary characterizations of the

frontier and the Indian and whites who lived there.

COpyright by
TERESA TRUPIANO BARRY

2001

L ____

This work is d

Words and to

 

 

 

DEDICATION
This work is dedicated to my parents. To my mother who taught me to love

words and to my father who taught me the value of hard work.

 

 

No we
extremely tori
Specially gr
graciously of
Burke's theo ‘
strengthened
Woklng ass
Interdisciplina
American we:
and Pointed c
dissertation,
thinking abot
Studies‘ not c
think from on
encouraging

grateful to ea

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No work of this magnitude is ever the work of a single person. I was
extremely fortunate to have the guidance and support of many people. I am
especially grateful to Kathleen Geissler, my dissertation director, who gave
graciously of her time and who always inspired me to probe ever deeper into
Burke’s theories and Stephens’ inscriptions; her thoughtful questions
strengthened my understanding of both. I received substantial thought-
provoking assistance in the research and preparation of this manuscript from my
interdisciplinary committee members. Jenifer Banks, nineteenth-century
American women’s literature, kept me abreast of recent scholarship in the field
and pointed out topics for further investigation beyond the limits of the
dissertation. Sheila Teahan, rhetoric and American literature, stretched my
thinking about the social nature of rhetoric. Patrick LeBeau, Native American
studies, nOt only introduced me to Native American studies, but helped me to
think from different perspectives. Joyce Ladenson, women’s studies, always had
encouraging words and helped guide my feminist explorations of rhetoric. I am
grateful to each for their guidance.

I also had the great fortune to belong to two perspicacious writing groups.
Each member contributed in different ways, facilitating my goal for a truly
interdisciplinary study. Rebecca Coogan pointed out feminist issues that could
be further explored; Jennifer Dawson nudged my thinking about nineteenth-

century women’s sensibilities; Elizabeth Demers was the best editor anyone

vi

could ever he

 

the first draft
provided user
I grate
research and
College of A
University Dr
Stephens Par
Arts and Left
Dissertation
Weentrate
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the call of
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could ever hope for", and, Mary Ann Sherby, who saw the project through from
the first draft of the proposal to the defense, not only encouraged me, but
provided useful criticism in many areas, especially organization.

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support I received during the
research and writing of this study. A Graduate Retention Fellowship from the
College of Arts and Letters and American Studies Program at Michigan State
University provided funds to travel to New York City to research the Ann 8.
Stephens Papers at the New York Public Library. I also thank the College of
Arts and Letters and the Graduate School at Michigan State University for the
Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which allowed me an entire semester to
concentrate solely on the writing of this study.

Libraries and special collections fill significant gaps for the scholar of
unrecovered authors of ephemeral literature. I am especially grateful to Anne
Tracy, of the Special Collections at Michigan State University, who went beyond
the call of duty to provide me with the necessary texts. I also received essential
texts from the New York Public Library, the JP. Morgan Library, the Connecticut
Historical Society, and the Northern Illinois University Albert Johannsen Dime
Novel Collection.

Last, but certainly not least, I would be remiss if I did not also
acknowledge the emotional, financial, and domestic (laundry, cleaning, cooking)

support of my husband and partner, David Barry.

vii

ABBREWAI

 

IHRODUCI
Ikmnd
Chapl

CHAPTER1
ADWFERE
NWT
Feni
The

 

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABBREVIATIONS ....................................................................... xi

INTRODUCTION ........................................................................ 1
Definition and Use of Terms ................................................. 4
Chapter Summary .............................................................. 9

CHAPTER 1

A DIFFERENT TRADITION: NINETEENTH-CENTURY F EMALE-CENTERED
MYTHS OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER .............................. 14
Female-Centered Myths ...................................................... 25
The Frontier Myth and Indian Women Characters

in Stephens' Fiction ..................................................... 32

Intermarriage in Fact and Fiction ........................................... 39

CHAPTER 2

HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL CONTEXTS: STEPHENS, INDIANS IN
POPULAR CULTURE. CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS OF STEPHENS.

AND METHODOLOGY ....................................................... 49
Ann S. Stephens - A "Literary Lady" ...................................... 54
Stephens' Knowledge ofAmerican Indians 66
Race and Scientific Discourse ..................................... 68
Indians in Popular Culture ........................................... 75
Literature Review ............................................................... 81
Nineteenth-Century Assessments of Stephens' Work ....... 81
Twentieth-Century Criticism ........................................ 83
Recent Work on Stephens' Indian Stories ....................... 87
Methodology ..................................................................... 93
Burkean Rhetorical Criticism ....................................... 94
Feminist Criticism ...................................................... 101
Post-Colonial Theory .................................................. 104
CHAPTER 3
RACE, GENDER, AND INTERMARRIAGE IN MALAESKA: INDIAN WIFE
OF THEWHITEHUNTER” .. 113
Malaeska as a Female-Centerect Myth ................................... 114
Plot Summary .................................................................... 117
Dramatistic Analysis of Malaeska ........................................... 121
Representations of Race ...................................................... 123
Malaeska ................................................................. 125
Other Indian Characters .............................................. 130
WIlIiam Danforth and Mixed Blood ................................. 132
Whiteness as Race .................................................... 139

viii

l

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repre

 

Conclr

CHAPTER 4

INDIANIZED
MARY
Mary
Histon
Plot 8"
Drama
RQDIB.

 

Reprr

Representations of Gender/Domestic Wortds ........................... 143

Familial Dynamics ..................................................... 144
Intermarriage ......................................................... 151
Conclusion ..................................................................... 161
CHAPTER 4
INDIANIZED WHITE WOMEN AND WHITENED INDIAN WOMEN IN
MARY DERWENT .......................................................... 172
Mary Derwent as a Female-Centered Myth .......................... 173
Historical Background ...................................................... 175
Plot Summary ................................................................ 177
Dramatistic Analysis of Mary Derwent ................................. 182
Representations of Race .................................................. 185
Tahmeroo ............................................................ 185
Picturesque Indian Women ...................................... 191
Gi-en-gwa-tah ....................................................... 192
Whiteness as Race ........................ . ....................... 196
Representations of Gender ............................................... 199
Catherine ............................................................. 199
Queen Esther ........................................................ 205
Mary and Jane ...................................................... 206
Tahmeroo ............................................................ 209
Intermarriage ........................................................ 210
Conclusion .................................................................... 215
CHAPTER 5

'WHITE OR RED?" COMPARISION AND CONTRAST IN ESTHER: A STORY
OF THE OREGON TRAIL AND THE MAHASKA TRILOGY 223

The Stories as Female Myths ............................................ 224
Plot Summaries ............................................................. 226
Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail ............................ 226
Mahaska Trilogy .................................................... 227
Dramatistic Analyses 228
Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail ............................ 228
Mahaska Trilogy .................................................... 231
Representations of Race .................................................. 235
Esther? A Story ofthe Oregon Trail 235
Mahaska Trilogy .................................................... 246
Representations of Gender ............................................... 254
Esther? A Story of the Oregon Trail ............................ 254
Mahaska Trilogy .................................................... 260
Conclusion .................................................................... 270

ix

CHAPTERS
CONCLUSIC

rial
Retirel
RepTEI
IMHm
Pbdn

 

BIBLIOGRAF

 

 

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: PLACING STEPHENS' INDIAN STORIES IN THE
AMERICAN TRADITION OF FRONTIER FICTION ...............
Representations of Race .................................................
Representations of Gender ..............................................
Intermarriage ...............................................................
Placing Stephens’ Indian Stories in the American

Tradition of Frontier Fiction ....................................

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................

276
277
283
285

288

293

A W
GM AGmmr
LASA Languag
PLF Philosop
RM A Rhetoi

RR The Rhe

 

 

 

ABBREVIATIONS

A. Standard Abbgviations of Kenneth Burke's Works

GM A Grammar of Motives

LASA Language as Symbolic Action
PLF Philosophy of Literary Form
RM A Rhetoric of Motives

RR The Rhetoric of Religion

B. Standard Abmgviations of Magazines, Jgumals, and Reference Wgrks
AWW American Women Writers

DLB Dictionary of Literary Biography
NAR North American Review

NAW Notable American Women

xi

 

America‘
I
lite on the IrontI
generally mammal
however l'rterah
Wider, class.
VOIGCIS of we"
0” Amman L
Karcher, Nina
“men's IIISCr

the “SI 0f Wow

their literature

 

In ficflm,‘ S I

INTRODUCTION

American women writers of the nineteenth-century frequently wrote about
life on the frontier, but their narratives differ from the typical male-authored
western. Because their stories centered on women characters, they were
generally omitted from the canon for their alleged lack of universality. Today,
however, literary scholars recognize that the concept of universality is an illusion
and that people's experiences of any given phenomenon differ according to race,
gender, class, and a host of other variables. Consequently numerous recovery
projects of women's writings have been undertaken to provide new perspectives .
on American Literature. This study joins the efforts of Annette Kolodny, Carolyn
Karcher, Nina Baym, and other feminist scholars who have begun to examine
women's inscriptions of the American frontier. It also adds an important name to
the list of women authors who experimented with the concept of the frontier in
their literature - Ann S. Stephens.

Stephens, a popular and prolific author, wrote at least eight novels set on
the American frontier. All of them are female-centered. Seven of them feature
intennarriages between whites and Indians. Stephens’ frontier novels, which
have hitherto received only scant scholarly attention, provide a more complete
picture of how the dominant culture presented its ideas about Native Americans
in fiction.1 Stephens’ representations of Indian characters and their
interrnarriages differ from those in the male canon and from those of recently
recovered women writers. James Fenimore Cooper saw the blending of cultures

and intermarriage as an anathema, whereas Catharine Sedgwick envisioned

whites living ll
inscriptions gr
Stephens’ fict
prominent role
her represent;
understanding
of literary cha:

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mmnwmbr
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been ignored l
men's experie
establish the v
and interpret y
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inverts many ‘
The Last of Ir
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Indian Charar
Brigitte Geor
MIG-author

whites living in Indian culture and blissful intermarriages. But Stephens'
inscriptions go beyond these conclusions and provide new perspectives.
Stephens’ fiction is unique because Indian women are consistently featured in
prominent roles. Examination of Stephens’ female-centered frontier fiction and
her representations of Indian characters and their intermarriages will add to our
understanding of nineteenth-century American literature by expanding the range
of literary characterizations of the frontier and the Indians who lived there.

Both the figure of the Indian and the myth of the frontier, which suggests
that vacant lands of the West offer settlers a place to begin anew, are significant
components of American literature. However, because women's novels had long
been ignored by critics, this myth has been historically presented in terms of
men’s experience. Literary critics focused on literature by and about men to
establish the ways Indians were represented in American fiction and to analyze
and interpret the myth of the frontier. Recently, however, feminist scholars have
begun to question many of the conclusions of such criticism. Nina Baym, for
example, demonstrates that male and female authors of Indian stories have
different perspectives that affect their inscriptions of the issues as well as the
outcomes. She demonstrates how, in Hope Leslie (1827), Sedgwick cleverly
inverts many of the staple scenarios of frontier fiction as presented in Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans. Women wrote in ways that differed from, indeed
sometimes directly opposed, male authors’ conceptions of how the frontier and
Indian characters should be constructed in American literature. Baym, Kolodny,
Brigitte Georgi-Findlay. and other feminist scholars have demonstrated that

male-authored fiction is typically androcentric. featuring male heroes and giving

2

female characte
to be woman-0d
primalily with
particularly Sec
brief mention 0‘

ldeologél
scrutiny during
Siemens insc
unsuccessful I
happy marriag
While woman A
Patriarchal asJ~
Women, How
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female characters only passive roles. On the other hand, women’s fiction tends
to be woman-centered, featuring active women protagonists. These critics have
primarily examined the works of those women authors already recovered,
particularly Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child. Although Baym and Kolodny make
brief mention of Stephens, no in-depth study of her frontier fiction exists.
Ideologies of race, gender, and family, all of which underwent severe
scrutiny during this mid-nineteenth century period of foment and change, inform
Stephens’ inscriptions. In seven frontier novels she portrays both successful and
unsuccessful intermarriages.2 Significantly, Stephens provides examples of
happy marriages between an Indian woman and a white man and between a
white woman and an Indian men, indicating that she was undaunted by
patriarchal assumptions that American Indians threatened the purity of white
women. However, Stephens is no protofeminist, which may explain why her
works remain unknown. Although Stephens clearly advocates expanded roles
for women in society in her fiction, her public nonfictional pronouncements about
"woman's appropriate sphere," when taken literally, suggest a more conservative
stance ("Address" 1).3 Baym contends that recovered women’s writings tend to
focus on themes of interest to modern feminists (American 4-5). Yet if we as
feminist scholars investigate only those authors whose views resemble our own,
we will have an incomplete picture of the ideologies that continue to influence
current views on controversial topics such as interracial marriage and expanded
roles for women. Stephens’ views are significant because, as a leader in
mainstream literature, as both editor and author during her fifty-two year career,

she also Mcame an arbiter of public opinion in the antebellum period.

Definition and

Because
indispensable ti
negative oonno

used loosely 0r

    
  
  

The Is
The White Ma

white authors

Definition and Use of Terms

Because this study involves socially sensitive issues, certain terms
indispensable to Open discussion require further explanation. Some have
negative connotations and/or are historically inappropriate. Others have been
used loosely or inappropriately and need clarification.

The term "Indian," as Robert Berkhofer emphasizes in his seminal study,
The White Man's Indian, is a 'White invention” (4). Since I will be analyzing how
white authors created images of the original inhabitants of the Western
Hemisphere, I will use the term "Indian" when referring to imaginary Indians
created by whites, whether the discourses be fiction or non-fiction. The term
'Native American” will be used to refer to real people, living or dead, who are
descendants of the many nations of peoples living in the Western Hemisphere
before the arrival of the Europeans. Wherever possible, I will also use tribal
affiliations; however, these designations often become meaningless in the hands
of nineteenth-century white authors who frequently disregard the historical
record, placing tribes or nations in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘Savage” is another term whites applied to Native Americans. Roy Harvey
Pearce believes that the term or idea of the “savage” cannot be contemplated nor
understood without its opposing term, “civilized man.” IMIite settlers viewed
indigenous peoples as being at a primitive stage of development in the process
of civilization, a situation whites believed was exacerbated by natives’ isolation
from civilized (white) society. Although certain features of native life seemed
“noble” to whites, in particular that Native Americans seemed "above and beyond

the vices of civilized man” (169), Pearce asserts that whites never believed that

4

savage herois
aspects of Art
the idea of. the
described as ‘t
He (for Native
accounts or va
often depicted
Spirit. He was
toward family.
'ignoble 58an
mole savage,
MEG his we
highly Superst
E"'"T’IIEISizes til
end of the firs.
me image. th

 

savage heroism could or would overcome civilized heroism (201).‘ So many
aspects of American Indian life seemed degraded and retrograde to whites that
the idea of the ignoble savage developed as well. The noble savage was
described as 'friendly, courteous, and hospitable” toward whites (Berkhofer 28).
He (for Native American women were either ignored in these early exploration
accounts or variously portrayed as sexual sirens and/or beasts of burden) was
often depicted as having a splendid physique, a stoic attitude, and an innocent
spirit. He was honorable and honest. He was courageous in battle, but loving
toward family, and he lived industriously, in harmony with nature. Conversely the
“ignoble savage” or 'bad’ Indian was drawn as an approximate opposite of the
noble savage. He was lazy, lecherous, and a poor specimen of manhood. He
treated his woman like slaves and was cruel and duplicitous. He was cowardly,
highly superstitious, and constantly at war with other savages. Pearce
emphasizes that '[t]he double image of the Indian, noble and ignoble, had by the
end of the first quarter of the [nineteenth] century, been firmly resolved into
one image, that of the savage whose life was to be comprehended by the idea of
savagism,” that is, the opposite of civilization (199). Thus, the word “savage,“
with its inherent negative connotations will be used only to emphasize when
characters are being portrayed as "uncivilized."

Native American women were also stereotyped by Euroamerican
explorers, primarily as “squaws'. In Women in American Indian Society, Rayna
Green points out that the term 'squaw‘ was originally “the Algonquian word for a
married or mature woman that later [in the hands of whites] became a

demeaning term for all Indian women, Algonkian or not” (14). Because these

explorers were
I

 

public and fo .

  
  
  

This androcer

and private rot.

explorers were usually male, ‘[t]heir texts tended to focus on Indian men in their
public and formal roles — as chiefs warriors, medicine men, and diplomats” (14).
This androcentric bias blinded them to the significance of women in both public
and private roles “in the determination and survival of their people” (14). Instead
they portrayed Indian women as they saw them, “only in relationship to men”
(14).

Like African Americans, Native Americans have often been characterized
according to the amount of blood of the “other" (i.e., lack of “white” blood) in their
heritage. Several terms have generally been applied specifically to mople with
some native ancestry: half-breed, half-blood, and mixed blood. 'HaIf-breed' and
'half-blood' are derogatory terms that have been used to refer to people with one
Native American parent and one white parent and have also been used loosely
to refer to anyone of mixed native ancestry. The terms connote that only half
one’s blood or breeding is acceptable, with the native half being of no account at
all, or, conversely that the negatives intrinsic to the native half completely
obliterate any positives of the white half. Furthermore, the word ”breed” itself as
applied to humans has a “contemptuous” connotation (OED) and reduces
humans to animals, such as a breed of horses or dogs. "Mixed blood,“ while it
still highlights perceived differences between the bloods of different races, is the
most acceptable term for referring to mixed ancestry because at least it does not
connote a sense of hierarchy. I will use it, except when quotations from texts or
references to those quotations require elsewise.

Terms referring to marriages between whites and Indians in the novels

also require an explanation. I will primarily use the term “marriage” when

6

 

referring to fict:

     
  

Stephens has

marriages san.

'pledge their t'

influence. Thd
Dictionary see
families, caste
M95 Specific
iniliflllalliage I
emPhasizes ti
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(OED). Thus

emphaSIZInQ

 

 

referring to fictional unions between Indian and white characters. However,
Stephens has definite ideas about what constitutes a “prOper’ marriage. Only
marriages sanctified by the Christian religion, in which both parties honestly
“pledge their troth,” constitute true or proper marriages for her. These marriages
develop into true friendships and equal partnerships in which both parties work
for the common good of the relationship within their particular sphere of
influence. The definition of intermarriage provided by the Oxford English
Dictionary seems relatively innocuous: “Marriage between members of different
families, castes, tribes, nations, or societies.” But, interestingly, the citation
refers specifically to marriages between members of different races, a type of
intermarriage not actually mentioned in the official definition. This citation
emphasizes the contentious nature of racial relations: “ 1841 Barrow Zincali l, iii,
ii, 274. It is by intermarriage alone that the two races will ever commingle”
(OED). Thus, I will use “intermarriage” or “interracial marriage” only when
emphasizing the racial implications of Stephens’ inscriptions.

Although some scholars have used the term “miscegenation” in reference
to the intermarriages between whites and Indians in American fiction (Baym,
Woman’s, Person; Mitchell), I choose not to do so for several reasons. First of
all, the word was not coined until 1864, as Sidney Kaplan demonstrates and the
Oxford English Dictionary confirms. This means that the word did not come into
common parlance until after Stephens had written her last novel depicting
marriages between whites and Indians; thus, any use of the term would be
ahistorical. Second, the term is defined as “mixture of races; esp. the sexual

union of whites with Negroes” (OED). Even Mitchell, who uses the term in her

examination C
cautions that
Americans a
then proceec
white and In
disrupt “the
reason for r

from ideolog

white race I

based, as l

scientific cc

WI scier

Within SO-CE

Olhe

 

examination of intermarriage in three nineteenth-century American novels,
cautions that “the temptation to superficially link the two groups [Native
Americans and African Americans] is to be avoided” (fn. 4, 128). However, she
then proceeds to use the word “miscegenation” to refer to alliances between
white and Indian characters as “fantasies” of “forbidden attractions” (129), which
disrupt “the stability of the white family” (130). This leads directly to my third
reason for not using the term. 'Miscegenation” has negative connotations arising
from ideologies about the superiority of whites that imply a degradation of the
white race through intermarriage with racial inferiors. And last, the term is
based, as Mitchell notes, on nineteenth-century beliefs that regarded “race as a
scientific concept’ (128). Such ideas are no longer acceptable, especially since
recent scientific studies have established that there is greater genetic diversity
within so-called racial groups than between them (Omi and Winant 20, fn. 5).
Other crucial terms in the analysis of interrnaniage and representations of
Indian women, all of which are fairly recent neologisrns, include “gender' (1963),
“racism” (1936), and “sexism" (1968) (OED). In The Creation of Patriarchy,
Gerda Lerner defines the term "gender" as "the cultural definition of behavior
defined as appropriate to the sexes in a given society at a given time" (238).
However, Ann Stephens and other women of the nineteenth century had not the
luxury of this term that distinguishes between biological sex and culturally
constructed notions of appropriate behavior according to sex. When Stephens
discusses what feminists today call "gender," she tends to use words like
”womanly” and "womanliness.’ Nineteenth-century people also did not have

access to the terms “racism” nor “sexism." They tended to talk about ”racial

8

prejudice' tort
the latter. Cor
inscriptions of
access. The 1
resorted to or
Chapter Surr

Chapte
Myths of the l
and how it we
its importance
Recent revisit
Significant We.
nineteenthee
to incol'Illoratr
hCiicn is exav
centered rm
inter-mama9E

Chapi

culture, Cm}

 

prejudice” for the former and “women's sphere” or "subordination of women" for
the latter. Consequently, this analysis of Stephens’ nineteenth-century
inscriptions of these concepts will primarily use the terms to which she had
access. The twentieth-century terms ”gender,” “racism,” and “sexism” will be
resorted to only for clarification purposes.
Chapter Summary

Chapter 1, "A Different Tradition: Nineteenth-Century Female-Centered
Myths of the American Frontier," reviews the history of American frontier myth
and how it was further developed in the white male literary tradition. Because of
its importance to this study, the power of this myth in shaping reality is examined.
Recent revisionists, including feminist literary critics, have begun to point out
significant ways in which the myth diverges from reality. They posit that
nineteenth-century women authors' responses to this myth substantially revise it
to incorporate women into it in meaningful, active positions. Stephens' Indian
fiction is examined to fit it within this recently discovered tradition of female-
centered fiontier fiction. The chapter concludes with an overview of '
intermarriage in fact and fiction to further contextualize Stephens' inscriptions.

Chapter 2, "Historical and Critical Contexts: Stephens, Indians in Popular
Culture, Critical Assessments of Stephens, and Methodology," presents a brief
biography of Ann S. Stephens to place her in the context of the literary history of
the period because, even though she was extremely popular and well-known in
her own time, few people today have heard of her. It also reviews the probable
sources of her knowledge of Native Americans, not to excuse, but to

contextualize her fictional representations of Indians. Because of increased

9

 

interest in fictfi
has been feati
demonstrates
views of writer

others see her

 

used to elucid
are explained
to analyzing hi
this study.
Chapte

the White Hui
race, gender.
eponliriious h
those She lov
Stow ‘3 gene.
illlbued With
CUlture, Alth
hovel, the ,3 .
and Wade“
Was firsi pub
publishing h:
related to m

comparism

interest in fiction interrogating the race/gender nexus, Stephens' frontier fiction
has been featured in several recent dissertations. A brief review of this work
demonstrates that scholars have a difficult time attempting to classify the racial
views of writers of the past. Some critics consider Stephens as openly racist,
others see her work as Indian-loving. The primary methodological approaches
used to elucidate Stephens' representations of race, gender, and intermarriage
are explained. A detailed explanation of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical approaches
to analyzing literature clarifies how and why they are especially appropriate to
this study.

Chapter 3, "Race, Gender, and lnterrnarriage in Malaeska: Indian Wife of
the White Hunter," begins the analysis of Stephens’ fictional representations of
race, gender, and intermarriage. Malaeska features an Indian woman as the
eponymous heroine and describes the devastating effects of racism on her and
those she loves. Malaeska marries a wealthy white man and bears his child. The
story is generally a sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans; however, it is also
imbued with ethnocentric assimilationist ideas about the superiority of white
culture. Although attitudes toward race form the predominant question in this
novel, the issue of gender must also be considered, particularly as it intersects
and overlaps race. Although Malaeska is best known as the first dime novel, it
was first published in 1839 as a serial in a middle-class ladies magazine. This
publishing history will be reviewed because certain changes in the text are
related to the different social contexts in which they were written and published.

Comparisons between the dime novel version (1860) and the serialized version

10

 

(1839) reveal i

context affects

 

Chapte
Mary Derwentl
event, the Wy
in Ladies Corr
Although this
tone and attrt.
Indian depict
featured as Cy
and publishei
outcome of o
‘0 be more in
‘0 race. Evel
“MO” or the

hel'Olne to be

 

(1839) reveal changes in American culture and cleany demonstrate how social
context affects inscription.

Chapter 4, "lndianized White Women and Whitened Indian Woman in
Mary Derwent,” examines Stephens' fictionalized account of a real historical
event, the Wyoming Valley Massacre of 1778. The original serial was published
in Ladies Companion in 1838 and republished by popular demand in 1840.
Although this story, like Malaeska, centers on the problems of intermarriage. its
tone and attitude toward Native Americans is even more complex. The only
Indian depicted favorably is actually three-quarters white. Two white women are
featured as chiefs of the tribe. Like Malaeska, Mary Derwent was later expanded
and published in book form (1858). The representations of Indians and the
outcome of one of the three interracial marriages in this narrative were changed
to be more in keeping with the new ideologies of mainstream America in regards
to race. Even more interesting, in 1862 Beadle published a British sixpenny
edition of the novel. It is virtually a reprint of the serial and allows the Indian
heroine to be assimilated into white British culture.5

Chapter 5, ‘White or Red?: Comparison and Contrast in Esther: A Story
of the Oregon Trail and the Mahaska Trilogy," analyzes nan'atives that were
written expressly as dime novels between 1862 and 1864. They provide some
interesting comparisons because Stephens uses one of her favorite devices.
comparison and contrast, to develop paired characters - one white, one Indian.
Esther features two young women - Esther, a white, middle-class pioneer
heading west. and Waupee, a member of the Sioux nation. Although the

marriage between Esther and Claude, the hero of mixed blood, does not occur

11

 

until the end 0

 

ilClaude is w.

by intermarria

detail the eflel

l

melodrama. n

 

interracial ma
centers on th
the “savage” -
i"terns! battle
idellii‘l‘lcationc
Chapter 6, "

Tradition of F
intermam'ag‘e
mainstream i
Ms the y.

StePhens’ y] E

 

until the end of the novel, issues of race are paramount as Esther tries to decide
if Claude is white or red. The Mahaska trilogy begins with the problems wrought
by interman'iage between whites and Native Americans and explores in more
detail the effects of mixed parentage on children born to such unions. In this
melodrama, Mahaska, or Katherine as she is called by whites, the child of the
interracial marriage, is compared to her white step-sister. Much of the action
centers on the internal war Mahaska suffers as her white tendencies battle with
the "savage" influences. These commrisons and contrasts, especially the
internal battles of Mahaska, are examined to gain a clearer understanding of the
identifications Stephens was trying to evoke in her readers.

Chapter 6, "Conclusion: Placing Stephens' Indian Stories in the American
Tradition of Frontier F iction," summarizes Stephens' views on race, gender, and
intermarriage to place her ideas in the spectrum of ideologies held by
mainstream America as revealed in both fiction and nonfiction on the subject. It
locates the works of this popular writer in context with other American authors
and their views on the subject. To conclude the study, I assess how Ann
Stephens' views on Indians and intermarriage contribute to our knowledge of

nineteenth-century American ideologies about indigenous peoples.

12

 

‘ Althm
atlention. the is
whites. Mamag
However. beca
W35 Gut
most of the loo

2Mary I
serial in 1838 a
1W. Malaesl
and then Decal
Wile sen:
Indian Stones ,
Esther A Sm
G0vemor5 inc

(1864).

3886i

4

Like

 

 

Endnotes

‘ Although the topic of intermarriage in fiction has recently begin to draw more scholarly
attention, the focus has primarily been on marriages between African Americans or Hispanics and
whites. Marriages between Indians and whites in American fiction have received less attention.
However, because Stephens' novels that feature marriages between Indians and whites also
encompass questions of gender, some of her works have recently been examined; however,
most of the focus has been on Malaeska, the first dime novel.

2Mary Derwent: A TeIe of the Wyoming Valley in 1778 was first published as a magazine
serial in 1838 and in book form in 1858, and as a Beadle sixpenny novel for British audiences in
1862. Malaeska: Indian Wife of the White Hunter also saw first light as a magazine serial in 1839
and then became the first dime novel in 1860. “King Phillip's Daughter was published as a
magazine serial in 1858, but because it was not published as a dime novel as were the other
Indian stories in this study, it will not be analyzed here. Stephens' later dime novels include
Esther A Story of the Oregon Trail (1862) and a trilogy of dime novels: Ahmo's Plot, or The
Governor's Indian Child (1863); Mahaska, or, The Indian Princess (1863); and, The Indian Queen
(1864).

3 See Chapter 2 for discussion of this particular article and other nonfiction by Stephens.

" Like most male scholars, his study depends primarily on works from the male tradition;
perhaps he might have reached a different conclusion had he included the works of more women
writers.

5 The dime novel version of this story is, indeed, a rare book. My research has found
only two extant copies in the United States. One is in the Yale University Beinecke Rare Books
Collection. They were unwilling to do any photocopying. Fortunately the other copy was at
Northern Illinois University (NIU) in the Albert Johannsen Dime Novel Collection. Although they
were unable to photocopy the entire novel, they provided a copy of the last chapter, which
matches, almost verbatim, the serialized version. On a subsequent visit to NIU, I verified that,
indeed, the British Sixpenny novel is essentially a verbatim copy of the 1838 magazine serial.

The changes were minon new paragraphing and changes to British spelling.

13

CHAPTER 1
A DIFFERENT TRADITION: NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMALE-
CENTERED MYTHS OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

From the earliest exploration narratives of the New World, America has
been described as the land of opportunity, a wilderness pregnant with material
wealth, a place free from the corrupting influence of the Old World, a frontier
offering rebirth to all comers. These discovery narratives contain the seeds of
what eventually developed into the myth of America (later known as the frontier
myth); Europeans described the new land they called America as “Arcadia.” The
Puritans, who viewed their new home as a potential “city upon a hill,” further
developed this myth. It began to take root across the continent during the late
eighteenth century when new discovery narratives described the trans-
Appalachian regions west of the newly formed United States as “virgin land.”
And it reached full blossom during the early national period when Timothy Flint’s
mytho-biography of Daniel Boone provided Americans with the archetypal male
hero of the wilderness lands. Although the frontier myth underwent several
incarnations during these centuries, the basic plot remained the same: the vast
lands of America, variously described as wilderness or virgin territory, offered the
hardy soul who ventured forth regeneration as a new breed of man (refened to in
the years after the Revolutionary War as the 'American’).

A major problem with this myth is that it has generally been presented in
ways that ignore or deny the presence of Native American peoples. For
example, in the1950 seminal study, Virgin Land, which first explained the

14

creation ar
Nash Smltl
‘vacant.' I
'[Freden'ck
free land, [i
devoid of h
correct in 5
facts) helpe
sud‘l a (1te

thought.

Anot.

creation and impact of the myth of the frontier on the American psyche, Henry
Nash Smith repeatedly refers to the lands inhabited by Native Americans as
“vacant.” He has recently acknowledged that he had been unduly influenced by
“(Frederick Jackson] Turner's conception of the wilderness beyond the frontier as
free land, [which resulted in] the tendency to assume that this area was in effect
devoid of human inhabitants” (“Symbol and Idea” 28). At the same time, he is
correct in stressing that the idea of “free” land in the West (regardless of the
facts) helped define the American character and affected its consciousness to
such a degree that this myth appeared in American political, literary, and social
thought.

Another defect in the traditional myth is its androcentricity; women have no
active role in these stories. The typical scenario of the male-inscribed myth in
American literature, as explained by Smith, details the adventures of the
trailblazer - the man who goes west seeking new lands. While the mythologized
Daniel Boone provided the origins, Cooper’s Leatherstocking became the
fictional prototype of the Western hero. As early as 1825, soon after The
Pioneers was published, a critic noted the similarities between Boone and
Hawkeye. Parallels include: “both these heroes love the freedom of the forest,
both take a passionate delight in hunting, and both dislike the ordinary pursuits of
civilized men” (Virgin 60). Smith asserts that “the character of Leatherstocking is
by far the most important symbol of the national experience of adventure across
the continent” (61 ). He sees the plots of the Leatherstocking tales as “flimsy, . . .
merely a framework to hold together a narrative focussed about an entirely

different problem” (61-2) - the conflicts inherent in white settlement of the

15

 

pith:
Cllei.‘
(i.e., l
civilizi
potent
“the W
wildnes
farmers
E

Critics he
for egrou
0f DIOnee
0* elvlllZa
Front/9,3.

wilderness. In this typical flimsy plot, the hero, often accompanied by his “noble
savage” Indian ally, saves a white woman from Indian captivity; uses knowledge
gained from Indian allies about life in the wilderness to advantage; wrangles
orally and/or physically with the villain (usually a white man who abuses the
wilderness); fights his Indian enemies in battle and/or single combat; and, spouts
pithy philosophical remarks about the way things ought to be in the lands west of
civilization. Although the hero is generally illiterate and romantically unattached
(i.e., has no real ties to civilization), he is the symbolic mediator between
civilization and the vast lands west of the frontier because he can envision the
potential the wilderness offers for a fresh start, a new life. As Smith points out,
“the Western hunter and guide was praiseworthy not because of his intrinsic
wildness or half-savage glamor, but because he blazed trails that hard-working
farmers could follow” (53).

But wives and children accompanied those farmers. Feminist literary
critics have begun to respond to these myopic visions which could clearly see the
foregrounded male heroes, but fail to see the women who shared the hardships
of pioneer life and who together with the men transformed the West into outposts
of civilization. In The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American
Frontiers, 1630-1860, Annette Kolodny explains that the history of westward
expansion has been narrated in terms of male fantasy - a sort of "psychosexual"
drama in which the land is portrayed as a virginal paradise simply waiting to be
penetrated and possessed by men. Kolodny asserts that women had their own
fantasies about the West. She believes that women developed the metaphor of

gardening to describe their own aspirations for and experiences of the West. By

16

 

making thei
a space for
of women's
fantasies, t‘
they had at
westering v
homestead
fantasies o
1“cftl'ltasy of t
Course of h
KOIOdny's C

My recent

making their homes comfortable and establishing home gardens, women created
a space for themselves on the frontier. According to Kolodny, this was the West
of women’s imaginings. She points out that though these ideas might be mere
fantasies, they still held powerful sway over events; indeed, she believes that
they had an effect on the course of history in the United States because
westeling women acted on their fantasies, planting gardens, domesticating their
homesteads, "civilizing" the West Kolodny even suggests that if women's
fantasies of domesticating the West had predominated instead of the male
fantasy of the great White Hunter penetrating and possessing the land, the
course of history might have been far different (11). But, as the 1984 date of
Kolodny's ovular study indicates, masculine versions of the frontier myth have
only recently been challenged.

The masculine myth, as explicated by Smith, not only failed to see
women's rightful place in the story, it failed to acknowledge Native Americans’
rightful ownership of the land that these white heroes were conquering. Richard
Slotkin, one of the earliest and most influential revisionists of the myth of the
frontier, not only recognizes the presence of Native Americans in the new lands,
but also centers his thesis on the conflict that arose between whites and Indians.
However, like Smith and other literary critics before him, Slotkin primarily
examines masculine versions of the myth and makes his assertions based on
these accounts. He argues that, although settlers saw America as a place for
regeneration, “the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of
violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring

metaphor of American experience” (Regeneration 5). Slotkin believes that to

17

 

create the
ammed
explaining
things sh0l
Slnc
with the ea
already exl
fit into their
opening 5e
nOthing to c
“Md ther

the Indian ti

 

create the myth of America and its “free” land, native populations had to be
accounted for. Mythogenesis, the creation of myths, provided a means of
explaining who native peoples were and what their place in the natural order of
things should be.

Since the concept of America as a land of rebirth arrived on these shores
with the earliest Euroamerican settlers, a major piece of the American myth
already existed, but they needed to find a way to explain how indigenous peOpIes
fit into their preconceived narrative. However, as Berkhofer establishes in his
opening sentence of The White Men's Indian, whites’ views of “the Indian" have
nothing to do with how the "original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere"
viewed themselves (3). Berkhofer traces the origins of the white man's idea of
the Indian to Columbus, who first gave them the misleading sobriquet. From the
very first accounts of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans are
described solely in terms of white culture. For example. even though neither he
nor his interpreter could understand the language of the indigenous inhabitants,
Columbus made large generalizations about "Indians": they had no creed but
possessed "acute intelligence"; they were generous and timorous (5). But his
greatest distaste derives from how they differed from white culture - men
"wearing their hair long like women," not covering their nakedness, working
women like slaves (6).

Because in the early days of exploration publications about the New World
were few, such discovery accounts had a disproportionately large impact on the
ideas Europeans developed of Native Americans (Berkhofer 7-9). Descriptions

by explorers put excessive emphasis on the sexual practices of the natives; their

18

 

open attitude
Warfare beta
terms that re
natural that r
looked dlfferl
conflicted wl
savage“ anc
two centres.
stereotypes
story illustra
savages, T
captivity na
Demonificai
The

edge of the

cpen attitudes toward sexuality appeared especially degraded to whites.
Warfare between different groups of indigenous peoples was also described in
terms that represented natives as "monstrous" in their lust for blood. It was only
natural that myths were created to explain the existence of people who not only
looked different from Europeans but whose cultural organization radically
conflicted with Europeans' ways of being. The opposing images of the "noble
savage" and the “ignoble savage” both originated in these early accounts. These
two contrasting representations of Indians developed over the centuries into
stereotypes and appear in early narratives of the myth. The first Thanksgiving
story illustrates an early attempt to account for indigenous peoples as noble
savages. The ignoble Indian figure was more ubiquitous; he appeared in
captivity nanatives and tales of Indian wars, as well as becoming the
personification of the devil in many Puritan sermons.

The physical and psychological imperatives of the colonists living on the
edge of the wildemess likewise shaped the national myth of the frontier. For
whites, the land held both the promise of great fertility and the threat of death
from nature or from the dark-skinned native inhabitants, who seemed mysterious
and whose ways appeared primitive (Slotkin, Regeneration 18). The
psychological effects of moving away from home, seemingly backwards in time to
a place with none of the comforts of civilization, were telling. Not only did the
wilderness seem fraught with danger, but contact with civilization was sporadic
and could take months, making colonists feel like exiles. Each of these
imperatives - the fear of the unknown, the dangers of the wilderness from both

man and nature, the isolation from civilization, the psychological and physical

19

 

discomforts c
experience. I
toward effort
white culture
impossibility
captivity nar
(Mary Rowlz
Isaac Jogue
derive from
refiecItirlg th
Regeneratli
Rem
their adven
settlers» ex
“6“ by tht
inSIEad. E
first White
.crvilizano

a byQOITe

discomforts of life on the frontier - generated narratives based on settlers’
experience, beliefs, and anxieties. For example, sermons might be directed
toward efforts to christianizelcivilize the natives and assert the superiority of
white culture and the Christian religion; histories of Indian wars might discuss the
impossibility of civilizing Indians because of their murderous tendencies; and
captivity narratives might emphasize the "miserable" conditions of "savage" life
(Mary Rowlandson, in Woloch 1-14) or the brutality of tortures suffered (Father
Isaac Jogues, cited in Namias 54). Although metaphors in these early accounts
derive from Europe, gradually they began to “metamorphose” into genres
reflecting the American experience with the land and her inhabitants (Slotkin,
Regeneration 19).

Reiteration of both historical experience and the accounts people wrote of
their adventures is a key component in the creation of any myth. Euroamerican
settlers’ experience of America resembles a recurring dream/nightmare: drawn
west by the promise of a better life, most pioneers encountered years of hardship
instead. Each time people moved west, they reenacted the experience of the
first white settlers. They moved away from family and friends, away from
“civilization,” into a wilderness with no amenities except whatever possessions of
a bygone life they managed to transport west. They had to provide all their own
food and shelter, deal with native inhabitants whose ways seemed strange and
foreign, and attempt to recreate the home they left behind. Pioneers’ narratives
of the Oregon Trail told essentially the same story as that of the earliest colonists’
accounts — a tale of the struggle to overcome the dangers of the wilderness and

to establish civilization in that wilderness. This story could be relnscribed in other

20

 

gen

58V:

with
then
Ame

litera

natio
UhiqL
the v
33 th
reasc
perils
an A,

eXist

genres as well; for instance, captivity narratives, describing the struggle to defeat
savages and return to Christian civilization, could be employed within the
sermons. Such repetition, of both narrative and experience, led to development
of conventions which became “sort of . . . given[s] between writer and audience”
(20). Slotkin argues that establishing these conventions meant that the stories
began to have ”some of the force of myth” (20-1).

In American mythogenesis the institution of these conventions coincided
with the earty national period when Americans were attempting to establish
themselves as culturally, as well as politically, independent from England. Many
American writers wanted to contribute to the establishment of an “American”
literature. Therefore, it is not surprising that the myth of the frontier, featuring
“American” history, places, and people, began to appear in the fiction of the new
nation. Captivity narratives, Indian wars, and pioneer adventures all provided
uniquely "American" anecdotes as fodder for an American fiction. Furthermore,
the vast landscapes of the Western lands were as picturesque and awe-inspiring
as the places and settings of British novels. As Charles Brockden Brown
reasoned in his preface to Edgar Huntley, "incidents of Indian hostility and the
perils of the western wilderness are far more suitable" than "Gothic castles" for
an American literature which "should differ essentially from those [themes] that
exist in Europe" (3).

However, it was not necessarily that simple. In Removals: Nineteenth-
Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs, Lucy Maddox
suggests that dealing with native peoples was a compelling and perplexing

problem for American writers in the early nineteenth century “when definitions [of

21

 

American lite
Indians was

problem.” as
Vietnam We
even fiction t
Vietnam Wa
Americans It
Pearce cont
Indian who

they hOped -
Maddox ass
and nonfictlrl
Statements
She mints t
'EXlinctlon'

 

American literature and history] were still being constructed and when the fate of
Indians was still being decided” (6). To demonstrate the impact of ”the Indian
problem,” as it was called, Maddox compares it to the intense emotions the
Vietnam War had on the American psyche. She notes that during that period
even fiction that was not directly about the war was affected by it (6). As was the
Vietnam War during the 19608, the Indian problem was considered by many
Americans to be the most important moral issue of the antebellum period.
Pearce contends that by the 1830s, “Americans were . . . of two minds about the
Indian whom they were destroying. They pitied his state but saw it as inevitable;
they hoped to bring him to civilization but saw that civilization would kill him” (66).
Maddox asserts that the oppositional nature of the Indian problem led both fiction
and nonfiction writers of the period to ”conclude with the posing of either-or
statements . . . . the choice between civilization [or] extinction for the Indians” (8).
She points out that the word ”civilization” is paired with “nation”; whereas,
”extinction” is paired with “race” or “tribe.” Maddox’s study “illustrates the
difficulty white Americans had in conceiving of living Indian people as belonging
to nations” (9). By representing Indians as tribal, whites demonstrated their belief
that Native Americans were considered to be outside the possibility of
nation/civilization. Maddox believes that
whether the American writer in this period wanted to address the question
of the place of Indians in national culture or to avoid it, there were few
subjects that she or he could write about without in some way engaging it;
and . . . as a result of that engagement, the American writer was, whether
intentionally or not, contributing to the process of constructing a new-
nation ideology, a process that both necessitated the removal or

supplanting of inappropriate tonne of discourse and justified the physical
removal and supplanting of the Indians (10-11).

 

In other
Americ:
writers.
many w

betw9€l

In other words, American writers were contributing new narratives to the
American myth, and to do so, they had to decide how to deal with Indians. Most
writers, both male and female, would rely on the trope of the ”vanishing” Indian;
many would also use the figure of the white male character who mediated
between white and red cultures.

The ideology of the vanishing Indian was not just a development of
American literature. As Pearce, Berkhofer, and more recently, Philip Deloria
point out, the concept of the tragical disappearance of the Indian with the
advance of the more “civilized” white settlers appeared in our history books, art,
and drama, and it actually shaped official Indian policy. Even science promoted
the ideology. In his study, Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman
demonstrates how racial theories developed to the point that "[t]he dominant
scientific position by the 1840s was that the Indians were doomed because of
innate inferiority, that they were succumbing to a superior race, and that this was
for the good of America and the world" (191). However, such forthright
sentiments did not befit the literary romanticism of the times. Berkhofer suggests
that the lndian's intimate connection with nature not only connected him to
romantic ideals but also imbued him with a certain nobility (79). As the last
representatives of a dying people, noble savages could be portrayed with
sympathy and became a staple in American frontier fiction. Although COOper is
the author most identified with this Romantic figure, many authors before and
after him used the trope. The vanishing Indian became a symbol of all that
whites were not. As Pearce so eloquently writes: "The Indian and his fate were

intelligible only in their relationship to the white man and his future, as savagism

23

 

was only int
authors us
to White val
(Berkhofer
The r
between sat
became the
other schol
American I
i”dispensz
ma“)! wor
maie‘autl
'bfidgers‘
present"
Such me
amth
Claims t‘
femaie ;
their ITC

fal’T’IIIIeL:

was only intelligible in its relationship to civilization" (201). So nineteenth-century
authors used vanishing Indians not to represent Indians, "but only in counterpoint
to White values, as metaphors in the struggle between savagery and civilization"

(Berkhofer 93).

The role of mediator is just as complex; although this figure mediated
between savagery and civilization, he belonged in neither world. Daniel Boone
became the first major mythic figure to occupy the role. Smith, Slotkin, and many
other scholars assert that Boone is the figure around whom the archetypal
American male hero developed. Although the role of mediator became an
indispensable part of the frontier myth in both male- and female-authored works.
many women writers did not envision the mediator as male. Using primarily
male-authored literature, Slotkin asserts that the ideal American hero generally
"bridge[s] the gap or mediate[s] between the European past and the Indian
present” (Slotkin, Regeneration 190). However, in this male-authored literature,
such mediation did not mean a merging of the races. Because most of the male
authors he examines avoid intermarriage between Indians and whites, Slotkin
claims that Americans found ”the marriage metaphor unacceptable” (191), yet
female authors of the nineteenth century employed intermarriage frequently in
their frontier novels. Ironically, both Smith and Slotkin note the importance of
families in male-inscribed frontier novels: “The family ties that bind the chief
characters of the historical romance provide the metaphorical structure of the
work. The division within the family reflects the social disorder of the nation”
(Regeneration 472). But their recognition of the significance of women is only in

relation to and as it reflects on men; women qua women are not considered.

24

 

The it
the America
leaves little
both male a
that explain.
principal rol
to minor, Su

differences
Female.“
Mn.
and leech
Invert par
Myth Wer
for Worth
Slotkin r
98nres!

The three main elements of the male-inscribed frontier myth are the hero,
the American wilderness in which he acts, and the narrative of the events. Slotkin
leaves little doubt of the effect of this myth on the psyche of the American people,
both male and female. However, his argument pivots on the male-centered myth
that explains the male relationship to the American frontier and assigns men the
principal role of hero-mediator. Women, when they appear at all, are relegated
to minor, subordinate roles. The male-centered myth ignores how gender
differences might affect women’s relationship to the American wilderness.
Female-Centered Myths

Nineteenth-century American women writers envisioned a different West
and recorded female experiences of it. Their narratives both incorporate and
invert parts of the male-defined myth. Women’s responses to the masculine
myth were ambivalent. On the one hand, the male-centered myth still resonated
for women to a certain extent as part of their collective memory because, as
Slotkin notes, these stories had been reiterated so often, in so many different
genres, they had “the force of myth” (21 ). But, on the other, women did not see
their ”own features and experience" fully represented in the male-inscribed myth,
partly because the women characters in male-authored fiction are ancillaries of
men and subordinate to them. White women have no active role in this myth.
They are passive victims, who, when threatened by the dangers of the
wilderness or the red men who roam there, require the activity and bravery of the
white male hero to save them from “a fate worse than death.” Therefore it is not

surprising that women’s inscriptions of the frontier myth differ from men’s.

25

 

 

Slotk:
action, defln
(7). its fun.»
this sense c
a myth” (8.
scenario or
identificat‘lo
function as
“mm Drovl
that 50me\
maiE‘authc
betWash it
passive re
assens th
Indians 8“
C:Uiture‘ (E

proVIde ti

Slotkin contends that a myth "provides a scenario or prescription for
action, defining and limiting the possibilities for human response to the universe"
(7). He further notes that “a myth that ceases to evoke this religious response,
this sense of total identification and collective participation, ceases to function as
a myth" (8, his emphasis). The frontier myth he describes, however, “provides a
scenario or prescription” for _m_al_e action but could not evoke a “sense of total
identification” for American women. Since the male-centered myth did not
function as a myth for women, they were able to write new narratives or myths
which provided a “scenario or prescription” for _fe_m_@ action. Baym contends
that some women wrote female-centered Indian fiction in direct response to
male-authored stories which “depended for [their] morality on gender distinctions
between its white characters, casting men as active defenders, [and] women as
passive representations of that which was to be defended” (“Stories' 67). She
asserts that in both male- and female-authored fiction, ”[tlhe topic of whites and
Indians across cultures merged with the topic of male and female within white
culture” (68). Both Child (Hobomok 1824) and Sedgwick (Hope Leslie 1827)
provide their white heroines with much more active roles in their frontier fiction
than do their male predecessors. In Hope Leslie, Hope shares the role of
heroine—mediator with Magawisca, her Indian counterpart. In the process of
creating such stories, women authors formulate their own female-centered myths
of the frontier.

Other feminist literary critics have made similar observations. Using the
frontier literature written by American women, Kolodny makes as convincing an

argument as Slotkin in his analysis of male-authored literature. For example, in

26

 

 

the first to a

the “salvage
story and d
West.

More
nOtlon of a 1
Narratives ,
the t8male
emanSIon
tetIErs' dike

her explication of A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, Kolodny points specifically to
Caroline Kirkland’s insistence that women, with no help from men, create the
gardens that grace their homesteads (147). Kirkland contends that women do
this because they ”feel sensibly the deficiencies of the ‘salvage’ state, so they are
the first to attempt the refining process” (247). This domestication or civilizing of
the “salvage” state places women’s fantasies of the West at the center of the
story and demonstrates women's centrality to successful white settlement of the
West.

More recently, Brigitte Georgi-Findlay has expanded and complicated the
notion of a female frontier myth. In The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s
Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion, she began to “search for
the female voices that seemed to be missing from the story of westward
expansion as told in the literature of frontier heroes” (ix). Using travel narratives,
letters, diaries, and other accounts of real westering women, Georgi-Findlay
argues that

Women’s western texts . . . relate not so much to a masculinist frontier

myth but to the discourses that have created the male subject of westward

expansion and that have produced and consolidated knowledge about the

American West, in the narratives of western discovery, exploration, travel,

and adventure. (xi-xii)

She finds women complicit in the “legacy of violence and disenfranchisement”
that followed westward expansion and suggests that we have to look at more
than gender to understand relations between whites and Native Americans (x).
Class, race, and culture are also important components of the Indian problem

and the American frontier myth. Georgi-Findlay believes that although they were

positioned differently than white men, nineteenth-century white women were

27

 

agents and 2
views the frd‘
race, class,
women as v
developmer

Citing Carol

 

 

l
Georgi-Find

male fantas
the ideal of.
as an instr
disorder t
passive “t
repress,“

Women m

agents and authors of territorial expansion. Like other feminist revisionists, she
views the frontier myth “as a range of cultural discourses ordering the relations of
race, class, and gender" (x-xi). Her study ”'explorels] the various ways in which
women as writers actively engaged with, contributed to, and at times rejected the
development of a national narrative associated with the American West” (xi).
Citing Caroline Kirkland’s writings, especially A New Home and Forest Life,
Georgi-Findlay sees women’s writings “not only as female counter-visions to
male fantasies of conquest and possession but also as complements to them:
the ideal of domesticity, read in the context of expansionism, potentially functions
as an instrument of cultural and social control and order imposed on western
disorder” (xii). But it was the white woman’s untenable position as the hero’s
passive "other" in the male myth - as the one who restrains him, who merely
represents white civilization, but has no active role in that culture - that led
women writers to carve out their own space on the frontier.‘

Both Kolodny’s and Georgi-Findlay’s arguments are based on the
experience, real or imaginary, of white women. They do not consider the place
of Indian women in the female-inscribed myth, which requires a new myth or
adaptation of other myths to explain new circumstances. Just as the male-
inscribed myth provides no “scenario or prescription for action” for white women,
neither does it provide any active role for Indian women, except as the
Pocahontas stereotype - the Indian woman who risks her own life to save a
white man from death at the hands of Indians. Thus, women authors such as
Stephens and Sedgwick, who were willing to use Indian women figures and

intermarriage in their stories, had to find new scenarios to supplement those

28

inimical to women’s experiences and to develop narratives which reflected
women’s conceptions of the frontier. They accomplished this by inverting some
of the staple narratives of the male myth, either racially and/or sexually. They
sometimes rewrote the script to fit their own designs.

Frequently these inversions expand women’s roles or create complex
female characters as opposed to the flat one-dimensional female characters so
common in men's frontier novels. For example, although Magawisca does
reenact the Pocahontas rescue when her father condemns Everell to death, she
has more important roles to fill. Her eloquent defense at her trial changes white
people's feelings and behaviors toward Indians and is much more significant than
the rescue, which does not change the attitudes of Indians toward whites.
Furthermore, Magawisca is a fully-developed character. she is intelligent,
virtuous, and kind, not the mindless Indian princess of some Pocahontas
retellings. Another method of inverting/subverting the typical male-plotted myth
of the frontier is to diminish the role of the hero. Although Everell is the white
male protagonist in this tale, he can also be read as a male passive victim who
must be rescued by Magawisca - a woman. Thus, he becomes a sexual
inversion of the typical white female protagonist role in the traditional male-
centered myth.

Child and Sedgwick both feature marriages between whites and Indians in
their novels. In them certain conventions of the male-ordained myth of the
frontier are inverted, and women are placed in the momentous role of mediator.
Neither marriage nor mediation are unusual roles for women in fiction. Many

women's novels, if not most, depend on the marriage plot, and women often act

29

 

 

as mediators
goodness. t !
also often h

Elmo.2 Wh»

the marriag.
the mediatir

who mainta

mediator be

 

Successful.
Indian husb'
Leslie, HOp
BMUNhe(
lndians‘ H c
Whites as .
ambush it

glVEn the r

as mediators in these stories. As moral agents who lead people toward
goodness, they are sometimes mediators between conflicting characters. They
also often help bring the Byronic here back to Christianity, as does Edna in St.
Elmo.2 What makes these Indian novels different is the interracial character of
the marriages and the cross-cultural mediation. In Hobomok, Mary is undeniably
the mediating hero, marrying Hobomok and bearing his child. As a white woman
who maintains her womanly virtues, despite marrying an Indian, Mary is a sort of
mediator between Indian and white culture; however, her mediation is not
successful. When her white fiancé, whom she thought dead, reappears, her
Indian husband nobly divorces her, and she returns to white civilization. In Hope
Leslie, Hope is more the hero-mediator between the two cultures than Everell.
But unlike white male hero-mediators who are often involved in fighting bad
Indians, Hope attempts to negotiate for Indian characters who are viewed by
whites as ‘bad,’ but are really only misunderstood. As Maddox points out,
although it was fairly easy for Child and Sedgwick to rewrite the history of women
given the changes in women’s prospects since the Puritan era, 'they could not
reinstate the Indians in the trajectory of American history . . . all they could do
was try to account for the Indians’ decline” (97).

Despite the inescapable historical fact that Native American populations
were indeed decreasing, Sedgwick still manages to create some racial inversions
of the typical male narrative, creating larger, more fully developed roles for her
Indian characters, humanizing them. Magawisca’s time in the Fletcher’s
household bears some similarity to captivity narratives, with a simple inversion of

the respective races of captive and captor, however, Magawisca’s suffering is

30

 

minimized, a

 

significant rt
narrative trc
Wical of th
slaughter u.
savages,

in fe
traditional
{Emale ex
i” the cent

femalemn l

a diallenge
White male
that hisiow
visions_ N:

emerDFISes

minimized, and she even comes to sympathize with her white “family.” A more
significant racial and sexual inversion is Magawisca’s retelling of the Indian war
narrative from the perspective of an Indian woman. The bravery of white men, so
typical of the traditional male narrative, is replaced with their cruelty as they
slaughter unarmed women and children. In this version white men are the
savages.

In female-centered frontier stories, women writers take staples of the
traditional male myth of the frontier and convert/subvert them into modes befitting
female experience. Women's narratives of the frontier feature women characters
in the central role, including the crucial role of mediator. As Baym observes, "a
female-centered narrative about the progress of civilization [can] be perceived as
a challenge to white male ownership of the Indian-white narrative, which is to say
white male ownership of history itself" ("Stories" 71). Women's visions of how
that history should/could be written and played out diverged sharply from men's
visions. Not only are women's roles presented as more critical to white
enterprises in the West than male narratives gave them credit for, men's roles
are less significant. Since war with the Indians is not seen as inevitable in
women's stories, men's roles as warriors and protectors of women diminish.
When white women choose to marry Indians, such manly roles become moot.

By writing female-centered stories of the frontier, women authors created a new
more female-oriented myth that proffered peaceful solutions to ameliorate the

Indian problem through the intercession of women.

31

 

 

The Frontit
Ann
centered in _
about the '
mind,‘ but
modest' (9
Child and E
tie-tween t
ieaturing r
dramatize
fears abc
meme in
”0 term
that is‘ l
Signing
0‘ “\Er;
SubSe

Come:

The Frontier Myth and Indian Women Characters in Stephens’ Fiction

Ann Stephens was apparently greatly influenced by Sedgwick's female-
centered myth. In her review article, “Literary Ladies,” her Iaudatory remarks
about the “author of Hope Leslie,“ not only praise “the brilliancy of [Sedgwick’s]
mind,“ but emphasize that “amid all her fame, [she] remained womanly and
modest' (97), a consideration of paramount importance to Stephens. Yet, unlike
Child and Sedgwick, who each wrote only one novel depicting intermarriage,
between 1838-1864 Ann S. Stephens wrote at least seven frontier novels
featuring American Indian women characters in major roles. Each novel
dramatizes one or more interracial marriages. Considering Stephens' expressed
fears about appearing "unwomanly," such a preponderance of the intermarriage
theme in her writing indicates that she must have determined that the topic bore
no taint of impropriety. That these intermaniages appear in “popular" literature,
that is, literature intended for the working masses, makes them even more
significant because they reached larger and different audiences than other types
of literature. Each fictional marriage is complex and multilayered and, in
subsequent chapters, will be examined within the fictional as well as the historical
context in which it was written.

In these stories, Stephens clearly inverts the male mythological narrative
of the American frontier, but only in certain aspects, only in ways which are
consonant with her visions of the West. For example, although she creates
individual "noble savage" characters, Indians in general are never depicted as
noble since this would not ring true for readers. Because the frontier myth had

been reiterated in so many genres, the conventions that prevailed as “givens

32

.rl

 

between writer and audience” insisted that Indians, as a rule, were "ignoble
savages." But such conventions made inversions fairly easy to create. And
Stephens used her knowledge of the traditional myth to her advantage, revising
the myth for her own purposes, creating woman-centered narratives that gave
female characters active roles.

During the same literary period that Stephens developed her woman-
centered frontier stories, other conventions regarding the white female
protagonist emerged. The "true woman" was supposed to be pious, pure,
domestic, passive, and submissive (Welter), characteristics that made it difficult
to cast a white heroine as the active, mediating counterpart to the male hero of
the frontier myth. That white women actually represented white civilization in
male-authored texts, as Baym, Maddox, and other feminist critics demonstrate,
made it even more difficult for white women characters to fit the role of mediator.
Although Stephens does employ a white woman figure in this pivotal position in
Mary Derwent, her earliest frontier novel, that character loses her womanly
qualities and turns “savage." The eponymous character, Mary Dement, also
acts as a mediator, but, because of her physical disability, she too is disqualified
from the role of a "true" woman. The failure of these characters to be both "true"
women and mediators demonstrates the difficulty Stephens has in envisioning
ideal white women in this crucial cross-cultural role.

To resolve the dilemma, Stephens, like Sedgwick, uses Indian or mixed-
blood women characters in the role of mediator. Such figures were free from the
cultural restrictions placed upon white women. They could be as active and

independent as their male counterparts. To be properly understood as potential

33

 

role models
and have p
good wives
who remalr
MEBfimve
dmmen.E
have ma“.
thnnes
exceuent
Word of r
“Mdenu
thoserx
bentree
muCh ‘

”QVer

role models for white women, however, these Indian women also had to be pure
and have proper womanly relationships with their families; that is, they had to be
good wives and mothers. In other words, unlike male heroes of men’s fiction
who remain romantically unattached, these women must follow the gender
imperatives of nineteenth-century, white, middle—class women to marry and bear
children. But other than these gender restraints, these Indian women characters
have many of the traits of the typical male western hero, as well as certain
attributes of the noble savage. They are well versed in weapon use and
excellent hunters, but they hunt only out of necessity. They view Nature as the
word of God, are at one with nature themselves, and enjoy the freedom the
wilderness provides. As Indians who marry whites or as mixed-blood children of
those marriages, these women characters embody mediation and reconciliation
between whites and Indians. Literally straddling the two cultures, they represent
much more strongly than COOper’s Hawkeye, “the man without a cross“ who will
never intennarry nor sully himself with the taint of Indian blood, the possibility of
peaceful coexistence between the cultures.

Stephens not only inverts the sexual and racial identity of the mediating
character, she also modifies some of the common plot scenarios of the male-
inscribed myth. For instance, the captivity narrative is invoked in all of her
frontier tales, but the racial and/or sexual identity of captor and captive is often
reversed from the traditional model. Narratives of war between whites and
Indians are also utilized, as Stephens takes readers into the thick of various
battles. Although her descriptions are similar to such scenes in male-authored

fiction, especially her depictions of Indian warriors as demonic, blood-thirsty

34

 

savages, hé‘
righteous.
landscape :
stalt But t

and mixed-

 

 

 

band of Ind
tales) is a \l
more me
this feat sl
0' Sexuall
naITafNe‘
Le
basalt 0r
generar‘

1

2

savages, her stories present war as evil and morally wrong, never as glorious or
righteous. Like her male predecessors, Stephens uses the vast American
landscape as a major symbol in her stories, representing it as a place for a new
start. But the regeneration she envisions is not only for whites; it is for Indians
and mixed-bloods as well. For instance, in Mary Derwent, her hardy leader of a
band of Indians who trek west in search of a new start (echoing the Daniel Boone
tales) is a woman, not a man. Thus, Stephens rewrites the male myth to make it
more amenable to active, independent women protagonists, but to accomplish
this feat she has to change the race of the leading character. as well as racially
or sexually invert many of the typical tropes and plot scenarios of the male
narrative.

Leading Indian woman characters in Ann Stephens’ frontier fiction are
based on a paradigm that ordains specific behavior and temperament. In
general, these characters have certain predictable traits.

1. They reenact the sacrifice of Pocahontas.

2. They learn, through intimate contact with white society, that they are

not welcome there.

3. They die or disappear at the end of the story.

4. They have a fatal flaw — an overiy passionate nature.

Interestingly, some of these characteristics resemble those that Slotkin
describes in The Fatal Environment as the “Cooperian Code” - characters in the
Leatherstocking tales stereotyped according to race, sex, and class. The most
obvious parallel is Stephens' use of the Pocahontas theme. In the original

American Pocahontas story of 1624, John Smith reports how Pocahontas

35

 

 

“hazarded t
Stephens‘
utilization 0
American h
Stephens‘
her rescue|
legend der
Oregon Tr
Esther, a .
Pocahont
resCues. l
the Calm
Li
iWilmer
gains kr
lndians
(the WC
civiliza
refiBEr

Sonnet,

“hazarded the beating out of her owne braines to save mine” (qtd. in Trlton xv).
Stephens' use may not necessarily be in response to Cooper as much as it is the
utilization of a character uniquely recognized as “American," with a long
American history. While none of the Pocahontas-type rescue scenes in
Stephens’ fiction are as dramatic as Magawisca’s arrn being Iopped off during
her rescue of Everell in Hope Leslie, the ways in which Stephens invokes this
legend demonstrate her innovative skill. For, example, in Esther? A Story of the
Oregon Trail, Waupee, the Indian woman mediator character, attempts to rescue
Esther, a white woman, a sexual inversion of the victim of the traditional
Pocahontas tale. In Mary Derwent, the Indian woman character, Tahmeroo,
rescues her white lover from the hands of other white men, a racial inversion of
the captor role.

Like COOper’s Natty Bumppo, Stephens’ Indian women Ieam from their
immersion into the culture of the racial “other.“ But, whereas the white male hero
gains knowledge that helps him live and act in the wilderness (the world of
Indians), Stephens’ Indian women Ieam that they are not welcome in civilization
(the world of white Americans). Most of them gain “that refinement which
civilization brings” through their interaction with whites. But despite this
refinement, they cannot overcome the obstacle that makes them unfit for white
society - the racial prejudice of whites, particularly that of white men.

Even if Stephens’ fictional Indian woman happily intermanies, she must
die or disappear. Like Chingachgook and Uncas, the noblest of savages in
Cooper's stories, even though these Indian women also represent the noblest of

their race, they cannot survive in the world of whites. A noble savage is still a

36

 

savage;a
of those i
heunh
beiore t‘
possible

disappr

their t
orde
contr
read
han

Uht

Wt

In

savage; as the antithesis of civilized, helshe cannot exist within civilization. Most
of those involved in successful marriages move beyond or near the borders of
the United States, others die or disappear. In other words, like male authors
before her, as well as her literary foremothers, Stephens cannot envision any
possible future for Native Americans other than “vanishing." They either
disappear into the wilderness or into white culture where their race is unknown.

The most intriguing characteristic of Stephens' fictional Indian women is
their fatal flaw. Each is too passionate and loves too deeply, leading her to death
or destruction. On the one hand, such scenarios emphasize how the inability to
control one’s temperament can lead to disaster as a warning for white women
readers to employ reason as well as emotion in affairs of the heart. On the other
hand, they operate as shorthand for inscribing Indians as emotional and
unthinking, a common literary stereotype of Indian women (Sundquist 21).

Ideal Indian women characters in Stephens’ novels, like ideal white
women in men's fiction, represent the best of their civilization. These Indian
women demonstrate ways in which women can be active participants in society
without losing their womanly virtues. Womanliness is an important issue for
Stephens - only those women characters who maintain perfect womanliness
can be role models. Stephens chooses Indian rather than white women
characters, not only because of the difficulties of using figures who represent
white civilization as mediators between the cultures, but because using the
Indian figure allows Stephens to demonstrate that women can be active
participants in their society and remain womanly. In other words, she depicts the

restrictions on women's potential in Indian society as less stringent than those on

37

white women in "civilization." Although Stephens does investigate racial hatred,
particularly in Malaeska and Mahaska, racial concerns are generally secondary
to gender issues in her Indian stories. Stephens’ ideal Indian women are women
first, and only secondarily Indians. Her exemplary Indian women characters do
not represent white women, but rather they are portents of possibility for them.
Ideal Indian women characters allow Stephens to envision expanded roles for
white women without upsetting the status quo, without having her own
womanliness called into question.

Other female characters in Stephens’ frontier novels, “bad” Indian women
and “fallen” white women, represent warnings of the dangers of crossing
sexual/racial boundaries. The line between that which is acceptable “womanly”
behavior and that which “unsexes” is thin. Stephens repeatedly uses her ideal
Indian women to demonstrate the location of that line. Crossing racial
boundaries is also fraught with danger for white women, as most of Stephens’
frontier stories demonstrate. Because she sees Indian traits as essentially
masculine, crossing racial lines means crossing sexual boundaries as well.

As might be expected, ideal white women also play a large role in
Stephens’ woman-centered myths. In some stories the white heroine is a
pathetic passive creature - a caricature of the supposed ideal white woman as
she appears in the male-centered myth - suggesting that Stephens does not
accept all restrictions the nineteenth-century places on white women. In Mary
Derwent, the idealized, disabled, white woman character actively participates in
the worid without losing her femininity, effectively deconstructing the ideology of

“True Womanhood." Although white women characters play key roles in several

38

 

stories, Ste

of intennarr‘

 

 

stories, Stephens’ use of Indian women as ideal figures and the preponderance
of intermarriages in her narratives makes her frontier fiction unique.
Intermarriage in Fact and Fiction

Recent demographic statistics indicating that "one in seven whites, one in
three blacks, four in five Asians, and more than 19 in 20 American Indians are
closely related to someone of a different racial group" (Goldstein) testify that
intermarriage has long been a common cultural practice among Native peoples.
Long before white people settled on the Eastern seaboard, the taking of captives
from enemy tribes was a widespread practice among Native Americans of the
Northeast and Southwest (Namias 3). These captives, like later European
captives, were frequently adopted into a family of their captors. They were no
longer considered enemies. Often they were accepted as replacements for
those who had died or had been captured by other tribes. Once adopted, they
became full-fledged members of the community. Many interracial marriages
occurred as a result of captivity. But, as June Namias points out, native peoples
did not consider such unions as intermarriage; for them the purpose of adoption
of captives was "the full integration of those adoptees" into the cultural life of the
people (87). Marriage was simply one part of that integration. In other words,
Native Americans accepted whites into their culture much more readily than the
reverse.

Europeans, particularly the English, took a much different view, one which
they represented in so-called “fact" as well as fiction. In her study of White
Captives, Namias poignantly demonstrates how captivity nanatives were

frequently fictionalized to fit the ideologies of the times. Based on an extensive

39

 

study of ca
types: the
certain trai
The Surviv
good Puriti
Earty Natic
ideology c
century fit,
Women w
and altho
effect On
Mmod
Stones v

account

study of captivity narratives, she categorized white women captives into three
types: the Survivor, the Amazon, and the Frail Flower. Each type corresponds to
certain traits deemed desirable for women during the period it was predominant.
The Survivor of the seventeenth century bore up under duress because she, as a
good Puritan, relied on God. The Amazon, dominant in the Revolutionary and
Early National periods, protected her family against all odds, in keeping with the
ideology of the Republican mother. And the Frail Flower of the mid-nineteenth-
century fit stereotypes about women's delicacy and dependence on men; these
women were helpless, hopeless victims. Although these types overlap in time,
and although the ideologies defining women's behavior may have had some
effect on captured women's actual behavior, literary license and the
commodification of captivity nanatives also appears to be a factor in how the
stories were written. Namias discusses, for example, how a short factual
account of 5 paragraphs in 1792 expanded to 66 pages of sentimental
description in 1825, emphasizing the sufferings and feelings of Massy Harbison,
the captured woman. In fact, later editions included even more elements of the
Frail Flower. Namias points out that the story was published just one year after
the highly successful Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jamison, the tale of a
white woman who, after capture, married and chose to remain with her Indian
family. Namias suggests that Harbison's story, which like Jemison's was an "as—
told-to" narrative, may have been sentimentally enhanced to increase sales (41).

One of the more interesting findings of Namias' study is that few Frail
Flower captives actually wrote their narratives themselves.3 As Kolodny

observes in her discussion of Jemison's story, in situations where the text is

40

 

written by s

 

oompositio
publication
In the cas
paragraph

by the time

 

were no lo
Conseque
0? her Ca;
Considere
90°F. hell
Al
affected
image ct
it is (mm

written by someone other than the actual captive, "the very circumstances of its
composition militate against the narrative's fidelity" (71-2). Reasons for the
publication, both monetary and political, often dictate louder than the storyteller.
In the case of Massy Harbison's story, for example, although the original, five
paragraph captivity deposition was given in 1792, the year of Harbison‘s release,
by the time it was published for public consumption, in 1825, female captives
were no longer supposed to be strong Amazons, but Frail Flowers.
Consequently, although Harbison, who was seven months pregnant at the time
of her capture, safely delivered her child in captivity, this event was no longer
considered evidence of her strength; rather, it became another reason to pity the
poor, helpless mother.

Although Namias believes that the sentimental conventions of fiction
affected the inscriptions of captivity nanatives, I suggest that the Frail Flower
image of the white woman captive influenced fictional accounts as well. Although
it is impossible to determine which came first, a certain reciprocity appears
evident. The Frail Flower character of the captivity narrative seems to
correspond with certain male-authored representations of fictional women in the
traditional frontier myth. Over and over again, white women are captured by
hostile "savages" in the fiction of nineteenth-century male writers. For example,
in The Last of the Mohicans. Alice, the fair-haired beauty and unquestioned
heroine, relies totally on the ability of white men to save her from the Hurons;
whereas Cora, whose taint of black blood disqualifies her as a "true" woman, is
more self-reliant (if just as ineffectual). In The Wepf of Wrsh-ton-Wrsh, the only

novel in which Cooper allows intermarriage to occur, young Ruth is captured by

41

 

Indians at ‘

"innocent \l

 

reaches it
the Woods

captured b"

 

Indians at the tender age of seven, considered by her parents "a babe," an
"innocent victim," truly a Frail Flower (175). However, the frailness of the heroine
reaches its apex in one of the most virulent of the Indian-hating novels, Nick of
the Woods (1835), by Robert Montgomery Bird. When the heroine Edith is
captured by the Shawnee, she sinks "helpless on the couch at her feet. . . .
sitting in a stupor of despair, her head sunk upon her breast, her hands clasped,
her ashy lips quivering, but uttering no articulate sound" (284). So frail is she,
not a sound can she make. But, of course, a major purpose of helpless women
characters in these novels, as Leland Person emphasizes, is to justify violence
against the Indians by the male heroes (671). The Frail Flower — the white
woman captive - also appears in women's novels, but rarely to excuse violence.
In women's frontier fiction, the Frail Flower is often the object of pity or even
ridicule; sometimes this character is used to decimate the entire notion of passive
womanhood.

But if men and women approached the topic of female captivity differently,
their approaches to intermarriage bear scant resemblance at all. In "The
American Eve: Miscegenation and a Feminist Frontier Fiction," Leland Person
posits that male authors avoided the intermarriage plot because it stripped away
the need for white male heroics because it did not fit "male fantasies" of the
frontier in which white men occupy the central role (677). When the subject of
intermarriage between a white woman and an Indian arises in these masculine
fantasies, it is often presented as if it were an actual, or at least threatened,
sexual assault, preserving crucial roles for the white hero - defender of white

womanhood, vanquisher of evil, exterminator of the Indian. Even so, the woman,

42

 

 

regardle
Wept or
during l
villager
white I
seeth

scene

only I
must
SEXU
WOIT
liter;
0f ti“
336
ties
the
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the
the
re r

hQ\

regardless of how passive she may be, temporarily takes center stage. In The
Wepf of Wish-ton-Vlfish, Cooper handles this problem by not presenting Ruth
during her captivity at all. Readers do not see her taken, nor in the Indian
villages; the first time she re-emerges is when she returns to the home of her
white family. Bird employs a similar tactic in Nick of the Woods; readers do not
see the captive Edith from the time of her capture until the hero arrives on the
scene.

However, the sanction of white male violence against Indians is not the
only reason that white women, as symbols of white civilization as well as purity,
must suffer the lustful gaze of red men. The stereotype of the lecherous,
sexually depraved Indian man, though rare in nineteenth-century fiction by
women, appears repetitively in male-authored fiction. While historians and
literary scholars acknowledge that rape of female captives by Indian nations east
of the Mississippi "was rare or nonexistent" (Heard 98), male authors used this
scenario repeatedly. In The Last of the Mohicans. when Magua expresses his
desire to marry Cora, "her eyes sank with shame under the impression that, for
the first time, they had encountered an expression which no chaste female might
endure" (104). Her honor is besmirched at the mere suggestion of intermarriage.
The response of Duncan Hayward, the white male hero, typifies the white male
perspective toward such a possibility: "Name not the horrid alternative again; the
thought itself is worse than a thousand deaths" (109). And why is the mere
thought so hideous? Because it threatens white society itself. As
representatives of white civilization, white women must reproduce white children;

however, if they marry red men, their children will be red also, in effect, killing off

43

 

 

|
sexual ass

attracted l
"most am
by a nine
and an Ir
OClllsrlder
Logan, 1
his wife
Wither .
Seen a:
Simply

”Inete(

white society. And last, but perhaps not least, as Namias, Person, and other
critics note, white male authors' obsession with the possibility of sexual relations
between white women and Indian men may signify a deep-seated fear that
"young women would prefer the noble bearing and indeed sexual and physical
superiority of Indian men to their white counterparts" (Namias 107).

Whatever their reasons for depicting white women as potential victims of
sexual assault by Indians, male authors rarely present white men as sexually
attracted to Indian women. Louise Barnett asserts that the primary reason is that
"most authors were fixated [on] color" (114). Interestingly, one of the few stories
by a nineteenth-century male author featuring a marriage between a white man
and an Indian woman, Logan (1822), was written by John Neal, whose
considerable influence on Ann Stephens will be discussed in Chapter 2. In
Logan, the Indianized white husband, although he fights against whites alongside
his wife's people, suffers guilt and self-recrimination, which is compounded even
further by his attraction to a married white woman. In other words, whites are
seen as more sexually attractive than Indians. Barnett suggests that this is
simply another aspect of assumptions about white superiority that pervades
nineteenth-century fiction about Indians.

Strangely, female authors, who, by virtue of wishing to preserve their
womanly reputations, might have avoided the subject, seemed to have few
qualms about creating stories of white-Indian marriages. Marriages between
white women and Indian men predominate in women's frontier novels. The most
obvious reason for this is that white women's novels tend to focus on white

women characters. But another more subversive explanation, readily apparent in

44

 

Hobomok, .
own husba
to be a ma.
Otherwise '
retiorted in
difficulties
marriage t
published
to write 0
man or in
Women :
w“Ose r
nilletee

SEXUa‘ .

“Titers
female
Mary r
wants
love ‘
Hobc
reVle
”Stu!

Hob,

Hobomok, may be that such marriages emphasize a woman's right to choose her
own husband, a certain defiance against patriarchy. Besides, if such a union is
to be a major event in a story, the woman character must freely choose.
Othennise it could be interpreted as the type of "forced marriage" so often
reported in the press. White women authors had to contend with several
difficulties if they wished to represent an ideal white woman as a willing partner in
marriage to an American Indian, as Lydia Maria Child discovered. Although she
published Hobomok (1824) anonymously, reviewers vilified the author who dared
to write on so "unnatural" a subject, "revolting . . . to every feeling of delicacy in
man or woman" (NAR cited in Karcher, "Introduction" )oodv). Consequently,
women authors like Stephens who wished to be perceived as "true" women,
whose reputations were at risk simply for publishing their stories in the early-mid-
nineteenth-century, were doubly jeepardized if they broached such a political and
sexual tapic as intermarriage.

Yet broach it, even flaunt it, they did. While nineteenth-century male
writers tended to avoid the possibility of intermarriage in their frontier novels,
famale authors placed it squarely in the forefront. In Hobomok, the protagonist,
Mary Conant, marries the Indian Hobomok for several reasons: because she
wants to defy her patriarchal father; because she believes that Charies, her true
love (whom her father has forbidden her to marry) is dead; and, because in
Hobomok she finds a sympathetic friend. Child was spared some vilification in
reviews by representing Mary as "not altogether [her]self" (120), as "mad" (124).
"Stupified" by her grief at the supposed death of her lover, she offers herself to

Hobomok, "the only being in the wide world who was left to love her“ (121).

45

 

Despite Sui

 

bears HobiI
when Char
not with th
song in th
many oth _
Karcher n
rebellion a
In I
more yet
unbroker
Oneco_
the main
H0b0mc
adult de

Despite such inauspicious beginnings, the marriage seems successful as Mary
bears Hobomok's son and her love for her "noble-hearted" husband grows. But
when Charles reappears, the noble Hobomok divorces Mary, whose "heart. . . is
not with the Indian" (139). His generous act allows Mary to "sing the marriage
song in the wigwam of the Englishman" she loves (139), and Hobomok, like so
many other fictional Indians, disappears and is seen no more. But, as Caroline
Karcher notes in her introduction to Hobomok, “it is not. . . racial issues, but. . .
rebellion against patriarchy” which informs Child’s story (xx).

In Hope Leslie (1827), Sedgwick's treatment of intermarriage is at once
more yet less radical than Child's. It is more radical in that the marriage remains
unbroken and Hope's sister, Faith, remains with and true to her Indian husband,
Oneco. But it is less radical because it involves a minor character as opposed to
the main character. Furthermore, Faith's marriage resembles Mary's union with
Hobomok because Faith is represented as simple and childlike (unable to make
adult decisions). Unlike Mary who remains thoroughly white, Faith is completely
Indianized; she forgets how to speak English, forgets the Christian God.

But as Karcher insists, it is Sedgwick's creation of Magawisca. the noble
Indian woman character, as opposed to the noble Indian warriors invented by
male writers, that makes Hope Leslie "a more progressive novel than Hobomok"
()oo<v). Sedgwick even hints that Magawisca is a suitable bride for Everell, the
white hero, who admits "I might have loved — might have forgotten that nature
had put barriers between us" (214). But this is not to be. Even more significant
than the potential intermarriage - Magawisca shares the crucial role of mediator

with Hope. Through words and reconciliation, these two young heroines attempt

46

 

to underst.

 

cultures re

attempts .
Indian chi
publicatio
But
novels. A
\thble 5
race, anr
histricnir
Indian vi
3% all

SUbSeq

to understand each other's culture and to make the men of their respective
cultures realize the futility of fighting and warlike behavior. Despite valiant
attempts and eloquent speeches, their efforts are to no avail. Like the noble
Indian characters of both male and female authors before and after the1827
publication of Hope Leslie, Magawisca "disappeared for ever" (334).

But the noble Indian woman character reappears in many of Stephens'
novels. And most of them do indeed marry white men. Stephens also creates
ignoble savage women - both white and red. Because of the complex gender,
race, and sex issues involved in creating these characters, not to mention the
histrionics of the melodramatic plots in which they find themselves, Stephens'
Indian woman creations defy easy classification. Each Indian woman character
and all intermarriages presented in Stephens' frontier fiction will be analyzed in

subsequent chapters.

47

 

 

and HOpe L

Feddel’ini

“5 Wicca:
FUD". of tr
E3” gains h
[M10] alOne

banedgn

 

narratives

Endnotes

‘ See, for example, Caroline Karcher’s and Mary Kelley’s introductions to Hobomok (xix)
and Hope Leslie (xxii), respectively. Also see Joyce Warren, “Introduction: Canons and Canon
Fodder“ in The (Other) American Traditions.

2 St. Elmo (1866) by Augusta Evans "sold 1 million copies within the first four months of
its publication" (Harris 60). It has the typical plot that Baym outlines in her ovular study, Women's
Fiction, of the young gin left alone in the world to make her own way. In St. Elmo, young Edna
Earl gains higher education and refuses to consider St. Elmo as a suitor until he finds "Jesus
[who] alone can purify and save" (279). Naturally, he does just that, but not before Edna has
IeanedGreekandLatinandhasbecomeapublishedauthor.

3 See Appendix, White Captives, pp. 275-280, for statistical analysis of the captivity

narratives that Namias reviews.

48

 

HIST

 

POPU‘

 

 

CHAPTER 2
HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL CONTEXTS: STEPHENS, INDIANS IN
POPULAR CULTURE, CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS OF STEPHENS, AND
METHODOLOGY

Analyzing fiction is fraught with difficulties for the critic. When the texts to
be examined are removed in time or culture, or if they deal with controversial or
socially sensitive issues, the problems are magnified. Today the critic has a wide
array of analytical tools to guide her, and she knows that her own ideologies will
affect her analysis. However, even critics aware of this ideological dilemma may
forget that that people in the past were equally affected by their own sets of
ideologies. Too often critics today judge writers of the past according to
contemporary ideologies, particulariy when dealing with socially sensitive issues
such as race, gender, class, or other differences by which people have been
segregated into distinct groups. Thus has Ann Stephens been judged as "racist"
and as a "conservative" on gender issues. However, a contextual analysis of
Stephens and the situation in which she wrote will help clarify her representations
and revise such criticism.

Questions of race and gender were as pervasive in the nineteenth century
as they are in our own day. A primary difference between then and now is that
social and literary critics have developed new theories and tools to facilitate
investigation of these controversial issues. Feminist and post-colonial critical
studies, for example, have provided us with lenses to allow us to view gender

and race from perspectives that were unavailable in the nineteenth century. To

49

 

understan _
ways, we
their influe
totheinhu
that work
social ordl
influence
Utilize he
xii). Th
against
Wholnt
mBent
Vflhch
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of d:
that
from
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SUb\

How

I

understand how nineteenth-century authors came to represent Indians in certain
ways, we need to examine other discourses on race from that period to gauge
their influence on authors' ideologies. Jane Tompkins asserts in her introduction
to the influential Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of Fiction, 1 790-1860,
that works of literature can and should be seen "as attempts to redefine the
social order” (xi). To understand how fiction endeavors "to win the belief and
influence the behavior of the widest possible audience," Tompkins insists that
critics need to know "the cultural realities that made those novels meaningful" (xi,
xii). Thus, as she rightly points out, historical context is not merely a "backdrop"
against which an author wrote. Her position is similar to that of Fredric Jameson,
who insists that the local issues surrounding texts "can recover their original
urgency only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story,"
which involves the political struggles of the time (19). Because contemporary
ideologies affect literary texts, these works need to be analyzed in terms of the
"religious beliefs, social practices, and economic and political circumstances that
produced them" (Tompkins xiii). In addition, if we are to understand an author's
writings, we must also know something of her circumstances and ideologies.
Women's supposed confinement in domesticity, coupled with the equation
of domesticity with the status quo, resulted in a literary tradition which suggested
that women were unable to step outside their culture to get the requisite distance
from which to critique it (Romero 1-2). However, feminist literary critics1 have
demonstrated that nineteenth-century women's writings could be just as
subversive as those of canonical men. But as Lora Romero emphasizes in

Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States, society

50

 

is not a m
particular
conserva"
on wome'
because
the doctri
women p
allowed t
even wm
v-J
"lJl'leg-nE
SOCiety t
establisq
by Herd
which Si
examplfl
magazi

l

q
I
l

 

is not a monolithic whole which an author writes for or against (5). Rather,
particular issues within a society serve as impetus for writing. Writers might be
conservative on one facet of an issue and liberal on another. Stephens' stance
on women's place in society, for example, has often been labeled "conservative"
because her writings have been interpreted as articulating stringent support for
the doctrine of separate spheres; however, at the same time, through strong
women protagonists in her fiction, Stephens argued that women should be
allowed to devel0p and use their God-given talents for the benefit of humanity,
even when it meant stepping beyond their assigned sphere.2
While Stephens was undoubtedly fearful of being accused of being
"unwomanly," her ooncems may have had more to do with her position in literary
society than anxiety about gender, per se. Much of the criticism that seeks to
establish Stephens as a conservative on gender issues is based on a misreading
by Herbert Ross Brown3 and interpretations of some of her earliest nonfiction in
which she attempts to explain the anomalous position of women writers. For
example, in her first nonfictional "address" to the public as editor of a new literary
magazine, Stephens writes,
The editor earnestly deprecates the unfair criticisms and ill will of the
sterner reapers in the literary field. Let them go on in the strength of giant
intellects, measuring pens in political strife. Their's it is to dig the bosom
of the earth, to scour the mountains, to draw the lightening from the
clouds, and pore with a keen eye over the starry heavens, in their search
for philosophical knowledge. Earth, ocean, air, and sky, we willingly yield
to them. The privilege of deep research is man's right; with it we have no
wish to interfere. All we ask is permission to use the knowledge he has
scattered over the enlightened world. But poetry, fiction, and the lighter
branches of the sciences are woman's appropriate sphere, as much as the

flower-garden, the drawing-room, and the nursery; and the use of these
cannot be denied with any show of reason, so long as woman is singled

51

 

out
get
All

acceptanr
reveals tr

Which she

 

assures r
she make
and the l
clever m _

have. Sin

 

 

out by nature and custom to lay the foundations of character for the rising
generation. (Portland Magazine 1 (Oct. 1834: 1-2))

Although this passage has been interpreted as reflecting Stephens'
acceptance of the doctrine of separate spheres, i believe that closer examination
reveals that Stephens has a more complex understanding of the situation in
which she writes. She first equates philosophy and politics with men's realm and
assures her readers she has no intention of trying to invade this tem'tory. Then
she makes an ostensibly similar comparison, through simile, that "poetry, fiction,
and the lighter branches of the sciences are woman's appropriate sphere." This
clever move puts her in the position of seeking no more than women already
have. Since men have the whole outside world, it seems like so little to ask.

But ask she does. For Stephens does not assert her rights, she requests
"permission." This, too, is an astute strategy. She does not demand her rights,
which, of course, would be met with severe disapprobation and defeat her
purpose. Rather, through clever use of rhetorical methods, hyperbole, simile,
and contrast and comparison, she becomes a conservative seeking to preserve
the status quo. She obsequiously acknowledges male authority and requests
"permission to use the knowledge he has scattered over the enlightened world."
Such obeisance is integral to ladylike behavior, for true ladies were to submit to
male authority. This is important, for Ann Stephens is simultaneously
establishing her credentials as a "tme" woman and invoking community mores,
both of which establish her ethos as a rhetor. But her irony is more visible here,
for the manifest deference to men obviates the need for close reading by males,
yet the word "scattered" implies waste. Without careful scrutiny, such

52

 

 

ex
Per
insi
bel.
9X2
Clrc
liter
as :
as l
true
dell

Cor

abc

age

implications might be overlooked. She is not asking for a higher education,
which, in 1834, was still unilaterally male, but seeking the opportunity to use
knowledge that might otherwise wither and die like the parable of the seed
scattered upon rocky ground because "it had not much earth" to nourish it (Mark
4: 6). Whether or not Stephens' irony was intended, nineteenth-century middle-
class women, many of whom read the Bible daily, would be more likely to notice
the allusion and recognize its possible connotation.

"Because ideology is always embodied in particular semantics, issues,
contexts, and institutions," such as religion, Romero explains, no one
"experience[s] it as a whole abstract entity" to be rejected or embraced (6).
PeOple can stand neither totally outside the ideologies of their culture nor totally
inside them because individuals are influenced by competing and conflicting
beliefs that can shore up or tear down the boundaries of any given ideology. The
example of Stephens' first public address exemplifies this notion. Financial
circumstances (her husband's business had just failed) make the success of this
literary magazine essential. To be a successful editor, she must present herself
as shrewd, knowledgeable, in control - adjectives that would generally be seen
as inimical to "true women." On the other hand she must present herself as a
true woman in order to achieve credibility with her intended audience. It is a
delicate balance that all writing women in the nineteenth-century faced.
Competing ideologies, of both the writer and her audience, constantly hover
about the fringes of the social act of writing. This chapter recreates the contexts
in which Stephens lived and wrote and delineates some of the ideologies that

affected her representations of Indians in her frontier fiction. It also presents

53

 

critical ass.
to analyz
Ann 8. S
An
century v.
expandin
brought
PTOSpero
less fort
States a
Society
theater 1
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critical assessments of Stephens' writings and explains the methodologies used
to analyze her frontier fiction.
Ann S. Stephens - A "Literary Lady"

Ann Stephens was a woman of her times. Born in the eariy nineteenth
century when opportunities for women's education and literary careers were
expanding rapidly, Stephens took full advantage of both. Her literary fame
brought her into the circles of some of the most distinguished, powerful, and
prosperous people, yet she never forgot her more humble beginnings, nor people
less fortunate than she. By the 1850s, she was celebrated both in the United
States and abroad as the "gifted one! America's daughter!" “ She took in all that
society and her wealth and fame proffered - attending cultural events from
theater to horse races to balls at the White House. She befriended many from
the upper echelons, including the Vanderbilts, Henry Clay, Charles Dickens,
\Mlliam Makepeace Thackeray, and every President from Van Buren to Hayes.
As Madeleine Stern notes," [t]hrough the years, both abroad and at home, Mrs.
Stephens had been collecting not only literary, but political notables" (We 41).
Her lively wit and quick repartee made her a papular guest at literary salons,
parties, and balls. By the 18703 and 808, she was holding her own Saturday
evening receptions for the literati and celebrities of the day (Stern Purple 111).
She was a member of Sorosis, one of the first women's clubs in America, as well
as the Nineteenth-Century Club. After her husband died, she spent her winters
in Washington, DC, and in her later years she summered at Newport, Rhode
Island.

 

Bu
issues, ar
dire circu
successfl

wretched

 

April 184
Stephen
declares

 

But, despite wealth and fame, she had a genuine concern for many social
issues, and she used her friendship with the powerful to advocate for people in
dire circumstances. For example, through a personal visit, Stephens
successfully interceded with Governor Seward of New York to get "a poor
wretched mother pardoned from the gallows" (Stephens, "To Mrs. Sigoumey," 27
April 1843). And this was not an isolated incident. A short biography of
Stephens that appeared in The American Literary Magazine as early as 1848
declares:

Orphans and penitentiaries, she often visits to console those who need

consolation. In more than one instance she has averted impending doom

from the head of the guiltless, by exerting herself in a most disinterested

manner, in behalf of the prisoner. (June 1848, 343)

Many of Stephens' obituaries, which appeared in newspapers across the
continent, mention her kindnesses to "the weak" or "less fortunate." She also
used her pen to bring attention to social ills, principally women's issues. Many of
her novels feature the plight of working women, including the hardships and
penurious straits of those who were outworkers in the needle trades.5 Other
social problems she addressed in her fiction include prison conditions,
particularly the predicament of women prisoners with children; the shocking
conditions of orphans sent to the alms house; the dire straits of married women,
with no rights to their own property, when their husbands were gamblers,
profligates, and/or deserters; and, the dilemmas faced by "fallen" women.
Stephens, explaining that the "domestic arrangements" of moving have

prevented her from timely completion of the story that Lydia Sigoumey had

apparently requested, comments on the moral responsibility of authorship:

55

 

she w

 

house

She gr

\

l have tried to make it such as you desire; it may not be as brilliant as
since-it might have been made, but I have striven to make it domestic,
quiet, and good - by good I mean in its moral. . . . Now that the novelty of

a Literary Life is beginning to lease lose its gloss and my mind is

becoming matured, I feel anxious to do something that I can look back

upon with pleasure in my old age. ("To Mrs. Sigoumey" 16 May 1839)

Because her most of her personal papers were burnt‘, little is known
about Stephens' early life. She was born on March 30, 1810 in Humphreysville
(renamed Seymour), Connecticut, the second child of John and Ann Wrigley
Winterbotham. The couple had emigrated from England in 1806 because John
had been offered a position as superintendent in the woolen mills of Col. David
Humphreys, for whom the village was named. Thus, Ann and her siblings grew
up in relatively comfortable surroundings. Her early education, typical of middle-
class girls of the period, began at a local dame school and continued at several
other primary schools as her parents moved from place to place. Ann also
attended a ladies” seminary until the age of 16 (Harper 123), but the name, and
thus her possible course of study, remain unknown.

Perhaps Ann's voracious reading habits were first sparked there, maybe
from her father‘s nightly oral readings to the family, or possibly in Col.
Humphreys' library where she was allowed to browse (Orcutt and Beardsley
457).7 Stephens herself remarks:

I have no idea how my literary tastes originated. My father was very

intelligent and a great reader, but he took no pains to influence me, and

long before I knew what authorship was, I made up my mind to write

stories and make books. (Leslie's 16 August, 1865, 158)

She was also very proud of her domestic skill and claimed that "there was no

household duty" which she did not know by age sixteen (158). "My whole life,"

she goes on to say, "was intensely occupied in learning something which might

56

 

posskflyl
ladies’ 's

In
PWmoml
[and] he
Portland
domesti
Portlanq
knomnei
the :1er
Chem“;

(ALM ‘i

the lite
Wfite ti
fundsu
publis
inVeSh

amOb

 

possibly be of future use" (158). And these three - learning, literary tastes, and
ladies” “sphere” — would shape her life and career.

In 1831 Ann married Edward Stephens, a merchant and printer, of
Plymouth, Massachusetts. By all accounts this 31-year marriage was a “tranquil
[and] happy‘ alliance (Orcutt and Beardsley 650). The newlyweds moved to
Portland, Maine, where Edward engaged in the mercantile trade, "rendering the
domestic duties of his lady comparatively light," allowing her to take advantage of
Portland's "large” circulating library, which she did with an irrepressible thirst for
knowledge (ALM, June 1848: 335). According to one account, “the records of
the librarian attest that nearly the whole number of books it contained had been
charged to her“ and that she read an average of two books per day for four years
(ALM June 1848: 336).

Similar to financial crises that precipitated other women writers' entry into
the literary marketplace, when her husband's business failed, Stephens began to
write for the public. The couple “held a council” and gathered "all available
funds" to establish a ladies‘ periodical, Portland Magazine, which Edward would
publish and Ann would edit. Before embarking on the venture, Ann decided to
investigate the feasibility of the project. As she explains, in a short
autobiography which appeared in Frank Leslie 's Illustrated Newspaper.

Eariy in the morning I commenced a story, the Tradesman‘s Boast, and

took it to John Neal, with whom I was slightly acquainted, and desired him

to tell me if there was talent enough to warrant our undertaking. He read
the story, criticized its faults honestly, and with generous warmth
commended its excellence. He told me to go on - that all I wanted was
experience and time. He sat down and kindly impressed on me the great
moral responsibility of authorship. . . . He not only gave us advice, but

help, read my proofs before I was able to read them myself, wrote for our
work, and helped us in every way that independent, and to a certain

57

 

309i?

Stepher
time the
breadwi
Edward
journals

death ir

 

extent, self-reliant persons could accept. We prospered. I wrote at first

with great trepidation and labor, but the public were very kind and so I

gained courage. Mr. S. worked as hard as I did. . . . There was nothing

calculated to insure success which he did not do, and which I did not help

him in. (158)“

Stephens’ mention of her husband’s contribution is interesting because, by the
time the autobiographical sketch appeared, she had been the primary
breadwinner of the family for almost two decades. But apparently, she and
Edward were partners in life, love, and business. He would publish many of the
journals she would edit over the course of her long literary career, and until his
death in 1862, he held the copyright to all her published works.

This account of her initiation into the literary world reappears in one of her
novels as a kind of fictive autobiography - a device used by many women
authors of the period. In The Wife's Secret (1864), the self-sufficient female role
model rises to upper-middle-class status through the use of her pen. She
becomes an author Muse she needs a decent, but secret, income to support
the child her sister bore out of wedlock. The chapter entitled "Authorship" is
basically the same story Stephens told in the August 16, 1856 issue of Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper. However. the fictional account embellishes, displaying all
the turbulent emotions a young woman of the 1830s might experience when first
exposing her writing to an outside male critic: self-critical "disappointment" (456);
"anxiety" that it would prove unacceptable (457); "embarrassment" at exhibiting
ambition (458); gratefulness and teary-eyed emotional turmoil at his "kind" yet
"severe" criticism (458); "bewilderment" at such printing conventions as proofs
(460); and, "strange feelings of mingled exultation and humility" at receiving pay
for her work (461). These emotions help to identify Stephens as a quintessential

58

 

 

candidat
about th
achfifie
mmee
out'nc“
the met
ends.i

simulta .

 

i
a'mOSt
C0nsun
0‘ her i
of aud i
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a Bio

candidate for Mary Kelley’s famous study of nineteenth-century women conflicted
about their careers as authors in light of societal restrictions on women's
activities in the public sphere. Stephens was a woman of her time, keenly aware
of the prohibitions against entering the public arena, but as Linda Kerber points
out, “notions of women’s sphere permeated the language; [women] in turn used
the metaphor in their own descriptions” ("Separate" 10-11) and often to their own
ends. Thus Stephens sought to establish herself as womanly as she
simultaneously ventured beyond the private sphere.

Stephens worked hard on the Portland Magazine, writing the first issues
almost completely by herself. Despite her inexperience as a writer for public
consumption, from the very beginning she demonstrates an astute understanding
of her ambiguous position as woman, author, and editor as well as a keen sense
of audience. In her inaugural "Address" to the public, her use of trope and her
appeals to nineteenth-century commonplaces all seem to indicate a rhetor of
skill. Stephens' first public sentence, indeed, first public word, is a Biblical
reference. This is not accidental. No educated woman in the mid-nineteenth
century could be unaware of societal restrictions upon women. By beginning her
first public statement with an unmistakable reference to the Bible, Stephens is
acknowledging the piety of her readers as well as establishing her own ethos as
a pious woman. Her first words also indicate appropriate female modesty:

Noah, when sending out the dove upon the waste of waters could not

have felt more anxiety for its safe return with the green leaf of promise in

its bill, than is experienced for the success of the specimen number of the

Portland Magazine, which we now offer to the Ladies of Maine. (Portland

Magazine, Oct. 1834: 1)

To suggest that Ann Stephens labored long and hard on this first piece of writing

59

 

to be pu
she ad .
applicat
(1). H
And her
financia
writings
betwee!
mman
fOroesl
reconc
was ac
neveri
in her I
true Wt
all “Mr
as a m

thOr‘r

to be published under her own name is probably a gross understatement. As
she admits a few sentences later, "[the editor] knows that days and nights of
application and anxiety will be but a part of the task she has imposed on herself“
(1). How much more was the anxiety she suffered as she wrote the address?
And her anxiety was not unwarranted, for the success of the magazine was a
financial imperative for the young couple. With this address and publication of
writings under her own name begins Ann Stephens' 52-year battle to find peace
between her public and her private roles.9 Constricted by societal pressures to
remain within the realm of domesticity, yet impelled by external and intemal
forces to step beyond it, Ann Stephens seems never to have found the
reconciliation she sought. Some of her most anxious moments came when she
was accused of being "unwomanly," yet once launched on her career, she
never withdrew. Her public persona was primarily that of a "true" woman, while
in her private life she took a much more active role in society than the precepts of
true womanhood allowed.” To counterbalance her conflicting roles, she signed
all work published under her own name as "Mrs. Ann S. Stephens," as if her title
as a married woman could somehow shield her from accusations of
unwomanliness.

Stephens edited the Portland Magazine for two years. During that time
she managed to garner the works of several authors of renown, a feat which
speaks well for her business and editorial acumen. One of the earliest, Lydia
Sigoumey, submitted a poem, "The Muffled Knocker," and encouraged Stephens
to continue her endeavors (Stephens, "Sigoumey" 260). Thus began a life-long
friendship. Other contributors included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Neal,

60

 

Seba S
aBOCX)
Portlan
advisedl
Snowde
heredh
sold, ar
l
the Uni

Ann ke

dufing

 

Seba Smith, and Nathaniel Parker Willis (DLB 73: 302). These same authors
also contributed to the Portland Sketchbook (1836), which Stephens edited.
Portland Magazine prospered, but Ann's delicate health gave way. The doctor
advised the Stephenses to move to a milder climate. Fortunately, William
Snowden, of New York City, having heard of Ann’s success as an editor, offered
her editorship of his publication, Ladies Companion, so Portland Magazine was
sold, and the Stephenses moved to New York (Orcutt and Beardsley 649).

Before they settled in New York City, soon to become the literary capital of
the United States, the couple traveled extensively in the West. Whether or not
Ann kept a journal on the trip is not definitely known, but she did keep a journal
during other trips, so it seems likely. Using her keen sense of observation, she
gathered the images that she was later to depict with such clarity and authenticity
for her readers. Under her auspices, circulation of Ladies Companion increased
from 3,000 to 17,000 (Stem, "Stephens and the Dime Novel " 3267). Here it was
that Ann Stephens first established her name among the "Literati" and gathered a
coterie of well-placed friends, including Anne Lynch Botta, known for her literary
salons. Here, too, Stephens wrote and published her first stories centering on
the lives of American Indians.

During her years as editor of Ladies Companion, the prolific Stephens
published poems, articles, stories, and serials in many other magazines and
story papers, including Ladies Wreath, Olive Branch, Columbian Magazine, Flag
of Our Union, and Brother Jonathan (DLB 73: 302). She also wrote a series of
letters entitled "Jonathan Slick in New York," which were published in the New

York Daily Express in 1839-40. These humorous sketches, letters of a

61

downeaster farm boy visiting the big city to his "Par" back home, were gathered
together and published in book form in 1843 as High Life in New York by her
husband under the pseudonym Jonathan Slick. According to Linda Morris,
Stephens was "the first American woman to write in the vernacular humor mode"
(50), which may explain why she chose a male pseudonym and persona for the
task. Although the book achieved great popularity, running through several
editions, it was Stephens’ only major attempt at humor (25—6). Thus Stephens'
first published volume was neither published under her own name nor in a genre
typical of her later publications.

Ann's success and that of Ladies Companion did not go unnoticed; soon
she was getting "tempting offers" from other periodicals (Cyclopedia 10:20). In
1841, George R. Graham, known for his liberal payments to contributors,
managed to lure her away from Snowden by offering "more money and less
work" as a contributing editor, with Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Peterson as oo-
editors (Stephens, "To Mrs. Sigoumey" 27 April 1843). However, Poe did not
remain with the magazine very long, and Stephens did not get along with his
rcplacement, Rufus W. Griswold, who held women writers in low esteem, and
whom she considered a liar and a "sycophant" (Stephens, "To Sigoumey" 27
April 1843). In fact, both she and her friend, Elizabeth Ellet, testified against him
when his wife sued to have their divorce annulled ("Griswold”).

Perhaps because of her conflicts with Griswold, Stephens found greener
pastures elsewhere. Charles Peterson offered her a position as co-editor of his
new magazine, Lady's Worid (later renamed Peterson's Magazine).‘1 She

retained a position at Peterson's for the remainder of her life. Despite Peterson‘s

62

 

claims th
continue
other )0 ,
Gazette

Mrs. St

that she
Peterso
corrobo‘

mOllvatl

In a put

claims that her "stories could be had nowhere else," the indefatigable Stephens
continued to make contributions to other periodicals. Indeed, she even edited
other journals during her tenure at Peterson's including Frank Leslie's Lady's
Gazette of Fashion and Fancy Needlework (1854-56) and her own magazine,
Mrs. Stephen's New Monthly (1856-58). Although Poe insisted in the "Literati"
that she was editor in name only at Graham's (Godey's 33:15), and editors at
Peterson '3 disavowed her editorial work soon after her death, evidence does not
corroborate such testimony. This repudiation seems likely to have been
motivated by wounded male egos in the face of enormous success by a female
in a public sphere.

In the early years, the fledgling Peterson's needed the expertise of a
proven, experienced editor, and Stephens provided such leadership. From her
editor's chair, she did much to advance the prestige of women's writings. The
January 1844 issue of Peterson's was penned entirely by female authors. As
Stephens remarks from the "Editor's Table": 'We believe no number of any other
magazine was ever before issued, whose contributions were all from ladies"
(5:37). Ann herself supplied much of the material in the early years. She also
provided Peterson's with the works of many noted contemporaries through her
friendships and connections, including Lydia Sigoumey, Elizabeth Ellet, Caroline
Kirkland, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Park Benjamin, and Henry Wadsworth
Ldngfellow. Due to Stephens' able pen and keen sense of what the public
wanted to read, Peterson's Magazine became immensely popular and by the

Civil War outstripped Godey’s Lady's Book in circulation (Mott, History 2: 309).

63

 

 

mor

buS

the

In 1848, Stephens began contributing year-long serials to Peterson's,
which also attracted subscribers, for to read the entire novel one had to buy the
magazine for the whole year. From January 1848, when the first installment of
"Lost and Found" appeared, until 1887, the year after her death, a new serial by
Stephens appeared in Peterson's every year, beginning in January and ending in
December. After 1859, these serials were published in book form by Peterson's
brother, Thomas, as soon as the December issue hit the streets.

Stephens' continuing popularity as an author can be traced in part to the
same qualities that made her a good editor, particularly her innate ability to
anticipate the literary tastes of her audience. Master of diverse fictional genres,
Stephens managed to pen historical romances, American frontier adventures,
domestic novels, and tales of country versus city life when each was the height of
fashion. Her astute knowledge of literary tastes is revealed in a letter to a "Mr.
Harper," nephew of the owners of Harper Publishing Company, in which she
requests a loan and offers copyrights of four historical novels that had never
been published in book form as security. She notes that "they are worth so much
more than the amount I want" ($2000) and that "this is a sort of security few
business men - not publishers - would understand" (6 March 1868). She lists
the titles and continues:

I hold these books more valuable just now than domestic novels, but if you

prefer, I can exchange for that class. They have of course run through

Peterson's Magazine exactly as Fashion and Famine and The Old

Homestead and all my other books have done, but some of them were

published twelve years ago and none of them has been published in the

last two years. I have kept this class of books back, intending to use them
when historical works came to be the favorite as they are now.

 

S

m

n:

 

This appeal also shows her sagacious business acumen, as she lists her two
best-selling novels as examples of the potential financial returns on serials
previously published in Peterson '3 Magazine.

Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book and one of the most
influential writers of her day, considered Stephens "one of the most successful
Magazine writers of the day" (797). In fact her skillful pen "seems to have been
the mainstay of the family," enabling her to far out-eam her less-than-successful
husband (NAW 361). When her husband died in 1862, Stephens forged ahead,
supporting herself and her two children, both still at home. She was one of the
best-paid authors of her time, receiving well above the standard $2.00 per page
for magazine contributions in the 1840s (Stern, We 39). In a letter to Frances
Osgood in 1844, Peterson declared that as far as payment for contributions were
concerned, she and Stephens were "above all rule" (Eastman 43).

Ann Stephens was a highly acclaimed and prolific author who triumphed in
many genres - serials, social novels”, dime novels, nonfiction, and poetry.
Although only Malaeska holds any resonance for modern readers, in his classic
study of best-sellers in America, Golden Multitudes, Frank Luther Mott classifies
two of her novels, Fashion and Famine and The Old Homestead, as "better
sellers." While all of her novels are woman-centered, some are historical fiction,
such as The Rejected We, a fictionalized biography of Benedict Arnold's wife,
and The Lady Mary, a tragic tale of a Iady-in-waiting of Anne Boleyn. Others
critique the artifice and foppery of the "fashionable life" of her own day, such as
The Reigning Belle and The Curse of Gold. Another genre, which she was

among the first women authors to exploit, is stories that pitted the sinful city

65

 

   

against
are b0

volume

against the purity of country life; Fashion and Famine and The Old Homestead
are both novels of this type. Two collections of her works were published, a 14
volume set in 1869 and a 23 volume set in 1886 (NAW 3:361).

During her later years Stephens was prevented, by her contract with
Peterson's, from writing for any other monthly magazines, but for not the weekly
story papers. Thus, in the 18605, she began to make extensive contributions to
them (Eastman 40). Many of the writers of dime novels contributed to weekly
story papers. Perhaps it was this connection which led Erastus Beadle to
approach the grand dame of American fiction for the publication rights to her old
serial, Malaeska. Or perhaps he discussed his ideas for marketing dime novels
with her when he negotiated the right to reprint, as a pamphlet, Victor Hugo's
letter on John Brown and her reply, both of which had been printed in the New
York Express.” Whatever influenced him, his instincts were right. Malaeska
sold over 300,000 copies, 30,000 within weeks of the initial issue (Stern and
Rose 1139). Quickly capitalizing on this financial bonanza, Beadle published
Myra, The Child of Adoption by Stephens as Dime Novel # 3. Altogether
Stephens wrote eight dime novels - all featuring women in leading roles, and all
but two with Indian women characters and intennaniage plots.

Stephens' Knowledge of American Indians

Exactly what sparked Stephens' interest in Native Americans is not known.
No existing records indicate she ever had any personal contact with them, either
on her trips West or in her early life. Among her papers at the New York Public
Library is a list of Indian words with their English translations in her own

handwriting. Before writing “Mary Derwent,” she spent time living on the island

66

 

where .
also int
massac
she weQ
enthno.
antebel
ltis like
ibe No
She re
as edi
ante:
one.
Wide
and

lnq

he

where most of the action takes place (Harper 125). According to Eastman, she
also interviewed some of the descendants of those who escaped the 1778
massacre to get her facts about the battle which took place there (57). Because
she was so well read, it is likely that Stephens had read one or more of the
enthnohistorical accounts of various Native American tribes published in the
antebellum period. Even if she did not read Schoolcraft, Catlin, or Heckewelder,
it is likely that she read excerpts of their books in the reviews that appeared in
the North American Review or in other literary magazines of the day. Most likely,
she read the stories and articles published in those magazines which listed her
as editor, whether or not she actually had editorial duties.“ During the
antebellum period, most issues of popular American magazines featured at least
one story, poem, or article about Indians (Clemmons 41), so Stephens had a
wide array of opportunities to study how Indians were represented in both fiction
and nonfiction. Furthermore, the newspapers were replete with articles on
Indians, especially their violent clashes with whites.

However, to be well read about Indians in the nineteenth century was not
necessarily to be well informed about Native Americans. As Gould, Pearce,
Berkhofer, and many other twentieth-century scholars have demonstrated, even
purportedly factual accounts about Native Americans from this period were
imbued with racial prejudices, and conclusions were generally based on the
ethnocentric biases of the writers. Berkhofer ponders whether scholars today
can accurately distinguish between ethnocentrism and racism of writers in the
nineteenth-century, a time when science viewed biology and culture as linked

(55). Although early in the century, many felt that the Indians were culturally

67

 

depnv
gradual
audien
noble a
civilizat
distan
relire
autho

l
m

by pro:
eKiller
later (1
the13'
Amer
thQSE
thlay I
80 n“
cUltu
othe:
aWar
aChi.
and

annh

deprived and could improve with education and contact with white civilization,
gradually, "race" became the operative word, not just in informal articles for lay
audiences, but in scientific reports as well. Even writers who viewed Indians as
noble and supported their causes saw them as “savage” in comparison to white
civilization and repeated many of the negative stereotypes in their works. At this
distance, it is difficult for us to comprehend the pervasiveness of such bigoted
representations, but a proper historical perspective can help clarify how white
authors such as Stephens came to represent Indians in fiction.
' n ' Di

Most accounts of Native American life during mid-century were not written
by professional anthropologists, but by Indian agents, missionaries, and
explorers. Professional anthropology was not established in this country until the
later decades of the century. Even the earlier Bureau of Ethnology, a division of
the Smithsonian Institution, was not established until 1879, although the
American Ethnological Society was formed in 1842 (Carr 151,154). Many of
those who worked for the Bureau were not trained as anthropologists, nor did
they have the perspective of the "Boasian emphasis on subjectivity" (Carr 148).“
So most of those who went out among native tribes to write of their lives and
cultures had no professional guidelines. Their only models were the writings of
other amateurs who preceded them. As Pearce reminds us, we need to be
aware of "how hard it is for us to find a place in our world for societies which
achieve their ends in ways which seem to deny the fundamental moral, social,
and political hypotheses of our society" (105). Thus, in his discussion of early

anthropological studies of the Indian, Pearce concludes that "in a nineteenth-

68

 

canon

 

pmgna
wonks

their 0v:

booksr

 

neverl
amend
1820,
Ekay
beds
arm
1834
Fhvr
Mic

“Vi

1E

W

century milieu the savage, as known in stem fact, could and did prove, savagism,
progress, and the manifest destiny of American civilization" (105-6). In other
words, those who studied Indians and their cultures were blind to the effects of
their own ideologies on the conclusions they reached in their reports.

The career of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft (1793-1864), whose numerous
books and articles on American Indians were, from first publication, virtually
never out of print during the antebellum period, exemplifies this attitude.16 He
attended college where he was trained as a natural scientist and geologist. By
1820, when he accompanied Lewis Cass as a geologist on an expedition to
explore the Lake Superior region of the Northwest Territory, he had already
become interested in the lives and cultures of Native Americans. He was
appointed Indian agent of the Upper Midwest in 1822, a position he held until
1836. In 1832 he led the expedition that located the sources of the Mississippi
River, and from 1836 to 1841 he served as superintendent of Indian affairs for
Michigan. During this period, he used his office and travels to study natives'
lives, concentrating on their oral literature — myths and traditions — and what he
called the "savage mentality" (Pearce 120). He began publishing his findings in
1826 in The Muzzr'niegan or Literary Voyager, a journal he founded, and, in 1839,
he compiled these materials into a two-volume publication, Algic Researches,
Comprising Inquiries Respecting the Mental Characteristics of the North
American Indians (Clements 53). Even though this work did not gain a wide
audience on first publication, literary notices and reviews helped publicize his
work; moreover, he developed a series of lectures based on his findings on the

grammar of Indian languages, for which the French Institute awarded him a gold

69

 

nedml

 

magazih
800“ g

resear

ofhs
Syste
"Khan
amme
DUNEH
Histor
57), g
Amer
John:
Make
the S
Sixw

amb

medal (McAleer 18). He also began to publish his findings as shorter articles in
magazines such as the Southem Literary Messenger and Knickerbocker. He
soon gained enough recognition to be commissioned by the State of New York to
research and report on Indian antiquities of that area.

Although he was not trained as an ethnologist nor anthropologist, because
of his scientific background, Schoolcraft attempted to approach his topic
systematically. After he had established his credentials as a serious scholar of
Indians, he was commissioned by the federal government to complete an
ambitious survey of all Native American tribes in the United States. This was
published in six volumes as Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the
History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (1851—
57). Schoolcraft undoubtedly considered himself sympathetic to Native
Americans. However, despite his marriage in 1823 to an Ojibway woman, Jane
Johnston, or Obahbahmwawagezhegoqua (meaning ”the sound which stars
make mshing through the sky") (Bellfy 294), he could not rise above his belief in
the superiority of the Anglo—Saxon race.” His comments in the preface to his
six-volume history demonstrate both his ethnocentric biases and his
ambivalence toward Native Americans:

Mistaken in his belief in a system of gods of the elements —
misconceiving the whole plan of industrial prosperity and happiness -
wrong in his conceptions of the social duties of life, and doubly wrong in
his notions of death and eternity, he yet approves himself to the best
sensibilities of the human heart, by the strong exhibition of those ties
which bind a father to his children, and link whole forest communities in
the indissoluble bonds of brotherhood. (1 :ix-x)

By the time Schoolcraft published this first volume, his name as an Indian expert

was well established, and consequently his findings were considered fact. To

70

 

organiz
questic‘
nonpro
have e
out. th
develo

culture

Cons
trans

Ideo

Gas
but
om
of 1

me

No

abr

'0

9h

organize this massive research project, Schoolcraft created an extensive
questionnaire with 348 main topics, which he sent to both professionals and
nonprofessionals (missionaries, Indian agents, and even travelers) who might
have experience with or knowledge of American Indians. But as Pearce points
out, the very premise of the survey is slanted by the questionnaire Schoolcraft
developed, which assumed a priori, that the Indians were savages and their
culture, primitive (124). Schoolcraft wanted his surveyors

to find out how the Indians whom they knew hUnted and warred; how

loosely their society was organized; how brave, simple, cruel, incapable of

systematic thinking they were; how much they clung to the immediacies of

life about them; how little sense of progress they had. (Pearce' s

emphases 124-5)

Consequently, although Schoolcraft strove for accuracy in his interpretations and
translations of Indian customs, beliefs, and culture, his work is marred by his own
ideologies and those of his culture.

His most influential work on American literature, Algic Researches (1839),
describes the myths and legends of Native Americans. When Longfellow
published Song of Hiawatha in 1855, he acknowledged, both publicly and
privately, that he drew heavily on Schoolcraft's work on oral legends and myths
of the Indians. To increase sales, Schoolcraft subsequently revised this book to
more closely resemble Longfelle poem and republished it in 1856 as The
Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythological and Allegoric, of the
North American Indians (Carr 139). Although Schoolcraft was deeply concerned
about historical accuracy and had railed against authors who romanticized

Indians in fiction, he was also a realist who recognized that Longfellow had

"given prominence to [the myth)" and had used it as "one of the true sources of

71

our literary independence" from Europe (Schoolcraft, cited in McAleer 13). This
revised edition became a sourcebook for many American authors, providing
romantic images of disappearing noble Indians and their myths such as is
recorded in Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha" (13). In an 1845 review of
Schoolcraft's work, American author William Gilmore Simms, who is known for
his use of the frontier and Indian characters in his own fiction, urged American
writers to employ Indians and their myths into their writings to help create a
national literature (Scheckel 16). Ann Stephens also seems to have been
familiar with Schoolcraft's work. And if she did not employ the myths Schoolcraft
provided, she did use some of the Indian names that appear in his tales for her
own Indian fictional characters, including Chileli and Osse'o.

While Schoolcraft was one of the most prolific ethnographers of Indians,
he was by no means the only person publishing studies of Native Americans. By
the antebellum period, most Americans believed the Indian was doomed to
disappear because he could not adjust to an agrarian lifestyle, a point that
Schoolcrafl frequently bemoaned. People from many walks of life felt a sense of
urgency to record the lives of the Indians before they totally disappeared. During
this period Lewis Cass and Thomas McKenney (government agents), George
Catlin and Karl Bodmer (artists), and many others published accounts and
painted portraits of Indian life to preserve the memory of what they perceived to
be a dying culture. Although the cultural customs of tribes they visited differed,
their conclusions, like Schoolcraft's, matched their preconceived notions: Indians
are savages, cannot withstand the coming of the white man, and are doomed to

disappear to make way for a superior civilization.

72

 

attemp
profess
quanhl
theorie
and Ar
scient?
90ven
Adam
desoe
tllbes
infenc
GdUc;
Clviliz
HOWE
Nativ
Gags
Sena
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differ

Dhy

During the antebellum period, science itself was in a state of flux. It was
attempting to become more professional through the establishment of
professional organizations and societies and more reliable through the use of
quantification and repeatable experiments. As science changed, so, too, did
theories about Indians. At this point in time, when Ethnology was in its infancy
and Anthropology was not yet born, one of the most prominent questions facing
scientists was to explain how the Indians came to be at all. Since science was
governed by Christian doctrine to a great extent at that time, the Biblical story of
Adam and Eve formed the basis of monogenesis, the theory that all humankind
descended from them. Native Americans were thought to be one of the lost
tribes of Israel. Up to the 18303, the theory that Native Americans' cultural
inferiority could be attributed to their environment was widely accepted. Most
educated people believed that with education and exposure to the superior
civilization of whites, natives would eventually become "equal" to whites.
However, by the 18305, when repeated attempts to Christianize and/or civilize
Native Americans failed, a new theory developed. Some scholars, such as Lewis
Cass, began to suggest that Indians were inherently inferior and perhaps even a
separate species (Horsman, "Scientific" 155). Although Cass was an
acknowledged expert on Indians of the Old Northwest, his remarks on Native
American genesis were merely speculatory.

Soon, however, others began to put these ideas into a more cohesive
"scientific" analysis. One of the earliest proponents of polygenesis, the idea that
different races of humans have separate origins, was Dr. Charles Caldwell, a

physician and, according to Horsman, "the first important phrenologist" (155). He

73

 

conten

 

homlu
that th
interbr
1 830,
man
"scien

size

Skull
Caller
Was I
orlgir
yeah,
later
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infer
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Hor
innE
Circ
Shh

contended that four separate species of humans existed, and he ranked them
from highest to lowest: Caucasian, Mongolian, Indian, and African. He believed
that the only way that those lower on the scale could be improved was through
interbreeding. Although his ideas were in the minority when he published them in
1830, his connections to phrenology may have brought them to the attention of a
man who would make them the leading theory of the 18505.

In 1839 Samuel George Morton published Cranium Americana, a
"scientific" study of the relative sizes of over 600 skulls to determine the brain
size of American aborigines in comparison to Caucasians, Ethiopians, and
Mongolians. Not surprisingly, his findings indicated that whites had the largest
skull capacity, followed by Mongolians. American Indians (or "Americans" as he
called them), and Ethi0pians (which he considered Africans)“ Morton's work
was highly influential and "regarded as basic to an understanding of human racial
origins until Darwin" published Origin of Species in 1859 (156). But for nearly 20
years, his ideas held sway. They were popularized, simplified, and expanded by
later adherents. For instance. Dr. Josiah Nott, who used Morton's theories to
support slavery, extended Morton's ideas to state that the smaller brains of the
inferior races were especially deficient "in those parts of the brain which have
been assigned to the moral and intellectual faculties" (159). As Reginald
Horsman points out, what interested the popular press was that "theories of
innate racial differences could be used to defend existing American
circumstances and policies. The ideas of scientists on racial variety were
simplified into popular justifications for [white] America's progress" (162) at the

expense of Native Americans and their cultures.

74

Indians in Popglar Culture

A survey of some of the nineteenth-century articles on Indians in popular
magazines to which Stephens, by virtue of her position as magazine editor and
author and as resident of New York City, would have had access supports this
conclusion. For example, while Stephens was still a contributing editor to
Graham's Magazine, it began a series of articles on "North American Indians," "to
gather the traditions, to picture the dress, to preserve the manners of the few
tribes that remain . . . before the red man has passed away forever" (26 (Feb.
1845): 92). In the first article, on Blackfeet Indians, a nostalgic tone hints at a
certain sympathy for Indians. While Graham's accounts are much less
sensational than some other magazine articles of the period, words like
"savages" creep into the discussion, and sensational events, such as the killing
of over 80 trapper agents in one year by the Blackfeet, are duly reported.
Remarks such as "[d]uels occur often among these savages and, like the ancient
Highlanders, they regard revenge as a sacred duty" (Grahams 26 (Mar. 1845):
136) tend to conflate all Indians into one monolithic savage figure. And lengthy
negative descriptions of the scalp dance and warrior behavior in battle
overshadow general physical descriptions and peacetime activities, as if to
emphasize Indians’ warlike behavior and their obvious differences from and
inferiority to the civilized readers of Graham's.

More typical of magazine articles, perhaps, is a dreadful bit of ennui
entitled "The Poor Indians," which appeared in Ladies Garland and Family
Wreath in 1843 (Harris 97-8). The author praises the Indians of ancient times,

comparing them to the ancient Greeks and Egyptians; he even calls them "god-

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like men." He then announces, with apparent surprise, that they were able to
create their civilizations without the help of Europeans or even God, "but by the
mighty workings of their own grand and intellectual souls" (97). Although whites
are squarely blamed for the decline of Indians, their extinction is inevitable. "But
though the last red man may sleep with his fathers, their remembrance will never
die. The beautiful streams, lakes, and mountains of our land will still bear their
names" (98). Although such sentimentality marks much of the fiction and poetry
about Indians, it had a prominent position in non-fiction as well, particularly, as in
this case, when the discussion centered on dead Indians - those who could no
longer threaten the safety of whites.

On the other hand, newspaper accounts primarily described "Indian
attacks" on white people. Any sentimentality in these reports directed readers'
sympathies toward the white victims of Indian atrocities. For example, an article
in the New York Times (30 Nov. 1857) reports that a group of 130 emigrants from
Missouri and Arkansas were "massacred by the Indians." Outnumbered and
outmaneuvered, they "sent out a flag of truce, borne by a little girl," but when
they gave themselves up to the savages," they were "immediately . . .
slaughtered, with the exception of 15 infant children." Reports of Indian attacks
in the New York Times outnumber any other type of story concerning Native
Americans between 1830-1860.19

Another news story in the New York Times (27 July 1850) rehashes a
previous account of an Indian attack in 1847 on a small settlement in Oregon and
adds new information. It claims that the young women who had been taken

prisoner in that attack had been "compelled to become the wives of some of the

76

 

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chiefs." Such sensational news stories defined those Indians who were still living
not only as different from whites but as dangerous to them. In Race at Bay: New
York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem, " 1860-1900, Robert Hays suggests
that “editorials offered a more reliable account of frontier news than did the
columns of the Times and other newspapers in the East” because news
correspondents were often prejudiced or based their reports on ill-informed locals
(XXV). He notes that often the Times had to issue retractions of such sensational
reports, but retractions rarely get the notice that an original news story does
(xxv). The resulting picture that Stephens and most New Yorkers and other
urban dwellers obtained from the New York Times was that surviving Indians
constituted a threat to white settlement of the West.

In "The Newspaper Indian," John Coward posits that such representations
cannot be attributed to racial prejudice alone (28). He explains how "routine
newsmaking practices" of the nineteenth-century contributed to the emphasis
placed on negative stereotypes of Indians in the press. First of all, "news," by
definition, includes extraordinary events such as "massacres" but excludes
ordinary, everyday life so that cultural practices of Native Americans were rarely
explained, perpetuating whites' misinterpretations and distorted images of native
life (18—19). Second, in order to be successful at meaning-making, journalism
must reduce "social reality . . . to a limited number of meaningful categories" (16).
Experiences beyond the ken of readers are "framed" in ways to make them
intelligible. This means "organiz[ing] reality in ways which do not question the
fundamental assumptions of society" (16). Thus Indians are portrayed according

to the stereotypes whites had developed over the centuries. Third, since "news

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tends to follow the patterns preferred by the predominant forces in a given
society," the negative stereotype of the evil Indian prevails because it better
serves the interests of whites (14). As Coward points out, newspapers ”do more
than simply reflect their culture, they order society and produce (and reinforce)
meanings which are consonant with the. prevailing attitudes within the culture"
(15). Thus, while avowing a commitment to objective and truthful reporting, the
news media both create and are created by the ideology of their culture, making
their lofty ideals fruitless.

Perhaps even more damaging than the negative news reports about
Indians is what the press failed to report. The mutilation of whites killed by
Indians, frequently described in graphic detail, was offered as evidence of their
savagery. No attempts were made to explain this practice "in terms of Native
American beliefs about the afterlife" (21) so that readers might begin to
understand why natives behaved in this manner. Acts of desperation, such as
the Indian mother who poisoned her children rather than let them become
captives of whites, were used to exemplify Indians' subhuman capacities. Yet
similar acts by whites "were frequently provided a disclaimer by the press" (39).
While the sufferings of whites at the hands of Indians received wide coverage,
the suffering of Indians often went unreported. For example, the death of
100,000 Indians from smallpox was reported in an 1838 issue of Western Weekly
Review, with no additional comment or explanation. Not only does this type of
reporting neglect the human suffering involved, Coward contends that it lent
"credence to the belief in the biological inferiority of Indians" (49). Another report

on a smallpox outbreak among Indians bemoaned the "utterly ruined" trade of

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whites in the fur business. Reports of "massacres" of whites by Indians were
often exaggerated and sometimes just plain erroneous. Similar attacks by whites
on Indians were rarely defined as massacres, and often went unreported or were
filled with rhetoric inveighing against the stereotypical evil Indian. In other words,
Indians were rarely portrayed as real people with feelings and hopes and
dreams, but as one—dimensional creatures - enemies of civilization and progress.

Since many of the "facts" reported by scientists and newspapers alike
blurred reality, the lines between fact and fiction also blurred. For example, in an
1847 review of a book on North American Indians, the confused critic of Literary
World suggests that Cooper has done as much to describe the woodland Indians
as Schoolcraft has done for the Indians of the lakes or Catlin has done for the
Plains Indians ('Recent’ 91). Cooper's fictional portrayals of Uncas and
Chingachgook are equated with ethnographic studies of real Native Americans.
Like newspaper reports, many of the short stories appearing in magazines
featured Indian attacks on whites, again blurring reality by relying on stereotypes
that reduce Indians to one-dimensional characters and by preying on unrealistic
fears about the red man's threat to white women's purity. For example, a story,
“The Hour of Peril,” that appeared in the very first issue of Peterson's Magazine,
and therefore may have been selected by Ann Stephens herself, ooncems the
fate of two young white ladies, alone in their cabin in the woods, who are
attacked by "savages." The hyperbole describing one of the Indians as he is
about to strike a mortal blow is worth quoting:

The Indian . . . unsheathing his tomahawk, . . . raised it aloft and

whirled it in rapid, uncertain circles about his head, as if momently to strike
his prey, yet delaying the blow, from instant to instant, to enjoy the

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agonies of his victims - and in his triumphant smile, his exulting smile, and

the expression of savage pleasure imprinted on his features might be read

the gratification which he felt in subjecting his victims to this fiendish

torment. (Selton 20)

Such reductive stereotyping serves white interests in usurping land from the
Indians, by portraying Indians as savage, less than human, unable to utilize the
resources the land provides.

But of course, such reductive accounts are not the whole story. Few of
these tales of frontier life bother to mention that the white pioneer characters
might be trespassing on Indian lands, or that the advancement of whites was the
very cause of the "vanishing" Indian, or that whites attacked Indian villages also
killing innocent women and children. Because these stories were based on white
ideologies, they do not just blur reality; they mask the ugly reality that the
onslaught of white settlers wrought on the lives of Native Americans. Whites
chopped down their forests, plowed up their prairies, and shot the game on which
their lives depended, purely for sport. Helen Hunt Jackson would later tell this
tale, both in fiction and nonfiction, but in the antebellum period the prevailing
story reduced Native Americans to one-dimensional characters. Although
readers could feel a certain sympathy for the "noble savage" — also a reductive
stereotype - he was usually presented as long dead, his tale from the annals of
the American past. However, the vicious ignoble savage, who was still very
much alive and therefore a threat to real white people living on the frontier, was
the predominant image in antebellum fiction, news, and even science. Most of

the information available to white authors, especially those like Stephens who

seems to have had no personal knowledge of Native Americans, created a

80

 

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reductive image that was difficult to refute because the institutions of white
culture - from art and science to news and fiction - all supported that image.
Such widespread endorsement of the Indian as ignoble savage resulted in a
reification of that image so that if an author wished to present frontier life in
verisimilitude, she was almost compelled to employ it.
Literature Review
Nineteenth-century Assessments of Stephens' Work

Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics have tried to condemn
Stephens as part of the "scribbling mob of women writers" that Hawthome
damned. And in a sense she was. Stephens was prolific and successful, both of
which Hawthorne apparently resented because it affected his own sales. But
Stephens was not a careless writer. A review of her papers at New York Public
Library reveals her careful revision of poetry and prose. For example, several
drafts of her carefully crafted response to Victor Hugo‘s letter on John Brown
testify to the gravity with which she approached this particular project. Because it
was indeed a political situation and because she cared so ardently about her
womanly reputation, she may have put extra effort into refining this crucial piece
in which she admits "womanly intervention." But she also worked hard on other
projects. John Neal reports that in a letter dated 23 July 1843, Stephens wrote
him, "There is one paragraph which you found fault with, which I wrote over thirty
Mules" (her emphasis, Portland 70). Edgar Allan Poe's assessment of her
writing ability in the "Literati," while not wholly complimentary, recognizes her

strengths:

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She is fond of the bold, striking, trenchant - in a word, of the

melodramatic, she has a quick appreciation of the picturesque, and is not

unskillful in delineations of character. . . . Her style is what critics usually
term "powerful," but lacks real power through its verboseness and floridity.

It is generally turgid - even bombastic - involved, needlessly

parenthetical, and superabundant in epithets, although these latter are

usually well—chosen. . . . Her faults, nevertheless, in both manner and
matter, belong to the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.

. . . She seizes adroitly upon salient incidents and presents them with a

vividness to the eye. (Godey's 33: 15).

Read in context, these comments illustrate that Stephens was, in part,
being criticized for writing "like a woman." For as Baym, Harris, Kelley and many
other critics have demonstrated, women writers in the mid-nineteenth-century
were limited both in subject and style to that which was defined as feminine.
Such restrictions resulted in women writers engaging in circumlocutions and
circumventions which carried double-coded messages: an overt message
ostensibly supporting the status quo, and a more radical implied message, which
advocated expanding the boundaries or even eliminating altogether the idea of
so-called "woman's sphere" which limited women's options. Ironically, Stephens'
work has also been praised as "more masculine and condensed" than most
"female writers" (Cyclopaedia 10: 20). No critical overview of Stephens' works
has yet been attempted. Her work has been subjected to misreadings that have
been repeated by later critics, and her prodigious output in so many genres over
a 52 year career make general assessment difficult.

Contradictory assessments which plague Ann Stephens' literary reputation
today began in her own day. In her lifetime, Stephens was primarily known for

her "bold pen,"2° her "powers of description,"21 and her ability to "bring out, in a

proper manner, the light and shade of human nature."22 She was frequently

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equated with Sir Walter Scott, both for her descriptive talent and her preference
for historical romances. Most critics of her time also noted the moral tone of her
works, one even suggested that readers "rise from the perusal of her writings
with new aspirations to do good" (ALM June 1848: 342). However, many critics
attempted to duplicate Poe's assessment by reproducing his language —
particularly the adjectives "bold," "florid," and "verbose" - lifting words out of
context, thereby negating the substance of his overall assessment. Stephens
was also criticized, as were many other women writers, "for improbabilities
attached either to a character of some event selected from the rest of the book
as too extravagant for belief" (Stephens, "Preface" The Curse of Gold).
Ironically, other reviewers, echoing the words used to defend fiction reading in
the eariy nineteenth-century, reported that many of her stories "are founded in
fact" (Peterson 235).
Twentieth-Qantugy Criticism

Stephens' biography appears in several biographical dictionaries
published in the early twentieth century, a distinction not accorded most women
writers of the nineteenth-century. However, as American Literature began to be
established as a serious discipline and textbooks and literary dictionaries began
to be published, her name was nowhere to be found. Nor did her woman-
centered stories fit the various themes that American literary critics developed to
define what constituted American "literature." In her Introduction to The (Other)
American Traditions: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (1993), Joyce W.

Warren eloquently explains this phenomenon:

83

 

 

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the belief that the individual man was an end in himself underlay
nineteenth-century American thought. . . . And since American
individualism applied only to the white male, the individual that forms the
center of American literature has been universalized as white and male.

(3)

She notes that women's fiction tends to focus on "others" rather than the "male

individualis " (3), countering a sacred myth of American culture. She continues:
more than any other single factor, it is [women authors'] rejection of the
hierarchies and exclusions of the dominant culture and their consequent
focus upon and portrayal of the perspective of people that the dominant
culture had defined as "other” that has kept these works out of the canon.

(34)

She charges that Richard Chase in his still critically influential book, The
American Novel and Its Traditions (1957), "had to ignore the American women
novelists of the nineteenth century in order to derive his definition" of "the
dominant tradition of the American novel" (in. 13, 22).

In his 1940 survey, The Sentimental Novel in America, Herbert Ross
Brown makes several citations of Stephens' work. or course, his intent is to
support current definitions of sentimental, including how "[m]any of the titles [he
examines] . . . deserve to appear on any list of the world's worst fiction" (vii).
Thus a citation here was no honor. But with the rise of feminist literary theory,
new ways of seeing sentimental literature developed. Warren explains that the
term "sentimental" had been transformed into a derogatory term and was often
simply equated with “viromen's writing." She asserts, "[slentimentality requires
an awareness of other people, a mental dialogue or displacement" (11). It
requires a sympathy, a reaching out toward others, the exact opposite of

individualism. Thus, sentimental writing, and by extension all women's writing,

had been dismissed.

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Stephens' literary resurrection got its first serious consideration when
feminist critic Nina Baym devoted one-third of a chapter in her 1978 ovular work,
Women's Fiction, to a discussion of Stephens' novels. Because of the
significance of Baym's book on changes in the canon of American Literature, and
particularly on the recovery of women writers, other critics began to review
Stephens' writings. However, in the early days of the feminist revolution in
literary criticism, no rubrics for evaluating women's fiction existed, yet it was
impossible to describe women's writings using current literary practices which
privileged male—centered themes. Consequently, during the early days of
recovery, feminist literary critics tended to focus on writers such as Fanny Fern,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman who developed strong
feminist themes in their fiction. Previous assessments of less radical proponents
of expanded options for nineteenth-century women often went unchallenged in
the rush to recover literary foremothers whose politics more closely matched
those of twentieth-century feminists. Thus, even Baym, who recognizes some
radical tendencies in Stephens, noting, for example, that she "had no qualms
about miscegenation" (181), criticizes her lack of commitment to women's
causes:

Stephens stressed the sensational effects, the suspense and excitement

generated by action, rather than any theoretical implications of her action

for woman's status. . . . Unfortunately for the reader with an interest in the
depiction of women, Stephens does not pursue the implications of this
scheme [of portraying "true women" as "vapid"] once she has set it up.

Her provocative formulations are lost in the elaboration of a gratuitous

fantasy about secret identities, lost parents, separated spouses carelessly

imposed on the story. (181-2)

Because Baym's work was so influential in the early days of recovery work, such

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an appraisal of Stephens' work may have led critics to accept other negative
reviews of Stephens' writing. For example, in American Women Writers (1982),
the first major reassessment of American women writers since the second
women‘s movement, critic Juliann Fleenor, using the few sources then available,
contends that the women in Stephens' fiction "are acted upon by others; or they
wait for some lover to arrive" (163). Fleenor concludes that "[Stephens'] work
can no longer find acceptance" (164). A similar deprecating evaluation of
Stephens appeared in the Dictionary of Literary Biography in 1988.

Madeleine Stern, who had been writing extensively on Stephens since the
early 1960s, drew a different portrait, although she tended to concentrate on
Stephens' claim to glory as the author of the first dime novel. In We the Women:
Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century America, Stern sets straight many of the
inaccuracies in Stephens' biography. Stern was also the first critic to note the
feminist tendencies in Stephens' work. As early as 1979, she was pointing out
the feminist implications of Stephens' eponymous character, Malaeska, in. the
first dime novel. As Stern points out, Malaeska's strength, courage, and
independence combine with her selfless submission to white male patriarchy to
provide "an intriguing combination of 19th-century self-abnegation and 19th-
century feminist power" (“Stephens and the Dime Novel" 3274). Stem is also
the first to suggest that at least some of Stephens' writings "still ha[ve] relevance"
today (3274).

A "Legacy Profile" of Stephens finally appeared in 1995, an important step
in the recovery process. In this profile, Paola Gemme stresses the ambivalence

Stephens' writings reveal concerning women's place in nineteenth-century

86

 

 

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society. Gemme observes that "Stephens' very conservative statements may be
intended to pacify the qualms of hostile readers rather than being a sincere
expression of her mind" (50). Although she finds Stephens' writings to be
"classist and racist," Gemme believes that
the documentary value of her work renders her a valuable subject of
investigation for the contemporary scholar, who will find in her novels both

the conservative ideology of the bourgeoisie and the dreams of power of
its discontented women. (53)

Regent Wgrk og Stephens' Indian Stgries

Because women's novels of the nineteenth century are still in the process
of being recovered, we lack adequate knowledge of female versions of the myth
of the frontier. Lately, however, because her works are at the nexus of increased
interest in popular culture studies and discourses on race and gender, Stephens'
frontier novels have been featured in several recent dissertations, as well as a
critical article by Gemme. The concept of female myths or fantasies of the
frontier is not directly addressed by any of these works; however, several allude
to its existence. All discuss the intertwining topics of gender and race in the
fiction of Stephens and other authors. Significantly, only one of these works
considers the last two books of Stephens' trilogy - the most overtly racially
prejudiced of Stephens' Indian stories.

In "Constructive Narratives of American Culture and Identity: Beadles
Dime Novels, 1860-1870," Carol Ruth Carney examines Stephens' dime novels
in context with other women's dime novels. She argues that this popular genre
was not intended just for males but that those written by women have themes

and tropes specifically for women readers. Carney contends that these dime

87

 

 

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novels "acted as an information network, and should be viewed as constructive
narratives intended to inform, educate, and empower a vast contemporary
reading audience" (Abstract). She also sets out to correct other misconceived
notions about women characters in dime novels. For example, Henry Nash
Smith, in his still influential Virgin Land, asserts that the first "aggressive female"
character is a male creation (Aneola in The Forest Princess, 1871), but he
ignores creations by women authors which preceded Aneola by a decade,
including Mahaska, one of Stephens' major characters. Carney maintains that
dime novels are written in accessible language to "deliver information to their
contemporary readers about race and gender relations, about women's roles in
the home and in society, about what women could expect in settling the frontier,
about the uniqueness of being an American" (9). Camey's insistence that
woman-authored dime novels were addressed to women readers is crucial to
understanding Stephens' narratives.

June Johnson Bube's dissertation comes closest to suggesting a female—
centered myth of the frontier. She devotes a chapter to Stephens' dime novels in
"'No True Woman': Conflicted Female Subjectivities in Women's Popular 19th-
Century Western Adventure Tales," examining how women-authored texts imply
that "[t]he extreme conditions of western settlement afford opportunity for . . .
disruptive female behavior that repudiates the subjectivity and social roles
prescribed for women by the Cult of True Womanhood" (Abstract). Bube argues
"that the conjunction of adventure story, domestic novel, and sensational tale in
women's border tales makes them a complex vehicle for nineteenth-century

women's frustration and anger over gender roles and women's social position"

88

(6). . She asserts that "at their deepest structural levels, women's border tales
enact a curious dynamic; they invoke the ideal of true womanhood and then
critique it, undermine it, and evacuate it" (7). Bube is especially intrigued by
Stephens' "appropriation of masculine agency" by her female characters. She
argues that "Stephens uses the frontier as a distancing mechanism - a removal
in time and place" to "safely" discuss and challenge cunent gender prescriptions
that hamper women's opportunities to fully develop and use their talents and
abilities (30). Bube's analysis of the complexities involved in women's border
tales helps explicate ostensible discrepancies in Stephens' tales of Indian
women, particularly Bube's recognition that while certain characters may inhabit
the role of "true womanhood," the overall story negates the desirability of such a
position in society.

In "The Indian in the Mirror. White Women Writers and the Native
American Other," Caroline Woidat makes a similar point, but reaches a different
conclusion. She examines the works of canonical authors, as well as Stephens
and other popular writers, to investigate how female Indian characters in fiction
may represent "a projection of the white author's own identity” (Abstract).
Woidat contends that white women authors used American Indians “as a means
of redefining their [own] gender” (6), demonstrating how their writings “engage in
debate over the racial politics of Indian-white relations from a dual perspective of
power (connected with the privileges of their race and class) and powerlessness
(arising from their marginalization as women)” (7). For Woidat, the mixture of
gender and race in women’s Indian literature differs from men’s because of their

differing circumstances. She believes that the image of the Indian princess

89

stirred women's imaginations. blending both the refinement and virtues of
civilization with the freedom and power of life with nature, or a “more ‘natural' life”
(8). Native American women were portrayed as alternatives for white women
who were reduced to overly delicate creatures in civilization. Woidat contends
that the simple dichotomy of “racist“ or “sympathetic“ is too simplistic to represent
white authors’ perspectives on Native Americans. According to Woidat, white
“women authors’ perceptions of American Indians have been filtered through a
consciousness of their own marginalization, inextricably linking racial and sexual
politics" (16). Using primarily Mary Derwent and Esther, she reads Ann
Stephens’ American Indian tales as a defense of “a more conservative domestic
ideology,” warning against “radical changes in gender relations” (133). While I
disagree with her conclusions about Stephens, Woidat's contention that a simple
dichotomy of "racist" or "sympathetic" is too simplistic to discuss white women's
inscriptions of Indians guides my analysis of the complexities and contexts of
Stephens' frontier novels.

Theresa Strouth Gaul takes a different approach. Her dissertation, “A
Native Tradition: Relocating the Indian in American Literature, 1820-40'
examines the changing attitudes toward the “potential offered by the subject of
American Indians for American writers' between 1820-40 (1 ). Gaul suggests that
the authors she examines, including Ann Stephens, used anthrOpological
discourses to find answers to discuss the Indian problem. She believes that
anthropology allowed them to view Indians “through a series of binaries:
self/other, uslthem, civilized/savage, observer/participant” (4). Gaul contends that

Stephens emphasized the “us“ side of the binary, “considering the costs of racial

90

divisiveness for ‘us’ and especially for white women“ (5). Using Malaeska and
Mary Derwent as examples, Gaul argues that “Stephens uses the genres of the
woman’s novel and the sentimental novel to explore the gendered implications of
anthropological models of race relations” (6). Gaul insists that “Stephens
critiques the trends toward identifying white women as the anchor of ‘civilization’
and enlisting women as the agents of civilizing efforts” (6). Although I disagree
with this claim, Gaul's analysis of anthropological discourses on race in the
nineteenth century helps clarify Stephens' use of them.

The differences between male- and female-authored works on Indian-
white relationships are examined by Patricia Matteson in her dissertation, "'A
Stain on the Blood': 'lndian Loving' and Nineteenth-Century Women's Literary
Strategies." She views women's fiction as more "Indian-loving" than men's.
Indian-loving narratives create a different vision of Indian-white relations, moving
away from the "killer hero" toward a "more feminized, kinder love fantasy" (3).
The main gendered difference is sexual union and family-making between white
and Indian. According to Matteson, males avoid this issue, whereas female
authors rely on it to such an extent that it becomes a tr0pe (7). Matteson
contends that women authors considered the disruption of family to be a more
serious moral offense than crossing racial boundaries and suggests that this
emphasis on family "underminelsl stereotypic images of bloodthirsty savages"
(8). She defines an "Indian-loving" story as one that "works to reproduce and
perpetuate the value of 'lndianness' by establishing respectful familial relations
between Anglo and Native, and does not eliminate or erase the integrity of Native

culture and ethnicity" (110). Matteson acknowledges that women's perspectives

91

on intermarriage are ambivalent and that even those who register high on the
Indian-loving scale may be essentialist in their approach to race, but she wiggles
out of this problem by suggesting that "the desire for the ideal" might be
heightened "by the pain of its removal“ (11). Because intermarriage is so rare in
Indian stories, Matteson asserts such portrayals are "iconoclastic," yet she
places Stephens' novels in the murky category of "Indian-romancing,"
somewhere between Indian-hating and Indian-loving. Predictably, although she
discusses Ahmo, the first novel of the Mahaska trilogy, she avoids any mention
of the last two books in the series because they would undermine her theory
about Stephens' place on the Indian-loving scale. Matteson's principal
contribution to my work is pointing out the primacy of the family in stories of
intermarriage; this idea helps demonstrate the complexity of Stephens' portrayals
and explicates how she appealed to her women readers.

In "Rewriting the Indian Tale: Science, Politics, and the Evolution of Ann
Stephens's Indian Romances, " Paola Gemme contends that certain changes in
the narrative closures of Stephens' novels depicting Native Americans in the
1830s and the 1850s are directly related to the changes in scientific theories
regarding the possibility of their assimilation into white "civilization." She
particularly focuses on Mary Derwent and Malaeska because both were originally
published in the 1830s and republished in expanded and revised versions in the
late 18503 or early 60s. The earlier versions tend toward a more sympathetic
portrayal of Native Americans. Mary Derwent suggests that assimilation is
possible, while Malaeska suggests it is not. But Gemme explains this apparent

contradiction by demonstrating that the earlier theory (that environment was the

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primary difference between the races) and the later ethnographic theory (that the
races were distinct and that the white race was superior to all others) were both
current during the late 1830s. She further contends that "Stephens's Indian
novels . . . not only echoed but circulated the racial theories by which they were
informed" (378). In other words she sees Stephens' work as a conduit of
contemporary beliefs about Native Americans. Although I disagree with her
ultimate conclusion that Stephens’ Indian novels are “a legitimation of
contemporary Indian policy, which pursued the segregation rather than the
integration of Native Americans“ (384), Gemme's article is useful in elucidating
how different cultural contexts affect Stephens' representations of Indians.

Although Stephens was the subject of a 1950 Master's Thesis, that work
was completed in the days when the word "sentimental" was used as an
invective to discredit women's writing. Stephens has never been the primary
topic of any dissertation or book. Thus her work has not been fully explored.
Methodology

Because of the complicated circumstances surrounding the creation of
literary texts, a variety of methods are needed to help reveal the social contexts
in which women wrote and the inscriptions of those social situations into texts.
As a white middlcclass woman writer in nineteenth-century America, Ann
Stephens both affected, and was affected by, the ideologies of gender that
pervaded the culture. Since there are no indications that she had personal
experience with real Native Americans, her ideas about them were necessarily
shaped by the political, scientific, and popular discourses circulating at the time.

To understand how these ideologies got translated in her Indian stories, feminist

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theory, particularly that which deals with the intersections of race and gender,
and post-colonial theory, which helps reveal how members of the dominant
culture view those outside it as "other," provide useful analytical tools for how
race and gender are represented in her texts. But this study will primarily draw
on rhetorical criticism, which specificallystudies how writers use rhetoric to
present their views on matters of significance to their society, providing readers,
as Burke tells us, with "equipment for living" in such social situations (PLF 61).
Such an approach can facilitate our understandings cf the purposes for which
Stephens creates these fictional worlds in which whites and Indians intermarry.
Brk nRhe ri I rii'm

Long before feminist literary critics such as Carolyn Karcher, Jane
Tompkins, and Lora Romero argued that women's literature is a response to the
social and cultural ooncems of its time, Kenneth Burke (1941) asserted that
"critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in
which they arose" (PLF 1). Burke's dramatism, developed over many years in a
series of theoretical works, is "a technique of analysis of language and of thought
as basically W rather than a means of conveying information" (my
emphasis, LASA 54). It is a philosophy of language in which language is not
merely a means of defining or naming, but of action - action that is directly
concerned with people's lived situation, in keeping with Burke's belief that
creative works are strategies for dealing with life's conundrums, providing
readers with ways of "encompassing . . . situations" (PLF 1).

Dramatism is a "grammar," an analytical tool for critics, to examine the

motives behind purposeful (i.e., motivated) human action, including language, in

94

terms of drama. Dramatism can be applied to action in real lived situations or in
fictional worlds. The dramatistic pentad of terms developed by Burke for
analyzing human action consists of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.
Burke's pentad starts with the act because dramatism is, at its core, a philosophy
of human action and because without an act, there Is nothing to be analyzed. In
this pentad, the act is what takes place, the scene is the background of the act,
the agent is who performs the act, the agency is the means by which the act is
performed, and the purpose is the reason for the act. Although this system may
appear to replicate the journalistic questions of who, what, where, when, how,
and why, Burke's method is much more complex.

As Burke explains. the terms cannot be reduced to just one, because one
is not enough to explain the motivations for a given act (GM )ori); however, the
other terms may be deduced from one term because of their consubstantial
nature as parts of the whole. Like the fingers on a hand the five terms are united,
yet separate. An act cannot happen without a scene in which it occurs, an agent
who commits it, and so forth. Burke uses the term "ratio" to describe the
relationships between the five elements of the pentad. For example, in the
scene-act ratio, the scene contains the act, and therefore the act should be
consistent with the scene (3). In Burke's own words, "the scene is a fit
'container' for the act, expressing in fixed properties the same quality that the
action expresses in terms of development" (3). In Uncle Tom's Cabin, for
example, Legree's plantation, deep in the wilderness, far from civilization, is a fit
container for his vicious (uncivilized) acts against his slaves because the isolation

of the place creates a sense of hopelessness on the part of the slaves; Legree,

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who is later revealed to be a coward, can inflict punishment without fear of
reprisal. The scene reinforces the act. Ratios apply to the other pairs of terms
as well (scene—agent, scene-agency, scene-purpose, act agent, act-agency, and
so forth), but only the scene acts as a container.

How the critic envisions the scene is crucial to the interpretation of
motives. Scene can be as general as "society" or as specific as "3:30 PM,
Tuesday, May 9, 2000." Neither is more correct, but how scene is designated
"affects the scope of the critic's interpretation of motive" (Foss, Foss, and Trapp
185). As Burke explains: "In the selection of terms for describing a scene, one
automatically prescribes the range of acts that will seem reasonable, implicit, or
necessary in that situation" ("Dramatism" 450). In Stephens' novel, Malaeska, for
example, scenes in which the Indian heroine, dressed in her native garments,
appears in the city or the white settlements, her very presence is considered out
of place by white inhabitants who see her. Adding to the usefulness and
versatility of the pentad, all of the terms, while distinct, also merge into one
another, reflecting the ambiguity of any human action. Burke offers the example
of the judge whose actions are modified by donning judicial robes. The robes
can be interpreted scenically as influencing action. Does the office make the
man or the man make the office? Burke considers such ambiguities in the
pentadic terms as potential sites of transformation. In the agent-act ratio, for
example, if an agent performs an act that appears inconsistent with his/her
character, either the act has resulted in some transformation of character of the
agent or the agent is more fully revealed through this act. Thus, dramatism

provides critics with tools to help reveal the complexities and ambiguities of acts

96

being analyzed, and such uncertainties indicate a possible transformation has
occurred.

Using the dramatistic grammar to examine all the possible ratios in a given
text helps the critic discover which term the author stresses most, which in turn
leads toward the term most implicated as motivation for the act. In Stephens'
frontier fiction this term is "agent." Dramatistic analysis of these works
demonstrates that the scene remains unchanged in her novels — Indians still
vanish and gender relations remain static. Stephens does not see how this
situation/scene can change. However, she does believe that people can change
their attitudes, thus her emphasis on agent/character. Stephens' Indian tales
question contemporary concepts of race and gender as too limited in scope,
grounded in stereotypes such as "savage" and "true woman," which reduce the
human potential of Indians and women. Because she wants people to change
their "idea" of what an Indian is and what a woman should be, she creates Indian
women characters whose nature and actions refute such stereotypes. Thus, the
locus of Stephens' motive is in the agent who can help "encompass the situation"
of race and gender relations in nineteenth-century America, thereby helping to
transform it.

Transformation and consubstantiality are key concepts in Burke's system.
He sees rhetoric as "the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing
cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols" (RM 43). Thus, the
transformation that Stephens seeks, in the Burkean scheme, becomes a kind of
identification (consubstantiality) between the reader and the writer based on

shared beliefs about race and gender. This Burkean analysis suggests that

97

Stephens writes Indian tales to question certain nineteenth-century cultural
beliefs about race and gender that narrow the scope of potentiality for both
Indians and women in the hope that some of her readers will identify with her
perspectives, which envision wider acceptance of Indians and increased spheres
of action for women. However, the latter goal is primary for Stephens; while she
is concerned about the plight of Indians, she is more directly affected by
ideologies of gender which limit women's potential.

Contemporary ideologies and stereotypes by which Indians and women
were measured preserved patriarchal power, confining both Indians and women
to circumscribed areas of action. These limitations influence the writing
circumstances and create an anomalous situation for a woman writer in the
nineteenth-century America. To deal with this dilemma and in keeping with her
position as a "proper" lady (and therefore suitable moral guide), Stephens does
not interfere in the masculine sphere of politics by trying to change laws, nor
does she attempt to meddle in government policies. Instead, adopting a stance
already espoused by such respected women writers as Sarah Hale and
Catharine Beecher, Stephens uses her fiction to suggest that women can help
change attitudes about race and gender through moral suasion. Using the
language of domesticity, a language with which print media intended for middle-
class women in America was saturated, Stephens connects with her women
readers on this issue. She tries to identify her views with those of her readers,
using a language that underties their consubstantial position in society. As Burke
points out, "[y]ou persuade a man (sic) only insofar as you talk his language, by

speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with

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his" (Burke's emphasis, RM 55). In other words, Burke believes that
identification is sometimes more descriptive of the rhetorical situation than is
persuasion (RM xiv).

This conception of rhetoric is much more in keeping with feminist
rhetorical principles because it is less agonistic. And it is also a more accurate
description of the rhetorical situation of nineteenth-century white middle-class
women writers whose position in society could be tarnished if they engaged in
debates over public policy. Stephens herself expressed her anxiety on this
account in a letter to George Graham in 1842: "I know I may be feeling this
subject too sensitively but . . . no one knows how keenly I feel anything
calculated to represent me as unwomanIy" (Stephens' emphasis, " qtd. in
Eastman 70). Instead of risking the censure of their contemporaries, many
women authors like Ann Stephens devised stories which presented their views
on important issues in the hope of "conveying images of truth and beauty from
the heart of the writer to the heart of the reader" (Stephens, "Genius" 89).

Burke's theories are especially useful in analyzing how Stephens presents
her concerns about the social situations she tries to "encompass" in her writing.
In "Literature as Equipment for Living," he explains that all literature provides
strategies for dealing with life's situations. In fact Burke declares that literature is
the "strategic naming of a situation" - recurrent problems in a society that need
naming (PLF 300). To be able to provide readers with "equipment for living,"
authors must be able to present these situations realistically. Burke insists that
an author "cannot accurately know how things will be, what is promising and

what is menacing, unless [she] knows how things are" (PLF 298). Stephens

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employs her knowledge of relations between whites and Native Americans to
depict the likely problems that will occur when people from different cultures meet
and many.

Burke's dramatism helps critics decipher these situations. As Barry
Brummett explains,

Burke picks drama as the central metaphor for his method because of his

insistence that any method should represent rather than reduce its subject

matter To represent something is to sum up its essence; and the
dramatistic aspects of what people do and say are the essence of human

action. (480)

For Burke the plot, because it reveals motivated action, represents the essence
of a discourse. Therefore "one key Burkean method stemming fiom his
dramatistic metaphor is his insight that the content or 'terminology' of whole
discourses or groups of discourses will imply, or will seem to be based upon a
representative anecdote" (Bntmmett 480). Burke develops the concept of the
representative anecdote to facilitate critics' ability to discern the situation being
named within the discourse.

Identification of the representative anecdote underlying a discourse allows
the critic "sum up the essence of a culture's values, ooncems, and interests in
regard to some real-life issues or problems" (482). Brummett explains that "the
representative anecdote is . . . a method that taps what a culture most deeply
fears and hopes, and how that culture confronts those ooncems symbolically"
(483). Thus, a representative anecdote will appear in many different types of

discourses because it represents a method of discussing certain real life

problems with which a society is struggling.

100

The ensuing analysis will delineate some of the strategies that Stephens
employs as she represents Indians and their intermarriages with whites and
illustrate how these strategies are designed to help readers see these issues
from her point of view. Through domestic scenes and images of cultural values,
such as motherhood and religion, with which they can identify and through
agents who embody those identifications, Stephens suggests that readers can
transform the situation of women and Native Americans. They can do so, she
infers, by changing their own attitudes (and the attitudes of those they know)
about race and gender.

Feminist Cm jg’sm

The ways in which "gender identity is inextricably linked to and even
determined by racial identity" (254) are clearly demonstrated by Evelyn Brooks
Higgenbotham in her ovular article, "African-American Women's History and the
Metalanguage of Race." She notes the difficulties of past definitions of race;
science, law, and literature have all failed at defining it because race is actually a
social construction through which groups are distinguished from and positioned
in relation to one another (253). Using contemporary perceptions of blacks as an
example, Higgenbotham illustrates that "the metaphoric and metonymic
identification of social welfare with the black population by the American public
has resulted in tremendous generalization about the supposed unwillingness of
blacks to work" (254). Such combinations of ideas prove that "race serves as a
. . . 'metalanguage' since it speaks about and lends meaning to a host of terms
and expressions . . . that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of

race" (255). In other words, "race not only tends to subsume other sets of social

101

relations, namely, gender and class, but it blurs and disguises, suppresses and
negates its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops"
(255). Given the rigid discourses on race in mid-nineteenth-century America,
particularly as it pertains to Native Americans, Higgenbotham's observations
seem especially apropos. In Stephens' representations of Indians, racial traits or
"lndianly" behavior are generally manifested as masculine attributes. For
instance, the mixed-blood character Mahaska, who chooses Indian life when she
is rejected by whites, becomes aggressive, war-like, and vengeful — all
characteristics associated with the male ignoble savage. This understanding of
race as a metalanguage will facilitate analysis of Stephens' inscriptions of race in
her fictional characters.

But Stephens also creates noble Indian characters, both female and male.
And for these characters, a different set of circumstances applies. Because
these noble Indian women model techniques for white women to expand their
realm of possibility while remaining "womanly," gender takes precedence over
race. In these cases, therefore, gender tends to operate as a metalanguage,
subsuming race. But race is a factor. Stephens uses race to discuss gender.
The Indian woman models behavior to expand white women's horizons; if she is
too lndianly, her conduct is no longer an acceptable example for white women.
Stephens' few noble Indian men tend to be feminized, as though nobility were
quintessentially linked to women and femininity. Rather than being actual
character traits, this feminization may be more connected to female fantasies of
possibility afforded by the frontier. To accomplish the goal of achieving a
peaceful solution to the conflict between white and red cultures, men must join

102

with women in the project and process of amalgamation. They must also refuse
to resort to violence as a solution. Part of what makes the noble savage noble is
that he is no threat to whites. Softening him, feminizing him, makes him more
worthy of emulation, makes peaceful resolutions more likely.

Feminist understandings of nineteenth-century ideologies regarding
women's place and purpose in society are also crucial to this study. Although the
"true womanhood ideal" as explicated by Barbara Welter is so well known as to
obviate the need for further explanation, the "real womanhood ideal" as
delineated by Frances B. Cogan in All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real
Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America is less well known. Using both
fiction and conduct literature as her guide, Cogan demonstrates that the true
womanhood ideal had many opponents, not just proto-feminists like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, but doctors and health reformers, conservative women like
Catharine Beecher and Sarah J. Hale, and many authors, all of whom advocated
a more active, healthy, realistic life-style for women. Cogan suggests that this
real womanhood ideal developed in the 1840s in opposition to the pale, passive,
pathetic true womanhood ideal as a "middle-of-the—road path" between the
radical changes advocated by the leaders of the woman's movement and the
restricted life offered by true womanhood. The real womanhood ideal stressed
self-reliance and self-support. Real women were healthy, strong, active,
physically fit, and educated enough to be self-sufficient. They had common
sense and knew how to "balance between demands of home, family, intellect,
heart, and soul" (82). Rather than being considered detrimental to their

reproductive health, liberal arts education was regarded an attribute that "gave a

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woman breadth of vision and helped develop character" (96). As if to
demonstrate Cogan's insistence that the ideals of tme womanhood and real
womanhood coexisted, Stephens represents both ideals in her writing, but she
favors a more active womanhood closely resembling the real womanhood ideal
that Cogan describes.
W

As a controversial topic in the nineteenth century, discussions of
interracial marriage require more than an acknowledgment of race. Stephens
represents differences between the races in some detail; in fact, she often uses
race as the "agency" by which acts are performed. In characters of mixed blood,
whiteness is generally presented as a mitigating factor struggling to overcome
barbarous tendencies inherited from the native parent. Even the “noble savage“
is still a savage; in other words, under Stephens' pen Native Americans are
viewed as "other." Post-colonial theory provides a method for examining how the
dominant culture has represented the colonized, how it views and treats the
colonized as "others." And no people were more thoroughly colonized than
Native Americans. As S. Elizabeth Bird points out, "[hjowever they are pictured,
Indians are the quintessential Other, whose role is to be the object of the
Whitelcolonialist gaze" (7). Stephens cannot escape her position as an
educated, fairly wealthy white woman when she picks up her pen to write about
Indians. Dana Nelson demonstrates in "Sympathy as Strategy in Hope Leslie"
that even in sympathetic portrayals of native life, American authors, as members
of the colonizing race or group, were unable to completely rid themselves of the

ideologies that contribute to the conflict of cultures.

104

Post—colonial theory, particularly the work of Edward Said, will strengthen
my rhetorical analysis by providing lenses to understand representations of
otherness. Using Foucault's ideas about the connections between knowledge!
power and discourses/institutions, Said developed the concept of "Orientalism" —
the idea that the West (as a powerful institution) constructed a discourse (which
created knowledge) of the East (Orient) as "other." Similar to Pearce's findings in
his study of Savagism and Civilization, Said posits that this construction of the
East as "Orient" allows the West to concomitantly present itself as the positive
standard against the negative alien other it creates. For Said, representation of
others is a troublesome issue because it implies that the maple being
represented cannot represent themselves. Representation is supposedly related
to truth, but, because such representation is always a substitution, Said views it
as a deformation.

No easy answers to the dilemma of representation exist, as Linda Alcoff
points out in "The Problem of Speaking for Others." However, awareness of the
factors that affect representation can facilitate a more complete analysis of
Stephens' inscriptions of Indians as "other." The writers position not only affects
her representations but, as Alcoff insists, her location is "epistemically salient"
because it affects how she understands the world (7). In other words, an
author's representations of "others" are mediated through her ideologies, based
on her position within the society from which and to which she is writing. Thus,
Stephens' position as a woman in a patriarchal society is just as salient as her
position as a white person in a racist society or as an upper middle—class person

in a capitalist society. Yet each position affects her representations in differing,

105

sometimes conflicting, ways. Moreover, since the writer can never know the
"true selves" of those she represents - a significant point given Stephens' limited
knowledge of Native Americans -- her representation of them becomes
problematic. She is "conferring information about them" and "participating in the
construction of their subject-positions" tolfor her readers (9).

Discursive context is another issue affecting representation. Because
literature is one way that people come to understand their world, fiction functions
as an important venue for learning about people and places beyond personal
knowledge and experience. Therefore, fictional representations of peoples
beyond the ken of readers take on added import. Using Foucault's concept of
"rituals of speaking," Alooff points out that these rituals are "constitutive of
meaning, the meaning of the words spoken [or written] as well as of the event"
(12). Thus both author and reader participate in deriving meaning. As a result:

meaning must be understood as plural and shifting, since a single text can

engender diverse meanings given diverse contexts. Not only what is
emphasized, noticed, and how it is understood will be affected by the
location of both speaker and hearer, but the truth-value or epistemic status

will be affected. (12-13)

Alcoff stresses that when critics evaluate authors' representations of others, "we
need to analyze the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and
material context" (26). Thus, post-colonial theory helps complicate
representation of others by bringing together the factors impinging upon its
inscription and reception. Stephens' representations of Indians do not occur in a
vacuum; not only were there other fictional accounts of Indians, but

representations of Indians were central to political, religious, scientific, and

journalistic discourses. These discourses are part of the sang in which

106

Stephens, as agent, acts (writes), creating stories (ageligy) in which she presents
her views on the Indian question and the woman question (games). Stephens'
multiple positions within the culture. as well as those of her readers, and the
culture itself "bear on" the effects of her inscriptions of Indians.

These methods - rhetorical, feminist, and post-colonial criticism - all insist
on cultural contextualization. All approach texts in multifaceted ways, providing a
variety of perspectives so that simplistic answers to complex questions can be
avoided. However, each also provides special lenses with which to view
particular issues. In combination with post-colonial theory and feminist criticism,
Burke's rhetorical criticism provides a flexible interdisciplinary approach to the
salient issues in Ann Stephens' fictional representations of Indians and their
intermarriages with whites. Taken together, these analytical methods provide a
versatile means to explicate the intricacies of Stephens' inscriptions as well as

the complexities of the situation in which she wrote.

107

Endnotes

1 See for example, Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs; Susan K Harris, 19th-Century
American Women's Novels: Interpretative Strategies, Nina Baym, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to
Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870; Carolyn Karcher, "Reconceiving
Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers."

2 For example, in Stephens' best-selling novel, Fashion and Famine (1854), a story of
Christian redemption, the female protagonist is a fallen woman who is saved by her father’s love
and sacrifice. Unlike many of the novels of the period, at the end of the story, she does not
marry. Instead, 35 years before Hull-House, she opens her mansion to the "educated poor" -
mistress of her mansion and mistress of herself. Although her new vocation takes place within
her home, "she . . . literally go[es] out by the wayside and hedges, forcing the poor to come in
and partake of her hospitality" (422). In other words, she moves in circles beyond her sphere, yet
is offered by Stephens as an exemplary woman.

3 In particular, Herbert Ross Brown's misreading of Stephens' The Old Homestead has
been cited to paint Stephens as a conservative who believed that women are innately dependent
upon men. Brown quotes a few lines from the novel: 'Women were born to look upward with their
hearts and cling to others for their support - men were made to give this support. You cannot
change places and be happy!" to support his claim. Aunt Hannah Issues this caveat to the young
heroine, Mary, when she suggests that, to enable them to marry, she can support Joseph, her
fiance. Taking this admonition verbatim not only means missing the irony, it involves misreading
the stated facts. Just prior to this exchange Aunt Hannah explains: "You are a nice girl, Mary,

. . . and mean right, I know. But Joseph will never be content to let you support him if you had the
strength [which the entire novel has shown she does]. He is very manly and proud with all his
softness“ (413). Thus, the "you" who "cannot change places and be happy" is not woman, but
man and his false pride. When Mary suggests that Joseph will not object because she is "like his
sister," Aunt Hannah, who does almost all the work around the old homestead with little help from
her brother, Uncle Nat, replies, "But sisters do not support brothers, and men do not like to take
favors where they ought to give them" (413). Such overt irony seems difficult to overlook, and,

108

when taken into account, changes the entire nature of Stephens' "clinging women." Yet, even
though many of Brown's assessments have been refuted by later feminist critics, his
interpretation of Stephens has never been challenged; in fact, as recently as 1988, it was being
cited to bolster claims that she was a conservative on women's issues. See DLB, vol. 73: 299-
305 and AW, vol. 4: 163-64.

‘ From a poem dedicated to Stephens on her embarkation on a grand tour of Europe,
cited in Stern, We, The Women 40.

5 Outworkers were provided the raw materials to produce goods at a piece rate, usually
very low, in their own homes or in sub-contractors' shops. According to historian Jeanne
Boydston, "[i]n 1850, almost half of New York City craft workers fell into this category" (Home and
Work 59).

° According to a letter from Stephens' nephew in the Stephens' manuscript collection at
the New York Public Library, Stephens' daughter was overwhelmed by her mother's collection of
papers. Apparently Stephens kept "everything." When she died her daughter and Mrs. Charles
Peterson, a personal friend of Stephens, went through the papers and destroyed most of them.
The nephew claimed that had he known what she intended, he would have prevented it.

7 Interestingly, Humphreys wrote the first published version of the Indian captivity of Mrs.
Jemima Howe. Apparently she had met Israel Putnam after her release and related her story to
him. Humphreys, who has a long list of published writings including narrative histories as well as
poetry, included her story in his The Life and Heroic Exploits of Israel Putnam (1788), who was a
Major-General in the Continental Army. Humphreys himself was a Colonel and served as an aid-
de-camp to George Washington.

° It is ironic that Stephens gives Neal so much public credit for her success because he is
one of the people responsible for some of the misinformation about Stephens' career, which
helped to deprecate her accomplishments. While he cleariy credits her as a "woman of great
original genius" he also wrongly notes that Portland Magazine only lasted for one volume, and he
mentions that Ladies Companion eventually failed but does not indicate that these failures took
place after Stephens left the companies. See Portland Illustrated (69-70) for more detail.

109

9 Stephens wrote several articles defending women's literary careers. These pieces
reveal her ambivalence about her conflicting roles. See especially "Literary Ladies" and 'Women
of Genius."

1° Because Stephens was so consumed with her public reputation as a true woman, this
study uses that concept, as explicated by Welter, in analyzing how Stephens portrays the
"womanliness" of her female characters. Yet Stephens, like so many other women writers of the
time, felt that submission to male authority prevented women from utilizing their God-given talents
to the best effect, and thus advocated a more active womanhood, similar to the Real Womanhood
ideal that Cogan develops.

‘1 During the early years of the magazine, it changed titles frequently. Peterson often
tried to capitalize on the success of Godey's Lady's Book, by such designations as The Lady‘s
World and to appeal to the public's growing nationalism by including "National" in their titles, such
as Ladies National Magazine and Peterson's National Ladies Magazine. However, to avoid
confusion, it will simply be refen'ed to as Peterson‘s Magazine, regardless of the name on the title
page for that particular issue. For a more complete account of Peterson's Magazine, see Mott, A
History of American Magazines 2: 306-311.

'2 l have adopted the nomenclature of Carolyn Karcher who recommends using the term
"social novels" to refer to women's fiction of the nineteenth century. She believes that they
interrogate how social ills affected people's daily lives. Furthermore, she stresses how these
novels directly criticize society, attacking patriarchal privilege and depicting the resources women
have to survive in such repressive environments. See "Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century
American Literature" for more detail.

‘3 In 1859 Victor Hugo wrote a letter, published in the New York Express, condemning
America for sentencing John Brown to death for his attack on Harper's Feny. Ann Stephens
wrote a response, which was also published in the Express. Although she prefaces her remarks
with an apologia for 'Womanly interference," she nonetheless strongly refutes Hugo's arguments.

“ in the mid-nineteenth century, magazines frequently paid well known authors simply for
the privilege of listing their name as members of the editorial staff. This appears to be the case at

110

Graham's Magazine, see Mott, History of American Magazines 1: 544-549. However, Stephens
did edit Portland Magazine, Ladies Companion, Mrs. Stephens' Monthly Magazine, and
Peterson's Magazine, especially during its early years.

'5 Franz Boas, an influential anthropologist in the early twentieth wntury as President of
the American Anthropological Association, was opposed to the hierarchical classification of races
and cultures of early ethnologists who set out to understand the savage or primitive mind, which
puts the ethnologist in a position of superiority over his/her subjects. Instead he felt that "there is
a tendency [on the part of scientists] to give biological reality to classifications aned at quite
irrationally" (Primitive 36). He believed that no race is inherently superior to another, and "the
idea of race, as applied to human types, is vague" (254). He concluded that no pure races exist
in humans (254).

1" Despite the ethnomntn’c ideologies that fill his government reports, they remain
important sources of nineteenth-century Native American life and culture.

'7 Carr suggests that Schoolcraft's conversion to fundamentalist Presbyterianism and his
first wife's drug addiction "darkened his view of the Indian character" (121). Johnston died in
1842, and Schoolcraft married Mary Howard from South Carolina in 1847. Howard, in 1860,
wrote The Black Gauntlet, a novel defending slavery and exposing what she considered to be the
problems of intermarriage and racial mixing. Scheik conjectures that the fictional Mr.
Walsingloss, who marries an Indian, may be "a sumogate for Schoolcraft" (21). Howard's racist
beliefs may have influenced Schoolcraft's thinking.

'° In 1977, Stephen Jay Gould repeated his experiments. Although he could "find no
evidence of conscious fraud," he regards Morton's data as misleading because they were
"finagled" (102). For example, Morton failed to take cranium differences within the American
groups into consideration, and "his sample is strongly biased by an overrepresentation of an
extreme group - the small-brained Peruvians" (105). Consequently, these results lower the total
numbers for the American group, when each subgroup should have been averaged and then the
average of all subgroups should have been considered the mean number for the American

groups. Similar finagling occurred in the Caucasian group. Gould's recalculated figures of 83.79

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cubic inches for Americans and 84.45 for Caucasians results in no appreciable difference in brain
size.

‘9 This assertion is based on articles listed in the New York Times Historical Index.
Coward, in his survey of 31 nineteenth-century American newspapers, demonstrates that Indian
attacks form the bulk of most newspaper articles about Indians.

2° Caroline May, The American Female Poets with Biographical and Critical Notices, p.

31 6.

2‘ Charles Peterson, "Our Contributors," Graham's Magazine, p. 234.

22 "Mrs. Ann S. Stephens," American Literary Magazine, unsigned critical biography,
although the author is probably Charles Peterson, as he uses the phrase "light and shade" in

other critical assessments of Stephens.

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CHAPTER 3
RACE, GENDER, AND INTERMARRIAGE IN MALAESKA: INDIAN WIFE OF
THE WHITE HUNTER

Malaeska, in part because of its status as the first dime novel, has
received more critical attention than any other work by Stephens. Its overt plea
against racial prejudice fits the sensibilities of today's readers, which may explain
its recovery and republication in 1997, while most of Stephens' other works
remain unknown.‘ Because racial prejudice continues to plague our society, the
story of interracial marriage and its attendant problems remains compelling.
However, today's readers are often disconcerted by the abrupt and apparently
racist ending which states that Malaeska died "the broken-hearted victim of an
unnatural marriage" (163).

In this chapter I focus on Malaeska's marriage to William Danforth and
provide reasons that have little to do with race as to why Stephens might
consider it unnatural. I examine the tale as a female-centered myth, provide a
synoosis of the plot, and then begin a dramatistic analysis which demonstrates
the complexities of the issues involved and elucidates Stephens' multifaceted
representations of race and gender. Specifically, I use dramatism to investigate
Stephens' representations of race, gender, and intermarriage to reveal her
Burkean motivations, that is how she would "encompass and confront" the
situation of racial and gender prejudice, how her novel provides readers with

"equipment for living."

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Malaeska as a Female-Centered Myth

Malaeska shares many similarities with the sentimental novel and the
historical melodrama, but Stephens appears to emphasize its mythical qualities.
The narrative is introduced as an "Indian legend," told to the female narrator by
an "old gentleman," a "staunch old republican farmer of the last century" (61).?
To counter British criticism that American culture was inferior, American authors
of the early National period often used the framed story, which tends to
historicize a narrative by providing it with a lineage, as a device to substantiate
the existence of an American historical literary tradition. However, by filtering it
from the male authority through the woman narrator, Stephens genders the tale
(Camey 70). While she ostensibly gets her authorflty from a traditional patriarch,
she acknowledges that the narrative she tells may not be "exactly as he told it"
(Malaeska 61). She is going to tell the tale from a woman's point of view.
Because women and Native Americans shared a marginal status in nineteenth-
century American society (Burke would consider this common marginality a form
of consubstantiality), these hints that the story is told from a woman's perspective
might lead readers of her day to expect the narrator to exhibit a certain
sympathy/empathy between women and Indians, such as that seen in the novels
of Child and Sedgwick (Baym "Stories"). In fact, in Stephens' rendition of the
legend, white male patriarchy, the very source of her authority, is denounced for
racial bigotry and for usurping woman's authority in the home.

By twice referring to the story as a "legend," Stephens authorizes her
narrative as part of the American historical and literary tradition while she

simultaneously documents it as myth. Placing the story in the pre-Revolutionary

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period, she creates a distance in time and space that helps set it apart from
reality, giving it a mystical, mythical quality. Further defining the story as myth,
Stephens exploits typical plot scenarios from traditional frontier myths,
inverting/subverting them to tell a very different story. For example, Malaeska's
long years in the Danforth Manhattan home are described in terms similar to
captivity narratives. Echoing the words of white captives such as Mary
Rowlandson, Stephens describes Malaeska as being "caged" in "strange lands,"
surrounded by "enemies," and thinking "of her own people incessantly" (94).
Long after details of the story have faded from memory, readers
remember the powerful character of Malaeska. Like nearly all mythological
heroes, the resilient Malaeska is larger than life. She is stronger than any other
woman, and she endures more than most could bear. Because she embodies
the best of civilized life as well as the freedom of the wilderness, Malaeska
represents an ideal for Stephens' white women readers. As Stephens explains,
"[t]he Indian woman . . . in herself combined all that was strong, picturesque, and
imaginative in savage life, with the delicacy, sweetness, and refinement which
follows in the train of civilization" (124). Woidat suggests that white women
authors' imaginations were stirred by the image of the Indian princess who
"blend[ed] both the refinement and virtues of civilization with the freedom and
power of life with nature, or a more 'natural' life" (8). Such characters offered an
attractive alternative to the overly delicate creature of the "two" womanhood
ideology. Their race allowed them freedoms and strengths deemed
inappropriate for white "ladies"; thus, the combination of race and gender

transforms gender and creates a new model of womanhood. Malaeska has all

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the qualities of the "true" woman — piety, purity, domesticity, and even
submissiveness to male authority - but her physical strength, freedom of
movement, and independence transform the "true" woman into a new ”real"
woman who has the potential for greater control over her life. This female myth
offers a new definition of womanhood. What makes Malaeska larger than life is
this embryonic promise of a new, more active womanhood ideal, which
developed in the decade after "Malaeska" was first published (Cogan 23).

Although the role of womanhood is conspicuous in this female myth,
Malaeska does have traits in common with her male counterparts. Like the male
heroes in the traditional frontier myth, she mediates between the worlds of
"civilization" and "savagery," but she belongs in neither world. As male heroes
typically do, she wrangles, albeit unsuccessfully, with the villain. But, because
Malaeska is a woman, she also differs dramatically from these homes. White
male mediators generally have no ties to civilization, as evidenced by such traits
as their illiteracy and a lack of romantic alliances (Slotkin, Fatal 105). Malaeska
is both literate and romantically attached. While these characteristics tie her to
white civilization, her race marks her as "other" in the world of whites. Thus, both
gender and race affect the role of heroine.

In this female-centered myth of the frontier, women occupy all the major
roles, but, with the exception of one minor character, none of the male characters
is admirable. The women, even those in minor roles, are primarily depicted as
mediators and peace-makers. On the other hand, the men are principally
portrayed as aggressors who disrupt social bonds. Although the women

characters' field of action is often limited to the domestic realm, the implications

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of their acts, particularly those of Malaeska and Sarah, extend far beyond the
home into the larger world. Ironically, their rhetoric, their words, remains
symbolic (unactuated) action: their intercession is never completely successful
because men fail to heed their words. For example, when Malaeska takes her
son to Manhattan to her husband's family, the boy's grandfather threatens to
keep him and to send Malaeska "back to her tribe." But his wife intervenes
pleading, "Do not separate mother and child!" (93). Although he ostensibly
acquiesces, in actuality, he separates mother and child, even though both remain
under his roof, by deliberately preventing Malaeska from "mothering" her child.
Through women's words and their attempts to ameliorate the annihilating effects
of racial and gender hierarchy, Stephens criticizes patriarchal ways of being and
thinking as divisive and posits that other ways of being and thinking can and do
exist. Even though most male characters in the story act on the presumption that
race and gender are immutable realities, Stephens creates a fictional worid in
which the boundaries of race and gender are not stable, but ever-shifting.
Plot Summary

In 1860 Beadle paid Stephens $250 for the right to publish a revised and
expanded version of Malaeska as the first dime novel. It had originally been
published as a three-part serial in the 1839 volume of Ladies Companion, the
magazine she edited upon her arrival in New York. The dime novel version is not
simply a reprint of the original serial as some sources erroneously report
(Johannsen 31; Berkhofer 99). It has six new chapters that not only add new
narratives to the novel but radically change its tone. Whether the dime novel

publishers recommended the plot changes or whether they simply indicated they

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wanted a story of about 125 pages is unknown. They may have had a hand in
the changes because, as the publishing industry grew in America, publishers
became arbiters of popular taste (Stern, "Role" 5). Yet Stephens' own
knowledge of popular tastes could have been a factor as well. Regardless of
their origins, the revisions of the dime novel version make Malaeska more
lndianly and less competent; she is also displaced as the only heroine, sharing
that role with Sarah, a young white woman.

In the original serial, "Malaeska," most of the action centers on the
eponymous protagonist. It is the tale of a beautiful Indian maiden who marries
William Danforth, a wealthy white hunter, and bears his son. Danforth and his
companions from the white settlement go off on a hunt. One of the hunters,
Arthur Jones, becomes separated from the others. When a "half-naked savage"
shoots at him, narrowly missing his head, Jones shoots back, killing the Indian
instantly. Because Danforth had been seen in the vicinity of the dead Indian,
Malaeska's tribe accuses him of the murder. Thus begin hostilities between the
Indians and settlers. Danforth is fatally wounded in the ensuing battle, and, while
in his death throes, extracts a promise from Malaeska that she will go to his
parents to "learn to love the white man's God" so that she may join him in
"another world" (83). After burying both him and her father, also killed in the
battle, the resilient Malaeska sets out for Manhattan in a canoe with her infant
son, also named William. During the trip, which took "many days," she manages
to "occasionally kill a bird, which her true arrow seldom failed to bring down" (87-

8) and to otherwise provide for their needs.

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Once she arrives at her destination, her self-reliance dissolves into self-
effacement as Danforth's bigoted father accepts the boy but not his mother.
Malaeska is reduced to the status of a servant and forbidden to reveal her true
relationship to the boy. The boy's grandmother tries to ease Malaeska's pain
through small kindnesses and secret access to the boy. Malaeska remains in the
Danforth household where she learns "the beautiful and simple truths of the
Gospel" from the old lady (Ladies Companion 10 (1839): 244), but meanwhile her
son is taught to hate the Indians. At this point the dime novel version adds a
significant incident not included in the original 1839 serial: Malaeska tries,
unsuccessfully, to kidnap her son to take him back to a life in the wilderness with
the Indians. Later, when young Danforth is sent to Europe to complete his
education, Malaeska returns to the woods alone. In the dime novel version, it is
at this point that she learns of the white man's God from a missionary.

Meanwhile, Danforth's hunting companion, Arthur Jones, has married his
sweetheart, Martha Fellows. They have several children and live in the same
settlement, which has now become a small village. Sarah, their oldest girl,
befriends Malaeska, who lives in a wigwam nearby. From Malaeska. Sarah
learns the true meaning of Christianity. At eighteen, Sarah is sent to the city to a
finishing school. In the dime novel version, this episode is expanded fiom a few
sentences to three chapters in which Sarah rescues an elderly man who lives
next door to the school when he has a stroke in the garden. The elderly man
turns out to be the younger William Danforth's grandfather. Through the
grandparents Sarah meets the young man, just returned from Europe, and they
fall in love. Although Mrs. Danforth suggests to her husband that William should

119

know the truth of his heritage, her husband replies "It is too late . . . . It would
crush him forever" (141). So, they both die without ever telling William his true
parentage.

Sarah and William return to her home to meet her parents before they are
wed. Sarah asks William to accompany her on a visit to see her old Indian
friend, but he refuses with an outburst that he "hates the whole racel" Sarah is
mystified at his attitude and rationalizes that her friend is "white in everything
but color" (151). But William, explaining that he cannot overcome the prejudice
he Ieamed from his grandfather, remains adamant. So Sarah goes off alone.
Malaeska is overjoyed to see her friend again, but when she learns that Sarah is
engaged to William Danforth she becomes wild with excitement. Assured that
his grandparents are dead, Malaeska realizes she is no longer required to keep
silent. She gives Sarah a message for young Danforth, asking him to meet her
later that night. On a spot overlooking Catskill Creek, Malaeska reveals her true
identity to Vlfilliam. Unable to bear the humiliation of mixed blood, young
Danforth commits suicide by throwing himself off the embankment into the creek
below. On his grave the next day Malaeska was of a broken heart, which is the
melodramatic ending of the serial. In the dime novel, readers learn that Sarah
never marries but lives a "useful" but "lonely" life. In the closing scene, she
witnesses the destruction of the old Danforth mansion to make way for progress
in the form of "a block of stores, the usual fate of every relic of old time" (164).
Such an ending seems to indicate that Stephens does not completely accept the
concept of white civilization as necessarily superior to Native American ways of

being.

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Dramatistlc Analysis of Malaeska

In Malaeska, the debate over nature/nurture, which appears in other
contemporary discourses on race, forms the basis of the representative
anecdote. In terms of plot, or dramatistic action, the representative anecdote is
not just that racial hatred devastates all it touches but that if nurture produces the
primary differences between the races, then such prejudice is counterproductive
because it does nothing to resolve those differences. With this as the underlying
anecdote, Stephens criticizes patriarchy for pursuing a policy of racial prejudice
and for usurping women's nurturing responsibilities in the home.

In Burkean terms, Stephens "sizes up" the situations of racial and gender
prejudice and strategically inscribes them in her fiction to lead readers to develop
an attitude toward them consistent with her purpose. Or as Burke phrases it:
thinking of literature as equipment for living means

considerjing] works of art . . . as strategies for selecting enemies and

allies, for socializing losses, for warding off the evil eye, for purification,

propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition

and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions. (304)

In the fictional world she creates, Stephens selects the allies and enemies and in

doing so gives the readers implicit instructions on the proper means for dealing

with similar situations in real life. A pentadic examination of the primary

characters and their acts reveals her intent:

Agent = Malaeska; co-agent = Sarah; counteragent = all Danforth men,
especially the elder Mr. Danforth.

Agency = race/gender characteristics.

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Act = demonstrating that racial prejudice and ideologies which prevent women
from taking active roles in society are ruinous principles.
Scene = racial/gender relations in nineteenth-century America.
Purpose = to demonstrate the destructive effects of racial and gender prejudice.
Malaeska is the primary agent and clearly an ally. Her racial and gender
characteristics are the agency through which Stephens reveals the injustice of
current ideologies about race and gender. John Danforth, as the oldest,
wealthiest, and most powerful male in the story, represents patriarchy and is the
counteragent (enemy) against whom Malaeska struggles. Sarah, who similarly
opposes the racial prejudice of Malaeska's son, William, becomes a co—agent.
Thus, Malaeska is a female-centered myth about the potential for human
beings of both sexes and different races to live in harmony. Through her Indian
woman heroine, Stephens questions the boundaries of race and gender.
However, since Stephens' own views of race and gender are complex and
conflicted, certain ambiguities appear in her textual inscriptions. Most of these
ambiguities are directly related to the nature/nurture debate about race that forms
the foundation of the representative anecdote - whether biology or environment
has the greatest influence on a person's ultimate character. Ultimately, the
scene of racial and gender prejudice remains unchanged in Stephens' narrative,
realistically reflecting American society of the nineteenth century. However, her
story hints at the possible transformation of this situation, if men would be more

receptive to women's words and ideas.

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Representations of Race
Representations of Indian women in nineteenth-century American fiction
have been investigated by several scholars in recent years, in an attempt to
codify them and provide critics with a vocabulary with which to make generalized
statements about them. In one of the most ambitious of these studies, Asebrit
Sundquist analyzed the works of 56 authors (including Stephens) and their
representations of 134 Indian women characters. Using quantitative analysis,
she classified the characters according to stereotypes, which, as she observes,
"tend to conform to nineteenth-century prevailing stereotypes of white women,
and hence, contain few specific 'lndian' features" (17). She employs three major
categories of stereotypes - sirens, angels, and mothers - each of which she
further subdivides for more specific characterization. In her review of the history
of the word "stereotype,’ she notes that it originally applied to the printing plates
that could be used over and over without variation. More importantly she
explains that
Walter Lippman was the first to introduce the concept of stereotypy to the
social sciences and to point out the double function of this phenomenon:
on the one hand stereotypes are easy to detect and categorize, therefore
they make life easier to understand and cope with as they constitute some
of the supports most people probably need to feel secure. On the other
hand, they contribute to prejudice, falsification, and distortion” (19).
As Sundquist points out, stereotyping refers to the 'repetition of a pattern” (20).
She believes that in literature these patterns “may become fallacious' and that
they are often used to create or maintain opinions about people belonging to the

groups being represented (20). However, repetition of stereotypes also

promotes their credibility, making it difficult for writers such as Stephens to avoid

123

stereotypes because both readers and writers rely on such codes to convey a
wealth of information (including value judgments) in a few words.

Because of the quantitative nature of her work, Sundquist has to place
each character into only one category, even though the character may fit into
more than one classification. For example, for the purposes of quantification,
Malaeska is assigned to the category of "Good Mother," but in her discussion
Sundquist explains that Malaeska "is the typical Angel who turns typical Good
Mother when she marries" (85). Since Angels and Good Mothers have many
characteristics in common, this is not surprising. Echoing the cardinal virtues for
"true [white] women," Good Mothers are virtuous, self-sacrificing, and devoted to
husband and children. Angels are young, beautiful, sincere, and "have the ability
to exercise a strong moral influence on peOple" (111). Even more interesting,
given Malaeska's fate, both Angels and Good Mothers are associated with
themes of death, victimization, and frustration of their desires (94; 111).

Although Linda Clemmons does not specifically analyze the Malaeska
character, her study complements Sundquist's findings. In "'Nature Was Her
Lady's Book': Ladies Magazines, American Indians, and Gender, 1820-1859,"
Clemmons' review of articles and stories about American Indians reveals that
Indian women were typically portrayed as "beautiful, pious, thrifty, as well as
diligent housekeepers devoted to their families" (40). In findings similar to those
of other scholars (Sundquist; Carney; Woidat), Clemmons concludes that the
Indian women in these stories "are not exotic princesses, but idealized versions

of nineteenth-century white women" (52). She contends that these

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characterizations are based, not on real Native Americans and their cultures, but
"on a mythical view of how Indians are supposed to live their lives" (52).
Malaeska

Stephens' representations of Malaeska fit precisely within these
parameters or stereotypes. In her first appearance in the story, before readers
are aware that the "young woman" is the heroine Malaeska, they learn that "[hjer
laugh was as musical as a bird song . . ., her long hair glowed like the wing of a
raven, and her motion was as graceful as an untamed gazelle" (64). Not only is
she beautiful, but through animal metaphors she is closely linked to nature as
befits a "noble savage." Most delineations of Malaeska's race are of this type -
images which link Malaeska to all that is benign and sublime in nature, similar to
COOper's descriptions of Chingachgook. But even though Stephens' story
crusades against the evils wrought by racism, her ideas about Indians are
imbued with the ideologies of her culture. While Stephens consciously may be
trying to present positive assessments of Indians, her descriptions frequently
contain negative connotations. Furthermore, as post-colonial theorists such as
Homi Bhabba have demonstrated, stereotypical portrayals always have negative
implications and assert power over colonized "others" by attempting to fix them
as unchanging and totally knowable (Childs and Williams 123-5). Even those
standard representations that connect Malaeska with nature and portray her as
good and beautiful are limiting because there is an implication that she is nothing
more - a simple girl with no real depth.

Although the story of Malaeska is an ardent plea to end the destructive

effects of racial prejudice, Stephens' representations of race often depend on

125

standard stereotypes. The tensions that result from these seemingly incompatible
means and ends reveal the ambivalence of Stephens herself on the subject of
race. Even the heroine, Malaeska, does not escape negative stereotyping. For
example, when Malaeska begins to plan taking her child back to her own peeple,
Stephens describes her actions in terms of race: ”The stealthy art of warfare
against an enemy awoke" in her (Malaeska 97), and with "native reticence" and
"native craft, Malaeska made her preparations" (97). In other words, because
Malaeska's acts involve deception, even though they may be for a good cause,
they are incompatible with prevailing notions of womanhood; therefore, Stephens
attributes them to her Indian heritage. Stephens even suggests that "but for the
blood of her husband, which ran through the old man's vein, [Malaeska] would
have given way to the savage hate of her people, against the household in which
she had been so unhappy" (97). These references to Malaeska's race reveal
that, even as Stephens struggles through theme and purpose to plead for an end
to racial prejudice, she cannot escape some of the very ideologies and
stereotypes on which such prejudice is based.

Certain racial characteristics, although they sometimes mark Malaeska as
"other," primarily serve to allow her to go boldly where white women might fear to
tread. Malaeska has a freedom of movement and an independence unavailable
to white women living in the cities and towns of nineteenth-century America. For
instance, her trips back and forth between the wilderness and Manhattan alone
or accompanied only by her young son were adventures not open to white
women, not because they were incapable, but because such exploits were

considered inappropriate for proper ladies. The home was woman's sphere. A

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woman appearing in public, unaccompanied by a male escort, could invite the
intimation that she was a "public" woman, a woman of ill repute, a prostitute. As
Mary Ryan deftly illustrates in her classic study, Women in Public, women in
public places were generally seen as either sexually/morally dangerous or as
sexually/morally endangered (68). Furthermore, she emphasizes that "the most
dangerous female inhabitant of the public streets was singled out by her [dark]
skin color" (73).

Stephens seems to refute these assumptions about unaccompanied
women in public, as she establishes that Malaeska is more endangered than
dangerous. Both race and sex make Malaeska the object of the white gaze. In
the scene in which the newly widowed Indian woman first appears on the streets
of Manhattan, "in full costume and with the proud, free tread of her race"
(Malaeska 89), residents stare at her as she tries to find someone who will help
her locate her in-laws. Stephens reports that Malaeska "had caught much of the
delicacy and refinement of civilized life from her husband, and her manner
became startled and fawn-like beneath the rude gaze of passers-by. The modest
blood burned in her cheek" (89). Even though her race allows her to move freely
about the country in ways that white women cannot, both her race and sex mark
her as "other” in the streets of New York. Stephens squarely places the blame
for this discrimination on the shoulders of whites. Their act, staring, is almost
predatory, causing Malaeska to blush; whereas her act, walking the streets of
Manhattan, is an innocent desire to fulfill a promise to her dying husband. Thus,
in this scene, Malaeska is represented as more civilized than the whites who

supposedly represent "civilization."

127

Malaeska's blush is but one indication of her "whitening" in the novel.
Gaul believes that "Malaeska's assumption of whiteness throughout the narrative
serves the interests of the dominant white culture" (126). Many whites, Stephens
included, viewed the assimilation of Indians into white culture as the best solution
for both whites and Indians. Malaeska adopts the faith of whites, and she learns
to read, both of which are primary assimilation projects for Native Americans
initiated by whites from the first contact It is these white skills and beliefs that
allow her to teach the Gospel to young Sarah and to elicit "[ajll the latent
properties of [her] warm, youthful, heart, and of [her] superior intell " (Malaeska
124). Malaeska's face shows "more than the remains of beauty; the poetry of
warm, deep feeling, shed a loveliness over it seldom witnessed on the brow of a
savage" (124). Whitening makes Malaeska more attractive, more acceptable. In
fact, Clemmons reports that articles and stories about Indians in nineteenth-
century magazines "focused on the similarities between the two cultures" and
"portrayed Indian women as being assimilated into white culture" (40). Sarah
defends Malaeska's race with these revealing words: "I have no predilection for
savages as a race . . . but you make one exception, may I also not be allowed a
favorite especially as she is a white in education, feeling, everything but color?"
(151) Such a sentiment raises the question of whether Malaeska could be a role
model for young women if she were less white.

Although Malaeska embodies the intertwining of race and gender, at times
Stephens appears to attempt to separate the two elements. In fact, when she
wishes to emphasize Malaeska's womanly traits, she does so at the expense of

her lndianly traits. By accentuating the gendered facets of Malaeska's identity to

128

the detriment of racial characteristics, Stephens' representations of race seem to
indicate that in some ways Malaeska's race is irreconcilable with ideologies of
womanhood as applied to white middle-class women. However, in certain
situations in the story, the lines between race and gender are murky. For
example, when John Danforth suggests keeping the child and sending the
mother back to her tribe, Malaeska is described as being "like a lioness guarding
her young" (92). Is it her race that makes her "like a lioness" or her maternal
(womanly) instinct? No clear answer emerges. Just as Stephens portrays the
elder Danforth wanting to "ren[d] the two races asunder in the very person of his
grandchild" (94), Stephens may have wished she could separate race and
gender in Malaeska. Even though Stephens is obviously disturbed by the
effects of racial prejudice, she cannot lift herself above many of the ideologies of
her time, which insist on the "savage" nature of Indians - a concept at odds with
notions of womanliness. And while racial prejudice ooncems her, gender issues,
in particular the desire for greater freedom for women, consume her. For
instance, none of her antebellum novels concern slavery, even peripherally, and
her postbellum novels that do feature African Americans place them in servant
roles and rely on stereotypical images of the wise and powerful Mammy, who is
nonetheless the object of ridicule for her social aspirations.3 Yet all of Stephens'
fiction focuses on expanding roles for white women. Stephens uses an Indian
woman heroine in this story, in part, because Indian women had greater
freedoms than the white women of her time. However, when race and gender

come into conflict in portraying Malaeska as a role model, race loses to gender.

129

But Stephens cannot ignore Malaeska's race since it is the agency by which she
dramatizes the consequences of racial hatred.

Malaeska, then, through the greater freedoms allowed her by virtue of her
race, represents the potential of greater freedom for white women - an ideal to
which they should aspire. But even as race allows Malaeska greater liberty, it
puts her at greater risk of being mistaken for a woman of ill repute and even
threatens to unmask her underlying "savage" nature. While women of every race
must confront the Madonna/Jezebel binary by which women have typically been
judged, this evaluation is more problematic for women of color who are more
fiequently connected to sexual depravity. Consequently, to overcome such
obstacles, Stephens frequently downplays Malaeska's race as she emphasizes
her womanly qualities - particularly her maternal nature. Malaeska's race is
connected to all that is benign and beautiful in Nature, while her womanly
characteristics connect her to civilization.

h l i n h

Although Stephens does rely on stereotypes to describe her Indian
characters, she tries to demonstrate that the negative images by which Indians
are generally depicted are not always accurate. This is a difficult task, for she
must balance her desire to establish that racial prejudice wreaks havoc on all it
touches with her reader's general "knowledge" of Indians, which comes from the
same popular sources she herself uses - sources which stress that Indians are
untnlstworthy, blood-thirsty, revengeful. Thus, when Stephens describes the
Indian warriors plotting revenge for the death of their comrade, thirst for revenge

being a common stereotype of male Indians (Sundquist 56; Barnett 84-5;

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Clemmons 48), she describes them as "a company of fiends . . . in their orgies"
(73) and as "vipers" (74). And in her descriptions of the battle in which
Malaeska's father and husband kill one another, Indian warriors as a group are
depicted as "fiendish . . . wild beasts." Indian women, as a group, fare no better.
When Malaeska returns to her tribe after her son is sent to Europe, its female
members want to torture her to death for stealing her son, their future chief, from
them. Stephens characterizes them as "menacing" and "fiendish," quintessential
descriptions of the stemotypical Furies (Sundquist 756).

However, Stephens' representations of Indians are mild compared to
those of Edward Ellis in Seth Jones, or Captives of the Frontier, another Beadle
and Adams dime novel published the same year as Malaeska, which sold as
many as 500,000 copies. By the end of the second paragraph of the story, Ellis
has the Indians successfully vanished/vanquished: "are many years . . . villages
and cities would take the place of the wild forest, while the Indians would be
driven further toward the setting sun" (172). But he does not blame American
settlers for the friction between whites and Native Americans; he sets his tale
back in post-Revolutionary times and denounces the "mother country" who
"continued to incite the Indians to revolting barbarities upon the unoffending
inhabitants" (176). Nor are his epithets reserved for Indian enemies; according to
his eponymous hero, all Indians are enemies. "[l]t won't do to trust an Injin,
They're obstropertous" (175). Ellis' description of Indians as "Five Nation niggers
. . . all a set of skunks" (189) is a typical example of how Indians fared in much of

the papular literature, including dime novels, in the 1860s.

131

While Stephens may label embattled Indians as "fiendish," individual
Indian Characters receive a different twatment. Her illustrations of particular
Indians intimate that people are individuals who should be judged by their actions
and character not their color or race. When Malaeska returns to her tribe, the
man "whom she had once rejected" is now chief. He claims his right to decide
her fate. He leads her into the woods, but instead of killing her as he implies in
front of the tribe he will do, he sets her free, providing her with food for her
journey. In depicting this chief as a gentle and generous man, Stephens
suggests that not all Indian men are evil and warlike. By presenting conflicting
representations of Indian characteristics, Stephens posits that race is not a stable
category, describing people once and for all time.
Wiljiam Danfgrtn ang Mixm Blgfl

Interestingly, Stephens' representations of race seem stronger in
Malaeska's half-white son than they do in the full-blooded Malaeska. Although
her descriptions belie contemporary beliefs that the half-blood inherits "none of
the redeeming traits of the full-blooded Indian, and none of the virtues of the
white man" (Howard, qtd. in Scheick 21), her racial depictions reflect certain
beliefs about white racial superiority. On the one hand. William is intelligent, and
he receives a European education, returning vn'th all the polish and "steadiness
of character" any "civilized" man could hope to exhibit (Malaeska 140). On the
other hand, \Mlliam also exhibits many stereotypical traits whites generally
attributed to Indians; for example, he is "a true friend and a bitter enemy" (148).
But William's most pronounced characteristic is his "passionate nature," a

common stereotype for Indians and half-bloods (Berkhofer 78; Clemmons 48;

132

Scheick 11). There is a certain dramatic irony in this inheritance from his Indian
mother, who except in her passionate love for her husband and son, is depicted
as meek, mild, and submissive. This irony is further heightened by the rather
unlikely assertion that Malaeska "had caught much of the delicacy and
refinement of civilized life from her husband" (Malaeska 89). Since her husband
is a fur trader, and she never leaves the wilderness until his death, one wonders
how much "delicacy" she could have absorbed from a man who had adopted the
wilderness lifestyle of her people. Whether intentionally ironic or not, William's
inheritance underscores biological factors, whereas Malaeska's stresses
environmental ones. In the 1830s, when the story was originally written, theories
on race generally promoted one or the other as the primary factor in the
development of character traits. Perhaps this is Stephens' way of suggesting
that both biology and environment play a role in molding identity. The irony
inherent in these depicted "inheritances" augments Stephens' questioning of
innate traits in Indians while it simultaneously re-inscribes them.

Nevertheless, conforming to stereotypes of male Indians in white literature
(Clemmons 48), the younger Danforth is represented as even more passionate
than Malaeska; he is ruled by emotions he cannot control. For example, when
he adamantly refuses to visit Sarah's Indian friend, Stephens reports that Sarah
"turned pale at [his] violent burst of feeling" and that Danforth tries but fails to
control his emotions.

"Forgive me, if I have spoken harshly, dear Sarah," he answered, striving

to subdue his irritation, but spite of his effort it blazed out again the next

instant. "It is useless to strive against the feeling; I hate the whole race! If

there is a thing I abhor on earth, it is a savage - a fierce, blood-thirsty wild
beast in human form!" (150)

133

Try though he might, he cannot control his racial hatred. Like his mother before
him, even his love is marred by an overly passionate nature, as Sarah's thoughts
reveal:

She knew that she was loved in return - not as she loved, fervently, and in

silence, but with the fire of a passionate nature; with the keen, intense

feeling which mingles pain even with happiness, and makes sonow sharp

as the tooth of a serpent. (148)

While these lines forebode the tragic ending, because they rely on stereotypes
they also indicate that certain aspects of William's character are innate, inherited
from his Indian parent. This inability to control his passion will lead to his death.
Stephens' emphasis on William's ineluctable Indian traits also seems to indicate
that exposure to white civilization cannot totally eradicate the biological
exigencies of race.

In the melodramatic climax of the story, young Danforth learns from
Malaeska that he is her son. Because he has been raised to hate Indians, his
reactions are swift and passionate.

"Great God!" he almost shrieked, dashing his hand against his forehead.

"No, no! it can not - I, an Indian? a half-blood? the grandson of my father‘s

murderer? Woman speak the truth; word for word give me the accursed

history of my disgrace. If I am your son, give me proof - proof, I say!"

(159)

And, within moments of hearing Malaeska's tale, he commits suicide by throwing
himself off a precipice. His passionate pride and racial prejudice lead him to
conclude that without the racial superiority that whiteness conferred on him, he is
somehow less worthy, less a person than he previously believed himself to be.
He also wrongly concludes that because his blood is tainted by his "sable

birthright . . . of dusky chiefs" Sarah could not possibly still want to marry him.

134

Readers know that he is wrong. For on her visit to Malaeska, Sarah explains the
love she has for her fiance, concluding, "[t]his feeling may not be the love which
men talk so freely of, but it can not change - never — not even in death, unless
William Danforth prove utterly unworthy" (154). \Mlliam thinks his mixed heritage
makes him unworthy, but Sarah, who never marries after his death, obviously
believes othenlvise. However, William, ruled by passion, pride, and racial hatred,
assumes that his union with her, rather than "lifting her to [his] lofty station."
would degrade her. He wildly begs Malaeska to

"unsay all this, if you would not see me die at your feet. I am young, and a

world of happiness was before me. I was about to be married to one so

gentle — so pure - I, an Indian - was about to give my stained hand to a

lovely being of untainted blood." (159)

But this Malaeska cannot do "without bringing the stain of falsehood on her soul"
(160). So, William, unable to bear the humiliation of mixed blood, commits
suicide. This scene also represents Malaeska as Eve, the bearer of "forbidden
knowledge" which leads to a fall from grace. But Eve is also the mother of all
people of every color, symbolizing our common humanity, so such symbolism
accentuates the ambiguities surrOunding issues of both race and gender.

Burke's dramatistic pentad allows us to view this critical situation fiorn
several perspectives, each of Which illustrates possible interpretations of the
event. From the point of view of agent, the suicide fits with all readers know of
William, and thus follows the imperatives of the agent-act ratio. Because he has
been taught since infancy that whites are racially superior, he is too proud to live

as one looked down upon by the whites with whom he had so long identified.
Although he has always been of mixed heritage, he has been taught to be, think,

135

and act as a white person, and not just any white person but one of wealth and
position, one who believed that these attributes made him superior to others. As
Stephens writes, "[t]he prejudices of birth and station had been instilled into his
nature, till they had become part of it“ (149). This is a crucial point, for, despite
Stephens' reliance on racial stereotypes, it implies that character is not racially
determined but socially constnicted, Ieamed behavior (Bube 40). Leaming that
he is part Indian could have been a transforming experience as well, but it is not.
Rather than being transformed by his new identity, he holds fast to the emptiness
of the old. When he discovers that he is not totally white, William's racial pride
dissolves, but leaves him with nothing to replace it.‘ Robbed of all that he
believed made him better than others, he clings to his racial prejudices. He
hates himself as he "hates the whole race." True to the words he spoke to Sarah
when she questioned him about his "strange prejudice" against Indians, "it . . .
cling[s] to [his] heart as long as there is pulse left in it" (151).

While William's words just before his plunge hint that he is concerned
about corrupting Sarah's purity, he is equally perturbed by the idea that she is
now above him in station. Stephens makes this clear when she informs readers
that "he preferred bestowing wealth and station on the object of his choice, rather
than receiving any worldly advantage from her" (149). In other words, he has not
only Ieamed the lessons of racial prejudice from his grandfather, William also has
mastered other major attributes of patriarchy - male privilege and class
prejudice. His act of suicide is in keeping with the selfish ideals of patriarchy —
scene-act ratio. He thinks primarily of his own degradation, with only minor

consideration for the pain he will cause Malaeska and Sarah. He does think of it:

136

"[t]here is one who will feel this more deeply than both of us, will you comfort
her?" he asks Malaeska (161). But this knowledge of the anguish he will inflict
on those who love him is not enough to stop him from the doing the cowardly
deed. He cannot face the idea, erroneous though it may be, that his betrothed
might be above him; he would rather die. By deciding what Sarah's reaction will
be, by not trusting her goodness, by robbing her of the opportunity to make an
informed choice, he further exhibits his selfishness.

Viewed from the perspective of act and aggmy, another interpretation
becomes apparent. Act and agency merge - plunging headlong off the
precipice describes both the act and the agency by which it is performed.
Danforth's act is precipitous in more ways than one: he 0.15.1115 [191919.09 to his
death over the m. Each of these words defines different usages or
applications of the term "precipitous."5 For the purposes of analyzing for motive,
however, the connotation of first two terms, "acting, or done with excessive or
undue haste, rash, headstrong" (OED) is especially significant. First of all, the
precipitous nature of Danforth's action clearly demonstrates that he is niled by
passion rather than reason. Stephens emphasizes his rash and impetuous
character through her descriptions of him during the tense minutes preceding his
death as he learns the truth of his lineage. He has an "almost insane gaze" and
is in a "frenzy" and "furious passion . . . every feeling which urges to madness
and evil - were a fire in his heart" (159-160). And it is this fiery passion which
precipitates his death. This representation is in keeping with stereotypes of half-
bloods in nineteenth-century fiction that emphasize their volatile nature and, as

William Scheick notes in The Half-Blood, often lead to their untimely demise (11).

137

In other words, William's Indian heritage results in a passionate, self-destructive
nature that exposure to the finest education that white civilization provides cannot
overcome.

The perspective of m, nineteenth-century racial and gender relations,
offers yet another interpretation, especially when the law of ratios is taken into
consideration. William has been inculcated with the racial prejudice of white
society "until [it] had become part of [his natural"; he knows that Indians are a
hated race. As a "half-blood," William embodies the tensions between Indians
and whites, but unlike his mother he cannot mediate between the two because of
his white-imposed indoctrination into racial hatred. The scene-agent ratio
represents a "synechdochic relation . . . between person and place" (Burke, GM
7). The racial hatred William feels is part of the scene he must escape. From his
perspective, he not only believes that most whites hate Indians, but that they

should hate them. The white society he knows (his grandfather‘s world) not only

 

does not accept Indians as equals, but views them as "savages," to be
"extenninated from the face of the earth" (Malaeska 150). Since the scene must
be a fit container for the act, the scene-act ratio dictates that William must die.
William's "prejudice too violent for adequate foundation," is a true reflection of the
beliefs he cannot dispel: it is no wonder that he cannot bear the thought of living
as a "half-blood" (151). The scene of racial relations in nineteenth-century
America that he conjures up in his mind, regardless of how realistic it may or may
not be, dictates that he cannot live in such a society. In other words, William,
too, is a victim of racial prejudice. Although his passionate nature and his selfish

disposition may have led him to the brink, had the scene revealed any hope of

138

acceptance for him, he might have been spared. He is both victim and
persecutor, racially oppressed and racial oppressor.

In this climax, although racial prejudice is at the foundation of the entire
situation, Stephens does not resort to simplistic reasons for Vlfilliam's suicide.
This Burkean analysis demonstrates the complexity of the issues that contribute
to his precipitous action. As 99.101. Vlfilliam personifies racial hatredz-"it is no
prejudice, but a part of my nature," he tells Sarah (150). He can escape it no
more than he can escape the Indian blood running in his veins. His
"predominating pride" leads him to resolve the issue precipitously, without
adequate reflection or consultation with those who love him. So racial pride,
patriarchal privilege, and his headstrong attitude combine in as; and ggggcy to
doom him. He cannot conceive of himself as a being of lower stature; the future
me he envisions appears worse to him than the death he chooses. Stephens
cannot condone his suicide; however, this Burkean analysis reveals that she
understands the power of racial prejudice to provoke such a turn of events.
W

As is typical of other Indian romance writers, Stephens uses the term
"civilization" to discuss whites, which places the discussion in terms of
environment, not biology or race. This distinction is in keeping with beliefs
circulating in the 18303 that Native Americans could be "raised" to the intellectual
and cultural level of whites if they were put into the proper environment (white
civilization) and provided with the appropriate education. Although Stephens
overtly supports the environmentalists' theory of race, she cannot totally escape

the belief that certain traits are racially inherited.

139

However, Stephens balances negative portrayals of Indians with evidence
that whites themselves are not above savagery, such as when Arthur Jones
scalps his victim in the opening hunting scene. But Stephens did not have the
benefit of recent scholarship on whiteness as raced. As Ruth Frankenberg
points out in The Social Construction of Whiteness, her 1993 work "seeks to
begin exploring, mapping, and examining the terrain of whiteness" (my emphasis
1). Because of the time in which Stephens lived and the privileges granted her
by her race, she, like other white writers of her day, tended to see only the racial
"otherness" of those who were not white, but saw no racial privileges, indeed no
racialization at all, in whiteness.

White men, particularly those of wealth and position, are castigated for
creating the conditions that prevent the assimilation of Indians into white culture.
John Danforth, the villain of the piece, is directly responsible for the tragedies
that befall Malaeska and her son. Stephens attacks his use of patriarchal
privilege to prevent Malaeska from being a loved and valued member of his
family. But Stephens does not comment on whiteness as a position of power,
perhaps because she does not even see it, or because the overtly political nature
of white privilege may have been more than Stephens was willing to pursue. She
could more easily justify her denunciation of patriarchal privilege because of its
devastating effects on the domestic realm. Furthermore, by the time Stephens
wrote this story, an anti-patriarchal discourse already existed in fiction; for
example, she had the benefit of such predecessors as Sedgwick and Child,

whose Indian stories contain anti-patriarchal themes.

140

Stephens' treatment of her white women characters' relationships with
Indians reinforces her emphasis on gender rather than race as the source of
friction between the races and social friction in general. The white women in the
novel develop (or attempt to develop) egalitarian relationships with Malaeska
(Gaul 122). For example, young Sarah's relationship with Malaeska grows into
mutual love and respect. However, even this relationship contains hints that
whiteness is lightness. As Gaul points out, the alliance is predicated on the
assumption that Malaeska is "kind and harmless," as indicated by the
accouterments of white civilization that decorate her wigwam (126).
Nevertheless, the two create a mutually beneficial relationship, for Sarah Ieams
much from Malaeska (which she will need to face future dilemmas), and
Malaeska gains a true friend (which she needs to ameliorate her solitary
existence).

Even Martha, Sarah's mother and a relatively minor character, has a
relationship with Malaeska that, though brief, is more egalitarian than that of the
white men with whom the Indian woman comes in contact. When Malaeska
appears in the white settlement after the disastrous battle to get the letter her
husband had left with Martha, she is discovered by Martha's father who half
drags Malaeska to his cabin with these revealing words:

Come along, you young porcupinel You skulking copper-colored little

squaw, you! We shan't kill you nor the little papoose, neither, so you

needn't shake so. Come along! There's Martha Fellows, if you can find

enough of your damationed queer English to tell her what you want. (85)

Although he concedes "[s]he's as harmless as a gartersnake," he still perceives

her as "skulking" and "copper-colored" - that is, different, animalistic, and inferior.

141

Stephens emphasizes how wrong he is in his estimation of Malaeska through the
irony of his mocking her "damationed queer English" with his own garbled
version, which is less melodious and grammatical than Malaeska's. When
Martha reveals that Malaeska was Danforth's Indian wife, Mr. Fellows persists in
his stance of superiority by his "kind" offer to bring the boy up as a farmer.
Although he has sympathy for Malaeska and her son, he wishes to assimilate
them into white culture, which Gaul suggests demonstrates his hierarchical
thinking (123). On the other hand, Martha offers the baby some food, and in
exchange Malaeska gives her a wampum bracelet. Martha does not presume to
tell Malaeska what is best for her, she "compassionately" offers Malaeska
assistance in her chosen path. Their relationship is co-equal. The juxtapositions
of these two ways of being expose the patriarchal way as hierarchical. White
women meet Malaeska on equal terms; white men, approaching from a position
of power and presumed superiority, try to possess, appropriate, or assimilate her.

Representations of race in Malaeska, like the socially constructed
concepts of race itself, are not stable, but fluid. At times Stephens represents
environmental influences as a primary factor in character develooment, such as
her detailed descriptions of the racial prejudice in young William. At other times,
she indicates that people cannot escape biologically inherited traits, as in her
portrayal of young William as ruled by a passionate nature. Like most white
authors of the period, she appears not to see whiteness as raced, but as the
unmarked norm against which all "others" are measured. But her vacillation on
the debate between biology and environment, especially in light of the overt

theme pleading for racial tolerance, demonstrates the complexities of the issue.

142

Because Stephens desires to present her readers with an atypical role model in
Malaeska, gender is a significant complicating factor in her racial inscriptions.
Representations of Gender/Domestic Worlds

Like many nineteenth-century women authors willing to address the
problems of racial relations between Native Americans and whites, Stephens
uses the female Indian character "as a means of redefining [her own] gender"
(Woidat 6). Malaeska represents a distinct form of womanhood. While she has
all the essential qualities of true women, she also hasexpanded freedoms more
typical of the developing real womanhood ideal. Using the genre of the female-
centered frontier myth, Stephens attempts to ”encompass the situation" of
gender and racial relations of her own time. But these relations are multifaceted,
and Stephens employs techniques which at once provide distance and bring the
reader closer, which both simplify and complicate. Bube astutely points out that
"Stephens uses the frontier as a distancing mechanism - a removal in time and
space — that allows her to dramatize conflicts over conventional prescriptions for
gender identity 'safely'" (30). In 1839 when the original serial was written,
Stephens is just establishing herself as an author and editor in New York City,
and ooncems about womanly propriety loom large in her writing.“ By placing
these questions of racial and gender conflict within the context of marriage and
family Stephens also familiarizes, providing her readers, for whom questions of
race seem remote, with narratives that conespond with their personal and

cultural schema for interpreting appropriate behavior within the family.

143

Eamilial Qyngmig

Unlike her male counterparts in traditional frontier stories who represent
rugged individualism, Malaeska, through her intermarriage and friendships with
whites and her motherhood, represents and embodies relationships. In other
words, Malaeska herself is a symbol. As an embodiment of relationships and
family, she symbolizes the possibility for peaceful coexistence between people of
different races and sexes. Almost all of Malaeska's deeds and words mediate
differences that threaten the sanctity of the family. The only time she commits an
act that might be construed as disruptive of familial bonds is when she kidnaps
her own child to preserve the more precious bond between mother and child. In
this scene, Stephens exploits the purported mystical powers of mothers as
promoted by the cult of motherhood, which grew exponentially in the nineteenth
century. When Malaeska uncharacteristically dissembles and even kills a bird
without any use for its body (except to entice her son to follow her), she is merely
following the dictates of motherhood to preserve, at all costs, the bond of love
between mother and child. Given the plethora of printed materials touting the
glories of motherhood at the time, readers understand Malaeska‘s atypical
behavior is motivated by maternal love. Furthermore, she does not initiate the
breaking of familial bonds. She is driven to these desperate acts by the conduct
of her father-in-law who symbolically kidnaps young William, initiating the fissure
between family members by intentionally disrupting the "natural affection"
between Malaeska and her son (Malaeska 95). Her aborted kidnapping

foreshadows the moumful denouement and suggests that although Malaeska

144

symbolizes the possibility of peaceful coexistence, it takes more than one person
and people of both sexes to overcome the power of racial prejudice.

However, despite the pessimistic ending to her story, Stephens manages
to raise issues that needed to be recognized and appreciated to ameliorate the
problems of racial prejudice in nineteenth-century America. Because
intermarriage results in a domestic world in which the races mix, the supposed
hierarchy of races is called into question. In the very first scene in which we see
Danforth with his Indian wife, this issue dramatically bursts forth. As Danforth
holds his infant son, who bears "scarcely . . . a tinge of its mother's blood," he
mutters, "It's a pity the little fellow is not quite white" (72). Although Malaeska
feels "proud anguish" at the remark, she does not rebuke or retort in kind.
Rather, speaking of herself in the third person, her reply indicates her belief in
the equality of the races: "Malaeska's father is a great chief - the boy will be chief
in her father's tribe, but Malaeska never thinks of that when she sees the white
man's blood come into the boy's face" (73). With these words, Malaeska
mediates between the two cultures in ways that appease rather than disturb the
balance. By pointing to the boy's noble Indian blood, she reminds Danforth that,
although from her perspective she might consider her bloodline superior to
Danforth's, she does not because, for her, distinctions between the races are
inconsequential. This scene prepares readers for Malaeska's mediation in the
larger world of whites, which she will soon face. It also symbolically represents
the iniquityllnequity of racial hierarchy in the larger realm by demonstrating how
such sentiments and words disrupt the harmony among humans in ostensibly

loving relationships. For if such "inadvertent speech" between husband and wife

145

causes anguish, how much more destructive is purposeful hate speech between
people who have little knowledge of the "other"? The scene's resolution
foreshadows the child's future and the story's denouement. Stephens tells us
that "Danforth, anxious to soften the effects of his inadvertent speech," agrees
that the boy "will make a brave chief" and quickly changes the subject (73). But
his act of diverting attention from his words has more meaning than his actual
mollifying comment, for readers, already aware of Danforth's racial prejudice
through his "inadvertent speech," have less reason to believe him than does
Malaeska whose life "centered in the love she bore her white husband" (72).
Issues of gender hierarchy are also addressed within the familial context.
Stephens suggests that there are more differences between white men and
women than between Indian women and white women. For example, Mrs.
Danforth, assuming a role typical of female characters in nineteenth-century
women's fiction, becomes a mediator between her husband and Malaeska. It is
Mrs. Danforth who convinces him "[wjith gentle and persuasive words" that
Malaeska should not be sent back to the wilderness away from her young son
(93). Moreover, Mrs. Danforth cannot embrace her husband's proscription which
barred Malaeska from expressing the "natural affection" she felt toward her child.
Mrs. Danforth had compassion on the poor mother. She remembered the
time when her own child had made all the pulses of her being thrill with
love, which now took the form of a thousand regrets. She could not watch
the lone Indian stealing off to her solitary room under the gable roof - a
mother, yet childless - without throbs of womanly sonow. She was far too
good a wife to brave her husband's authority, but, with the cowardliness of
a kind heart, she frequently managed to evade it. Sometimes in the night
she would creep out of her prim chamber, and steal the boy from the side

of his nurse, whom she bore on her own motherly bosom to the solitary
bed of Malaeska. (95)

146

Here the conflict between two nineteenth-century versions of womanhood —
woman as wife and woman as mother - are revealed. In her role as wife,
woman was expected to obey the law laid down by her husband. Mrs. Danforth
apparently has no other option - "she was far too good a wife" not to conform to
this law. But the privileged position of motherhood in the nineteenth century
creates a conflict for her. Although true women were to be subservient to their
male protectors, motherhood was considered woman's preeminent role. During
the antebellum period, motherhood was glorified in books, sermons, and ladies'
magazines. For example, Godey’s Lady's Book proclaimed that motherhood was
"one of the chief sources of her happiness, and her mightiest power for good” (60
(June 1860): 530). Thus Mrs. Danforth enacts her womanly destiny as a mother
who has known the pain of losing one's son by allowing Malaeska secret access
to her son. While ostensibly obedient to her husband's command, Mrs. Danforth
does what she can to ameliorate the effects of his "obstinate" rule. Although she
has a small measure of success in granting Malaeska limited opportunities to
express her "natural affection" for her son, in the long term, patriarchy wins, for
the boy Ieams to hate Indians and to resent Malaeska's embraces, which is
exactly what the old man intended.

In another more pointed example, a young white boy, having already
mastered certain rules of patriarchy (particularly the right of "men" to ignore
women's words and the knowledge that accusing opponents of sexual deviance
wins arguments), prevails over his mother. When Sarah discovers Malaeska
living nearby, she is immediately drawn to the Indian woman. Sarah's younger

brothers unmercifully tease that she has "fallen in love with an old squaw” and

147

taunt her with jeering questions such as "how did the old squaw’s lips taste?" So
Sarah appeals to her mother for help. Although Martha threatens them with
mayhem, the oldest boy not only ignores his mother's admonitions but also turns
the argument against Sarah for refusing to answer what he calls "a civil question"
(122). But as the narrator reports: “[t]here was something altogether too
ludicrous in this impudent appeal, and in the look of demure mischief put on by
the culprit. Mrs. Jones bit her lips and turned away, leaving the boy, as usual,
the victor of the field” (122). Martha is "ashamed of her want of resolution," and
fails to use the opportunity to teach her little men to become more loving and less
disruptive of the bonds which bring and hold peOpIe together. Here, Stephens
points to the opportunity women have to teach boys how to be more loving and
caring, more respectful of the "ties that bind." Martha, although she has some
good qualities (e.g., industry, thrift), never fulfills the promise of womanliness. In
this scene, rather than becoming an agent of transformation by teaching the boy
more appropriate ways of being in the world, she remains silent. This allows her
son to emerge as an agent of disruption, coming between mother and daughter
and attempting to break the budding relationship between Sarah and Malaeska.
Within these familial interactions, Stephens posits the potential for change,
but the outcomes suggest that men must change as well. Only Malaeska and
Sarah, representatives of a new ideal of womanhood, directly confront the
disruptive issue initiated by the words/deeds of the representatives of patriarchy.
Neither Mrs. Danforth nor Martha have the courage necessary to directly
challenge male authority. Mrs. Danforth tries to heal the growing rift between

Malaeska and her son, but in this case, actions do not speak louder than words.

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The only way to counteract the deleterious effects of Mr. Danforth's plot to steal
young William from his mother is to end it. But this she cannot do; she is "far too
good a wife." Stephens paints her as a kind-hearted soul who is deeply troubled
by the situation, but powerless before her tyrannical husband. Martha's failure to
confront her son is another matter. Although he is tyrannical in his own way, he
is only a boy, a patriarch-in—training, but the tenets of motherhood, as expounded
by Protestant ministers of the time, dictate that Martha has a moral obligation to
bring him up in Christian love and charity. Her neglect of this duty is inexcusable
weause it allows her son's unchecked growth into patriarchal privilege and
acclimates him to the practice of ignoring women's words. Similarly, although
Malaeska tries to counter her husband's disruptive notions when he bemoans his
son's mixed parentage, she is no more successful than Mrs. Danforth or Martha.
Her words may have a chastening effect on Danforth, but they do not change his
attitude.

Stephens' dark perspective on the ability of women to successfully
mediate conflict differs from the typical female mediator in nineteenth-century
women's fiction. For example, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, except for the failure of
Mrs. Shelby to prevent the sale of Tom in the opening scene, women mediators,
including Mrs. Bird, Eliza, Cassie, the Quaker women, and of course, Little Eva,
manage to resolve conflicts that break social and familial bonds" Although
Stephens posits the potential women have to create a more equitable society,
she clearly recognizes that without changes in patriarchy, without male

acceptance and support for such goals, success is unlikely.

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While Mrs. Danforth's actions remain strictly within the confines of the
domestic sphere, Malaeska demonstrates that women can take active part in the
world without sacrificing their womanliness. The idea of the "noble savage"
permeates this story. Although most traditional sympathetic fictional portrayals of
Indians have male characters, such as Chingachgook in Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales, Stephens seems to have taken her lead from Sedgwick's
character of Magawisca in Hope Leslie. The noble savage is transformed by
gender. In Malaeska, Stephens suggests that for an. Indian woman to create
empathy in the white reader, she must "combine all that [is] strong, picturesque,
and imaginative in savage life, with the delicacy, sweetness, and refinement
which follows in the train of civilization" (124). For example, although Malaeska
exhibits deep faith in "the wild religion of her race" (82), without the "white man's
religion" she cannot be a mentor to Sarah. However, this issue is multilayered.
First of all, there is the irony in Malaeska's religious training taking place in the
white Danforth household (an event that occurs only in the original version of the
story). She Ieamed "the beautiful and simple truths of the Gospel" (Ladies
Companion 10 (1839): 244) from Mrs. Danforth at the same time she was being
forced by Mr. Danforth to live a life of deception. While she was being taught
about the mysteries of Christ's love for all people, her son was being taught to
hate Indians. Despite this inimical situation, Malaeska abandons her "wild,
poetical religion" in favor of Christianity. This conversion puts her in a position to
teach the "White man's religion" to Sarah, who "had sat under preaching all her
life" yet had failed to gain the "refinement of principles and feelings" that

Malaeska's example of "Christian meekness and enduring faith" provides (125).

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In this case it seems that to overcome the problems posed by the amalgamation
of gender and race, in order to become a "true" lady, Malaeska must abandon
certain "picturesque" characteristics of her race (such as her "wild, poetic"
religion) in favor of, not combined with, the "refinement" of the white race.

Interestingly, in this female myth, the white men in both renditions of the
story are hardly the type of individuals on whom a lady would want to depend.
Malaeska's husband, who "had never thought of introducing her as his wife
among whites,’ thinks only about "his disgrace" and "degradation," when
circumstances force him to leave the tribe (76). Only when he is dying does he
consider her ambiguous position. The grandfather's bigotry results in his own
grandson's suicide. Even a minor male Character, Sarah's father, exhibits
irresponsibility when his "foolish sho " (67) kills an Indian and begins the uprising
in which Malaeska's husband and father are killed. None of these men seem
worthy of the admirable Malaeska, who despite some changes in the story from
one genre to the other, remains a resilient heroine who struggles for her rights as
a mother and a person.
Intermarriage

While some scholars view Malaeska's marriage to Danforth as a "happy"
alliance (Bube 39; Carney 81), Stephens provides ample evidence to support a
contrary assessment. The interracial aspect of the marriage does not make it
"unnatural"; rather, the marriage is tainted for a variety of reasons having little to
do with race. Danforth's commitment to the marriage is held in doubt; Christianity
holds no place in the marriage; Danforth's motives for marrying Malaeska are

suspect; and, even Malaeska's love for Danforth is not beyond reproach. These

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hints that the marriage is not as it should be make it "unnatural." The true nature
of Malaeska's marriage begins to be revealed when Malaeska's husband is
falsely accused by her tribe of killing the Indian shot by Arthur Jones. Danforth
thinks he must abandon Malaeska and their infant son to escape the wrathful
vengeance of her tribe and to return to the safety of white civilization. Malaeska,
whose quick thinking has just saved his life by hiding him from his pursuers (the
Pocahontas re-enactment scene), makes it clear that she intends to come with
him, bringing their son along as well, but
[Danforth] had never thought of introducing her as his wife among the
whites, and now that circumstances made it necessary for him to part with
her forever, or to take her among his peOple for shelter, a pang, such as
he had never felt, came to his heart. His affection struggled powerfully
with his pride. The picture of his disgrace - of the scorn with which his
parents and sisters would receive the Indian wife and the half-Indian child
presented itself before him, and he had not the moral courage to risk the
degradation which her companionship would bring upon him. (76)
This action, while entirely metaphorical as it all occurs within Danforth's mind, is
pregnant with juxtapositions which reveal that William Danforth has not entered
into this marriage with the same purity of motive as Malaeska. Just a few pages
earlier readers learn that "her heart, rich in its natural affections, had no aim, no
object, but that which centered in the love she bore her white husband" (72). Yet
he views his marriage vows as his "degradation" and "disgrace." In this
comparison of their attitudes towards their marriage, Stephens demonstrates that
Malaeska, the one marked as "other' by virtue of her dark skin, not the "brave"
white hunter, is the hero to be emulated. Her love is selfless, honest, and pure;

whereas Danforth's, tainted by his selfishness, has been deceptive from the start.

When he imagines his degradation, he sees his wife as "other," certainly not as

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one with him, as befit pervasive nineteenth-century notions of maniage (Gilman
in Woloch; Sarah Hale in Norton; Welter).

This incident occurs at the threshold of the wigwam he has shared with
Malaeska, symbolizing that they both are in the borderlands between two worlds.
But Danforth is transported in his mind to a contrasting scene - white society - in
which he becomes the object of scorn. His disregard for the young wife who has
placed him on a pedestal, in an era when husbands were supposed to place
wives on pedestals, merely amplifies the juxtapositions. Moreover, in this scene
both Danforth and Malaeska are agents: he, an agent of racial hatred, she, an
agent of wifely love. In his mind, he has not one thought for his wife nor child,
only his own position in White society, which he believes is ruined by his alliance
with Malaeska. He is not concerned with how the racial hatred of whites will
affect her or the boy, only with how it affects him, illustrating not only his
selfishness but also how ingrained racial opinions can be in many white people.
On the other hand, Malaeska's selfless concem centers on Danforth: she saves
his life at the risk of her own and is prepared to leave her people and the only life
she has ever known to follow him. Stephens' allusion to the Biblical story of
Ruth, "Wither thou goest, I will go, wither thou Iodgest, I will lodge. Thy people
shall be my people, thy God, my God" (Ruth 2:16), would not be lost upon
nineteenth-century readers who had a greater familiarity with Judeo-Christian
Scripture than today's readers. In other words, despite her ignorance of
Christianity, Malaeska exhibits a more Christian attitude than Danforth. This
biblical allusion is further augmented by Danforth's thoughts as he lies dying

alone on the battlefield just before Malaeska finds him.

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Now his heart lingered with strange and terrible dread around the
shadowy portals of eternity which were opening before him; again it tumed
with a strong feeling of self-condemnation to his Indian wife and the infant
pledge of great love, which had made him almost forsake kindred and
people for their sakes. (my emphasis, Malaeska 81)

But to "almost" forsake is contrary to Jesus' words: "For this cause [marriage] a
man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife" (Matthew 19:5),
another biblical allusion that most women readers would probably notice. Even
as he is dying, Danforth's perspective on marriage lacks Christian commitment.
Danforth's emotional and protracted death scene reinforces these ideas.
With Malaeska at his side, Danforth realizes he is dying, and he ponders, "my
poor girl, what will become of you?" (82) But Malaeska is unafraid. Relying on
the beliefs of "the wild religion of her race," she assures Danforth that she will
follow him to "the land of the Great Spirit" where they will be reunited (82).
Danforth realizes, too late, that he has never discussed religion with her, but has
left her in "heathen ignorance." In other words, God has had no place in his
marriage to her. He disabuses her of the notion that there is a "great hunting
ground," taking away her "wild poetic faith." He tells her, "T he whites have
another faith, and - Oh god! I have taken away her trust and have none to give
in retuml" (82) This passage is revealing because both the lower case "9" on
God and the idea that he has no faith to give demonstrate just how ungodly
Danforth is and how ungodly his intentions toward Malaeska have been. He
prays for forgiveness that he has "left this poor girl in her heathen ignorance"
(82). Then, perhaps to make amends for this oversight or perhaps to save his

own soul, he tells her that if she is to join him in another world, she "must learn to

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love the white man's God." Ironically, he sends her to his parents for this task,
and Malaeska promises to do as he has bidden her.

This act of Danforth's sets up the rest of the tragedy. Stephens' text
relating to his purposes for sending Malaeska to his parents is ambiguous: is it to
save his own soul or to save hers? Burke asserts that when there is ambiguity
involved in the pentadic terms, transformation is possible. Does Danforth
undergo a death bed transformation? He knows the prejudice of his father. Just
a few days before the fatal battle, he was willing to leave Malaeska rather than
face the "degradation" he would encounter if his family knew of his Indian wife.
But now he sends her into the city, alone, with only their infant son, to face the
prejudice he so feared. He says, "beseech them to cherish you and the boy for
[my] sake" (83). Yet, given his knowledge of his father's prejudice, does he really
think they will accept her and the boy? While it is true that his impending death is
robbing him of the time and strength necessary to say all that he might, to have a
son old enough to crawl means that he had well over a year to teach Malaeska
about the white man's God himself. But he did not.

The Christian concept of marriage, with which nineteenth-century readers
would be familiar through a variety of discourses including conduct literature and
fiction, is one of seeing Christ in each other, loving the other as part of Christ's
creation. Marriage "signifies . . . the union between Christ and his Church" (Book
of Common Prayer 423).8 In her nineteenth-century advice manual, Womankind,
Charlotte Yonge cautions that a young woman should "not . . . become attached
to a man outside her own Church. If he be in earnest in his religion, he cannot

but try to bring her over to him; if he be not, she ought not to marry him at all"

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(169). Naturally, her advice book is addressed to white middle-class women;
Yonge does not even intimate the possibility of intermarriage. However, her
counsel indicates that men have a religious responsibility in marriage - a point
Yonge reiterates several times, most emphatically when she writes, "No one
ought to marry a man whom she does not know to be religious and sound in faith
and doctrine" (her emphasis185). Reverberating the strains of many religious
texts of the day, Yonge contends that only those "hearts linked together 'in Christ'
. . . [have] true love" (174). This idea is a major theme in many women's novels
of the period, including The Lamplighter and St. Elmo. Because Malaeska has
no knowledge of Christianity nor of such courtship conventions, she is not
implicated in the failure to adhere to such rubrics. However, with Danforth it is
another matter. He had a Christian responsibility to "try to bring [Malaeska] over
to" his religion. His death bed act of sending her to his parents could rectify his
sin of omission on this account, but the ambiguity within the text suggests that
even he himself doubts the outcome.

Since he never even discussed religion with her, Danforth obviously had
other, more worldly, intentions in mind when he married Malaeska. As a proper
middle-class woman Stephens does not directly address this issue. But neither
does she ignore it. At the time Malaeska was written, the late 18303, many
social reform movements were underway in a rapidly changing and expanding
America. One of the most vigorous was the Female Moral Reform movement,
which attempted "to reform the standards of sexual morality and to regulate the
sexual behavior in their communities" (Ryan "Power" 27). The movement, which

began in New York, was sparked by the Second Awakening and in particular the

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revival meetings of Charles F inney, held in New York City between 1829 and
1834 (Smith-Rosenberg 112). The association with religion provided members of
the American Female Reform Society with the necessary authority to attack male
privilege. In his revival meetings, Finney charged attendees to take seriously
their duty to go forth into the world to reform sinners. The Society took this
command to heart and worked to save prostitutes from a life of sin. They also
fought the double sexual standard, which traditionally held women to blame, by
exposing licentious male customers and regarding them as equally liable and
sinful. By 1839 the Society was a powerful force for sexual morality: it had 445
chapters in greater New England and boasted a circulation of 16,500 subscribers ‘
to its weekly publication, The Advocate of Moral Reform (120; 115). Members of
the Society were active reformers. They went into the streets and even brothels
to rescue prostitutes from their fate. In the course of their investigations, they
Ieamed that many prostitutes had been seduced at an early age. "Ruined" for
entry into polite society, these young girls had little choice in finding alternative
ways to earn a living. Thus began the moral reformers' long battle to make
seduction a crime and to raise the age of consent, which was as low as ten in
some states (Odem 8-9).

Stephens hints that Danforth's marriage to Malaeska amounted to such a
seduction of a young girl. Although no extant records directly connect Stephens
to the Society, she may have been a member, especially given her interest in
social causes concerning women. Even if she were not a member, she still
would have had access to its findings through her women friends, newspaper

reports, church attendance, or other social interactions. Twice Stephens makes

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reference to Malaeska's young age at the time of her marriage to Danforth. On
both occasions Malaeska is the speaker. The first instance occurs when
Malaeska first arrives at the Danforth's in Manhattan. Standing in their parlor,
pleading for the acceptance her husband had said she would find there, she
beseeches them, "he said that his mother’s heart would grow soft to the poor
Indian woman who had slept in his bosom while she was very young" (My
emphasis, Malaeska 91). By using the adjective "very," Stephens indicates that
Malaeska's age was unusually young, even for those days when brides of 16
were not uncommon.9 But the second mention of Malaeska's youth more
explicitly indicts Danforth by making him agent of the act. Malaeska is explaining
the details of his heritage to her son. When he asks if she is "mad" to insinuate
that he is her son, she replies:

It was a blessed madness - the madness of two warm young hearts that
forgot every thing in the sweet impulse with which they clung together, it
was madness which led your father to take the wild Indian girl to his
bosom when in the bloom of early girlhood. (my emphases, 158-9)

These words clearly incriminate Danforth as the one who "took" her, even though
the word at that time did not have the sexual connotation it does today (OED).
She admits they were both "mad," but her words ("warm hearts," "impulse,"
"clung together") suggest sexual passion, not love, as the basis of their madness.
Stephens stresses Malaeska's young age by the words "early girlhood," which
indicate that Malaeska is indeed "very" young. Under the circumstances,
Danforth, as older and more knowledgeable of the world through his travels,

seems to have taken advantage of her youth, inexperience, and innocence. In

other words, he seduced her. By his act of taking her to his bosom, he took

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away her innocence. She may not have been unwilling, but because she was so
young, she had not the experience to make an informed choice. Once in his
bosom, she is totally committed to the relationship and willing to forsake all her
peOple for his sake. He, on the other hand, like the seducers in many novels, is
duplicitous. By keeping his Indian wife a secret from his parents and by an
unwillingness to forsake his family for her, he reveals the nonchalance with which
he entered into this alliance. His willingness to desert her at the first sign of
trouble between whites and Indians underscores that he does not consider her a
"legal" wife, such as a marriage to a white woman would be. For him it is a
sexual attraction not a commitment. Stephens draws attention to this perverse
aspect of the relationship between Malaeska and Danforth by repeating how
young Malaeska was when she met him.

Even Malaeska's love for Danforth is questionable. She loves him blindly,
unable to see his duplicity. In keeping with stereotypes by which whites
represented Native Americans, Stephens depicts Malaeska as having an overly
passionate nature, especially in her love for Danforth:

her untutored heart, rich in its natural affections had no aim, no object, but

what centered on the love she bore her white husband. The feelings

which in civilized life are scattered over a thousand objects, were, in her

bosom, centered on one single being; he supplied the place of all the high
aspirations - of all the passions and sentiments which are fostered into

strength by society. (72)
Although white women are expected to be devoted to their husbands, Malaeska's
"untutored" love is problematic. Given Danforth's fraudulent nature, since
Malaeska equates him with "all the high aspirations," obviously the value of her

love must be correspondingly lowered. But Stephens' description also suggests

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that, because Malaeska loves Danforth to the exclusion of all else, it is a weak
love, not "fostered into strength" by spreading it. Stephens hints that if Malaeska
were white, she would have knowledge of literature, music, and the arts which
strengthen and ennoble love by providing examples of love and beauty to guide
the uninitiated on the proper bounds of love.

Malaeska's passion for Danforth and her promise to him as he is dying
promote the circumstances which allow the eldest Danforth to steal her son's
affection from her. Stephens emphasizes this point in several passages:

It would have been an unnatural thing, had that picturesque young mother

abandoned the woods, and prisoned herself in a quaint old Dutch house,

under the best circumstances. . . . But love was all-powerful in that wild

heart. (93)

Nothing but her husband's dying wish would have kept Malaeska in
Manhattan. (94)

[Plassion had been too strong in Malaeska's heart . . . and the refinement
which affection had given her, enslaved the wild nature without returning a
compensation of love for the sacrifice. (94)
But alas, poor womanl submission to the wishes of the dead was a terrible
duty; her poor heart was breaking all the time; she had no hope, no life;
the very glance of her eye was an appeal for mercy . . . she had nothing
on earth to live for. (96)
Malaeska is ruled by her passions, rather than ruling them. Her love for Danforth
has no compensations; in fact, it is a curse that will steal her child from her heart
and take away her reason for living. Although Malaeska does finally conquer her
passion for her dead husband, it is too late to rescue the love of her son, and the
passionate love she bore her husband is transferred to the son, who like his
father, does not return that love. This uncontrollable passion results in her death

of a broken heart.

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. Stephens suggests that the marriage between Malaeska and Danforth is
"unnatural" because it was not a maniage based on mutual love and respect.
Stephens not only questions Danforth's commitment to the marriage but also
hints that it may have been "improper." Although Malaeska loves her husband
deeply, she loves to the exclusion of all else. In both cases, Christianity is not
integral to the relationship, which Stephens, as a practicing Episcopalian and a
woman affected by the ideologies of her time, believed to be essential to a good
marriage.

Conclusion

Stephens' emphasis on her protagonists as potential role models for
young women readers. necessitates close investigation of these characters'
fictional acts. Both Malaeska and Sarah offer examples of ways in which women
can be active participants in the world, yet remain womanly.

In certain situations, Stephens' attempts to separate race and gender in
Malaeska's character are clearly demarcated. It is Malaeska's race which allows
Stephens to represent her in ways that would be considered inappropriate for
nineteenth-century American white women. Malaeska is self-reliant. Bereft of a
protector, she successfully travels alone with her infant son to Manhattan.
Furthermore, when she returns to the wilderness, she lives alone and provides
for all her own needs. She has indomitable strength, which is recounted
throughout the novel. Reminiscent of Magawisca in Sedgwick's Hope Leslie,
Malaeska's physical and moral strength mark her as an admirable woman,
worthy of emulation. With "almost superhuman strength," she attempts to rescue

her "self-murder[ed]" son carrying him up a "steep bank where at another time no

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woman could have clambered even without incumbrance" (162). But even more
remarkable is her indomitable fortitude despite the unbearable sorrow of losing
father, husband, and son to racial prejudice.

In the original 1839 story, written for middle—class ladies, this is the
predominant picture of Malaeska. But the dime novel version, rewritten over a
generation later, for a larger audience, presents an altered character. In the
original serial, Malaeska's time in the Danforth Manhattan home is reduced to
three paragraphs, mostly devoted to her "unappeasable" desire for freedom. But
in the dime novel, three entire chapters describe Malaeska's inability to kidnap
her son. In this rendition, although she is still able to provide her young son with
food, she is beset with the vicissitudes of weather and wilderness. The young
boy is nearly bitten by a rattlesnake, and a cold and bitter rainstorm allows her
pursuers to overtake her "before she had the least idea of their approach" (111).
In other words, in the later version, Malaeska loses many of her lndianly
characteristics, such as the ability to live in harmony with nature. Instead, her
maternal essence is emphasized. Since motherhood was considered the
ultimate fulfillment of womanhood, such characteristics mark her as a woman
worthy of emulation.

It is in conjunction with these maternal duties that Stephens discusses
Malaeska's "womanly self-abnegation," words which never even appear in the
original story. However, these two words have received an inordinate amount of
critical attention. After making a bed of moss for the child, Malaeska sinks into

a broken rest, piling up soft couches for those she loved, and taking the
cold stone for herself. It was her woman's destiny, not the more certain

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because of her savage origin. Civilization does not always reverse this
moumful picture of womanly self-abnegation. (103)

Although this inscription of gender has been interpreted to mean that Ann
Stephens believed that women are supposed to be self-effacing (Papashivily
143), the entire quotation, taken in context, offers another interpretation. The
three chapters describing the kidnapping constantly refer to Malaeska's wildness
and lndianly behavior (such as paddling a canoe, shooting down game with her
bow and arrow). To modify these qualities, to make her an acceptable role
model, her womanly characteristics are needed to balance the scale. The words
"it was her woman's destiny" imply that racial differences are less significant than
the common bonds of womanhood. Here gender is the metalanguage.
Stephens' gentle reminder that "civilization does not always reverse this moumful
picture of womanly self-abnegation" tells her readers that they, too, may be
called upon to be self-sacrificing for their "loved ones." But this designation as a
"moumful picture" also suggests a certain sadness that things are not as they
should be, that civilization is not as civilized as it might be were women allowed
to be self-actualizing. This passage is one of the most direct criticisms of societal
restrictions on women that Stephens makes in her frontier fiction.

Using the Burkean dramatistic lens to analyze this act of self-abnegation
immediately brings to light the ambiguity between a_c_t and my. 'Womanly
self-abnegation" describes both; that is, being womanly and self-abnegating is
both the act and the means by which the act is performed. This ambiguity in the
pentadic terms depends, in part, on the tautological nature of the words. In the

parlance of This Womanhood, to be a woman was to be self-abnegating, and

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even "real" women were expected to have "a sense of duty to others" (Cogan 5).
Malaeska is the agent, the m remains race and gender relations in
nineteenth-century America, and the gums; is to question why women in both
cultures are expected to be self-sacrificing. Malaeska's long years of suffering in
the Danforth household constitute a single protracted act of self-abnegation
brought about by the mic of patriarchy. But out there in the wildemess, where
she is apparently free to be whatever she wants to be, her "woman's destiny"
requires continued self-sacrifice. Stephens uses hyperbole to accentuate what
"woman's destiny” means - "soft couches for those she loves" and "the cold
stone for herself." The absurdity of this situation — Malaeska certainly could have
made herself a soft bed of moss without causing any harm to the boy —
represents the absurdity that some human beings must give up everything for
others simply on the basis of sex. Presaging the "real womanhood" ideal,
Stephens is suggesting that women need not "renounce" themselves entirely for
the love of others. In fact, she suggests that had Malaeska been more self-
loving, she might not have died of a broken heart.

Why does this passage regarding "womanly self-abnegation" appear only
in the dime novel version? Most likely because of the time in which it was ’
written. While the "T rail of Tears" may have evoked sympathy for Native
Americans in 1839, "Manifest Destiny" had become a national obsession by
1860. With more and more white settlers moving West and invading Native
American lands, skirmishes between the two groups became more common;
consequently, in an effort to justify whites' actions, descriptions of Indians

became more vitriolic. Therefore, to make an Indian maiden a more acceptable

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protagonist, she has to be more womanly and less lndianly in 1860 than in 1839.
In other words, in 21 years the construction of race had changed so drastically
that Stephens was compelled to compensate for the Changed ideologies of her
readers. However, the construction of gender had changed little. If anything, the
concept of women's sphere was even more ingrained in the minds of Americans
through the proliferation of printed materials, especially women's magazines,
novels, and giftbooks which intoned didactic messages of true womanhood.
Consequently, sentencesthat described Malaeska’s desire for freedom in the
original serial were quietly replaced with scenes in which she submits (albeit not
without an active struggle) to the will of her father-in-law in the dime novel.
Furthermore, by the time the dime novel version was written, the all-time
best-seller, Uncle Tom's Cabin, had been published. Because of its popularity
and its American themes, Uncle Tom's Cabin generated a plethora of novels,
poems, plays, and even songs, both pro and con, responding to its tragic tales of
slavery. The kidnapping scene in the dime novel version of Malaeska evokes
images of Eliza taking her child across the water to save him from the powerful
whites who would steal him away from his mother. Both Eliza and Malaeska are
servants in the household of whites, and although Malaeska is not a slave, she is
a prisoner in the household nonetheless. In both cases, it is the patriarch of the
family who separates mother and child against the expressed wishes and hopes
of his kindhearted wife. Both Eliza and Malaeska believe they have no other
alternative than to take their child across the water to a place where he will be
safe from harm. In both novels, water marks the boundary between two modes

of life. The journey is perilous for both mothers. Whether Stephens' portrayal of

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Malaeska's attempt to rescue her son is an intentional imitation of Stowe's tale is
impossible to ascertain, but it certainly bears many similarities to Eliza's brave
escape. Although Malaeska fails while Eliza succeeds, Malaeska's strength and
courage during her dangerous attempt to rescue her son are unforgettable and
mark her as a woman and mother worthy of emulation as well as sympathy.

Sarah's role is greatly expanded in the dime novel version of the story.
Although the facts of her part in the tale remain essentially unchanged, three
added chapters recount her experiences at boarding school and her courtship
with the younger William Danforth. These revisions of the original serial bring the
novel more in line with other women's fiction of the time by centering more of the
story on a young maiden on her own in the world, who thereby Ieams the value
of self-reliance as do the heroines featured in many woman-authored novels of
the 1850s and 1860s (Baym, Woman's xix). The added chapters also recount
experiences (school and courtship) with which many young female readers were
familiar, whereas the life of an Indian woman would have been much less
familiar. Although Malaeska remains a heroine, the expansion of Sarah's role
displaces her as the sole heroine. This scenario is also in keeping with the less
sympathetic attitudes of white Americans toward Native Americans.

Sarah's most important acts, like those of Malaeska, are acts of mediation
between Indians and whites, between savagery and civilization. Although Sarah
does not embody a relationship between the two cultures in the ways that
Malaeska does, she has been interpreted as a "figurative half-blood" because of
her status as Malaeska's ”adopted child" (Scheick 73). Such a characterization
befits her role as mediator. As co-agent with Malaeska, Sarah creates bonds

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and destroys barriers between Indians and whites. She befriends Malaeska and
attempts to defend that friendship in the face of her brothers' ridicule. But her
most important act is her refusal as an adult to give up Malaeska's friendship
despite William's obdurate reaction. Although William asks forgiveness for his
violent retort to her appeal in support of Malaeska, it is clear that Sarah will not
be submissive to male authority at the expense of her personal beliefs. In other
words, Sarah will not be self-abnegating, but she is definitely womanly. She has
strength in her convictions and will not be untrue to herself.

Thus, in some ways, Sarah becomes a more important role model for
young women readers than Malaeska, who is too passionate and so self-
sacrificing, such that when William dies, she has nothing to live for. Sarah, on
the other hand, finds ways to make her life "useful," even though she is "lonely"
without the man she loved. Sarah does not need a man to complete her. She is
a "real" woman, physically active and healthy; she exhibits common sense and
does not allow academic pursuits to take precedence over learning the
necessary domestic skills. Although Stephens is vague about the ways that
Sarah's life was "useful," Sarah's story suggests that marriage and motherhood,
the twin idols of True Womanhood, are not the only viable alternatives for
women. They can find meaning and fulfillment in life by making themselves
"useful" to others, as Malaeska made herself useful to Sarah by teaching her the
true meaning of Christianity.

Stephens' use of an Indian woman protagonist allows her to encompass
and confront the problem of racial prejudice while she simultaneously provides
women readers with exemplary models of new womanhood. Through

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unequivocal examples of border crossings and ambiguous references that
emphasize the indeterminacy of race and gender, Stephens demonstrates that
neither race nor gender is a stable, unchanging category. Because Malaeska is
an Indian, she is not impeded by the rubrics of True Womanhood, which would
restrict her freedom of movement. Yet she always, even under the most
crushing anguish in the Danforth home, remains womanly - that is pure, pious,
"meek", and most of all, matemal. However, as an Indian, she also is capable of
living on her own in the wilderness, exhibiting traits generally applied to males -
self-reliance, independence, physical strength, and courage. At certain points in
the story, Stephens seems to accentuate gender at the expense of race,
especially if the presumed racial traits are at odds with prevailing notions of
womanliness. But even though Malaeska crosses both racial and gender
boundaries, she remains a strong model of womanhood. Stephens uses her as
a challenge to male authority - as one who attempts to rectify patriarchal moral
turpitude and to reclaim woman's rightful place as guide and guardian of the
young. When Malaeska attempts to kidnap her own child, it is merely to save
him from the symbolic kidnapping being perpetrated by Mr. Danforth, who usurps
for patriarchy women's ultimate position as mother.

In the story of Malaeska, Stephens emphasizes how differently white men
and women treat Indians. She posits that women tend to approach interracial
relationships more equitably than men, who tend to view themselves as superior
to racial "others." Stephens suggests that women's mediation and relational
ways of being - thinking and acting in terms of relationships with others, rather

than in terms of their own individual desires - offer possibilities of transforming

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racial prejudice. However, she argues that white men must be more receptive to
women's words and ideas before real change can occur. Malaeska and her son
go to their deaths doomed by patriarchal privilege that sanctions deceit and hate
over truth and love. In this female-centered myth of the frontier, Stephens posits
that had men been more accepting of Indians in white culture and more
rcsponsive to women's words, the entire tragedy might have been avoided.

Although Stephens appears to vacillate on whether biology or environment
determine character, her insistence that both play a key role in the formation of
young William's character indicates not indecision, but rather a belief that both
are factors in character development. Environment made him a racial bigot;
biology made him too passionate. Both contribute to his death. Malaeska's
passionate nature is attributed to biology, but she is also meek and demure, is
this biology or environment? Regardless of the origin of these traits, such
inscriptions suggest that certain stereotypes about Indians are invalid and that
Stephens believes that people need to reconsider their beliefs about the nature
of Indians. Malaeska's placement squame in the middle of the nature/culture
divide reinforces this point. One the one hand, Malaeska, as is typical of
depictions of both women and Indians in literature, represents Nature. But as
she shows herself to be more civilized and more Christian than whites, she is
also connected to white culture.

In Mary Derwent race plays a less central role. Stephens explores the
possibilities of women's leadership through Indianized white women who
represent what women should not do to gain independence and a whitened

Indian woman who models appropriate types of womanly leadership.

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Endnotes

1 Actually, as the first dime novel, Malaeska has generated the attention of scholars
several times during the twentieth century. Because the ephemeral nature of dime novels and
the collectibility of extant copies, reprints of Malaeska have been issued twice prior to Brown's
reprint of it with several other dime westerns. In 1929, Frank O'Brien. dime novel collector,
arranged for the first reprint since the Beadle series' demise. In 1971, Blom also issued a reprint.

2 All subsequent citations from the dime novel version of the story are from the reprint in
Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westems, Bill Brown, ed. (Boston: Bedford Books,
1997), unless otherwise noted.

3 See Deborah Gray White, Ar'n‘t l a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South,
particularly Chapter 1, "Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery" for more
detailed information on stereotypes of black women in the antebellum period.

‘ Such identity problems are a common source of frustration for those of mixed heritage
(Scheick 6; Gunn Allen 129).

5 I gratefully acknowledge that Lora Romero's chapter, "Vanishing Americans: James
Fenimore Cooper," in Homefronts first brought my attention to the multiple meanings of this word
and its connections to "vanishing Americans."

6 See especially, 'Women of Genius," where she defends women of genius who use their
powers of description to "convey images of truth and beauty" to others while she simultaneously
champions their womanliness and domestic skill.

7 Some of the more familiar nineteenth-century women's novels featuring successful
woman mediators include: Louisa May Alcott, Work and Little Women; Vlfilla Cather, O Pioneersl;
Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok, Harriet Brent Jacobs (Linda Brant), Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl, Caroline Kirkland, A New Home, Who'll Follow?; Judith Sargeant Murray, The Story of
Margaretta; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Silent Partner, Catharine Sedgwick, Hope Leslie and A New
England Tale; E. D. E. N. Southwoith, The Hidden Hand: Sara Payson Willis (Fanny Fern), Ruth

Hall, and, Augusta Evans Vlfllson, St. Elmo.

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5 Since Stephens was a practicing Episcopalian, the Book of Common Prayer probably
reflects her understanding of Christian marriage.

9 The age of consent for marriage for women was 14 — 16 in most states, with only 2
exceptions (New Hampshire, 18 and Kentucky, 12) as late as 1928 (Richmond, Appendix B,
Table 3, 370-1). Although minors (generally classified as though under 18) had to have parental

permission, such statistics suggest that many women did, in fact, marry at a young age.

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CHAPTER 4
INDIANIZED WHITE WOMEN AND WHITENED INDIAN WOMEN IN
MARY DERWENT

In Mary Derwent Stephens attempts to demonstrate that women can be
capable leaders in public affairs, contrary to the prevailing norms and notions of
nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, which deem women unsuitable for
such positions. She appeals to her readers by using actual historical figures and
events, blending fact and fiction, thereby making it difficult to refute her
assertions about the potential benefits of women's governance. Because the
strictures against women in public life were so strong, she provides a cautionary
example of a woman who loses her womanliness and becomes nithless in her
relentless pursuit of power. This strategy further disarms critics who argue that
women should not be in positions of power because they will become unsexed.
By admitting this can happen, Stephens is then free to provide examples of
women's successful, womanly use of authority.

In this chapter I examine Stephens' visions of ideal womanly leadership -
governance guided by concern for others not for the power it represents. As a
tale of intermarriage, issues of race enter the equation, but with no major full-
blooded Indian characters, race issues are secondary to gender. However, since
Stephens tends to equate lndianly traits with masculinity, the analysis is complex.
She does suggest that racial othemesslmanliness must be eradicated before a

woman can become a suitable model for women in public life.

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Mary Derwent as a Female-Centered Myth

Mary Derwent is not the typical domestic tale. It violates many of the
accepted beliefs about nineteenth-century American women's novels. For
example, Cogan, reiterating Baym's contention in Women's Fiction, notes that
p0pular women's fiction was written "primarily for female audiences and featured
a heroine making her way in the world, dealing with immediate, realistic, and
often domestic ooncems as opposed to exotic adventures" (20-1). While
Stephens' frontier novels were undoubtedly primarily written for female
audiences, they are definitely stories of women's exotic adventures. The appeal
of such adventuresome heroines is understandable for both middle-class women,
whose lives were dictated by the never-ending chores of domesticity, and
working-class women, whose long days were spent in relentless toll in textile
mills and other factories. These heroines suggested that women's lives need not
be so restricted, that women could have adventures without incurring social
disapprobation.

Unlike Malaeska, which is clearly presented as an old Indian legend, Mary
Derwent, subtitled A Tale of the Wyoming Valley in 1778, is not only represented
as grounded in historical fact, but is actually based on real events and
populated with real people. Stephens weaves her fictional tale and fictional
Characters with actual historical events, creating a sense of verisimilitude for her
readers. But, more importantly, she uses historical fact to demonstrate not just
the devastating effects of war on women, but women's vigorous strength and

courage in response to the desperate situations that war creates.

173

The two Indianized white women, Catharine Montour and Queen Esther,
both of whom are represented as leaders of their tribe, are based on real people,
and some of their actions reflect actual events. However, like Malaeska, these
characters assume mythic proportions. In this story Stephens posits that life
could be different, and perhaps more equitable, if women were leaders of
society. Through the opposing characters of Catharine and Esther, Stephens
provides examples of benevolent as well as despotic leadership. Under
Catharine's leadership, the Shawnee tribe experiences peace and prosperity,
represented by the gardens and orchards planted under her tutelage.
Conversely, under Queen Esther, they become involved in wars between whites,
and their villages and lands, indeed their way of life, are destroyed.‘

The young Tahmeroo best exemplifies Stephens' ideal of the potential of
female leadership. It is she who re-enacts a Pocahontas-type rescue when the
male leaders of the tribe refuse to undertake a rescue attempt for her Tory
husband, Butler, who is being held captive by the Americans. And it is she who,
at the end of the story, leads her people further into the wilderness toward a new
life in the West. In this female myth, men's political leadership is found wanting,
and women's leadership is suggested as a viable alternative.

Young white women living domestic lives more typical of the young
women readers of the tale also are important figures in this female—centered myth
of the frontier. The eponymous heroine, Mary, is compared and contrasted with
her sister, Jane, calling into question the ideal of True Womanhood. Through
Mary's story, as well as Catharine's and Tahmeroo's, Stephens posits a new,

more active ideal of womanhood.

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Historical Background
Mary Derwent: A Tale of the Wyoming Valley in 1778 is a stirring
fictionalized account based on what is known in white American histories as the
Wyoming Valley Massacre, in which Indians allied with the British attacked and
wiped out white settlements in the area near Monockonok Island in the
Susquehanna River.2 Queen Esther, the seemingly improbable white woman
leader of the Indian tribe, is actually based on a real person. In his 1851 History
of Wyoming, noted nineteenth-century historian Benson J. Lossing explains that
Queen Esther, also known as Catharine Montour, was a French Canadian,
probably the daughter of Frontenac (357).3 Stephens uses Lossing's suggestion
that Esther‘s "superior mind gave her great ascendancy over the Senecas" in her
narrative of the events (357).‘ Furthermore, Lossing concurs with Charles Miner
who emphatically declares that Queen Esther did, in fact, while singing a death
chant, kill "fourteen or fifteen" captured American prisoners who were seated
around a rock. Lossing describes the event:
Sunounded by a body of Indians, queen Esther, a fury in the form of a
woman, assumed the office of executioner with death maul or tomahawk,
for she used the one with both hands, or took up the other with one, and
passing round thecircle with words, as if singing, or counting with a
cadence, she would dash out the brains, or sink the tomahawk into the
head of the prisoner. (226)
Although Stephens' description is more melodramatic and sensational, the
results are the same - many men die at the hands of the white Indian queen.
Furthermore, in accordance with Miner's carefully researched history (358),
Stephens maintains that the cause of Esther's great fury was the death of one of

her sons in an earlier battle with the Americans.

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The character of Catharine Montour is entirely fictional as presented in the
story. Typical of melodramas, several characters in Mary Derwent are incognito
and have many names, but Stephens draws from recorded history as well as
Indian custom when she suggests that the fictional Queen Esther bestowed her
own previous name upon Catharine at the time of her adoption into the tribe. Gi-
en-gwa-tah, Catharine's Indian husband in the novel, is also based on a real
person. Lossing records that he was "a celebrated Seneca chief," who led the
main force of Indians in the Wyoming Valley attack (354). The idea that he is the
son of Queen Esther is apparently pure fiction. Walter Butler, the villain of the
novel, is also a real person, and, as Stephens indicates, the son of Col. John
Butler, leader of the British forces in the battles at Wyoming Valley. However, no
records attest to Walter's presence at these engagements. Apparently, as
Stephens suggests, he did die in a later battle in the same general vicinity (Miner
235). Other characters in the novel based on real people include Col. Zebulon
Butler, Sir William Johnson, Sir John Johnson, and Joseph Brant, the renowned
Iroquois leader known to his people as Thayendanega, signifying "two sticks of
wood bound together" (Thompson Kelsey 43).

Besides the horrific execution by Queen Esther and the general rout and
defeat of the Americans, other events recorded by Stephens appear in white
histories as historical fact. For example, the histories mention that women
assisted the Americans by making saltpeter for gunpowder and working in the
fields (Miner 212; Lossing 352), but Stephens tends to emphasize women's
deeds and hard labor in keeping with her message of female strength and

capability. Her accounts of white male savagery - brother killing brother,

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neighbor killing neighbor, Tories promising quarter to fleeing rebels and then -
ruthlessly slaying them - also derive from these nineteenth-century sources
(Miner 224-5; Lossing 356-7). Thus, the story of Mary Derwent is a curious
admixture of fact and fiction. Although readers must suspend disbelief regarding
some of the elements of this melodramatic work, such as Catharine's failure to
recognize the missionary as her husband, Vamham, some of the more
improbable events are part of recorded history.
Plot Summary

Like Malaeska, the tale of Mary Derwent had an illustrious history before it
was ever published in book form in the United States in 1858. It was first
published in Ladies Companion, May through October 1838, as a prize-winning
article.5 The serial proved so popular that Ladies Companion took the
unpmcedented step of reprinting the entire serial in 1840. As the editors
explained:

At the very pressing solicitation of many of our present subscribers, we

have been induced to republish the Prize Tale of "Mary Derwent. " At the

time of its former publication, there were only four thousand, five hundred

copies issued, now the "Ladies Companion" has a circulation of seventeen

thousand. (their emphasis, Ladies Companion 13 (May 1840): 18).
Capitalizing on Stephens' tremendous success with the full-length novels
Fashion and Famine (1854) and The Old Homestead (1855), T. 8. Peterson
published an expanded and drastically revised edition of Mary Derwent in 1858.
In fact the changes in the story from the serialized version to the book version
are so radical that the Indian woman character, Tahmeroo, who is an heiress in

the serial, becomes, in the novel, a dispossessed Indian who must trek West in

search of a new life. Paola Gemme contends that these changes represent "a

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legitimization of contemporary Indian policy which pursued segregation rather
than the integration of Native Americans" ("Rewfiting" 386); however, the truth in
the matter may not be so simplistic. In 1862, when Beadle and Adams published
a sixpenny British novel of the story, they reverted to the original serialized
version so that Tahmeroo remains the heiress of a British estate. Because these
denouements are so diametrically opposed, other major revisions in the plot also
occur. These changes are discussed in the conclusion of this chapter. The plot
summary is based on the 1858 American version.

Mary Derwent, a young woman with a beautiful face, but a deformed body,
lives with her equally beautiful sister, Jane, and Grandmother Derwent on the
island of Monockonok. In the opening chapter, Mary is cruelly made aware of
her deformity by the malicious taunting of a schoolmate, Jason Wintermoot, a
Tory and close companion of William Butler, who will later become the false-
hearted suitor of Jane. Edward Clark, the future true-hearted suitor of Jane,
comes to Mary's rescue, incurring the abiding enmity of Butler and Mary's
undying love. After this transforming incident, Mary avoids the company of any
but loved ones who accept her as she is. She comes to understand God's love
through introspection and prayer. Jane, by contrast, is a thoughtless young
woman and a flirt. She disregards Mary's feelings by entertaining thoughts of
marriage to Butler, who is simultaneously wooing Tahmeroo, the beautiful mixed-
blood daughter of Catherine Mantour (a.k.a. Caroline Vamham and Lady
Granby), white chief of the nearby Shawnee. Catharine, recognizing Butler's
base character, attempts to protect Tahmeroo from the possibility that he might

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desert her by arranging a lawful, Christian marriage for her daughter to Butler
and bribing him with the offer of a large dowry.

When Catharine goes to the Indian missionary to arrange the ceremony,
she is overcome by his "power' and "sympathy" and tells him her own painful
history. Orphaned in England at a young age, Caroline, as she was then known,
married Vamham, her father's ward. Although they had no real wealth, they had
plenty for their needs and were happy and loving. However, she unexpectedly
inherited a vast fortune and a new title, Lady Granby. The change of fortunes
transformed her and she became a social butterfly, much to Vamham's dismay.
Misfortune touched their lives when she and her husband's best friend, Murray,
fell in love with each other, confessed, but did not consummate it. Realizing the
futility of their love, Munay sought a marriage partner. Driven to despondency,
even insanity, by these events, Caroline went to Vamham and revealed all. He
did not reproach her, but denounced Murray, and she sank into madness.
Although Vamham watched over her carefully throughout her long illness, during
a rare absence of his, she, in her debilitated state of mind, dropped their infant
child out the window.

When her sanity returned, she discovered her horrific act. Unable to face
Vamham in the mistaken belief that she had killed their child, she escaped to the
wilderness of America. Once there she heard that Vamham had perished at sea
while searching for her, so she joined a tribe of Shawnees in which a white
woman, Queen Esther, was the leader. Catharine was accorded great power by
the people, who regarded her as one "sent to them by Manitou." Queen Esther‘s

son, Gi-en-gwa-tah, was attracted to the new arrival, but she refused his

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advances. However, when a white family was captured and brought to the
village for a death feast she acquiesced to Gi—en-gwa-tah's proposal, for the
family was none other than Murray's, her former lover. To save Murray's life
Catharine married the "savage," and their daughter, Tahmeroo, becomes her
only solace.

After Catharine’s interview with the missionary, Mary espies Butler
negotiating a lucrative contract with Catharine to many T ahmeroo. Catharine
insists that he must take Tahmeroo to England and, in return, she promises him
fifty thousand pounds dowry. Mary is even more shocked to discover that Butler,
upon leaving, has a clandestine meeting with her sister, Jane. Later that night,
the very evening of his Christian maniage to Tahmeroo, Butler returns to elope
with Jane, but he is foiled by the combined efforts of Tahmeroo, Mary, and the
missionary. Catharine finds out about Mary's kindness to Tahmeroo and
arranges a meeting. Catharine thanks Mary and gives her a serpent bracelet to
wear to protect her from danger should hostilities begin. Both feel an inexplicable
bond of sympathy between them, but they have no idea that they are actually
mother and daughter.

Time passes. Jane, her passions subdued by her humiliation over the
Butler affair, is engaged to marry Edward Clark. Catharine, her ruthlessness
softened by memories of her former life, has lost power over the tribe. Queen
Esther once again rules, just in time for the outbreak of hostilities between the
Shawnee and the American settlers. Catharine is powerless to stop the fight.
Thinking the bracelet will save them from harm, Mary and her relatives remain on

the island. On the other hand, Catharine, realizing her bracelet no longer holds

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power, worries about Mary but does nothing. Suddenly the missionary appears
at her tent. Seeing that she is paralyzed with indecision, he reveals that Mary is
her own daughter whom she believed dead, and that, he, the missionary, is her
husband, Vamham. Finally spurred to action, Catharine heads for the island.
She meets up with Murray, her former love, now an English agent in America.
Together with Tahmeroo, they go to the island to save the Derwents, but by then
the fighting surrounds them. Both Murray and Catharine are stabbed by Queen
Esther. Meanwhile, Mary, Jane, and their grandmother manage to escape by
hanging on to a floating log, but Mary, realizing it will not bear the weight of all
three, purposely slips off, only to be rescued by the missionary. Murray dies, but
Catharine is snatched from Vamham by Gi-en-gwa-tah, who takes her back to
his people for recuperation. But Esther still rules and demands that Tahmeroo
leave her mother to go with her husband to England. When Gi-en-gwa-tah is
away, Queen Esther riles up members of the tribe against Catharine, and she is
dragged out into the wilderness in mid-winter to die. Having finally Ieamed the
truth of her birth, Mary, along with her father, Vamham, come upon Catharine as
she breathes her last.

In the denouement, Butler Ieams that as the eldest daughter, Mary is legal
heir to the Granby estate. Jane's husband, Edward, manages the estate, and
Mary and Vamham live out their days peacefully. Butler deserts Tahmeroo and
returns to America. She pines for him until, at last, she returns to America too,
only to find him dead. But she lives on to become a leader of her people and to

pass down the stories of her mother, Catharine Montour.

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Dramatistic Analysis of Mary Derwent

Because Mary Derwent is a melodrama, with plots and counterplots and a
long cast of characters, its dramatistic analysis is more complex than Malaeska.
The representative anecdote in this narrative tells the story of two contrasting
modes of female leadership in society - one, destructive and immoral, the other,
constructive and beneficent. In other words, the representative anecdote
confronts contemporary questions in society about the extent that women should
participate in the public sector, by posing the question: Can women be effective
leaders in publiclpolitical affairs? Although the formal woman's movement had
not yet begun in the late 18305 when Mary Denlvent first appeared in print,
women had begun to agitate for more equal participation in society. Many had
joined various reform movements of the period, including the abolition of slavery,
moral reform, and temperance. A few women had begun to speak in public on
behalf of those causes. In the early days, most women reformers addressed
only the female branches of their respective societies, but some attempted to
speak before "promiscuous" audiences, as mixed-sex groups were called. As
Angelina Grimké's experience with the mob at Pennsylvania Hall demonstrates,
even when these women'were working for a good cause, they had to defend the
right of women to enter into the agon of public debate.6

The furor over woman's right to speak in public provoked discourses on
the proper role of women in society as well as predictions regarding the future of
society if women gained a more prominent role in public life. By addressing both
the hopes and fears of American society, the representative anecdote of Mary

Derwent depicts the possibilities of women's leadership in society as well as its

182

potential pitfalls. The fears are represented by the anecdote of the woman who
is unsexed by political power, and the hopes are expressed by the tale of the
woman who uses power wisely to create a more just society. Although Stephens
advocates a more active role for women in American society, she warns that
women must remain womanly in such roles or disaster will likely follow.
Consequently, as in the case of the representative anecdote in Malaeska, a
certain ambivalence resides in her inscriptions.

In Mary Derwent, Stephens questions contemporary ideologies of
womanhood and suggests that women need to be more active participants in
society than these current notions permit. To effectively "confront and
encompass" this situation, Stephens creates a number of characters to act as
agents to demonstrate both appropriate and inappropriate ways of being a
woman. In this novel she begins to experiment with the literary device of
comparison and contrast, which she will use to even greater effect in some of her
later frontier (and other social) novels.7 Labelling a contrasting character as
"counteragent" may be somewhat misleading, since Stephens' purpose is to
illustrate both positive and negative examples of womanhood; however, for the
sake of clarity, this term will be used. Her use of irony further complicates
analysis. Thus Burke's dramatism, which specifically highlights ambiguities, is
especially useful in interpreting Stephens' intentions in this provocative yet
sometimes convoluted narrative. Agent is the most significant term in Mary
Derwent because characters (agents), through their eggs, demonstrate new
ideals of womanhood (gum). Stephens holds up certain characters for
readers to emulate and others for them to reject. In other words, in keeping with

183

Tompkins' insistence that authors had "designs" on their readers, Stephens
provides both good and bad examples of womanhood, which she hopes will
effect changes in current ideologies through her readers who will enact a new,
more active ideal of womanhood.

Because it is a melodrama with several intersecting plots, Mary Derwent
has many agents and counteragents; however, only those discussed in this
analysis are listed below.

Agents = Mary Derwent (a positive example of womanhood), Catharine Montour
(both a positive and a negative example of womanhood), and Gi-en-gwa-
tah (an idealized male character); co-agent = Tahmeroo (both a positive
and a negative example of womanhood); counteragents = Jane Derwent
(a negative example of womanhood, against whom Mary and Tahmeroo
struggle), Queen Esther (a negative example of womanhood), and William
Butler (a totally reprehensible male character).

Agency = gender characteristics.

Act = demonstrating appropriate (womanly) or inappropriate (masculine) methods
of leadership.

Scene = nineteenth-century gender relations.

Purpose = to question current ideologies of womanhood and propose more
active leadership roles for women.

Catharine and Mary (mother and daughter) are the primary agents through which

Stephens reveals her ideas about a more liberal and realistic womanly ideal.

Tahmeroo, as a mixed blood character, is freed from certain restrictions placed

on white women, but she is a co-agent with her mother and half-sister and further

184

develops the theme that women can be active agents in the world without losing
their womanliness. Vamham and Gi-en—gwa-tah represent an ideal manhood,
that is, man who are good, just, honest, and less prone to violence. But
Stephens does not fully develop this idea because, in this novel, she is more
concerned with limitations on women than with reforming men. Jane Derwent is
a pivotal character because she represents a negative example of white
womanhood, yet, ironically, she wins the hero. Queen Esther and Walter Butler
are both thoroughly evil, and thus mitigate the comparatively minor flaws in the
characters of Catharine and Tahmeroo, who, while not perfect, demonstrate the
potential of women as leaders in civic affairs.
Representations of Race

Race in Mary Derwent does not hold the central place it does in Malaeska;
however, in a novel of intermarriage, Stephens cannot avoid the subject. As a
member of the dominant race, her representations of race are fraught with
notions of otherness, even when she invokes mixed-blood characters as ideal
role models to be emulated. At the same time, Stephens destabilizes notions of
savagery as a trait peculiar to Indians by emphasizing the savagery of whites,
particularly of Queen Esther and Butler.
Tahmeroo

There are no major full-blooded Indians in this tale. Tahmeroo is actually
three-quarters white, but Stephens still exoticizes her as though she were some
alien creature. For example, in her first description of Tahmeroo, Stephens
emphasizes her strangeness both in her description and in the reaction of Mary,

who espies Tahmeroo but remains unseen herself.

185

Mary held her breath and remained motionless, for her poetical
fancy was aroused by the singular and picturesque attitude of the figure
[of Tahmeroo]. There was a wildness and a grace in it which she had
never witnessed before. At first glance she supposed the stranger to be a
wandering Indian girl belonging to some of the tribes that roamed the
neighboring forests. But her complexion, though darker than the darkest
brunette of our own race, was still too light for any of the savage nations
yet seen in the wilderness. It was of a clear, rich brown, and the blood
glowed through the cheeks like the blush on a ripe peach.

Her hair was long, profusely braided, and of a deep black; not the
dull lustreless color common to the Indians; but with a bloom upon it like
that shed by the sunlight on the wing of a flying raven. She appeared to
be neither Indian nor white, but of a mixed race. The spirited and wild
grace of the savage was blended with a delicacy of feature and nameless
elegance more peculiar to the whites. In her dress, also, might be traced
the same union of barbarism and refinement . . . (27)

Thus, in a few strokes of the pen, Stephens deprecates Indians, while presenting
whites as being of a higher standard. This description insinuates that it is
Tahmeroo's white blood that provides her beauty, "delicacy," and "refinement,"
although it does grant that Indian blood bestows a certain "spirit and wild grace."
Yet it is her spirit, not her beauty, that makes Tahmeroo an admirable
character. For example, when her Tory husband, Butler, is captured by the
Americans, both her grandmother, Queen Esther, and her father, Gi-en-gwa-tah,
refuse to risk their lives to rescue the white man. Instead they offer to "revenge
his death," should his death sentence be canied out (228). Desperate,
Tahmeroo then appeals to her mother, but by this time Catharine admits she is
"powerless" to do anything. Horrified that Butler might be killed, Tahmeroo
decides to rescue him herself. Thus, she journeys to Albany with just a few
waniors to attempt that which those who are supposedly more powerful and
courageous dare not do. Butler arranges a plan, which involves much deception

on the part of Tahmeroo, and she manages the escape without any difficulty.

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Thus, she demonstrates the ability of women to actually do something, to
intervene in men's military realm and to save her man from certain death, unlike
many white women in the novel who are passive recipients of the news that their
loved one has been killed in battle.

However, in this reenactment of the Pocahontas rescue Tahmeroo's
motives and behavior are imbued with ambiguity. In pursuing this active course,
she exhibits, on several occasions, lndianly behavior (i.e., stereotypical behavior
attributed to Indians), which is sharply rebuked by whites to whom she appeals.
For example, when her mother reveals she no longer has power to help
Tahmeroo, Tahmeroo retorts that she will resort to violence: "Let a band of
warriors go to their city . . . we will burn it to ashes if they refuse to give him up"
(231). Catharine is horrified. "Oh Tahmeroo!" she cries, "do not become a fiend
like the res " (231). And, although Tahmeroo apologizes, she retains this
revengeful spirit.

When she resolves to rescue Butler herself, she turns to Mary and the
missionary for help and advice. But when the missionary mentions that Butler is
considered a spy, Tahmeroo's lndianly passion for revenge bursts forth once
more:

A spy! . . . he serves his king. Those that have captured him are

miserable rebels. But let them beware - it is Gi-en-gwa-tah's son that they

have imprisoned; the children of Queen Esther never forget nor forgive.

(239-240)

Although she immediately repents when scolded by the missionary, such
outbursts of passion indicate that she has unacceptable lndianly traits, which

must be expunged if she is to be a worthy role model. Her passionate love for

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Butler provokes these stereotypically Indian-like responses. As Stephens
explains:

That strong love had completely subdued the passionate pride of her

nature and, rather than being parted from him, she would have sold

herself a slave in his behalf, asking only the sunshine of his presence and
the glory of his love. That wild devotion had so mingled itself with the
religious creed her mother had taught her that it had become part of her

religion, and only death could have torn it from her heart. (224)

But a passionate love that obliterates the self is definitely not part of the new
womanhood ideal that Stephens is proposing -— that is, women who do not
sacrifice the self, but live for the self as well as others (Cogan 5).

To become an appropriate model of new womanhood, then, Tahmeroo
must be whitened. She must exhibit proper womanly virtues and eliminate her
lndianly vengeance. Mirroring her mother's slow redemption process, Tahmeroo
does just that. For, enacting another, albeit inverted, Pocahontas rescue, she
saves Mary, Jane, and Grandmother Denivent from certain death at the hands of
her own tribe. Chastened by Butler's cruel treatment of her and motivated by the
pure love that Mary has shown for her, Tahmeroo risks her own life to save the
Derwents, including Jane. This is significant, for Tahmeroo fully realizes that
Butler still is enamored of Jane. In fact, she rightly believes that he has led the
Indians to the Island to "seek vengeance" on Jane (319). Yet, in this case, she is
able to put aside her own emotions and pangs of jealousy to come to the aid of
others. In fact she realizes that she "do[es] not wish [Jane] to die" (320). So,
exhibiting the physical strength and health of a new more active womanhood

ideal that Stephens advocates, she plunges into the waters of the Susquehanna

and swims across to the island to locate a canoe in which the Denlvents might

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escape. Later, on the island, she charges fearlessly through the battlefield to
rescue the Derwent women.

These 1915 mark her redemption - from this point forward, her ways are
more womanly, more white, and less lndianly. In other words, her redemption
feminizes and whitens her. Tahmeroo's plunge into the Susquehanna represents
a purification ritual, a baptism. Although she still loves Butler, she is able to look
beyond her own personal desires to the needs of others, which is exactly the
attitude she needs to achieve her final destiny as a leader of her people. Burke
asserts that acts of self-sacrifice (such as Tahmeroo's perilous rescue of the
Dervvents) operate as a kind of mortification of the self, obliterating sin and guilt.
Tahmeroo's act coincides with Burke's definition of mortification as "the
deliberate slaying of appetites and ambitions" (RR 135), which "must come from
within" (190). Tahmeroo knows that she has done wrong by meeting with and
marrying Butler without her mother's knowledge. In fact, at one point she thinks
the Great Spirit intends to punish or even kill her for this secret sin (35). But,
after the maniage is blessed by the Christian minister, and she realizes she must
accept Butler as he is, not as she wants him to be, she is ready to be redeemed.
Through the process of self-mortification, she slays her lndianly passion for
revenge against Jane and is purified/whitened and reborn.

By juxtaposing these two Pocahontas-type rescues, Stephens calls
attention to their differences. In substance, they are similar - Tahmeroo risks her
life for others in both. But in motivation, they are antipodal. In the first, her act is
based on her selfish desire to save her husband at any cost because she

believes she cannot live without him; however, in the second, she thinks only of

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the safety of others, even Jane, whom she had considered a rival. The second
act is also an act of forgiveness, not just words with which she asks others to
forgive her transgressions (as in her apologies for lndianly outbursts), but a bona
fide act of contrition and selfless love - a transfonriative act that purifies her and
makes her a worthy role model. Furthermore, the aggngy by which these two
acts are committed differs. In the Butler escape, Tahmeroo resorts to deception,
including using her womanly wiles to beguile the guard. In the rescue of the
Derwents, Tahmeroo proceeds openly into the battle, no deception is required.

In this representation of Tahmeroo, Stephens equates lndianly ways with
stereotypical negative traits associated with the ignoble savage - particularly a
desire for revenge against white enemies and an inability to control her passions
(Clemmons 48). However, as Clemmons points out, such traits were usually
applied to male characters, not females. Thus, it is difficult to separate
representations of race from those of gender, for Stephens' depictions of
Tahmeroo's lndianly behavior might equally be considered masculine. In other
words, race operates as a metalanguage masking gender.” The use of such
negative stereotypes to describe Tahmeroo's conduct marks Indians as a race as
inferior to whites.

In other words, in Clemmon’s account Stephens aligns Indians with
masculine behavior and whites with feminine conduct. By contrast, Bube, in her
dissertation, suggests another interpretation. She believes that

["l]n making her main characters Indians or Indianized women, [Stephens]

establishes the equation that women are to men as Indians are to whites,

and she then offers two dichotomized social positions for women using
race as a code for exploring gender. (36)

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Framing her discussion in terms of the assimilation-extinction dichotomy that
Maddox insists is inherent in the Indian question, especially as presented in
nineteenth-century literature, Bube believes that, by equating women with the
less powerful Indians and men with the more powerful whites, Stephens is able
to exploit the dualities implied in such dichotomies. According to Bube,
"Stephens finds ways to contest and resist the dualities, masculine or feminine
and civilized or savage" (37). I suggest that one method Stephens uses to unfix
these categories is to portray both sets of opposing dualities (equating both
Indians and whites with both men and with women), effectively cancelling both
sets. Such connections undermine the subservience of both women and Indians
to white men, freeing both from the limitations/stereotypes that inhibit their full
participation in the world. For example, only when Catharine is liberated from the
bonds of white civilization/patriarchy can she accomplish leadership tasks usually
accorded to men, such as building cities and making alliances with other nations.
Pi re I i Worn n

Stephens frequently uses the word "picturesque" to describe Tahmeroo,
Malaeska, and her Indian women heroines in other novels. Burke believes that
authors often reveal their attitudes through "associational clusters," that is,
through certain images or words that they identify with certain character types
(PLF 20). Burke contends that while a writer may "be perfectly conscious of the
act of writing, conscious of selecting a certain kind of imagery to reinforce a
certain kind of mood, etc, [she] cannot possibly be conscious of the
intenelationships among all these equations" (20). He believes that these
interrelationships are the motives behind the writing and that by "statistically"

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examining an author's associational clusters, critics can "disclose" such motives
(20). Thus, Stephens' repeated use of "picturesque" in connection with her
Indian women characters seems particularly noteworthy.

Bube contends that by stressing the word "picturesque," Stephens is
"aligning herlself] with the writers of the romantic school who portrayed Indians
sympathetically as part of a larger search for American uniqueness" (41). She
astutely observes that while

Stephens' use of the word picturesque as a descriptive label and as a

category participates in this sympathetic attitude toward Indians. . . . [It]

also [is] an implicit confession of white cultural, social, and racial
limitations; the Other can only be received through a drastic social/cultural

filter. (42)

In other words, in describing Tahmeroo as "picturesque," Stephens marks her as
"other," while simultaneously pleading the cause of a common humanity. The
Oxford English Dictionary definition clearly reveals the ambiguity of this term as
applied to Tahmeroo and other Indian women heroines in Stephens' fiction.

Like or having the elements of a picture; fit to be the subject of a striking or

effective picture; possessing pleasing and interesting qualities of form and

colour (but not implying the highest beauty or sublimity): said of
landscape, buildings, costume, scenes of diversified action, etc, also of
circumstances, situations fancies, ideas, and the like. (OED)
In other words, the term is not usually applied to human beings, so for Stephens
to use it in this manner, not only suggests that Indians are not of "the highest
beauty," but dehumanizes them as well. It also attempts to colonize - to fix them
as completely knowable.
i n - h
In Stephens' nanative, Catharine's Indian husband is the half-blood son of

Queen Esther. According to a witness of their marriage ceremony, Sir John

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Johnson, a British emissary, Gi-en-gwa-tah had "just enough of white blood in his
veins to save the whole thing from being repulsive" (183). Ironically, this same
character suggests that Gi-en-gwa—tah's "noble presence" derived from the white
blood he had inherited from his mother, who just happens to be the most vicious,
vengeful, blood-thirsty character in the story. Yet Sir John claims that "fiom her
[Gi-en-gwa-tah] had learned many of the gentler graces, both of manner and
costume, which made his appearance rather picturesque than savage" (183).
Just a few pages later, readers are informed that Queen Esther "allowed no
bright color or glittering ornament to soften the grey of a stern old age which
hung about her like a garment" (195). Yet ostensibly from her, Gi-en-gwa-tah
Ieamed to dress in clothing of "rich color, heavy with fringes and embroidery"
(183). By presenting such contradictory equations of whiteness with rightness,
Stephens destabilizes dualities such as civilized or savage.

In relating her story to the missionary, Catharine also presents Gi—en-gwa-
tah as superior to other Indians because of his white blood.

The eldest son of Queen Esther was a noble. He came of his
father's race, with something of the refinement, which his mother could
never entirely cast aside, blended with it. . . . Queen Esther had given him
fragments of a rude poetical education, and this, with the domestic
refinement of her lodge, had lifted him unconsciously above the other
chiefs of his tribe. (94)

Although this description occurs fairly early in the text, before Queen Esther has
shown her true colors, and readers learn just how "refined" she really is, there is
still reason to doubt the veracity of Catharine's words. First of all, just a few

minutes earlier, Catharine acknowledges that Esther, as the daughter of a

French governor of Canada, had a fine education prior to being taken prisoner by

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the Indians. But Esther, she relates, preferred "savage rule to all the
remembrances of a delicately nurtured childhood and . . . [had] flung off the
refinements of life" (90). Catharine also explains, comparing Esther to Queen
Elizabeth, that "both were arrogant, crafty, selfish, and ruthless, proving their
power to govern, only as they became harsh and unwomanly" (90). Esther, she
declares, "was, doubtless, from the first, a savage at heart" (90). Furthermore,
as Catharine continues her tale, she reveals Esther‘s "savage passions" and
vengeful nature, provoked by Catharine's initial rejection of Gi-en-gwa-tah (95).
Consequently, the implausibility of this attribution of Gi—en-gwa—tah's virtues to
Esther's "refinement" is readily apparent and further undermines notions of
inherent racial qualities.

Despite all the irony with which Stephens fills others' descriptions of Gi-en-
gwa-tah, when he finally appears in the story, he is presented as a reasonable
man, a caring father, and a shrewd statesman (111-12). Stephens never
portrays Gi-en-gwa-tah as "savage." Catharine, herself, admits that Gi-en—gwa-
tah is "eloquent, sincere, [and] manlY' (95). And, although he may not
understand Catharine, particularly after she begins to "soften" under the
influence of Mary and the missionary, his actions prove he loves her. After the
terrible battle on Monockonok Island, he takes the wounded Catharine from the
arms of Vamham and carries her back to his tribe for recuperation. Unaware that
it is his own mother who stabbed Catharine and that Esther has long been
plotting against Catharine, he leaves the village to resume the business of a
warrior. When he returns to find that Esther has banished Catharine, causing

her death, he announces to the tribe: "[t]hat woman [Esther] is not my mother,

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but the murderess of my wife" (370). He deserts her and all those who assisted
her in Catharine's death, leaving her "to the Great Spirit, whose curse shall hang
about her as lightning strikes an old hemlock dead at the tOp" (370). And he then
leads his loyal followers West.9 Such characteristics mark him as a stereotypical
"noble savage," and although scholars today recognize the inherent racism in
such a concept, Stephens appears to be attempting to establish Gi-en-gwa—tah
as an admirable person.

Vrewing this incident through the dramatistic lens elucidates such an
intent. Gi-en-gwa-tah is the agent; his denunciation of Queen Esther is the fig.
Since the m is nineteenth-century gender relations, not race relations, and
the overall m is to question current ideologies of womanhood, the agency -
the manner in which he commits this act - takes on special import. He does not
react in ways typical of the "ignoble savage," that is, he does not seek "an eye for
an eye" type vengeance. The m is his words, which reveal the awful truth
about Esther. He renounces her as no mother, no woman at all; her lust for
power has not only brought about Catharine's death, but the ruin of the tribe as
well. Although Gi-en-gwa-tah recognizes the truth too late, he bravely defies the
woman that even Brant, the great Indian warrior, feared encountering (194). Gi-
en-gwa-tah‘s willingness to brook her animosity redeems his masculinity. He
becomes the unquestioned leader of the tribe. Through the rebirth of this
transforrnative act, he can now, as Burke phrases it, "mov[e] fonrvard towards a
goal" (PLF 203), that of reuniting the remnants of his tribe and moving west to

establish a new life.

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Wm
Catharine

The figure of Catharine Montour fascinates the imagination. Stephens
gives readers a taste of the mystery that surrounds Catharine when she is first
presented in the narrative:

And this was the stem, haughty woman - the white Indian - who ruled the

Shawnee braves with despotic rigor - whose revenge was deadly, and

whose hate was a terror. This was Catharine Montourl (39)
After Catharine recounts her narrative to the missionary, an act that functions as
a confession, both in terms of content and results, she develops into a mediator
between the white and red cultures. Indeed, part of her value to the tribe is her
connection as a white person to Sir erliam Johnson, British agent for relations
with the Six Nations (Lossing 232). Queen Esther willingly adopts her because
of her wealth and the power she can bring to the tribe. But Catharine's most
important role is mediating, not between the Indians and the British, but between
the Indians and the Americans. Alter her confession, although she begins to lose
her power over the Indians, her role as mediator grows more significant. Prior to
that time, she had not been concerned about Americans, but about extending the
power of her tribe through alliances with the British. Once she meets Mary, the
changes in her personality are accelerated. The special bond she feels toward
Mary transforms her attitude toward the Americans. Her act of giving Mary the
serpent bracelet for protection marks her reformed attitude.

As a leader of the Shawnee, Catharine "grew stem, selfish, and despotic,
but never cruel" (94). In her confession to the missionary, Catharine attempts to

rectify the perceptions that many Americans have of her. Although in her thirst

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for power she required homage from the tribe, she claims to have used that
power to save "many poor victims from the stake . . . , many a village from the
flames, and many hearths from desolation" (94). Knowledge that she is innocent
of murder and violence, in stark contrast to Esther, prepares readers for
Catharine's gradual redemption. These revelations also illustrate that Catharine
has used her power as a leader of the tribe for benevolent purposes.

However, it is Catherine's race that allows her to lead the Indians. They
give her homage and respect and benefit from it, but in Stephens' tale no full-
blooded Indian women are presented as leaders; in fact, they are depicted as
squaws and furies, with little intelligence or ability to think for themselves. But by
demonstrating the expediency of the Indians' acceptance of female leadership,
Stephens hints that women should be allowed more influential roles in white
society as well.

Mary

Mary, without any prejudice or guile, is a perfect mediator between the
races because she, like Natty Bumppo, belongs to neither world. Because she
has a condition commonly referred to as "hunchback," both whites and Indians
regard her as different from "normal" people. To whites, Mary is disfigured and
consequently "unlike other girls . . . . never to be loved as they were" (9). But to
the Indians, Mary's deformity is "a sacred seal of holiness which the Great Spirit
sets upon his own" (166). Either way, Mary is set apart from both cultures,
allowing her to mediate between the races. However, like the Indians, she is

marked as "other" by whites because of her bodily difference from them.

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Her very presence calms Indian "savages" from their violent ways, such
as when she shields the missionary from their arrows or when she interrupts
Queen Esther's execution of the American captives. Yet she seems to have the
Opposite effect on savage whites (Jason Wrntennoot and Walter Butler) whose
acrimonious words reveal that they are provoked to greater shows of violence in
her presence. For example, when Mary appears as Butler is attempting to
convince Jane to elope with him, he cries, "Out of my path, lying impl before I
trample your shapeless carcass under my fee " (126). White savages hate Mary
for the same reasons that Indians honor her: she represents a higher truth and
goodness. Thus, Stephens exposes the baser nature of barbarous whites while
she simultaneously reveals the moral rectitude of Indian culture.

Esther

Esther, on the other hand, epitomizes the savagery of whites. Her wanton
violence destabilizes notions that Indians are savage and whites are civilized.
However, for Stephens, Esther's abandonment of womanliness is more serious
than her abandonment of white civilization. Forsaking the traits of her gender
has masculinized her, resulting in her eventual decline to a ruthless savage.
While Esther‘s barbarity proves her degeneracy, the Shawnees' acceptance of
Esther as a leader constitutes proof of their debasement as well. The Indians are
subjugated by Esther’s reputation as a brutal enemy. For example, Stephens
has her fictionalized Joseph Brant, the Iroquois leader who was mistakenly
placed at the Wyoming massacre in white histories, express anxiety at Queen
Esther’s wrath. "I would rather encounter a troop of fiends than her tongue," he

admits (194). Esther's association with the Indians is not the cause of her

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savagery. Readers are informed, "[slhe was, doubtless from the first, a savage
at heart" (90). Thus, Stephens demonstrates that the line between civilized and
savage, white and red, is fine indeed. By showing how whites can become
savage, Stephens also questions the Opposite assumption that Indians cannot
become "civilized" and be assimilated into white civilization.
Representations of Gender

In her representations of gender, Stephens compares and contrasts
suitable and unsuitable models of womanhood. While she believes that women
deserve expanded roles in public affairs, she expresses concern about the
effects of political power on women, as evidenced by her depictions of Catharine
and Esther. On the other hand, Stephens has little ambivalence about the
crippling nature of the "true womanhood" ideal that attempts to keep women
subservient to men. Stephens contrasts Mary and Jane to propose that the
ideology of true womanhood suppresses women rather than encouraging them to
advance toward their potential.
Catharine

The contrasting stories of Catharine and Esther are the heart of the
representative anecdote in Mary Derwent, portraying possible options for women
interested in taking leadership roles in society. Catharine‘s story represents the
potential benefits of women's leadership in society; she uses her power for
benevolent purposes - saving the lives of whites held captive by the tribe and
distributing money to the needy. But more importantly, she has a "civilizing"
effect on the Indians. Under her government, the Shawnee build Catharinestown

at the head of Seneca Lake, "one of the most lovely spots in all the world" (204).

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The "richly cultivat " lands replete with fruit trees and grape-arbors represent
the peace and prosperity of her administration. They suggest that Indians can be
civilized and change from their nomadic existence to a more agricultural, rooted
life like that of whites, a primary goal of assimilationists.10 But Catharine's
influence accomplished even more. "Wrth her benevolence, her gold, and those
wonderful powers of persuasion, with which no woman was ever more richly
endowed, she had softened many a savage heart" (204). Thus, Stephens
suggests that women's leadership can ennoble society through nurturing
benevolence in others.

However, even the kindhearted Catharine experiences the corrupting
influences of power. When she first arrives among the Shawnee, she merely
wants to hide from the world of whites where she has committed so many wrongs
from betraying her husband to harming (and she believes killing) her infant
daughter. Although she may not consciously realize it, she also attempts to
escape the guilt arising from these sins. Her beauty, intelligence, and wealth
have given her power over the Indians, but it becomes an overwhelming force in
her life. As she explains it in her confession to the missionary:

For the first time in my life I felt the force of liberty and the wild sublime

pleasures of an unshackled spirit. . . . There was something of stem,

inborn greatness in the savages who adopted me — something
picturesque in their raiment, and majestic in their wild, untaught
eloquence, that aroused the new and stem properties of my nature till my
very being seemed changed.

The wish to be loved and cherished forsook me forever. New energies
started to life, and I almost scorned myself that I had ever bowed to the
weakness of affection. What was dominion over one heart compared to
the knowledge that the wild, fierce spirits of a thousand savages were
quelled by the sound of my footsteps? — not with a physical cowardly fear,

but with an awe which was of the spirit - a superstitious dread, which to
them was a religion. . . . They looked upon me as a spirit from the great

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hunting ground . . . , endowed with beauty and supernatural powers, which

demanded their rude worship, and fixed me among them as a deity.

l encouraged this belief for a thirst for rule and ascendency was strong

upon me. (93)

In other words, although Catharine had hoped to find a new life among the
Indians, she is still besieged by sin. Power corrupts Catharine, miring her ever
deeper in sin, for setting herself up "as a deity" breaks the first commandment of
the God of Christianity. Although Catherine was already alienated from God
before she entered her new life with the Indians, her desire for power masters
her, obliterating the Christian lessons of her youth that might have Chastened her
hardening heart, until she feels left with "no hope, no God" (53). But as the
missionary rightly perceives, deep in the recesses of her heart and soul, she still
believes in God.

Once she recounts her Christian upbringing and the sins of her past that
led her to forsake white civilization, she begins to lose her power over the
Indians. In the first place, her heart no longer hungers for power but for peace of
mind. The guilt she feels over the past she tried to forget comes back to haunt
her, and she begins to search for new meaning. Moreover, the changes wrought
by her confession affect her outward demeanor. No longer is she haughty and
proud, but "kind and gentle as a child" (229) and a "poor weak woman" (313);
consequently, she no longer commands the respect of the tribe. Even more
significant, given the sexual mores requisite for nineteenth-century white women,
Gi-en-gwa—tah cannot comprehend the changes that come over Catharine, and

mcause of this they become estranged. This paves the way for Catharine, who

is unknowingly a bigamist, to be redeemed.

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Catharine's redemption follows a Burkean pattem similar to Tahmeroo's.
To be redeemed she must first purge herself of her "ambitions" for power over
the Indians. Her confession to the missionary operates as her self-modification.
She, the great Catharine Montour, humbles herself before an indigent man of
God. Through her words, she begins the process of purification, purging her sin
and guilt, but she has lived in sin for many years, and her redemption is an
arduous and painful process. Even after her meeting with the missionary, she
remains self-absorbed. Other than trying to protect Tahmeroo from the pain of
an unhappy maniage, Catharine takes little notice of the people and events
around her.

However, her rendezvous with Mary moves her closer to redemption -
"the gentle, almost holy presence of the young girl changed the whole current of
[Catharine's] feelings" (162). But it is not just Mary's demeanor that transforms
Catharine; it is her fortitude in suffering. Catharine has come to tell Mary to warn
Jane to keep away fiom Butler, who is married to her daughter. Although Mary
never explicitly reveals her love for Edward, whom she explains loves Jane,
Catharine intuitively understands Mary's anguish and moves beyond her own
problems and pains to feel compassion for Mary. As a result Mary admits to
Catharine those feelings that she has never revealed to others. "You are straight
and proud as a poplar. You don‘t know what it is like to go through life with your
head bent to the ground, and the heart in your bosom warm and full of love, like
other people's" (165). Catharine is so moved by Mary's suffering that she claims
that "if my own life could remove the cause of your sorrow, I would lay it down

this moment" (166). When Mary asks her if she says this out of love or DIN. the

202

godless Catharine answers," God knows [the love I bear you] is some holy
feeling that has taken me unawares" (167). When their talk turns to the immortal
love of God, Catharine answers, "I know nothing of that" (167). But Mary replies
that Catharine must not let such ideas "he strangers . . . when you send them
away, as I once did, it is like tuming angels out of doors" (168-9). Catharine
begins to weep copiously, and Mary recognizes the healing power of tears. She
tells Catharine that the door of salvation "is open now, or you would not cry so;
gentle thoughts always follow tears, just as violets start after the brook overflows"
(169). Thus, through the genuine offer of self-sacrifice and the baptism of tears,
Catharine moves toward a new identity that will mark her spiritual rebirth.

Her redemption cannot be complete until she is absolved fi'om all her sins.
Although she no longer lusts for power, and despite all the years that have
passed and her subsequent marriage to Gi-en-gwa-tah, she remains under the
obsessive spell of love for Murray. They meet up once again, just as she is
attempting to rescue Mary and her family from the attack of the British and
Indians. Just before he dies from the stab wounds inflicted by Esther, Murray
begs for and receives forgiveness from both Vamham and Catharine, liberating
both from the secret sin each has carried for so many years - Vamham, his
malice against Murray, and Catharine, her illicit love. So, although Catharine
loses her earthly power, her leadership of the Indians, she gains the more
significant power to save souls, for it is her willingness to forgive Murray that
moves Vamham to also forgive him.

Stephens depicts Catharine's gradual redemption not only as a process of

Christianization but also as feminization. For example, when it becomes clear

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that the Indians and British are planning to attack the Americans, Catharine
pleads with Gi-en-gwa-tah to prevent the violence. "Never in the days of her
loftiest pride," Stephens writes, "had Catharine appeared so touchingly lovely, so
gentle, and so woman-like" (289). Redemption, in her case, equals
womanliness. Although Catharine is never as thoroughly masculinized as Queen
Esther, never commits violence or murder to command respect, in her days as
leader she had been "almost as stern and unyielding" as Gi-en-gwa-tah (289).
This portrayal of power as a masculinizing force represents societal fears
about women as leaders - especially the fear that women's "thirst for rule and
ascendency" will be so strong that they will become manlike. On the one hand,
Catharine's leadership is benevolent and successful. The lives of the Indians are
more productive, and Catharine moves them toward the possibilities that
civilization offers. But on the other hand, her life with the Indians is a fabrication.
She is hiding from the truth and from God. Under such circumstances, she
cannot flourish, even if her leadership allows her subjects to flourish. Her flaws
and sins make her vulnerable to further corruption, including the hypnotic
attraction of power for its own sake, as apposed to what it can allow one to do for
others. But her leadership, which proves beneficial to her people, suggests that
women can be effective leaders. Catharine, had she not been beset by so many
problems, might have been able to conquer the corrupting influences of power,
but without God, she unable to resist such temptations. In typical fashion with
nineteenth-century stories of Christian redemption, she must "die to sin" (Rom. 6:
10 -11). Her death symbolizes her complete redemption. But her story does not

die. Her daughter Tahmeroo carries on Catharine's productive work as a great

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leader by keeping her mother's legend alive; thus, the ability of women to be
great leaders remains a consistent narrative of possibility.
9W

Queen Esther represents the other end of the spectrum. Her story is the
representative anecdote of "woman run amok." Thoroughly depraved, Esther
exemplifies the perceived conelation between women and witches in Western
culture.11 Stephens' description likens her to the typical witch.

Esther['s garments were] gathered at the bosom by a small stiletto, with a

. . . keen blade that glittered like the tongue of a viper. . . . Her hair was

white as snow, silvery as moonlight, and so abundant, even at eighty

years of age, that it folded about her head in a single coil, like a turban.

The high forehead, the aquiline nose, curved with time, like the beak of an

eagle, and the sharp, restless eyes, stood out from beneath this woof of

hair stern and clear, as if chiseled from stone. (195—6)
These physical characteristics - particularly the beaked nose, the sharp eyes,
and the white hair coiled high on the head like a witch's hat -— resemble the
traditional witch and identify her with the evil and mystery surrounding witches.
She is continually described as cold hearted and frequently compared to stone.
Others consider her "mad" (199). Stephens even writes that Esther is "less
human" than the "savages" she leads (366). But it is Esther's obsession with
mayhem and murder, with the spilling of blood that separates her from other
human beings. Even Tahmeroo, who fears the old woman, chides her, "blood,
always blood - I am sick of vengeance" (227).

Esther is the unredeemed -- defiant to the last breath. She symbolizes the
fears that both men and women in the nineteenth century may have held about
women in power. In her lust for power, she is more violent and ruthless than any

man. She becomes not just unsexed by power, but demonic, not just inhumane,

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but inhuman. Her leadership results in the destruction not only of the bountiful
village cultivated under Catharine's reign, but also of the tribe itself. If her story
were unopposed, readers might rightfully assume that Stephens does not
advocate greater power for women in civic affairs. But through the contrast of
her story with Catharine's, a different message emerges. Women can be civic
leaders, but they must be ever vigilant against the corrupting influences of power
by remaining true to their womanly selves and close to the God whom they serve
— qualities that will guide them to use their power for the benefit of all.

Mary ang Jana

Mary's story demonstrates that womanliness does not mean weakness.
Although she is considered by others to be disabled, Mary is fully capable of
arduous physical labor, suggesting that disability is a social construction in the
eyes of the beholder. Mary also has all the cardinal virtues of True Womanhood
- piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness — yet she is denied the rewards
of True Womanhood (husband and children) solely on the basis of her physical
appearance. On the other hand, her sister Jane, who has none of the virtues of
True Womanhood but is beautiful, gains the hero, Edward. Although Mary
secretly loves Edward, she knows that her deformity prevents her from being
loved as others are (9).

The most significant contrast between Mary and Jane are those virtues so
integral to the ideal woman of the nineteth century. Mary, despite her
handicap and the knowledge that it means she can never marry, remains
generous and kind to all she meets. Jane, on the other hand, is self-centered

and cruel, particularty to Mary. She invites Wrntermoot, who had so callously

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called Mary a "hunchback" in front of schoolmates, to her birthday party, fully
realizing how Mary will feel. During the aborted elopement with Butler, Jane fails
to defend Mary when he calls her “the little Hunchback” and a ‘lying imp” (126).
After the incident, Jane is more concerned about her own reputation than Mary’s
feelings.

Ironically, it is the able—bodied Jane who is actually dependent. For
example, she demonstrates little skill at "feminine needlework. . . . [the would
put her work on Mary‘s lap with pretty childish petulance, asking Mary for help”
(233). And even after Grandmother Derwent declares that Jane has become
“industrious,” Jane shows herself to be clinging and dependent during the Indian
uprising, where she depends on Edward and Mary to make all the decisions for
her. Furthermore, since readers see much more of Jane as the petulant, selfish,
and cruel child, and very little of her as the competent, worthy woman, her
transformation remains questionable.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson believes that “the disabled figure [in fiction]
operates as the vividly embodied, stigmatized other whose social role is to
symbolically free the privileged, idealized figure of the American self from the
vagaries and vulnerabilities of embodiment' (7). Such a description certainly
applies to Mary, the agent who frees Jane from the vulnerabilities of embodiment
by acting as a distorted mirror of Jane's normalized beauty. For example, at one
point in the story Mary asks Jane, "am I not hideous to look upon?" (22). Mary
draws her to the water so that both girls' faces, equally beautiful, are reflected in
the pool. But only the faces show; Mary's "distorted" body is not reflected. In
fact, Stephens writes that with "the loveliness of her face concealed [Mary's] form

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seemed scarcely human" (23), and that Mary walks with her face "bent to the
ground" (165), leaving readers to conclude that Mary is indeed "hideous to look
upon." As the "vividly embodied, stigmatized other," Mary makes Jane appear
comparatively "privileged [and] idealized." But not only that, twice she actually
offers up her body to save Jane: first, when Mary prevents Jane’s impulsive
elopement with Butler, and second, when to escape an Indian attack the girls and
their grandmother cling to a log floating in the river. Mary, noticing it will not
support the weight of all three, slips off so that “the old grand-dame and that
beautiful sister should be saved” (Mary Derwent 333). That Mary herself is
rescued does not diminish the significance of her self-sacrificial act.

The emphasis Stephens places on the physical capability of the "disabled"
Mary not only interrogates the meaning of disability, but also elicits the question
of why she is represented as disabled at all. The meaning of disability is so
destabilized by the physical feats and endurance of Mary so as to suggest that it
holds more meaning than just her physical nature and appearance. Burke's
notion of ratios helps solve this riddle. An & and all its component parts must
be consistent with the scene. Since the saga is gender relations in the
nineteenth-century, which place white women within the confines of the home
and prevent them from freely developing their talents and abilities, the agam
(disability) must fit within that ideal. Mary has the requisite characteristics of True
Women, even though she is considered "disabled" - equating True Womanhood
with disability. However, her actions reveal that she is not disabled at all,
confounding that equation. Perhaps the transformation that Stephens advocates
is that even though society views True Womanhood (disabling though it may be)

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as the appropriate mode of action for women, women need not be disabled by it.
Such an interpretation is further supported when we, following Burke's
recommendation, use what is known about an author to complement textual
analysis (PLF 23). Stephens wrote other novels featuring traditional non-
disabled heroines who blatantly disregard the most disabling feature of True
Womanhood - submission to male authority.12 Freed from this precept, women
can become independent, unfettered by the prosthetic support of True
Womanhood. While it is clear that Jane will never move beyond the sphere of
True Womanhood, both Mary and Tahmeroo, daughters of the redeemed
Catharine, enact a more physically and mentally active type of womanhood - one
that engages in civic affairs. Mary administers her wealth and estates, and
Tahmeroo leads her people to a new life.
13.9mm

As noted in the previous section on Tahmeroo in Representations of
Race, Stephens tends to equate "lndianly" behavior with "masculine" behavior,
making it difficult to separate representations of race from those of gender.
Tahmeroo's redemption process transforms her into an acceptable model of
womanhood by washing away her negative lndianly characteristics. However,
from her first appearance in the novel, Tahmeroo has striking admirable
characteristics. She is brave, physically and mentally strong, and loyal - traits
befitting the new model of womanhood Stephens proposes. If Mary's role in the
novel is to deconstruct True Womanhood as an ideal, Tahmeroo's purpose is to
construct a new, more active womanhood ideal. At the end of the novel, once

Butler's death frees her from the debilitating passion he represents, Tahmeroo

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emerges as a capable leader of her people. As she leads them away from the
death and destruction of Queen Esther‘s regime, her youth and vigor symbolize
rebirth and the flowering that will follow in her wake.

W

Catherine and Gi-en-gwa-tah

When Gi-en-gwa-tah makes his first advances toward Catharine upon her
arrival in the wilderness, she rejects him, incurring Esther's wrath. After Murray
and his family are taken prisoner and are to be sacrificed, Catharine appeals to
Esther, but is met with a "cold sneer that froze [Catharine] to the heart" (96).
Catharine alone could prevent the torturous deaths of the captured whites, and
her only recourse was to agree to marry Gi-en-gwa-tah. This racially inverted
Pocahontas narrative features a white woman saving the life of a white man from
death at the hands of Indians over whom she has some political power.”

While literary references to the Pocahontas story fiequently, at least
subliminally, hint that Indian women prefer white men as marriage partners, in
this inscription Stephens clearly demonstrates Catharine's disgust at the idea of
marrying an Indian. As Catharine explains "[mjy heart recoiled at the unnatural
suggestion" (95). Whereas in Malaeska Stephens provides other possible
interpretations for the term "unnatural" as a descriptor for intermarriage, in this
case, the meaning is crystal-clear - the marriage of a white woman to an Indian
man is unnatural because it is "at variance with natural feeling or moral
standards" (050).“

Gender and race account for the different perceptions of Catharine's and
Malaeska's marriages. First of all, male writers such as Cooper established the

210

idea of intermarriage between white women and Indian men as "morally
repugnant" (Wardrop 62), in part by representing even the suggestion of it as a
threat to the woman's chastity. Because Indians in white fiction represent the
opposite of civilized life, they are "a danger to [both] ethnic and sexual
boundaries" (Mitchell 130). Caren Deming points out, "white women in America
have [been assigned] a 'receptacle' function where culture is concerned. Bearing
the white civilization to the frontier, their main function is to preserve it" (90).
"Bearing the white civilization" also means bearing white children. A white
woman who marries an Indian will be derelict in this duty. On the other hand, no
comparable moral standard is required of Indian women; marriage between them
and white men "is viewed as a natural occurrence" (Deming 94).

Although Catharine is horrified at the prospect of marrying an Indian, her
feelings accord with nineteenth-century notions of appropriate white womanhood.
She agrees to many Gi-en-gwa-tah solely to ransom Munay and his family, but
she claims to respect Gi-en—gwa-tah as a man and as a person. She admires his
intelligence and comments that he had "all the elements of a warrior and a
statesman" (94). Wnile race is never specifically mentioned as the factor most
troubling to Catharine, no other explanation makes sense. Gi-en-gwa-tah as a
person is not the problem; crossing the racial boundaries disturbs her.

The marriage never would have taken place, had it not been to save
Murray. But once Catharine recognizes Murray as one of the white captives, a
"strong resolve of self-sacrifice" displaces her fears and disgust, and she
immediately agrees to marry Gi-en-gwa-tah if he will free the captives (98). As

she admits, "in that moment of my stern resolve, my heart would not have shrunk

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from its purpose though the fang of an adder had been fixed in it" (99). Because
her motives for marrying Gi-en-gwa-tah are not love, nor any of the typical
reasons one marries, the act of marrying has an ambiguous quality - marriage,
self-sacrifice, and ransom all describe the act. Catharine is the agam, for it is her
word that saves Murray and allows the marriage to take place. Her "self-
sacrifice" constitutes the agagay by which the act is accomplished. The gym
is not to marry Gi-en—gwa-tah, but to save Murray. And the m is nineteenth-
century race and gender relations in which such an act can occur.

But the situation is much more complex, as a discussion of ratios can help
clarify. Both race and gender ideologies of the scene insist that intermarriage of
white women with Indian men is improper and counterproductive to the goals of
white society; so in one sense, Catharine's act crosses the bounds of white
propriety, albeit unwillingly. However, women also are to be self-sacrificing, in
accordance with gender ideologies of the scene; in this case, her act remains
within the prescribed parameters. In other words gender imperatives dictate
conflicting solutions for the situation - it is a no-win situation. Catharine allows
her "self" to be sacrificed as ransom for the life of the man she cannot stop
loving. Thus, the marriage becomes suggestive of the "forced marriages" that
appear in newspaper accounts about white captives of the Indians. In fact,
before Catharine realizes who the white captives are, she believed that "it was far
better that blood should be shed than I should force my heart to consummate a
union so horrible as mine with this savage" (97 my emphasis). Catharine is
forced to accept the marriage proposal of Gi-en-gwa-tah to save Munay's lite.
Gi—en-gwa-tah, although he loves her and wants to marry her, did not "yield [her]

212

the homage which was so readily rendered by the more ignorant of his tribe"
(94). In other words, he is a manly man in the nineteenth-century patriarchal
tradition - worthy of a good woman. He will only accept one ransom for the lives
of Murray and his family, her promise of marriage. Imperatives of the purpose-
act ratio compel Catharine to acquiesce, for Catharine's m (to save
Murray) can only be achieved by the agt of marrying Gi-en-gwa-tah.

Even though the marriage begins inauspiciously, Catharine keeps her
word and maintains her respect for Gi-en-gwa-tah. He builds her a fine house,
and they have a daughter on whom she dotes. Although readers are privy to
little of her domestic life with Gi—en—gwa-tah, it is clear he loves and admires her.
Only when the marriage is in decline do readers learn that Catherine and Gi-en—
gwa-tah had developed a deeper understanding of one another. Butler, intent
upon weakening Catharine's power, callously reveals that Murray is alive, in
America, and knows of Catharine's bargain to save his life. When Catharine
hears this, she is devastated. Gi-en-gwa-tah notes her anguish, and
remembering the circumstances surrounding her acceptance of his proposal,
feels betrayed: "His savage heart was stung with memories to which those few
cruel words [of Butler] had given a bitter interpretation" (210). Catharine and Gi-
en-gwa-tah separately spend the night agonizing over Butler's revelations. Then,
as Stephens reports: "The next day Catharine and the chief recognized each
other as ever. But, alas! in their souls they never met again" (211).

Although this statement implies that Catharine and Gi-en-gwa-tah had a
soulful relationship during their long marriage, that readers only learn of it after it

has ended seems significant. It suggests that Stephens hopes to lead readers to

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see the marriage more as "self-sacrifice" than as a "marriage of the minds." That
neither Gi-en-gwa-tah nor the domestic arrangements of the marriage are
developed to any great extent promotes this view. Catharine is redeemable
because her motives were not selfish, but selfless. Had she manied the chief to
gain more power in the tribe, as Esther had done, she might have been as
unrepentant. But the development of the marriage into a more profound
understanding in which their souls met indicates that crossing racial boundaries
does not necessarily result in a degeneration of the spirit. And Tahmeroo, as
one who grows into an ideal model, represents the idea that it does not dictate
the degeneration of future generations either.
Tahmeroo and Butler

The maniage of Tahmeroo and Butler differs greatly from that of Catharine
and Gi-en-gwa-tah, although it shares some similarities. Neither marriage is
entered into with full faith and love. Tahmeroo loves Butler, but blindly,
obsessively. She cannot see his true colors. Originally, Butler marries
Tahmeroo in an Indian-style ceremony, which whites do not recognize or accept
as lawful, for his own deceitful purposes - lust and power. Tahmeroo is beautiful
and he desires her, but his marriage to her will also strengthen his ties to her
father and solidify Indian-British alliances, increasing his stature with both
groups. He never intends to remain with her. But when he Ieams that his
marriage to her also represents financial rewards, he is willing to go through the
motions of a white, Christian ceremony, even though he still has no intention of
keeping his vows. Just as he formerly planned to use her sexually, he now

intends to use her financially as well, for his own personal gain. In other words,

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like Catharine‘s pledge to Gi-en-gwa-tah, he does not enter into the marriage with
honesty and love.

However, while Catharine grows to respect her husband and they develop
a more profound spiritual basis for their relationship, Butler never moves beyond
his sordid motives. The maniage cannot thrive because Butler is evil and self-
absorbed. Neither can Tahmeroo nurture the relationship because she is too
passionate, too trusting, too oblivious to the facts. She loves him despite all
evidence that he has no respect for her or their marriage vows. She clings to him
because she believes she cannot live without him. As a nonwhite woman, she is
not subject to any of the sexual or racial impropriety that so haunted her mother
prior to her marriage to Gi-en-gwa-tah. However, her passion for such a
reprobate undermines her thinking and actions. Until he dies and she is freed
from the enthrallment which captivates her, she cannot develop into the strong,
resolute leader her people need.
Conclusion

Even though Tahmeroo's marriage fails, race is not the cause. Butler's
deception and selfishness doom the relationship. However, racial attitudes in the
United States at the time the novel was published in 1858 do make a difference
in how the marriage is portrayed, as the conflicting denouement of the British
sixpenny novel version (1862) demonstrates. The British edition follows the
original 1838 serialized version of the story. In this narrative most of Butler's
more despicable actions are minimized or eliminated, although his attempted
elopement with Jane just after his Christian marriage to Tahmeroo remains

because that incident connects Mary to Catharine. But in this rendition Butler is

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the son of Munay, known as Colonel Butler in America (Beadle (1862): 174).
Chastened by his father's death in the attempt to save Jane and Edward, the
very people that he himself had sought to murder during the battles on
Monockonok Island, Butler repents and becomes the loving husband of
Tahmeroo. Mary is not Catharine's daughter in this version, so Tahmeroo
inherits Catharine's estates in England, where "her Indian blood [is] . . . no
reproach to her" (135). In other words, in the mid-nineteenth—oentury. British
readers were perceived as less racially prejudiced than American readers, so the
in the British dime novel Butler lives and is redeemed, and the maniage develops
into a happy, equitable alliance.

In the American novel, Butler, who as an enemy of the American patriots
is painted in much darker colors, must die. Racist attitudes of society shape this
version because American readers at mid-century are considered less likely to
accept a mixed-race marriage, so the marriage must also die. In this rendition,
Tahmeroo is dispossessed by Mary's right, as the eldest daughter, to Catharine's
wealth. Butler deserts her and returns to America. Although she is encouraged
to remain with Mary and her family, Tahmeroo has not shaken her obsessive
love for Butler, so she follows him back to America. When she discovers he has
died, she seeks out her tribe and, doubly dispossessed, finds their lands in wins
and the tribe nearly destroyed through Esther's disastrous leadership. Tahmeroo
leads the remnants of her tribe west to start a new life. Thus, like most Indians in
nineteenth-century American fiction, she disappears from the world of whites,
fading into the vast West of the American continent. Further substantiating

Maddox's insistence that Indians must either be removed or exten'ninated,

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Tahmeroo and her father Gi-en-gwa-tah remove themselves to the far West
where they pose no threat to white American settlement in the post-
Revolutionary period setting of the novel.

These conflicting plot resolutions suggest that although the American
public was willing to accept assimilation of Native Americans into white culture in
1838, albeit assimilation at 3 remove across the Atlantic Ocean, twenty years
later it was not, or at least Stephens may have believed it was l'lot.'5 Many
factors contribute to these'changing ideologies. The increased volume of settlers
moving west at mid-century escalated the number of violent encounters between
whites and Native Americans. These clashes were widely/wildly reported in the
press, coloring many white Americans' perceptions of Indians. Furthermore, by
mid-century scientific discourses, which also appeared in the popular press,
promoted polygenesis, suggesting that Indians were a separate, inferior species
to whites. These elements combined with belief in white American progress, as
demonstrated by the exponential growth of invention and technology, spelled
doom for those outside "civilization."

While Stephens' own perceptions of Indians remain ambiguous, her later
Indian tales tend to be more racist than Malaeska and Mary Derwent, suggesting
that her ideologies had changed along with the majority of American society.
However, race is not the central issue in Mary Derwent. Expanded roles for
women concern Stephens more than the eventual fate of Native Americans.
Responding to the hopes and fears of Americans regarding women's proper
place in civic affairs, Stephens posits that women's leadership can have a

positive effect on the lives of ordinary citizens, but improvement of society must

217

be the goal of such governance, not power itself. Using the stories of Esther,
Catharine, and Tahmeroo, Stephens demonstrates the pitfalls and the
possibilities of women's leadership.

As three generations they also represent the past, present, and firture of
women's leadership in civic affairs. The representative anecdote of Esther's
story is that of the evil witch - the woman who uses her power to bring tragedy
and misfortune to all she touches. But the days of witchcraft are past. Esther
dies and with her the evil she represents. People need not fear women's
leadership as the representative anecdote of Catharine reveals. Catharine's
narrative hints that female power can be used for benevolent purposes, but that
women in positions of authority must guard against godlessness which can lead
them to seek power for its own sake rather than for the benefit of all people.
Catharine represents the present - the women of the mid-nineteenth-century
who were "unsexing" themselves to gain women's rights in the public forum.
Catharine's story is a parable - a cautionary tale - warning women to remain
womanly regardless of where life may take them, whether it be the wilderness of
America or positions of public service in the "civilized" world. Mary retains her
womanliness and represents an acceptable, traditional, contemporary role for
women leaders - that of benefactress. Stephens tells us, "[gjravely and quietly,
like one who takes up a pleasant duty, the young Countess of Granby assumed
the great power of her birthright," which provided her "ample scope" for
"remedying the evils" of civilization (378). Stephens connects the loveliness of
womanhood with "moral goodness" (289). Wlthout that quality women's

leadership is no different from man‘s and may deteriorate into disaster, as

218

Esther's ascendency over the Shawnee suggests. Tahmeroo's tale is the
promise of tomorrow when women will be accorded leadership of society based
on their ability to guide people in the proper direction. Tahmeroo has to come
through the fire of trial to prove herself worthy. Baptized by the waters of self-
sacrifice, she affirms her worthinessMomanliness. She will lead her people
wisely with the temperance she gained in her struggle to overcome her own
passions. Women can lead, not for the power leadership represents, but for
opportunities for service to others that it provides.

The next chapter also discusses women's leadership, but its picture is
much darker. In a trilogy of novels regarding women leaders, Stephens seems to
back away from the possibilities and dwell more on the pitfalls. In these later
dime novels, Stephens' representations of Indians, both male and female, tend to
be less favorable and to support the idea that Indians are savages. Questions of
race tend to take precedence over questions of gender. However, in the
Mahaska trilogy, Stephens does return to the incisive critique of patriarchy that

resonated so strongly in Malaeska.

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Endnotes

‘ Stephens uses published histories of the events in creating her story, notably, Isaac
Chapman, Sketch of the History of Wyoming (Wilkes-Barre: Sharp D. Lewis, 1830); Benson J.
Lossing, The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution, Vol. 1 (New York, Harper, 1851); and,
Charles Miner, History of Wyoming, in a Series of Letters from Charles Miner to His Son, William
Penn Miner (Philadelphia: Crissy, 1845). In fact, as Henning notes, "[t]he descriptive language
of those sources appears almost indistinguishable from hers" (Beyond 145, n. 9). While
Stephens emphasizes the historical role of the white woman leader of the Iroquois, Queen
Esther, she makes little use of the fact that the Iroquois were a matrilineal society. Interestingly,
however, she applies this concept to the white Granby family peerage in which "the Granby
honors descended alike to male and female heirs" (Mary Derwent 62).

. 2 The island, according to Lossing, is actually Monockasy Island. Why Stephens
fictionalized the name of the island is unknown.

3 There is much confusion about the historical Catharine Montour. Apparently, more than
one real person of this name with connections to Seneca peOples existed in eighteenth-century
Pennsylvania. According to John Freeze in "Madame Montour," the Catharine who called herself
"Queen Esther" was a "French half-breed who had a French Governor of Canada for [her] father"
(81 -2). Miner and Lossing agree that the historical Queen Esther was of mixed parentage,
although Stephens makes her white in her narrative. Freeze insists that the Catharine Montour
for whom Montour‘s Ridge and other locations in Pennsylvania were named "was a French
Canadian without any admixture of Indian blood - that she was educated — [and] that she
preferred the Indian custom, and roving unsettled habit of life . . ." (81). According to him this
white Catharine married a mixed-blood Seneca, Roland Montour. Unfortunately Freeze does not
give his sources for his information. Whether Stephens, who was definitely aware of Miner's and
Lossing's works, had access to some source that suggested that Catharine Montour was white,
which she then used to develop her white women leaders of the Indians, or whether she simply
used creative license to further her own goals is unclear. Ascertainable facts are that there was a
mixed-blood woman named Catharine Montour, also known as Queen Esther, who had

220

considerable influence among the Seneca, and that Stephens' fictional Catharine Montour bears
little resemblance to any historical person by that name.

‘ In the serial and the British Sixpenny novel, Stephens calls the tribe Mohawks; in the
1858 book, she changes it to the Shawnee. Although the Shawnee were not part of the Iroquois
Confederacy (Six Nations), both the Mohawk and the Shawnee peoples joined the British in
fighting against the Nnericans during the American Revolution. However, such blending of fact
and fiction is typical of while authors and demonstrates their lack of understanding about Native
Americans. For many, an Indian was an Indian.

5 Although the reported amounts of the prize vary from $ 200 to S 400 (Edgar Allan Poe
seems to have been the source for mistakenly inflated prize value, which was repeated by later
authors), a notice attached to the beginning of the serial as it appeared the 1838 magazine
clearly states that Stephens won $200 for it. To absolve themselves of charges of favoritism, as
Stephens had just become editor of Ladies Companion, the note also explains that she had
entered the story under a pseudonym, Mrs. Catharine Rogers, and that at the time the prize was
awarded, Stephens was not yet connected with the magazine. Regardless of any shenanigans
that may have been involved in the contest, the story itself was highly popular.

5 In May of 1838, Angelina Grimké delivered a stirring speech in Pennsylvania Hall
supporting the abolition of slavery, while a mob outside jeered, threw rocks, and otherwise
attempted to dismpt the meeting. Because many churches and other public facilities were afraid
to allow abolitionists a public podium, abolitionists raised money to build the hall, as a symbol of
free speech, to provide a place where he society, and other groups interested in moral causes,
could present their views. Later that night the mob destroyed the building, burning it to the
ground.

7 Some of her best uses of comparison and contrast occur in her two best-selling social
novels. In Fashion and Famine (1854) and The Old Homestead (1855) she not only contrasts the
lives of the poor with the rich but she is also one of the first American authors to compare city life
unfavorably with country life (Papashvily 143).

a This is also a subversive method of critiquing male behavior.

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9 By choosing to move west rather than being removed by whites, Gi-en-gwa-tah
absolves whites of guilt for taking over Indian lands. Paola Gemme takes this interpretation even
farther. In "Rewriting the Indian Tale," she contends that because Tahmeroo rejects Mlite offers
to live in white civilization, her choice of going west places the onus of land dispossession on
Indians and their "natural unredressable savagism" and not on whites. She sees Mary Derwent
"as a legitimization of contemporary lndian policy, which pursued the segregation rather than the
integration of Native Americans" (384).

'° Although eariy white accounts of Indian customs and life, including Heckewelder's
(History 193), detail the peoples' use of agriculture to raise food crops, Stephens omits this fact,
insinuating that Catharine's influence over the Indians had established agriculture as well as the
more settled life that such agrarian pursuits allow.

" See, for example, Chapter 5 of The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Wrtchcralt in
Colonial New England by Carol. F. Karlsen, which provides a brief history of the correlation of
women with witchcraft.

‘2 For example in Stephens' The Old Homestead, several women characters are "strong-
minded" and refuse to kowtow to male authority; however, each maintains womanly dignity and
demeanor.

’3 One interesting aspect of this rescue is that Catharine wields some power over the
tribe, as drdthereal Pocahontas asthedaughterofPowhatan, leaderofaconfederacyof
numerous small tribes in the Chesapeake area.

“ The connotation of sexual impropriety for the term "unnatural“ is made even more
obvious by the nineteenth-century usage example cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. It
comes from Sir Walter Scott and refers to "incea," thus emphasizing the connection between the
term and sexual deviance. Furthermore, Biblical references to sexual impropriety use the word
"unnatural" to describe such "vices" (Rom. 1:26; Jude 1:7).

'5 However, Stephens returns to the assimilationist plot in her dime novels written during
the Civil War, which suggeststhat shewas unwillingto give upthehopeforthe eventual

assimilation of Indians into white culture.

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CHAPTER 5
“WHITE OR RED?” COMPARISON AND CONTRAST IN ESTHER: A STORY
OF THE OREGON TRAIL AND THE MAHASKA TRILOGY

Although the plots of Esther? A Story of the Oregon Trail and the Mahaska
trilogy differ greatly, Stephens uses comparison and contrast in both narratives
as a primary rhetorical device to develop paired characters - one white, one
Native American - to pose the question: What difference does race really make?
For example, Esther features two young women, Esther, a white woman heading
west and Waupee, a member of the Sioux nation. Both are beautiful. But race
and culture — the only ostensible differences between them - drastically affect
their outcomes in the narrative: Esther marries the hero, while Waupee dies of a
broken heart. The Mahaska trilogy takes a similar approach. In these novels two
step-sisters, one blonde and pale, the other half white, half lndian, not only are
compared and contrasted, but they compete for the affection of the same white
men. The men’s preference for the white woman drives the mixed blood
character to seek vengeance on the whites who reject her. Though ooncems
about race take precedence over gender in both nanatives, Stephens
simultaneously manages to provide social commentary on women and their
place in society.

This chapter examines how Stephens adopts comparison and contrast as
a strategy to "encompass and confront" contemporary ideologies about women
and Indians and to offer alternative perspectives on these issues. Through

various sets of paired characters, Stephens discredits racial prejudice and

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stereotypes about Indians by highlighting the similarities between Indians and
whites. She invites readers to confront their own prejudice by presenting fictional
characters' encounters with their racial biases. Because these tales emphasize
questions of race, Stephens returns to the nature/nurture debate inherent in
discussions of race in the nineteenth century and posits that nurture is more
significant than nature in establishing moral character. She also stresses
women's capabilities to act in the wider realm beyond the home, comparing and
contrasting active women with their passive counterparts. This chapter also
reveals how Stephens uses a palimpsest to blame white males for much of the
trouble besetting both Indians and women.
The Stories as Female-Centered Myths

Unlike Mary Deni/ant, which is based on historical events, Esther and the
Mahaska narrative are imaginary tales conceived by Stephens. Written
specifically as dime novels for dime novel audiences, they tend to replicate more
closely, although in female-centered ways, the more traditional western
adventure, which was quickly becoming a staple of the dime novel genre. In
them Stephens reverses certain conventions of the male-centered western. In
these tales, the passive White woman who faints at the slightest danger, typical of
the heroine in male-authored novels, appears as a pale shadow of a woman in
comparison to her stronger, more vibrant, lndian sister. The role of white men as
protectors of white women is also undermined in these stories as Indian or
mixed-blood men prove their mettle and save white women captured by Indians.
Furthermore, in the trilogy, men, both white and Indian, are ancillaries of women;

that is, they must mact to women's actions, inverting the stereotypical plot.

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Contrary to her use of female heroines in Malaeska and Mary Derwent,
Stephens uses the cautionary tale with flawed women characters to warn women
of the hazards of liberty and freedom of choice in these later female-centered
myths. Both protagonists abuse their liberty: Esther through thoughtless
wandering alone in the wilderness, Mahaska through blind ambition. On the
surface, Esther A Story of the Oregon Trail appears to be a typical novel of the
American West, complete with scenes of man versus nature, savage Indians,
and the perennial damsel in distress, whose virtue is threatened by "bad" men.
However, Stephens sets up these familiar scenarios, in part, to satirize the
passive heroines of the Cooperian tradition. Comparison and contrast of Esther
and Waupee, quickly reveals that Waupee, not Esther, is the real heroine;
Esther‘s passive nature is gently, but firmly, chided. In this novel Stephens also
points out that the romantic ideal of "happily ever after" is often chimerical, as
she emphasizes how Waupee's husband of less than a month has become
enamored of a beautiful woman, Esther, whom he only knows by sight.

The Mahaska trilogy is the darkest of Stephens' frontier stories. The main
character, Katherine/Mahaska, rejected by whites, rejects them as well and tums
"savage." When she fails to get the love she seeks among whites, she lusts after
power over the Indians instead. As in the encoded message in Mary Dement,
Stephens warns readers of Mahaska that power can be a corrupting force,
especially when feminine qualities are abandoned. However, unlike Mary
Derwent, the tale of Mahaska has no positive female role models to
counterbalance the tragic results of overweening ambition. Mahaska's lust for

absolute power at any cost and her abandonment of womanliness take center

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stage, covering the more subversive plot which indicates that patriarchal policies
of exclusion promote "savage" aggression against whites who think they are
above Indians and thus exclude them from white society. However, even though
Mahaska is an antihero who abandons her womanly principles, her tale is a
thrilling adventure of a woman who lords over men and of men who kowtow to
her authority, reversing the typical male plot.

Plot Summaries

Eataar: A $19!! at tha Oman Tag”

This novel, written in 1862, follows the adventures of Esther Morse, a
young white woman who is captured by the villainous Black Eagle, a Dacotah
lndian, who ostensibly plans to sell her to an even more nefarious Mormon.
Actually, he plans to keep her as his wife and collect gold from the Mormon as
well. Esther claims that rather than be his bride, she will "die first!" (38).
Waupee, her beautiful lndian friend and Black Eagle's bride of less than a month,
provides Esther with a knife for whatever purpose she may deem necessary.
Two men, Kirk Walterrnyer, a Natty Bumppo type, and Claude LaClide, a wealthy
man who is one-quarter Indian, attempt to rescue her, but it is Claude, the hero,
dressed in Indian garb and calling himself Osse'o, who saves her. Claude,
raised in St. Louis, has abandoned civilization for the world of his lndian
ancestors when his fiancee proved faithless and her racist remarks led to his
mixed-blood lndian mother‘s fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, Kirk successfully
battles a prairie fire and saves Waupee, despondent over Black Eagle's
faithlessness, fiom committing suicide. In the climax all six main characters meet

up. In the ensuing melee, Black Eagle kills the Mormon, then dies himself.

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Claude is injured, but Waupee treats the wound before she goes down to the
grave of her husband where she dies of a broken heart. Claude, his true "white"
identity revealed, marries Esther, and Kirk rides off into the sunset.
Tha Mahaska Trilggy

In 1863-4, Stephens wrote a trilogy of dime novels: #56, Ahmo's Plot, or
The Govemor's lndian Child; it 63, Mahaska, or The Indian Princess; and, it 70,
The Indian Queen, which follows the misfortunes of Katherine/Mahaska, the
mixed-blood daughter of Frontenac, the French Canadian Governor. Katherine
is rejected by the white man she loves: her father and Gaston La Guy, who
marries her step-sister, Adele. Katherine's lndian grandmother, Ahmo, has
taught-her that her lndian name, Mahaska, means "Avenger" and that she must
live up to her name and her destiny as a great leader of her people. Enthralled by
the idea of power, Mahaska seeks revenge on whites, particularly Adele, whom
Mahaska believes has wronged her. Mahaska leaves white civilization and joins
the Seneca as a leader. She arranges for the Indians to kidnap Adele and vows
to marry the man who kills Gaston, who has rescued Adele. Gi-en-gwa-tah,1 a
Seneca chief, is mistakenly identified as the man who has fulfilled her desire, but
in actuality, he has only wounded Gaston. Mahaska remains true to her word.
Even though the idea is "repugnant" to her, she marries Gi-en-gwa-tah, but only
because she sees no other means to gain her ultimate goal - total power over
the Indians.

To avenge the French who rejected her, she secretly plots to break the Six
Nation's alliance with the French and team up with the English. She tries to gain

Gi-en—gwa-tah's support for this idea, but he resists. She comes to hate him; and

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to increase her power, she continually undermines him in the eyes of the tribal
council whenever he is away. Although motherhood softens her fury, it does
nothing to curb her desire to go out on the warpath (53). To further enhance her
power over the "superstitious" Indians, she arranges for gifts fiom the English to
seem like gifts of the Great Spirit. When Gaston returns to Canada to take over
the post of Governor, Mahaska again has Adele kidnapmd. But this time, Gi-en-
gwa-tah, who has seen through Mahaska's mysterious powers and understands
her true motives, foils the attempt. Mahaska has her henchmen arrest him, and
she brings him before the tribal council and the people. She demands that the
council be delayed until she has had time to commune with the Spirits, but Gi-en-
gwa-tah urges them not wait upon the wiles of a woman. When the Elder,
Upepah, agrees with him, she tries to kill Gi-en-gwa-tah, but her tomahawk kills
Upepah instead. This turns the people against her. She withdraws, and Gi-en-
gwa-tah's eloquence brings the people to their senses. Mahaska is banished
and goes off in her canoe. The next day, the canoe is found empty: "Mahaska,
the Indian Queen, was no more’ (112).
Dramatistic Analyses
Eathar? A Stag 9f {ha Om Tail

The representative anecdote in this novel is an inversion of the traditional
captivity narrative in which a white woman is saved from "a fate worse than a
thousand deaths" (intermarriage) by the white hero. By creating a hero who is
one-quarter Indian and by placing the question of his race at the center of
Esther's thoughts, Stephens conflonts the moral dilemma: What difference does

race really make? This question became more important in American society as

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the Civil War raged over the right of one race to enslave another and as hordes
of whites moved West, displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands.
Whether or not race makes a difference in a person's character was a boiling
political question during this period, but Stephens poses the problem in terms of
a romantic/domestic relationship. From the moment ClaudelOsse'o arrives on
the scene, Esther feels as if "she had gained a protector” (56), but she is
obsessed with determining whether he is white or Indian. Although Stephens,
from her first lines, clearly provides her answer to the conundrum by indicating
that all people are ultimately the same, she simultaneously reinscribes perceived
differences by employing the racial stereotypes of her day to describe both good
and bad Indian characters.

Whites do not inevitably compare favorably with Indians. Stephens
creates several sets of comparable characters, similar in age and sex, to
demonstrate that race does not necessarily dictate moral character. Particularly
through her comparison and contrast of Esther and Waupee, Stephens
emphasizes that race really makes little difference in a person's character. A
pentadic analysis of the novel reveals that the primary agams are those whose
agta reveal that race is a moot point for predicting behavior. Thus race is the
agangy that reveals the gm of the novel, which is to question its significance
as a predictor of human behavior. Interestingly, as the only lndian novel by
Stephens which is not set in the far past, its m is less metaphorical than her
other frontier novels because it clearly represents nineteenth-century American
society. Yet it is also the most nostalgic, raising the issue of the "vanishing"

Ind ian to a felt accompli.

229

The overall pentadic analysis reveals that, in this novel, agan_t is again the
most important term because agents either demonstrate that race makes no
difference or are forced to examine their own racial prejudices.

Agent = Waupee (a positive example of active womanhood and proof that full-
blooded Indians can have high moral standards); co-agents =
ClaudelOsse'o (a mixed blood character who demonstrates racial mixing
does not lead to degeneracy) and Kirk (a white man who is forced to
examine his own racial prejudices); counteragents = Esther (a negative
example of passive white womanhood, prejudiced against Indians) Black
Eagle (a negative example of Indian manhood) and Elelu Thomas (a
greedy Mormon and negative example of white manhood).

Agency = ways of being Indian/white; race.

Act = self-sacrifice; selfishness.

Scene = 19th century American society.

Purpose = to question/determine the difference race makes.

Although Esther does struggle against Black Eagle when he kidnaps her, most of

her acts, most notably fainting, are passive motion rather than motivated action.2

At one point in the story, she does manage to slip away unnoticed, but other than

that, she relies on the actions of others to save her from peril. Her only

motivated a_ct is her prejudicial assessment of Osse'o based solely on his race.

Waupee, on the other hand, actively participates in Esther’s struggle, at great

personal cost, providing her with a knife to escape and nearly killing Black Eagle.

Osse'o and Kirk also selflme struggle against the counter-agents. Their acts

lead readers to question contemporary racial prejudices that correlate particular

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types of behavior with specific racial traits. As might be expected counteragents'
acts are the opposite of agents', being selfish and motivated by personal gain.
To avoid reifying the racial stereotypes of the ignoble savage, Stephens creates
an equally sinister white man to counterbalance the evil lndian. By placing
certain characters in situations where they must come to terms with the
difference race makes in their acts and/or in the acts of the racial "other,"
Stephens "confronts and encompasses" a major problem that many in society
were trying to understand. Her fictional solutions provide readers with possible
responses to one of the burning questions of the day.
The Mahaska Trilagy

The trilogy represents a major change from Stephens' previous novels of
Indian women; Mahaska, even though she is half white, is heavily racialized and
stereotyped. Perhaps Stephens' publishers requested a sterner view of Indians
to increase sales. By the time these novels were published, Orville Vlctor was
the editor of Beadle dime novels (Stern, Publishers 39). The success of Beadle's
dime novels had spawned many competitors, and Victor had suggested that all
that authors needed to do to keep Beadle sales high was to "kill a few more
Indians" (Pearson 99). Thus, perhaps novels portraying Indians favorably were
no longer considered marketable. This could have been a significant concern for
Stephens. Her husband of 31 years died in 1862. While he never contributed as
much to the household income as did Stephens herself, with two children still at
home, she may have been concerned that she might not be able to support them
in the manner to which they had become accustomed. Furthermore, ever aware

of readers' tastes, Stephens probably realized that the recent wars between

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Native Americans and whites may have colored the attitudes of her reading
audiences.

However, even though this trilogy appears to be the most racist of
Stephens' lndian tales, it still insists that all Indians are not necessarily inferior to
whites. Through the characters of Chileli, Mahaska's ill-fated mother, and more
significantly, Gi-en-gwa-tah, Mahaska's loving husband, Stephens insists that
Indians can be good, faithful, and loving, as well as great leaders. And, if the
main plot centers on an Indian gone "savage," she is driven to it by white men
who exclude her from their society. Secondary plots and characters repeat
themes from Stephens' earlier novels that racial essentialism cannot adequately
define all "others" and that people must be judged by their character, not their
race.

Because the Mahaska trilogy is a cautionary tale, its dramatistic analysis
is complex. Mahaska's savagery develops because of uncaring, unthinking white
patriarchy. These novels indict such indifferent male leadership and warn that its
results can be devastating. Standing alone, the trilogy could be considered an
indictment of female leadership, but, as Stephens' other frontier novels reveal,
she believes that women should be more active in their society and culture. In
Mahaska's story Stephens reiterates the warning she issued in Mary Derwent,
that to be effective leaders women must remain womanly. Because Mahaska
fails to do this, her leadership is doomed; however, her experience of racial
antipathy and prejudice at the hands of white men initiates her vengeful spirit and

annihilates the last vestiges of womanliness from her heart and soul.

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The representative anecdote, then, of these novels recounts the
devastating results of men's continued leadership and policies of exclusion. It is
the story of white men using their power and privilege to maintain their position
and keep "others" subordinate by excluding them from "civiliz " life. Wrth the
country in the midst of a civil war and Indian wars raging in the West, Stephens
writes a novel that suggests that man's policies of exclusion must be held
accountable for the needless wholesale killing that their type of administration
has wrought. Had Mahaska's own father not recoiled from her as fiom one
unclean, she might never have left civilization, sought absolute power over her
tribe, and become a vicious killer. This theme is a faint palimpsest under the
cover story of the Shakespearean plot, "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."3
Stephens paints Mahaska's ambition, fury, and vengeance with broad and
brilliant strokes, but hiding beneath that portrait lies a distinct discontent with
patriarchy. As Bube points out:

the conventionality or deviance, conformity or rebellion dichotomy is the

key tension operating on many levels in Stephens' life and explaining its

major disjunctions: between her public pronouncements on "womanly"
behavior and her own social and professional activities and between the
gender norms she verbally promoted and her disturbing melodramatic

portrayals of Indian women in her frontier fiction. (49)

Stephens' fantasies of deviant women who move beyond the limits of patriarchal
civilization bespeak her own frustrations with the limits imposed on women and
"others" by white males.

A pentadic analysis of the Mahaska trilogy helps illuminate this covert

message.

Agent = Mahaska (mixed-blood woman who seeks revenge on whites after being

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rejected by the white man she loves), counteragents = Frontenac and

Gaston de LaGuy (the white men who reject Mahaska).
Act = going "savage"; rejecting "others" because they fail to meet racial and/or

gender criteria.
Agency = gender/racial characteristics; perceived notions of race and gender.
Scene = nineteenth-century American society.
Purpose = to demonstrate the effects of patriarchal policies of exclusion.
Although these three novels contain many other characters, Mahaska is the
primary 8.99113. for she is the one who goes "savage" and thereby exposes the
purpose of the narrative: just how ruinous the policies of white men can be.
Frontenac, the white father, is responsible for his daughter's existence, yet he
finds "her presence . . . almost painful" (Princess 15). His aga, from manying
Mahaska's mother without love simply to ease his own "loneliness," to rejecting
the daughter she bears him, reveal not only his shallowness, but his policies of
exclusion. The segregating guidelines by which he lives create a hierarchy
setting whites above Indians, men above women, separating husband from wife,
father from child. Gaston's agt of rejecting Mahaska's advances is more
understandable; he already loves and is betrothed to Adele, and Mahaska has
already become bitter over her father's rejection, so her motives are fraught with
deception. However, Gaston‘s act and words reveal that he believes "how
impossible [it would be] for a woman" to wield power over nations (Princess 60).
He prefers the demure Adele, a "weak girl" whose "clinging affection" (61) "fills
his [heart] thoroughly" (59). In other words, he represents male power and

privilege that seeks to keep women subordinate to man. His rejection seals

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Mahaska's fate. The complicity of white men in Mahaska's rejection of
civilization, pushing her over the accepted boundaries of sex and race,
permeates the tale. The agaggy of Frontenac's and Gaston‘s agta is their
narrow-minded beliefs about race and gender. Because Katherine/Mahaska fails
to meet their criteria for what a woman should be and because she exhibits
certain racial characteristics that they find undesirable, they reject her — exclude
her from their company. On the other hand, those characteristics that they find
so repellent are the agaggy by which Mahaska goes savage. Mahaska tries to fit
into white society, but, once excluded, the racial and gender characteristics
which prove unacceptable in civilization are the very qualities she needs to be a
leader of "savages."
Representations of Race
Esth r? A t f h Trail

In Esther, Stephens directly confronts the issue of the difference race
makes. She Opens the novel with an elegy for the vanishing Indian, which she
tempers with the thought that all are equal in the grave.

Our every footstep treads upon a gravel The keel of the snowy-pinioned
vessel but turns a fleecy furrow while plowing its way over the abodes of
death. Earth is but one vast tomb, where sleep, side by side, commingling
their dust, the king and peasant, the master and slave, the beautiful and
repulsive. . . . We turn from the scenes of busy life, and enter the deep
forest, unthinking and careless that beneath our footsteps lie the
mouldering bones of the war-painted warrior, beside his broken spear and
stringless bow; and, in another place, the dusky forest maiden, who once
wreathed amid the dull blackness of her hair the gorgeously-tinted buds
and blossoms of the God-cultured prairie. But so it is. The star that leads
civilization westward shines sadly upon the graves of a peeple almost
extinct - a people that have been hunted ruthlessly from their greenwood
haunts till every year has seen their graves multiplying thicker and thicker

in the wilderness. Then the Anglo—Saxon comes to plow it up and plant
corn above the dead warriors, stooping now and then to pick up a stone

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arrow-head from his furrow, and examine it curiously, as if he did not know
what soil his sacrilegious plow was uptuming. (5)

Esther is Stephens' only novel of intermarriage between whites and Indians that
is set in a contemporaneous nineteenth-century time frame. Although in 1862,
when this novel was published, Native Americans were not as Stephens
suggests "a people that have perished" (6), she merely reiterates the Romantic
notion of the vanishing noble savage that had been a staple of American
literature since the 1820s (Dippie 18-21; Deloria 64-5). She also follows the
tradition of other women writers such as Sedgwick who insist that white man's
policies toward Indians are "ruthless" and "sacrilegious." By asserting from the
Opening that all people and races are equal in the grave, she prepares readers to
seriously confront the issue of race in the main plot. Stephens places the
question of race at the center of Esther's thoughts, which allows readers to
vicariously consider the issue themselves. To emphasize that race is not the
important criterion in establishing a person's moral disposition, Stephens
"confronts and encompasses" the issue in a secondary plot, when Kirk, whose
heart is a "pure diamond" (18) must confront his own prejudicial attitudes.
Waupee and Esther

Race is the paramount issue in Esther. Stephens compares and contrasts
Waupee and Esther to demonstrate that categorizing peoples by contemporary
racial expectations can lead to erroneous conclusions. Indians can be generous,
kind, and resourceful while whites can be narrow-minded, self-centered, and
helpless. Encounters between Waupee and Esther highlight these notions.

Waupee "risked her life" (10) to try to prevent Esther from being kidnapped by

236

Black Eagle because Esther had been "kind" to her, yet Esther barely
remembers meeting the young Indian. Waupee, hurt by this apparent
indifference, comments that "the memory of the white squaw is not true like the
heart of the red one" (9), a point that accentuates the difference between the two.
Waupee fills the all-important role of mediator between the world of whites and
Indians. When Black Eagle succeeds in his devious plan, Waupee sneaks into
the camp where he has imprisoned Esther and slips her a knife to help her
escape. VWIIIB Esther is grateful, she is consumed With frantic terror over Black
Eagle's plan to have her as his bride. She begs Waupee, "Save me from this
awful fate!" (38) totally disregarding Waupee's feelings and that the fate that
Esther finds so loathsome had once been Waupee's greatest joy. Esther is
insensitive and helpless, while Waupee, though her heart is breaking because
her husband prefers Esther to herself, proves loyal and resourceful as she risks
her life to save Esther.

Esther's obsession with race is the most significant difference between her
and Waupee. Even though Esther is of a different race than Waupee, that does
not deter the young Indian fiom trying to help her. But for Esther race is a crucial
consideration, and her prejudices against Indians inform her reactions. Although
Osse'o rescues, protects, and guards her, she continually, from their first
encounter, until his race is finally revealed, ponders whether he is white or red.

That he could not be an Indian was her first thought; but as she looked
again, the idea was discarded. (68).

"I will trust you" [she tells Osse'o], "for you have been kind to me. Still,
you are an Indian, and a stranger." (91)

237

"Oh forgive me for having doubted you . . . ," she pleaded, touched to the
heart, not only by the care he had bestowed upon her, but by the truly
gentle and respectful manner in which it had been performed, so entirely
different than any thing she had before seen among the Indians. (92)
Who could he be [she thinks], with the garb of a savage and the graceful
courtesy which marks the highest civilization? Truly he was an Indian, but
that voice, those gentle words, it was difficult to think of him as a savage.
. . . Or - her heart bounded again, as if serpent-stung - could all this be
treachery? She put this idea aside and she thought of her father, of his
agony at her loss. . . . But again she looked and saw Osse'o. . . . Could
he, also, have bitter thoughts? Did the heart of an Indian ever feel the
fierce passions that cause the sufferings she was enduring?
"Oh, shame! shame!" almost burst from her lips, as she reflected how
nobly he had acted. (92-3)
Esther is ambivalent. On the one hand she is attracted to Osse‘o, "he seemed
more like a warrior of the air, . . . than a mortal being" (64-5).4 When she first
sees him, indeed before she knows that he will rescue her, Esther is so
transfixed by him that she "forg[ets] her peril, her bonds, her captivity" (65).
Later, after he had proven himself tnrstworthy and "he [had] held her firmly with
his strong arm" (113) to prevent her from falling off her horse, readers are told
that "in her gratitude and her admiration, Esther forgot every thing which might
have revolted her at another time" (114). On the other hand, she cannot
entirely forget that which revolts her. When Osse'o is wounded in the climactic
battle and his shirt is removed, Esther rhapsodizes: "[she] saw the white
shoulder glowing from beneath the torn hunting-shirt, and knew, with a thrill of
joy, that the man she had so long taken for a Dakotah was the same
complexion as herself" (121). In other words, until she knows he is mostly
white, even though he has risked his life for her, she cannot trust him. While
he sleeps to recover from his wounds, Kirk tells Esther Osse'o's history, so she

finally Ieams that he is actually one-quarter Indian.

238

 

 

In the denouement, readers discover that Osse'o, again known as Claude,
loves Esther and that his attitude toward her “was changed after he knew how
near Esther had been to forgiving the savage character he had assumed" (my
emphasis, 124). Although this sentence is purportedly about Claude's attitude,
it reveals more about Esther‘s attitude toward race and racial differences. She
did not forgive him for his "savage character," she came "near . . . to forgiving"
it. In other words, race still makes a big difference to her. Although
Claude/Osse'o is the same person, regardless of how much Indian blood runs
through his veins, she cannot ignore race. Until she knows that he is mostly
white and that he has been raised as a white, she cannot give in to her desire
for him. As a "prOper" lady she cannot cross the racial divide. Stephens'
emphasis in this novel that character, not race, defines a person suggests that
such a dictum restricting intermarriage is spacious because it is based on false
assumptions.

Claude and Kirk

Like Esther and Waupee, Claude and Kirk are closely linked, even though
they have no blood ties. Both are honest and true-hearted. Osse'o's name
means "True Heart" (68), and Kirk "has a heart that beats like a trip-hammer, and
always in the right place" (107). Both are experts in hunting and wilderness
survival and have legendary reputations in the West. Both operate as mediators
between the world of whites and Indians. As a mixed-blood, Claude literally
straddles both worlds, while Kirk, although white by birth like his prototype Natty

Bumppo, is more at ease in the wilderness than in the world of whites.

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In a clever secondary plot, Stephens makes Kirk's rescue of Waupee a
complete inversion of Claude's rescue of Esther, providing readers with a
different response than Esther’s. Whereas race is a crucial factor for Esther, for
Kirk, "[w]ho it was he did not pause to think. Enough for him to know that some
fellow-being was in trouble and bent on self-destruction" (1 03). He saves
Waupee from committing suicide, just as she is about to leap off a cliff. She
faints in his arms, and only then he does he recognize her as an Indian.

"Pshawl" he muttered, in disappointment. "It is only a squaw;" and
then, as if ashamed of himself, he smoothed the long, black hair from her
bronzed face. . . .

'Wall, she's real pooty, too," he muttered between his teeth. "The
pootiest squaw I ever sot eyes on. Who would have thought a red-
skinned gal could look so much like a human?" (103)

When she awakens, Kirk Ieams that she has much in common with him, no
home and no people. He also Ieams that Black Eagle's desertion is the cause of
her despair and that, although she had thought to kill her faithless husband in his
sleep, she was unable to do the dead because "she had loved him once" (105).
Kirk is relieved, for the thought of "murder[ing] a sleeping man in cold, calculating
blood" made him "shudder" (105). But when she says she will go, live all alone,
and wait for death to relieve her of her painful burdens, Kirk objects vehemently.
He insists that Waupee accompany him. Waupee replies that "the chiefs of the
pale-face will laugh at their brother for being kind to a woman of the Dacotahs"
(107), but Kirk retorts that he does not care what others may think and that he
will protect her from the taunts of whites. In other words, Kirk confronts his racial

prejudice - his shame at his initial disappointment at discovering that Waupee is

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"only a squaw“ — and realizes, at least in this case, that individuals should be
judged by their character not their skin-color.

However, Kirk is not free of prejudice. He cannot quite comprehend that
such a view might also apply to those with evil characters, for when Waupee tells
him that Black Eagle has kidnapped Esther, he replies, "Black devill . . . But he's
an Indian, arter all, and its his natur', I suppose" (84). His contradictory view of
the meaning of race can be interpreted several ways. First of all, it mimics
Stephens' own inconsistent representations. Through Kirk's and Esther's
encounters with racial others, Stephens posits that race is inconsequential in
determining moral character. However, as narrator, Stephens sometimes
employs the very racial stereotypes and prejudices she seeks to nullify. For
example, when Waupee sneaks up on her sleeping husband to kill him but
checks herself at the last second, the nanator explains, "No thank God! She was
a savage, but could not stain her innocent hand in blood, wronged though her
love had been" (98). So even Waupee, who in many respects represents the
proper role model for active womanhood, can, by virtue of race, be called a
"savage." But because Stephens satirizes COOper's version of the American
West in this novel, another explanation of Kirk's prejudicial statement about Black
Eagle's Indian "natur'" becomes apparent. His comment simply reiterates, almost
verbatim, a point that Leatherstocking makes over and over and over again about
the "natur" of "red gifts" and "white gifts" - the idea that each race has certain
characteristics.5

The ambiguity of the meaning implied in Kirk's words and actions in this

scene make it a prime candidate for closer examination using Burke's pentad.

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Kirk's confrontation with his own prejudice - the m in which he saves
Waupee and promises to protect her from prejudicial treatment — is intermingled
with his own biased pronouncements — the m in which he maintains that
Black Eagle is evil because he is an Indian. These intertwined scenes involve
two different agta. In the first, Kirk confronts his own racial prejudice through
a_ct_ions - treating Waupee as he would any other woman. In the letter, he only
§Q§§L§ prejudicially, he does not ag on his bias. The adage or proverb "actions
smak louder than words" seems particularly apropos to this situation. In
"Literature as Equipment for Living," Burke contends that all literature can be
considered "proverbs writ large" (PLF 296). He insists that proverbs "name
typical, recurrent situations" (293) within a society. He continues:

Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. In so far as situations

are typical and recunent in a given social structure, people develop names

for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies

might be attitudes. (Burke's emphases, 296)

Since Stephens' overall m in the novel is to question the validity of the
common notion that race determines one's moral character (situation), her use of
the proverb, "actions speak louder than words" (strategy) suggests that Kirk's
actions (treating Indians the same as any other peOpIe) represent the type of
attitude she would like her readers to adopt towards Indians.

Yet Stephens' descriptions of Claude are riddled with stereotypes about
Indians, particularly the equation of Indian with "savagery" and whiteness with
civilization.

The raven hair of his [lndian] grandmother, but softer, finer, and glossy,

fell in thick waves over his forehead. The tall, lithe form, erect and

graceful, the eagle eye, the proud poise of the head, were splendid in their
regal beauty; while the soft, olive-tinged skin, wanned by the flashing

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blood of his transatlantic [French] father, the tender light that sometimes

filled his eyes, the blush that flushed his pure forehead, were perfect in

their blending of refined and savage beauty. Just enough of the wild
grace and insouciance of his Indian ancestry had been mingled with the
pure blood of the old French nobility to render this young man strikingly

beautiful in person and most alluring in mind. (26)

While Claude's lndian qualities are complimentary, they fit the mold of the "noble
savage" and contrast with the characteristics of the "civiliz " man. Whites
blush, Indians do not. One trait is contrasted with the other. For example,
Stephens writes, "[a] more fearless horseman could not be found, even among
his grandmother's tribe, yet, in the dance he was quiet and graceful" (26). Such
a contrast suggests that Indians are not usually quiet and graceful in dancing and
that whites rarely are fearless horsemen; that is, it uses stereotyped beliefs to
establish Indians as savage, whites as civilized, even though all the traits exist in
the mixed-blood character of Claude/Osse'o. However, by choosing positive
traits to characterize Claude's Indian side, perhaps Stephens felt that she was
promoting harmony between the races. Through Claude's admirable traits
inherited from both sets of ancestors, Stephens discredits the common
contemporary stereotype that interbreeding results in degeneration and the worst
characteristics of both races.

Ironically, this interrningling of the races is what makes Claude the ideal
hero for this novel in which Stephens tries to show that race (nature) is not the
determining factor of a person's character. It is he who points out to the doubtful
Esther that "there are black hearts among Indians and whites men alike" (90).

And a few minutes later, as she is still debating whether or not to tnlst him

because he is "an Indian and a stranger," he retorts in no uncertain terms, "I am

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a MAN!" (91). Rarely does Stephens resort to capitalization for emphasis,
indicating the significance of this declaration. He is a human being with all the
virtues and foibles of any other man. Indian or while, he is the same person.
Black Eagle and Elelu Thomas

The comparison and contrast of Black Eagle and Elelu Thomas merits
special attention because both are thoroughly evil; Stephens' pairing of them
reiterates the theme that race is not an accurate predictor of behavior. Although
Carol Carney suggests that this story represents "a blunt [anti-Mormon] prejudice
embarrassing to the modern reader" (97),6 being Mormon is not what makes
Thomas depraved any more than being lndian makes Black Eagle immoral.
Stephens accuses both of misleading their people, whom she considers
"deluded" (19) and ignorant, but not base or immoral. Both Black Eagle and
Thomas are revealed as "savage," as their encounters with a ""good man
demonstrate - each acts more savagely than the last. When Osse'o has his
back turned, Black Eagle pushes him off the edge of a cliff and assumes that
Osse'o has died. However, Thomas sees the Indian hanging by a root from the
precipice and shoots at the root, sending Osse'o tumbling into the abyss. Each
of these acts is" savage" in the sense that each is unwarranted and unfair
violence committed against another human being. When the two villains meet
up, Thomas lies, telling Black Eagle that he saw the Indian hanging by a root
"and was going to help him, when all of a sudden he fell, and was crushed at the
foot of the rocks" (74). In a revealing passage the narrator continues:

Black Eagle could not well doubt the story, for, base as he was, the Indian
would have scorned to leave his worst enemy in a situation so terrible.

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The savage would have rescued him, even if an hour afterward he had
sought his scalp, and therefore had no suspicion of the white man. (74)

In other words, Stephens complicates the picture by painting Thomas, in this
instance, as even more "savage" than the Indian.

However, the most savage act of all is (almost) perpetrated by Black
Eagle. In the final confrontation, when Black Eagle finally manages to kill the
Mormon, even though he is bleeding profusely, he takes out his knife and
attempts to scalp Thomas. The combined efforts of Kirk, Osse'o, and Waupee
thwart his endeavor, but Kirk's words reveal the profundity of his savage act: "By
the light of heaven, you shall not scalp him! A cussed, treacherous reptyle as he
was, he was yet a white man, and shall not be butchered" (120). Apparently the
savage acts that both committed against Osse'o, the mixed blood, including
shooting down the defenseless man in an already precarious situation, do not
equal the savagery and butchery of scalping a white man. Stephens' depiction of
this incident exemplifies the difficulty that white writers of the nineteenth-century
faced when they attempted to encourage readers to overcome their racial
prejudice. Stephens posits that race does not determine moral character, but,
simultaneously continues to employ stereotypes that mark Indians as "other," as
"savage." The post—colonial writings of Linda Alooff make these apparent
contradictions more understandable. On the one hand, Stephens' inscriptions
are based on her ideologies - in this case, the belief that race does not
determine moral character. But, on the other, her position in society as credible
author and the discursive context in which her representations of race occur

necessitate using images of Indians with which her audience is familiar. If her

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story loses a sense of veracity for readers, then Stephens‘ endeavor to curtail
racial prejudice will be to no avail. By including certain stereotypical beliefs about
Indians, she makes her story seem more realistic and thus is more likely to
achieve her overall purpose.
Tha Mahaalga Trijggy

In this tale of female self-aggrandizement, it is sometimes difficult to
separate race from gender. However, clues can be gathered from Stephens'
other writings. She wrote a similar western tale of a white woman who also
destroys her life by abandoning her feminine principles. Comparisons between
the two help to unravel this entanglement of race and gender. In Sybil Chase; or
The Valley Ranch, Dime Novel # 21, the eponymous character viciously seeks
her own desires at all costs and, like Mahaska, crosses sexual boundaries and
appears unredeemable. Consequently, although it might be easy to attribute
Mahaska's blood-letting violence and her reliance on sexual attraction to
accomplish her goals to race, Stephens portrays a fictional white woman's acts
in a similar fashion. Although Sybil does not personally murder anyone, she is
an accessory to such crimes, and she even purposely causes a duel.
Furthermore, like Mahaska, she uses her sexuality to attract the attentions of a
man already betrothed to another. Such inscriptions by Stephens suggest that
the wrongs committed by Mahaska might be more accurately ascribed to the
abandonment of womanly principles than to particular racial characteristics.

However, ambiguity still exists at the nexus of race and gender. While
Mahaska personifies most negative racial stereotypes about Indians, the

rejection of her white father provokes their manifestation. Her tale as Indian

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queen In which she leads and men follow provides a thrilling adventure tale for
women readers, but Katherine/Mahaska also exhibits many defective gender
characteristics. As in Esther, Stephens uses comparison/contrast not only to
highlight differences between the races but to stress similarities as well. But
none of the whites in the Mahaska trilogy are truly admirable characters, whereas
certain Indian characters, Chileli and Gi-en-gwa-tah, represent moral goodness.
In this tale, Stephens' representations of race are complex, refuting yet
simultaneously reinscribing prevailing stereotypes; however, by pointing out the
differences between Indians as well as their similarities to whites, Stephens
destabilizes notions that all Indians are alike and that they are the opposite of
whites.
Chileli and Ahmo

Stephens contrasts two Indian women, Chileli and Ahmo, daughter and
mother, respectively, to demonstrate that not all Indians are alike, nor can they
be simply categorized as the opposite of whites. Chileli is patient, loving, and
kind, despite the growing "repugnance" that her white husband Frontenac
exhibits towards her (Ahmo 51, 52, 53). Even when she overhears Frontenac
confess to a friend that he never loved her, she does not reproach him.
Sundquist, in her study of stereotypes of Indian women in American Literature,
suggests that Chileli exhibits the traits of the AngelNrctim (113), including being
"young, beautiful, frail, . . . weak, . . . shy, . . . self-effacing, . . . loyal, . . . [and]
compassionate" (111). As is typical of AngelNrctims, themes associated with
Chileli involve victimization, frustrated love, and death (111-2). Her meek and

mild personality contrasts sharply with her mother's. Ahmo personifies lndianly

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vengeance, befitting the stereotype of the ignoble savage woman. Sundquist
categorizes Ahmo as a Fury — a character who is "noisy, forward, revengeful,
cunning, cruel, lethal, and destructive" (67).

When Chileli dies from a consumptive illness, Ahmo believes that
Frontenac has poisoned Chileli. In one sense she is correct, for once Chileli
overhears Frontenac admit that he never loved her and that he prefers a pale-
face, she takes on a cold chill that "never le[aves] her heart" (Ahmo 38).
Although her white doctors believe "her constitution [to be] so much stronger and
more vigorous than that of a white woman" (54), she continues to fade.7

The most explicit contrast between Chileli and Ahmo occurs at Chileli's
death scene. Chileli is full of love and compassion for Frontenac, while Ahmo is
full of hate and cunning. Chileli's last words are for Frontenac, who, as is typical
of many melodramatic death scenes, arrives just as Chileli breathes her last.
She whispers into his ear: "Chileli dies that her brave may be happy. . . . [and]
that he may find the beautiful pale-face " (61). Thus, Chileli's thoughts are loving
and selfless, but Ahmo's are "full of bitter hate and fell suspicion" (60). Ahmo
had tricked Chileli into explaining the cause of her misery. Upon learning that
Chileli is not first in Frontenac's heart, Ahmo begins to nurse "fury . . . in her heart
like fire in some heathen shrine waiting for its victim since with her, revenge was
an instinct of religion" (54). And she does not have to wait long to find a victim,
for Frontenac soon manies his beloved pale face, and Ahmo plots to kill his new
bride in retribution for the death of Chileli.

Not only does Ahmo personify the stereotypical lndian traits of vengeance

and hatred of whites, she encourages these attributes in Mahaska. When Chileli

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dies, Ahmo takes over the all-important role of motherhood, training Mahaska to
be a proper Indian princess. Ahmo's success in this endeavor helps substantiate
the notion that nurture plays a key role in character development. Chileli had
originally named her child "Cherry Blossom," indicating more about Chileli than
the child. But Ahmo renames her "Mahaska" and tells her that the name means
"Avenger" and that she must live up to her name, to avenge her mother's spirit by
killing the pale-face wife of Frontenac. Ahmo taunts Mahaska with the racial
question that underlies all Mahaska's troubles:

Which does Mahaska love best, her white blood or the red stream that

flowed in the stream of great chiefs? The whites call her Katherine, and

would make of her a toy or plaything, shallow and idle as themselves; but

the Indian name given by her grandame has a deeper meaning. (69)

But Mahaska is not yet ready to concede that her father does not love her and
cannot bring herself to commit the crime, so Ahmo kills Frontenac's new wife.
Ahmo continues to inculcate the young girl with traits that Ahmo believes will
make Mahaska a great leader of the Indian nations. Ahmo has genuine love for
her granddaughter, but it is "a ferocious affection that ha[s] something terrible in
it" (70).

The contrast between the type of mother Chileli might have been and the
type that Ahmo becomes demonstrates a significant difference between the two.
Though they are mother and daughter, they are as different as night and day.
Stephens thus posits that not all Indians, nor even all Indian women, are alike,
destabilizing race as a discrete and reliable category. In this narrative, she

insists that reductive racial stereotypes do not adequately describe individuals

even as she employs those conventions to describe both Chileli and Ahmo. This

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situation also demonstrates the intenrlreaving of race and gender: does Ahmo's
ferocious brand of motherhood generate from her Indianness or her
unwomanliness? Such a conundnlm is difficult to answer. However, by
accentuating the differences between the two characters, Stephens takes a
strong stand against judging a person solely on the basis of racial stereotypes.
Mahaska and Adele

Stephens employs a different strategy to discuss issues of race in the
second novel of the trilogy, where the comparison/contrast of KatherinelMahaska
with her step-sister Adele takes center stage. Rather than emphasizing
differences within the Indian race, Stephens' characterizations of these two
young women primarily highlight differences between the races; however, at the
same time Stephens dispels certain contemporary stereotypes about Indians.
Katherine, bereft of her mother and neglected by her white father, male jealous of
the white girl whom her father obviously prefers. In hopes of gaining her father's
love, Katherine forms a plan to "surpass" Adele in all her endeavors (Princess
12). In this depiction Stephens counters the idea that Indians are ignorant and
unable to team or to appreciate civilized culture. Katherine, eager to prove
herself, absorbs all that she can about white history. Female leaders, such as
"Boadicea, queen of the Britons," particularly fascinate her.8 Adele is clearly not
as intelligent as Katherine, as signaled by Katherine's superior scholastic abilities
and Adele's own admission, "I feel so stupid" (25). By portraying Katherine as
intelligent, Stephens refutes that the idea that whites are naturally superior to

Indians in intelligence.

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However, despite Katherine's intellect, Stephens forewams readers that
Frontenac's rejection of his Indian daughter could be disastrous. "Love for her
father had been the one tender feeling in her nature, deprived of that, there was
nothing to combat the fierce impulses which made such riot in her breast" (16).
Under Ahmo's tutelage and her own father's rejection, Mahaska becomes more
Indian-like, less identified with whites, and less womanly. These changes in her

are not only exacerbated by Adele's presence but are also refracted in the mirror
of Adele's white womanly perfection. The governor "center[s] all the affection" he
had felt for his second wife upon her daughter Adele (15), but he approaches
Katherine with "a faint shudder” and a "shrinking chill" (11). Quite naturally,
Katherine resents this abandonment:

She knew well that the best blood of his proud heart was beating in her

own veins; he was her father, her own, own father; she was his only child;

what light had he to told that young face to his bosom and kiss so tenderly

the golden hair of another man's child? (15)

When Frontenac requests that the two girls become "pleasant companions for
one another” (11), Adele honestly and cpenly befriends Katherine. However,
Katherine, although her heart "s'eethe[s] and bum[s]" with "savage jealousy" (14),
"with the wonderful dissimulation bom in her nature, . . . conceal[s] every show of
emotion" (11). In other words, in keeping with contemporary stereotypes of
Indians, Katherine is dishonest and conniving, but the innocent Adele is not.

Ahmo tutors Katherine to restrain any indication of emotional excitement
and enkindles a hatred of whites in her heart (Ahmo 71). Katherine Ieams these

lessons well. When her white father demonstrates his preference for Adele,

Katherine "cease[s] to show the slightest trace of feeling upon the subject, but no

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victim to the tortures of her savage forefathers ever suffered keener agony than
she endured without a visible sign or murmur" (15-6). These images of savagery
in descriptions of Katherine's behavior link her with her lndian ancestry at the
same time they connect her father's rejection to her inclination toward lndianly
ways.

Stephens uses Ahmo's racial hatred of whites as a method to explore the
precarious position of mixed blood children. Ahmo's crucial question about which
race Mahaska loves best proclaims a significant truth, whites do not accept
people of mixed parentage. They are at best an exotic "toy or plaything." This
depiction of the problems of self-alienation faced by children of mixed marriages
underscores the guilt of white men who marry Indian women for selfish reasons
but fail to accept the concommitant responsibilities — including loving their mixed
blood children. But other whites do not accept Katherine either, as the incident of
a classmate mocking her grandmother Ahmo shows. Although no one is allowed
to disparage Katherine within the Frontenac estate, neither do they "speak of her
parentage" (42). But it is her own father's neglect that determines her fate.

Katherine has already decided to live among the Indians when she meets
and falls in love with Gaston de LaGuy, whose future marriage to Adele has
already been arranged by the governor. His rejection seals her fate and sets up
the rest of the tragedy. Katherine's passion for him and her "womanly ambition"
cause her to forsake her usual caution about revealing her true emotions.
Although Adele and Gaston obviously love one another, Katherine believes that
because "de LaGuy was an ambitious man," he would welcome the opportunity

to share her life and "rul[e] over the savage nations, instructing them in all the

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arts of civilization" (51). However, when she tries to seduce him, "the repulsion
which he had always felt toward her increased" (58). When he fends off her
proposal with a cold rejoinder about how happy he will be "in the love and
companionship of [his] little Adele" (61), Katherine's soliloquy reveals the depth
of her anger and hatred as well as her contrast to "little Adele."
"He spurns and despises me. . . . Gaston de LaGuy, you have sealed
your own death warrant as well as hers. Power, power, there is
vengeance in it, if not love! . . . .
I believe I have been mad! I did think he might love me! Am I growing
feeble? Am I a love-sick girl? No, no! Henceforth I am Mahaska, the
Avenger! Tremble every white man of you all, you shall have need of aid
at that name! I will make it a terror that shall blanch your cheeks to hear.
The last link that bound me to that hated race is broken; I will leave their
close cities forever, but I will leave behind me that which shall be the
beginning of a new life." (62)
Katherine's thoughts contrast feminine behavior with lndianly demeanor, "Am I a
love-sick girl? No, no! Henceforth I am Mahaska." Unlike Adele, who
personifies the passive white woman, Katherine will not sit around and wait for
others to save her from peril. She will act like the savage Indian of the white
imagination - aggressively. She will actively pursue a course which will put her
in power over others, and she will seek retribution from those she feels have
wronged her. Such sentiments embody the stereotype of the vengeful Indian
while they demonstrate her loss of womanly comportment.
Gi-en-gwa-tah and Gaston

Gi-en-gwa-tah, the Indian husband whom Mahaska is forced to accept to
obtain the power she seeks, contrasts sharply with Gaston, who rejects her

advances. Gi-en-gwa-tah is loving, accepting, and open, whereas Gaston is

racially prejudiced. Although Gaston in true gentlemanly fashion does not reveal

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his encounter with Katherine to Adele, he acknowledges that "it is [the Indian
blood in her] which I so thoroughly detest" (62). While Katherine's attempted
seduction gives him ample reason to distrust her, he couches his aversion in
terms of race, not individual personality. On the other hand, Gi-en-gwa-tah loves
Mahaska and never slights her for her mixed heritage. In other words, Gaston
represents the policies of exclusion of Indians from white society, the very cause
of Katherine going "savage," whereas Gi-en-gwa-tah signifies the openness of
Indians towards whites.

The two men also have many similarities. Both are handsome, intelligent,
powerful leaders of their people. They also share the dubious honor of saving
Adele when Indians working for Mahaska capture her. Both eventually see
through Mahaska's duplicity, although each is temporarily blinded from it -
Gaston because he hesitates to disturb Adele who loves Katherine and Gi-en-
gwa-tah because he loves Mahaska. But, despite their resemblances, Gaston
represents the intolerant attitudes of the white fathers, while Gi-en-gwa-tah
signifies the more guileless, straightfonrvard attitudes of Indians, quintessential
traits of the "noble savage."

Representations of Gender
gather: A $325! of me Qgggn Tcail

In this novel, issues of gender run secondary to issues of race. Stephens
inverts stereotypes of the passive woman heroine of male-centered westerns to
demonstrate how absurd such characters are. She places Esther's passivity in
direct comparison to Waupee's more realistic active nature, emphasizing Esther‘s

utter uselessness. Waupee, like Malaeska and Tahmeroo, though lndian, is the

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heroine and intended role model. Stephens also examines men's roles and
proposes that manly men can also be tender-hearted.
Waupee and Esther

By comparing and contrasting Waupee and Esther, Stephens offers
Waupee's active engagement with events as a more reasonable womanly ideal
than the passivity of True Womanhood. Stephens' ridicule of the passive female

so typical of male-centered westerns, shines brightest when, at his moment of
crisis, Osse'o could use Esther's help, but she is completely ineffectual. Waupee
must take care of the wounded and bleeding Osse'o, for although Esther wants
to help, "the hand of the pale-face is like the aspen leaf in the breath of the storm,
and her heart is faint as the dove" (122). While Waupee does all the work,
stanching the flow of blood, gathering the required herbal remedies, and binding
the wounds, Esther merely sits there, cradling his head in her lap. Stephens
emphasizes Esther's lack of womanly ability to nurse when just a few paragraphs
later, Kirk says, 'Waal, it's woman's business to take care of the sick, I s'pose"
(123). Esther has failed to fulfill her womanly duty. Although she does sit up
and watch over him all night, had it been up to her, he might not have survived
because she was unable to care properly for his wound. Furthermore, her
obsession with Osse'o's race indicates her selfish, self-absorbed nature, a most
unwomanly trait.

Not only does Esther fail to accomplish "waman's business," her passivity
and weakness are held up to ridicule. First of all, they contribute to her capture.
Man Black Eagle appears before her "[h]e gathered her up from where she
stood white as death and frozen with fear" (11). At critical moments, instead of

255

keeping her wits about her, she faints (71) or feels that she "is losing [her] mind"
(89). When she does manage to slip away from her captors, she is described as
a "feeble girl" who is led by her "noble steed," her "brave horse," rather than her
leading him. In fact she is so weak, "[t]he bridle slipped flom her grasp. . . . [and
she was] powerless to hold it" (87), nor can she "retain her upright position, she
crouches in the saddle" and "clings wildly" to the horse (88). Other than slipping
away during a "sham" battle that the Mormon Thomas has concocted to make it
seem as though he has rescued her from the Indians, Esther does nothing to
help save herself. She completely relies on others - from Waupee to Osse'o.

On the other hand, Waupee personifies a much more active type of
womanhood. She tracks down Esther in the wilderness to warn her of Black
Eagle's plans; she provides the captive Esther with a weapon; and she treats
Osse'o's wounds — all at great personal self-sacrifice. In the earlier events, she
is risking her life, for she believes that Black Eagle might kill her for thwarting his
intentions. In the latter, she tends to Osse'o, even though her heart is breaking
because of Black Eagle's death. Waupee is anything but passive. She models
the more active womanhood ideal that Stephens endorses - she is resourceful,
self-reliant, and faithful.

Even though Waupee engages actively in the world about her, she retains
her sense of proper womanly behavior, whereas Esther does not necessarily
know the appropriate gender/womanly boundaries as demonstrated in the
climactic battle between Black Eagle and the Mormon. Esther wants the men to
break up the fight between her "mortal enemies," even though Kirk points out

"Thar lives ain't of any more 'count that a sneakin' cayote" (118). But Waupee

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knows better.
The Indian woman sat with bowed head. She knew well that the man she
loved so passionately was engaged in a desperate encounter, but though
there might have been something of that former love yet lingering around
her heart, the education of a lifetime rendered it a duty to restrain her
feelings. It was not for a woman to take part in the strife of warriors. (119)
Waupee, despite all her activity in opposing Black Eagle's plots for Esther, knows
her place. A "true women" (120) to the end, Waupee represents the more active
ideal of womanhood that Stephens envisions. However, like all of Stephens'
Indian women, a fatal flaw dooms her - she is too passionate. It is this fault
which leads her to attempt murder and suicide; it also causes her death of a
broken heart. Yet Stephens suggests that Waupee's womanliness overcomes
her passion and saves her from murdering Black Eagle: "the pure womanly gold
triumphed over the base alloy of passion" (98).° In other words, in this tale the
Indian woman rather than the white woman represents Stephens' vision for a
new ideal of womanhood. Waupee exhibits important characteristics - in
particular self-reliance and resourcefulness - that Stephens sees as essential to
women taking their rightful place in society. Esther does nothing worthy of
emulation; she faints and cries and relies on others; when needed, she proves
useless. Despite great trials and tribulations, Waupee maintains her wits, acts
rather than reacts, and demonstrates her ability to deal with any crisis. Through
her, Stephens suggests that such "womanly gold" can help other women
"triumph" as well.
Claude and Kirk

Stephens uses her comparison and contrast of Claude and Kirk not only to

make statements about manliness, but also to demonstrate men's ideas about

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womanliness, as Kirk's comment about medicine being "woman's business"
reveals. Claude, as the primary hero, exudes masculinity. Readers are told he
"had become perfect in his manliness" (26). Furthermore, he knows how to treat
a lady. He not only rescues Esther from Black Eagle, he provides her with food
and shelter in accordance with what white society expects men to do for their
womenfolk, even though Esther does not expect such a "gentle and respectful
manner" from an Indian.

Kirk also knows how to treat a lady. After resouing Waupee, he insists
that she ride his horse while he walks alongside. When she suggests that she
could walk, he retorts,

you're not a-goin' to walk, while I own a horse. I know the braves, as they

call themselves in your tribe, make you go on foot while they strut off on

thar horses all fiery-fired to death. But I don't and won't! Thar's no use a-

talkin‘, its just what Kirk Walterrnyer would do for any women. (107)
Although Waupee is an Indian, Kirk regards her as a human being who deserves
to be treated as any other woman might be. But Kirk has his own perspective on
women and their place in society. Osse'o may prepare food for Esther,
indicating that he will take care of all her needs. But Kirk, although as a "daring
frontiersman [he] makes a refined woman his idol — a creature to work for, fight
for, and die for, if need be" (42), expects women to do all the food preparation.
When he and Waupee meet up with Osse'o and Esther, Kirk commands, "Come,
gals, stir about and let's have a little somethin' to set" (115). In other words, even
though he has "exulted Esther Morse to a paragon" (46), When it comes to

gender roles, he demands that both "refined" women and Indian women stay

within their appropriate boundaries. However, like Claude he radiates manliness.

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He is "the very beau ideal of that pioneer race who, scorning the ease and
fashionable falters of city life, have laid the foundation of the new States in the
unexplored regions of the giant West" (14). Though he can cross the trackless
desert without water and escape the prairie fire, "he has a woman's heart about
some things" (80). In other words, assured as he is of his manliness, he is not
afraid to expose a more tender side.

Intermarriage .

The marriage between Esther and Claude/Osse'o does not occur until the
end of the novel, and definitely not until Esther has determined that, although
Claude may be one-quarter Indian, he was born and raised in white civilization.
Wrth Esther's love for him, "[hjis disgust for civilized life died a gentle death"
(124). They marry, honeymoon in Europe (as befits wealthy Americans), and
return to his "mansion," which Esther christens "HOME!" in the final word of the
novel. Camey suggests that Esther's love has tamed his savage proclivities,
"fully domesticating him" (46). Stephens may be suggesting that a woman's love
has domesticating power. But, if Stephens is indeed ridiculing the passive
heroine, perhaps a more fitting interpretation would be that Esther, "feeble girl"
that she is, will never have to worry again, her man will take care of her. Unlike
women of the real world, she has found and married her Prince Charming. Even
a cursory glance at the circumstances of Esther's continual doubt of Osse'o
because of his indeterminate race demonstrates that she has done nothing to
earn his love. In fact, the narrator informs readers at one point that Osse'o reacts
"[a]s it touched, insulted by her doub " (91). Esther's marriage to ClaudelOsse'o

says less about intermarriage than it does about Esther, recapitulating her

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undesirable superficiality. First of all, it only happens after Esther Ieams that he
is "the same complexion as herself" (121); in other words, it is not really an
intermarriage at all. Furthermore, Claude is not only white, he is wealthy; Esther
need never outgrow her passive nature; her husband will provide for all her
needs. In the "HOME" Claude provides, Esther can remain within the confines of
domesticity, sheltered from the real world.

Much more fascinating than the marriage of Esther and Claude is the
intimation that had Waupee lived, Kirk - that beau ideal frontiersman - might
have married her. When he and Esther find Waupee lying dead of a broken
heart upon the grave of Black Eagle, Kirk buries her,

and as the kind, tender-hearted frontiersman piled the last stone upon the

rude monument to mark her grave, his eyes filled with tears and he

hoarsely whispered:

"Poor womanl May she be happier in heaven than she ever was on
earth. I didn't think I should ever have cried over a red-skin but thar's no
denyin' it now, if she had lived . . . Waal, waal, she's at rest." (124)

Esther's motives in marrying Claude seem calculated and selfish. But Stephens
leaves no doubt but that Kirk loved Waupee. He recognizes that, although they
may have differences of skin color, they had more important qualities in common.
Waupee's death prevents their possible marriage, but Kirk's love for her
reiterates the theme that intermarriage should not be considered improper.

Tha Mahaska Trilggy

Issues of gender are complex in the Mahaska trilogy, in part because of
the difficulties of separating race and gender. Stephens' representations of race

and gender, particularly in the central character of Katherine/Mahaska, but in

others as well, reflect ambiguities that can be resolved using Burke's dramatistic

260

analysis as a clarifying lens. Mahaska's unwomanliness tends to be
overshadowed by Stephens' equation of Indianness with masculinity.
Furthermore the theme that white male policies of exclusion are responsible for
Mahaska's decline into savagery fades into obscurity in the last novel of the
trilogy in which Mahaska takes her place as the Indian Queen. In this nanative,
Stephens tries to show that if women abandon their womanly principles, their
leadership can be as disastrous as men's. At the same time she creates a
thrilling female adventure tale in which warriors and Chiefs are not primary actors
but ancillaries to the Indian Queen.
Mahaska and Adele

The gender contrasts between Mahaska and Adele are stark, in part,
because Mahaska steps far beyond the boundaries of apprOpriate behavior for
women, even though that line is frequently difficult to pin down. Wherever it is,
Adele never crosses it - she is gentle, kind, patient, selfless, a paragon of
womanly virtue. Katherine, on the other hand, is harsh, conniving, reckless, self-
centered - "almost 100 percent pure Siren" (Sundquist 68). Adele is asexual,
"childish" (Princess 40), "child-like" (41), and "innocent" (41). She hesitates to do
anything "unwomanly" (47). Katherine, by contrast, is a vamp, "passionate" (42),
"irresistible" (59), and "dazzling" (45), whose “womanly vanity" (57) impels her
beyond womanly pr0priety to use her sexual power to attempt to seduce Gaston.
Later, she uses the same womanly wiles to keep Gi-en-gwa-tah in line.

Not that Stephens offers Adele as a proper role model for women readers;
on the contrary, Stephens presents the insipid, passive, selfless Adele to satirize

the pale pathetic heroines of male-centered border tales. Her inability to

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decipher Katherine's true nature demonstrates just how foolish she really is.
Captured by an Indian at Mahaska's behest, Adele thinks she is "saved" when
she hears Katherine's voice in the encampment; it takes two pages of dialogue
and Mahaska's threat to "tear [her] heart out" before the slow-witted girl realizes
Katherine is not her friend (80). During their years as "sisters" and schoolmates,
Adele showers genuine love and affection on Katherine, but as Stephens reports:
sweet, gentle Adele, how fruitlessly her young heart was flinging out its
kindness! She might as well have shamed a hawk fiom the prey it
swoops down upon as attempt to win affection from that mysterious

creature, in whose heart rioted all the blood of antagonistic nations. (14)
In other words, Adele's womanly acts of kindness are futile, whereas Mahaska's

unwomanly acts of revenge, such as having Adele kidnapped, are fruitful as well
as dangerous. Unlike Adele, Katherine is never passive, but she continuously
crosses the boundaries of propriety. Through comparison and contrast,
Stephens manages to illustrate the inadvisability of both womanly passivity and
manly aggression.

Unwomanly behavior is not dangerous just to Mahaska's foes, but to
Mahaska herself. Once she leaVes civilization to live among Indians, Mahaska
must deal with the consequences of that decision. In order to become queen of
the Indians, she must prove herself worthy and must eliminate her enemies.
When Gaston makes a daring rescue of Adele, Mahaska tries to kill him with her
tomahawk, but her arm is "paralyz " by the love she still bears him (86). So she
orders her warriors to kill them both. As she grows more "savage," she also

becomes more masculinized.

The young savage — for she truly was such now - had reddened her
conscience with a murderous revenge. The last trace of the old life was

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swept aside forever. The stain of blood upon the woman's soul had fully

roused the tiger within, which henceforth only warfare and desolation

could appease. (90)

In other words, for Stephens, to step over the boundary of race is to step over the
boundary of womanhood.

This critical act is imbued with indeterminate representations of race and
gender that Burke's dramatism helps clarify. In this incident the g is attempted
murder, the agent is Mahaska, the gagggsa is revenge, and the m is the
wilderness, far from the civilized world of whites. But the key element is aga_n_gy
- that is, Indians who are the means by which the act is accomplished - for
Mahaska "ha[s] no strength to kill [Gaston] with her own hand" (86). Thus, the
aganyagency ratio becomes critical to unraveling the ambiguity of Stephens'
inscriptions of the limits of sex and race. Conflicting passages during this
incident reveal that race and gender war against each other within Mahaska. On
the one hand, she is "convulsed with passion . . . like . . . some wild animal" (84),
but on the other, she is "paralyzed" and cannot "kill him with her own hand" (86).
Her womanly love for Gaston overpowers her lndianly desire for revenge. As
Stephens describes it:

Katherine whirled the tomahawk around her head. Its whiz went through

her heart, turning its point. The last throb of love that ever swelled her

bosom broke through her wrath and paralyzed her arm. . . . Spite of the
hatred that burned so fiercely in her bosom, spite of the dread of escape
which drove her almost mad, she had no strength to kill him with her own

hand. (86)

The repeated reference to her "bosom," surely represents her womanliness,

especially when "swelled" with love. Yet, her fierceness and hatred represent the

stereotypical ignoble (male) "savage." Love and hatred commingle, as do her

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womanly and lndianly traits. Stephens skillfully presents KatherinelMahaska's
bifurcated nature while demonstrating that no clear boundaries between race and
gender exist; in this case, neither race nor gender operates as a metalanguage.
When Mahaska realizes she cannot do the deed herself, she attempts to
murder him by proxy. She promises not only to wed the "chief" who kills Gaston,
but also that she will be his "slave . . . [and] he shall be . . . her master!" (86). In
other words, Mahaska is so disturbed by the warring factions within her that she
momentarily forgets her ultimate goal of complete power over all the Indians. By
having an Indian, a male lndian, commit the crime, and by insisting that Mahaska
cannot do it because of love, Stephens suggests that only an Indian or a male
would commit such an act. Yet, the narrative also clearly states that the Indians
were initially reluctant to pursue the fugitives, especially since they were allied
with the French. It also insists that Mahaska instigates the attack. Burke's
explanation that each element of a ratio must be consistent with the other
elucidates Stephens' motives through the agent/agency ratio. Mahaska the
Indian seeks revenge, but Mahaska the woman cannot do the deed. At this point
she has not enough Indian in her, so she adds to her own Indianness by
employing external Indians to do the job for her. The agent/agency ratio reveals
that Stephens believes a woman cannot/should not kill a man she loved, but that
nldians "mad with ambition [and] wild with savage greed for blood" can kill even
those who are supposedly their allies (86). However, once Mahaska commits
this act, even by proxy, Stephens insists that she has become "savage" because
she has crossed the borders of both race and gender. Once she has besmirched

her "woman's soul" with the "stain of blood," she has passed the point of no

264

 

return. Furthermore, once stained with the blood of murder, she never again
hesitates to slaughter others with her own hand.

Because motherhood held such important gendered notions in nineteenth-
century ideology, Mahaska's maternity holds special import. When she has a
son, Mahaska becomes the same type of mother that her role model, Ahmo, had
been. Her love for her child, like Ahmo's love for her, is filled with "ferocity." and
"selfishness" (Queen 51-2). She does not want to share him with anyone,
including Gi-en-gwa-tah. She intends to raise the boy to be a great chief and to
instill "hatred toward his [white] grandfather's race . . . [as] the only faith she
impresse[s] on his soul" (51). Although "the blessing of maternity" does "soften"
her "for a time" (51), it does not quench her thirst for bloodshed. As she reveals
to Gi-en-gwa-tah shortly afier the baby's birth, "before many moons the tribe will
go out on the warpath . . . . This time Mahaska will lead them . . . . she is weary
of leading the life of a squaw" (53). To prepare herself for the "arduous
undertaking," she exercises for hours - "[n]o matter what the extreme of the cold
- no matter how deep the snow lay upon the ground" (55-6). Even though
Stephens portrays Mahaska as corrupt, the Indian woman nevertheless ably
demonstrates that women can be physically active soon after giving birth.

The unholy love she bears her son manifests itself in the scene in which
Mahaska arrests Gi-en-gwa-tah and taunts him with imminent death. Gi-en-gwa-
tah asks, “Would the queen murder the father of her child?" but Mahaska retorts,
"Mahaska's child is the gift of the Great Spirit! . . . he has no other father" (103).
These few words reveal that Mahaska has lost touch with reality as well as the

obsessive nature of her love for the boy. The statement equates her son with the

265

 

son of God, metaphorically making him a deity, thus making her the mother of
God. Such blasphemy by a woman marks her for death in the conventions of
nineteenth-century women's novels. Burke might suggest that this scene
allegorizes the proverb "pride goeth before the fall." Indeed, Stephens explains
that Mahaska was "too proud, too defiant, to yield," even when her machinations
had obviously failed (109).

When she loses everything she has worked to achieve by anesting Gi-en-
gwa-tah and challenging his authority in the council, she must also lose that one
redeeming feature of her life - her son. When she discovers this,

Mahaska sunk upon a seat and gave way to her great grief. Ah, it was

terrible to witness. Such grief could only come fiom the conscience-

stricken, from the wretch conscious of his own debasement past all
redemption. For over an hour she remained in her fearful agony - not
over her wrecked fortunes, over her lost empire, over the detection of her
true character, for all these things her fierce nature could bear; but that

she was an outcast, scorned by the savage who had loved her like a

Spartan, deSpised by the race among whom she had come as prophet

and queen, and more than all, that she, a mother, was childless as well as

a banished, disgraced wife -— all these made her hour of agony one

passing words to depict. That hour had one redeeming virtue — it proved

that she was a woman, and taught us to know that beneath the fury of the
most violent natures is a deep of humanity and purity which will assert

itself at the propitious moment. (110-1)

The ambiguity of this scene in which the character "past all redemption" has "one
redeeming virtue" bears further investigation.

Burke's concept of hierarchy illuminates these tensions. He believes that
hierarchy leads to guilt because those who are higher feel guilt for not being
lower and vice-verse (LASA 15). Mahaska has spent most of her life ruthlessly
climbing to the t0p of the ladder. Consequently her guilt is even greater. In

Burkean terms, she has "scapegoated," blamed others for her problems, and

266

 

 

 

used them to gain success in her relentless pursuit of power. But in her grief and
agony upon losing everything, Mahaska "look[s] upon herself in her true light"
and realizes how wrong she has been (110). Only when she begins the process
of self—modification can she purge herself of guilt. Burke believes that
mortification "must come from within" (RR 190). So Mahaska's womanly
"humanity and purity" deep within her reassert themselves as she faces the awful
truth of her monstrous crimes. In other words, for Stephens, gender!
womanliness is the metalanguage that redeems Mahaska. She chose to
become savage, but deep within her soul lay a womanly heart, which she had
trained into subjection. However, faced with the enormity of her wickedness and
the loss of her child, "the long pent-up, warped and perverted woman's nature
asserted itself, [and] tears, so strange . . . welled up in her eyes and dropped
upon her bosom" (110). This physical sign of purging represents a sure sign of
redemption in nineteenth-century women's novels. But Stephens goes further
and insists that "women's nature" itself is redeeming.
Gi—en-gwa-tah and Gaston

Given Stephens' conviction that womanliness redeems, it is not surprising
that both Gi-en-gwa-tah and Gaston are described as having hearts like women
(Queen 15; Princess 59). Both are loving and tender-hearted toward their
women. But they have different perceptions of women's place in society. When
Katherine attempts to seduce Gaston by offering to share her power over the
"savages" with him, Gaston is incredulous. He responds that it would be
"impossible for a woman" to wield power over nations (Princess 60). He prefers

the passive Adele, who relies totally upon him (59). In other words, Gaston

267

 

 

represents the white patriarchal status quo. He believes that men should govern
and lead society and that women are incapable of such leadership. He views
women as appendages or dependents of men.

On the other hand, Gi-en-gwa-tah feels "no jealousy of his wife for the
supremacy she had gained over the people," a sentiment that Stephens
emphasizes by repeating it numerous times (Queen 15). However, Gi-en-gwa-
tah also believes that women are special beings. He is "shocked" when
Mahaska "with her own hand" (15) tomahawks a warrior of the tribe who dared to
stand "between her and the gratification of her unwomanly hate" (10). As
Mahaska grows more unwomanly in her pursuit of revenge, Gi-en-gwa-tah
becomes "perplex " by her behavior (48). Gradually he Ieams "the uselessness
of opposition" to her will (54). And eventually he suffers "the horrible grief and
jealousy a civilized man might, when confronted with the first doubt in regard to
the woman he loved arose" (72). The similarities between Gaston and Gi-en-
gwa-tah reiterate the theme that race does not determine character. However,
their different perceptions of women's place in society emphasize the theme that
white patriarchy, by insisting on a narrow sphere for women, represses their
potential.
lntemram‘age

The two intermarriages in the Mahaska trilogy are Mahaska's own and her
mother’s. Frontenac marries the young and beautiful Chileli under false
pretenses. She falls in love with Frontenac while he is being treated for wounds
by Chileli's mother, Ahmo. Frontenac had come to Canada in an attempt to

forget that his betrothed had been stolen from him by his own brother. But, as he

268

 

admits, he believed that "in [Chileli's] genuine affection I might sometimes forget
the trouble which had made me an outcast from a foreign land. Love was out of
the question, but I was very lonely" (Ahmo 48). The governor soon regrets his
"mad act" (49), but not before Chileli bears him a daughter. He admits that
Chileli "must have mourned over my coldness and silence . . ., [but] she endures
my mood with such patient submission that it tortures my very soul" (49).
Although he claims to be tortured by Chileli's goodness, such suffering in no way
changes his feelings toward her. He still feels "repugnance" every time he
touches her, "she had been swept completely out of the heart where she had
always held so light a place" (52). In fact, within the castle, she has separate
quarters from his. Her apartment is hung with furs according to her "savage
taste" (53) and represents the vast distance between them.

Mahaska's marriage to Gi-en-gwa-tah is even more deceitful. Not only is
love out of the question, "the idea of wedding the dusky chief stnrck her proud
heart with abhorrence" (Princess 67). Prior to the marriage when Gi-en-gwa-tah
looks at her with "wild love," she is "filled . . . with a sort of abhorrence, which, for
a moment, made her forget her pride and all her hungry revenge, to feel the
sharp pain of womanly suffering which throbbed in her heart" (76). However, her
thirst for power and revenge are stronger than her disgust at marrying an Indian,
even though "every feeling of her womanhood revolted against it" (95). What
Stephens does not say is that it is not just Mahaska's womanhood, but her M
womanhood that is revolted. Mahaska has Ieamed that marriage with an Indian
is unacceptable in white civilization. As half-lndian herself, the stigma against

interracial marriage makes little sense because any marriage she enters would

269

 

be interracial. But Mahaska has acquired some of the sensibilities of the whites
she claims to hate, proving, however circuitously, that Indians can be assimilated
into white culture.

As Mahaska takes her place as an "Indian" among Indians, she gradually
loses these last vestiges of womanhood. Her marriage to Gi-en-gwa-tah
represents how low she has sunk, for she wanted desperately to maintain her
independence. The chiefs have insisted that she must marry one of their braves
if she is to be their queen. Although she is revolted at the idea of "marriage . . .
[to an] unlettered savage" (66), she weds him because she desires power above
all else. This allusion to prostitution should not go unnoticed. She is willing to
sell her body in return for power, which has become the only narcotic that can
ease the pain of the rejections she has received at the hands of white men. Nor
does Gi—en-gwa-tah's noble nature and love ease that pain or change her
loathing for him. She hates him even more, especially since she sees him as the
only barrier to "her scheme to become sole chief" (Queen 22). However,
recognizing that she still needs him, she continues to use her sexuality (body) to
blind him to her ulterior motives (mind). In other words, their marriage will never
be a marriage of the minds nor a partnership of equals but a duplicitous liaison, a
means to selfish ends. Although neither of the intermarriages is successful, it is
not race but racial prejudice and dishonest motives in marrying that cause them
to fail.

Conclusion
Esther. A Story of the Oregon Trail differs greatly from the Mahaska trilogy

in terms of plot, but the two narratives have similar themes and methods of

270

m-

 

 

development. By the time Stephens penned these stories, in the early 1860s,
comparison and contrast, which she uses to great effect in both tales, had
become one of her fortes. Orville Victor may have encouraged Stephens to "kill
a few more Indians" in her western tales, yet she still manages to present
pictures of Indians that question their inherent inferiority to whites. In Esther
Stephens attempts to demonstrate that in the important issues of life, race is
inconsequential. Whether Claude/Osse'o is red or white makes no difference in
his character. He is a good man who risks his own life to rescue Esther, even
though she constantly frets about his race. Similarly, Waupee's race makes no
difference in her actions. As a good woman, she proves herself to be loyal,
trustworthy, and resourceful. Kirk's intimation that he would have married her,
albeit after a struggle with his own conscience, attests that race should not be a
determining factor in judging character and that societal barriers to intermarriage
are based on erroneous ideas about race. Considering that by the 18603
contemporary science insisted that Indians were inherently inferior to whites,
such a stance was remarkable. A

The Mahaska trilogy makes a different statement. While the theme that
Indians are not inherently inferior to whites receives some attention, Stephens is
more concerned with ruinous policies of exclusion in patriarchy that lead to
violent clashes between the two cultures. She also posits that if women are to
take their rightful places as active leaders in society, they must remain womanly
or their policies may be as destructive as men's. Mahaska's duplicitous dealings
with the British and her divisive administration nearly bring the tribe to ruin. Yet

by placing Mahaska's leadership of men at the center of the last novel in the

271

 

 

trilogy in which men are ancillaries of a woman, awaiting her will and action,
Stephens inverts the typical male-centered Western.

In both stories the boundaries of race and gender are called into question.
Waupee demonstrates that a woman can be active in the world, yet remain
womanly; whereas Mahaska's border crossings illustrate that the lines of gender
and race are murky. Both narratives satirize the pathetic passive female heroine
of the male-centemd tradition and counter with more active examples of
womanhood, although Mahaska is hardly an exemplary case. But more
significantly, Stephens confronts the problems of racial prejudice and asserts
through her characterizations of Osse'o and Mahaska that nurture, not nature,
determines character. Through characters such as Waupee, who is much more
exemplary than Esther, and Mahaska, who surpasses Adele in intellect,
Stephens insists that Indians are not inherently inferior to whites. On the other
hand, in keeping with her assimilationist beliefs, she suggests that environment
can improve Indians, as her descriptions of Osse'o and Mahaska reveal.

These later nanatives may rely more on stereotypical descriptions of
Indians, but they clearly suggest that all human beings are equal. Although
Paola Gemme contends that Stephens "depictled] lndian characters as
unredeemably 'savage'" ("Rewriting" 378), this analysis demonstrates that
Stephens believes that gender/womanliness redeems the savage. Both Waupee
and Mahaska are saved by their womanliness. Gemme also suggests that
Stephens' depictions of Indians indicate that they "could not be civilized"
("Profile" 53); whereas my analysis shows that in Stephens' view, whites,

particulariy men, would not accept Indians in "civilization."

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ra-

 

By creating tales of intermarriage between Indians and whites, Stephens
challenges prevailing prejudices and stereotypes about Indians. She
"encompasses and confronts" the problem of racial prejudice, asserting that
character is not determined by race and that whites are not necessarily superior
to Indians. She employs strategies to encourage women to take a more active
role in the world, while demonstrating the dangers of unwomanliness. And she
also makes her stories woman-centered, not just by creating female protagonists,
but by inverting staples of male-centered stories, placing women in roles where

they control their own destinies.

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1"” 771%

 

Endnotes

‘ Gi-en-gwa-tah's name appears on a list of Indian words and their translations,
handwritten by Stephens, among her papers in the New York Public Library. Although she had
usedthe name before, she may have used it hereforauthenticity, since shewasaware, probably
through Lossing's history, that Gi-en-gwa-tah was a real Seneca chief.

2 Burke explains the difference between what he calls "sheer motion" and motivated or
"symbolic action." Motion represents the "extra-symbolic or non-symbolic operations of nature"
("Dramatism" 447), such as biological functions, which can be reduced to their physical
components. Only motivated action has symbolic meaning, for it cannot be reduced to shear
motion. Using a ratio to help distinguish the difference Burke observes, "'Action' is to 'motion' as
'mind' is to 'brain.‘ . . . Empirically, that is, though there can be a brain without a mind, there
cannot be a mind without a brain" (RR 39). In other words, action has symbolic meaning
because it involves freedom of choice and purpose; thus, only motivated action is subject to
symbolic interpretation.

3 Stephens directly cites Shakesmare, using quotation marks to emphasize the allusion
to his line about "a woman scorned" in the Indian Princess, p. 77.

4 Homi Bhabha explains that this attraction for the racial "other" by the dominant race is a
repeated theme in the discourses of the colonizer (Childs and Wllliams 126). Although typically it
is the woman who is sexualized, Stephens inverts this convention as well. Bhabha believes that
this convention arises from the psychological need to make the "other“ knowable by discovering
similarities as well as differences.

5 See especially The Deersfayer, in which this idea is reiterated ad nauseam.

f In 1857, Mormons allied with Indians attacked a wagon train of settlers heading west,
resulting in 130 deaths. This event became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Carney
98). Thus, typical of many of her western stories, Stephens uses a real event to provide her story
with verisimilitude.

7 Here Stephens counters the stereotype that Indian women are necessarily physically
stronger than white women, who are frequently portrayed as trail in male-centered westerns.

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° Unlike many of the classical subjects that were considered too difficult or unnecessary
for women, history was deemed an acceptable subject for them to study. As early as 1741, David
Hume was recommending history "as an occupation, above all others, the best suited both to
their sex and education" (cited in Kerber, Women 246). By the time these novels were published
seva anthologies on women's contributions to history had been published (Kerber 260).
Stephens appeals to women's knowledge of history, particularly to their knowledge of great
women leaders in history, in this and many other narratives.

9 Many of Stephens' novels use passionate women, both white and red, including several
analyzed in this study, to warn women of the dangers of obsessive love for some (usually
unworthy) man. See for example, Fashion and Famine, Married in Haste, Sybil Chase; or The
Valley Ranche.

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___ ___—JFP‘E

 

CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION: PLACING STEPHENS' INDIAN STORIES IN THE AMERICAN
TRADITION OF FRONTIER FICTION

Ann Stephens believed that authorship carried with it a duty to do good,
but she also felt that it conveyed special blessings to the writer ("To Sigoumey"
16 May 1839). As she explains in her letter to Lydia Sigoumey of 16 May 1839,
the very time she was probably writing "Malaeska, "I think that I never truely (sic)
felt the goodness and beauty of our Savior's character till I was called upon to
write a little essay 'Cana of Galilee.”1 While this statement is phrased in terms of
nineteenth-century Christian sensibilities, it suggests, as Stephens herself later
explained in greater detail, that authors should use their God-given talents to
"convey images of tnrth and beauty from the heart of the writer to the heart of the
reader" ('Women of Genius" 89). Given this conviction, she developed stories
that presented the moral dilemmas of the day using strategies that led readers
toward her conception of the most ethical resolution. Thus, in her Indian stories
Stephens presents carefully crafted pictures of native life that clearly
demonstrate the ill effects of racial prejudice. She simultaneously creates stories
that illustrate how patriarchal limitations deter women from resolving or
ameliorating the social problems that Stephens suggests frequently originate in
male policies of hierarchy and exclusion.

In her stories of the American frontier, Stephens "encompasses and
confron " questions regarding the place of women and Native Americans in

American society. In other words, as Burke might say, she describes typical

276

 

 

situations of racial and gender prejudice, strategically inscribes them in her
fiction, and names allies and enemies to lead readers to develop an attitude
consistent with her purpose: that is, expanded roles for women and acceptance
of Native Americans within white culture. This is not to suggest that Stephens
had the sensibilities of the twenty-first century. On the contrary, her
assimilationist beliefs were based on the conviction that whites were superior and
that Indians would be improved by contact with whites, and her ideas about
expanded roles for women were generally couched in terms of her conception of
"woman's nature." Neither of these ideologies would be acceptable today.
However, despite what some recent critics have suggested, Stephens was
neither "racist" nor "conservative" on gender issues in the context of her own
time. The historical and discursive contexts in which she wrote complicate
analyses of her representations of race and gender yet must be taken into
consideration to elicit a faithful interpretation. Burkean approaches to analyzing
literature help unravel the ambiguities that have made it difficult for critics to
situate Stephens among other nineteenth-century authors who wrote novels
about the American frontier and/or Indians. V
Representations of Race

Certainly Stephens was influenced by her literary foremothers, particularly
Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, and Lydia Sigoumey, all of whom wrote
sympathetic tales of American Indians prior to Stephens' first venture into the
genre.2 A unique feature of Stephens' lndian stories is that so many incorporate
intermarriage into the plots. Such a preponderance of marriages between

Indians and whites indicates that Stephens, despite her great fear of being

277

 

 

considered unwomanly, probably felt that neither stigma nor impropriety was or
should be attached to these alliances, or at least not to writing about them. By
the 1860s when her later frontier tales were penned, she had almost 25 years of
experience as a published author and editor and had befriended many politically
powerful people; perhaps she felt well enough established to return to a theme
that had given her national recognition. After all, her original serialized version
of "Mary Derwent" had won a prize and was later republished when the
circulation of Ladies Companion, largely through her efforts as editor, had
increased tremendously. These successes led directly to her employment at
Graham's Magazine, where she garnered a national audience. Perhaps the
republication of Malaeska and Mary Derwent, both of which required extensive
revision, reminded her of the popularity of Indian stories and inspired her, once
again, to take advantage of that vogue.

Regardless of her reasons for returning to the topic, Stephens' lndian tales
bear certain similarities to Child's and particularly to Sedgwick's, but they also
differ in many respects. As did her predecessors, Stephens racially and/or
sexually inverts many of the staples of male-centered myth of the frontier. In
some of her stories, she follows the lead of these literary foremothers and
creates strong white women characters that counter the passive creatures
presented in male—centered fiction. But she also advances beyond that strategy
to satirize such "frail flowers" by contrasting them with strong, vibrant Indian
women. Like Sedgwick's Magawisca, some of Stephens' Indian women
characters are presented as noble, intelligent mediators between whites and

Indians - especially Malaeska, Tahmeroo, and Waupee. But in Malaeska

278

 

Stephens goes beyond Sedgwick's conception of Indians' position in American
society by placing Malaeska at the center of the story and making her the
protagonist, even though the outcome - that the prejudices of patriarchy prevent
the assimilation of Indians into white culture - remains the same. The serialized
and British dime novel versions of Mary Derwent make an even greater leap -
Tahmeroo is allowed to assimilate into white culture, albeit beyond the borders of
the United States. And finally in Esther, Esther and Claude/Osse‘o are admitted
into white culture, within the boundaries of the United States, in St. Louis, where
"lndian blood . . . was no bar to . . . reception in society . . . for an intermarriage
with the Indians had been no uncommon thing with the first settlers" (Esther 24-
5). Nor is St. Louis just an outpost of civilization, for as Stephens recounts, it
"has its villas and palaces now crowding out the log-cabins of thirty years ago"
(24).3 This assimilation represents a material advance in how authors dealt with
the "Indian problem." Yet, to maintain verisimilitude in both assimilationist tales,
Stephens acknowledges that many Americans remain prejudiced against
Indians. For example in Esther, she observes that "new-comers [to St. Louis] . . .
had begun to bring their prejudices beyond the great river" (25). Admittedly,
Stephens does suggest that most St. Louis residents had "forgotten" Claude's
mother's "savage blood" (25), but in terms of assimilationists' beliefs, such
forgetfulness only proves their objective - that Indians can be successfully
integrated into white society.

Today we recognize the racist implications of such a policy, as it also
suggests that whites are superior to Indians. However, this method of dealing

with the Indian problem does not suggest that Indians are subhuman as did the

279

3:23;!

li"°"‘ '- ‘—

 

doctrine of separate species, which gained greater currency in the 1860s when
Stephens was writing these later lndian tales. In fact, as Stephens' elegy at the
beginning of Estherimplies by its insistence that all are equal in the grave,
assimilationist ideals are based upon the common humanity of all peoples.
Moreover, assimilation is a nonviolent settlement. It represents a more peaceful
solution than that of the male tradition, which typically posited that only wars of
extermination could end the Indian problem. In other words, in making the either-
or choice between civilization or extinction that Maddox asserts all authors of the
period had to resolve, Stephens belongs on the civilization side (8).

On the other hand, Kolodny's argument that nineteenth-century women
writers "tended toward amelioration [of social problems] rather than solution"
(163) also describes Stephens' position on the Indian problem. Stephens
envisions no radical changes in the status quo for Native Americans; she does
not suggest, for instance, any massive programs to help assimilate American
Indians into white culture. Rather she points out that the prejudice of whites
against Indians is immoral and counterproductive. Stephens' stories document
that Indians can be as intelligent, ethical, and honest as whites (more so in some
cases), and that. given the opportunity, Indians are uplifted by contact with white
civilization. She seeks not so much to change the m as to change aging -
readers who are moved to compassion for the plight of Native Americans and
thereby lose their prejudice against the original inhabitants so that when the two
cultures do meet, whites' understanding (agency) will promote harmony rather
than discord. Such amelioration of the problem absolves Stephens from charges

of "unwomanly intervention" into the male sphere of politics. At the same time,

280

 

 

she uses her fiction to present sympathetic portraits of Indian women that
facilitate her (mostly female) readers' identification with her fictional characters
who were daughters, wives, and mothers, emphasizing the similarities between
reader and character. In other words, Stephens has "designs on her readers."
While she was reluctant to propose a change of scene, which could have been
interpreted as a political solution, she believed that by helping readers view the
Indian problem vicariously through her Indian women characters, she could, to
paraphrase Burke, "identify lndian ways with her readers' ways." That is, she
persuades readers that racial prejudice is an absurd contradiction by
demonstrating the similarities (consubstantiality in Burke's terms) between
Indians and whites.

Such a project was not easy. To create realistic characters, Stephens
also had to portray her fictional Indians in accordance with her readers'
"knowledge" of Indians, which probably came primarily from mass-produced
sources that, for the most part, vilified Indians. This meant that Stephens also
had to characterize her fictional Indians to coincide with the stereotypes with
which they were generally described in the popular press. To achieve her
ultimate purpose of improving racial relations, her portrayals of Indians had to
seem authentic or the story would lack the verisimilitude necessary to convince
readers of the genuine need for changes in attitude. Given such discursive
contexts, Stephens employs stereotypes to describe Indians even as she
deconstructs such racial classifications.‘ The ambiguities resulting from these

conflicting exigencies of the writing situation are clarified by Burke's approaches

281

to literary analysis, which help elucidate authorial motives underlying her fictional
dramas.

Even in the Mahaska trilogy, which contains more stereotypically racist
descriptions of Indians than any of her other Indian stories, Stephens'
representations of Indians, both good and bad, demonstrate that not all Indians
are alike, destabilizing the very notion of race upon which the entire project of
racial prejudice rests. Moreover, she provides mitigating factors to explain
Mahaska's savagery - most prominently white man's prejudice and policies of
exclusion. In this narrative, as in Malaeska, Stephens suggests that if white men
were more accepting of Indians, much of the tragedy, violence, and death
involving Indians could be avoided. In all of her lndian stories, despite widely
divergent plots, Stephens posits that racial prejudice is immoral and must be
curtailed.

Though some of her Indian tales, particularly Malaeska, reveal a certain
ambivalence about the nurture/nature debate so central to discourses on race in
the mid-nineteenth century, most of her stories and representations of race
indicate that nurture, not nature, determines moral character. Mahaska, the most
"savage" of Stephens' Indian women characters, is trained to be that way by
Ahmo, her Indian grandmother. Bereft of her tender-hearted mother at an early
age and neglected, even avoided, by her white father, Mahaska is unduly
influenced by Ahmo, who teaches her to repress her natural feelings, to hate
whites - in other words, how to be "savage." On the other hand, descriptions of
Claude/Osse'o demonstrate the civilizing effects of growing up in white society.

Such representations accord with Stephens‘ assimilationist approach to the

282

lndian problem. Ultimately, even though she describes both good and bad
Indians in stereotypical terms, Stephens' narratives represent racial prejudice as
counterproductive because it prevents the peaceful integration of Indians into
white society.

Representations of Gender

Like most of her literary foremothers, Stephens also writes to advocate
expanded roles for women in American society. In her Indian tales, she primarily
resorts to Indian women to represent women's active participation in the world
because, ironically, Indian women were not restricted to the same standards as
white women. Although white women do occupy leadership roles in Mary
Derwent, both are "fallen" women who have already crossed the boundaries of
womanliness and are thus freed from the restraints that bind most white women.
In female-centered myths of the frontier, Stephens proposes that if women were
allowed a more active role in society and had more influence on men in power,
less dissension between cultures would exist. For example, in Malaeska, had
women been allowed to speak their minds freely and had men heeded their
words when they did speak, much, if not all, of the tragedy might have been
averted.

While these protofeminist themes that Stephens develops resemble those
of her contemporaries, her subversionsfrnversions of the male myth of the frontier
are provocative. For example, Baym points out that in male-authored frontier
stories the "possibility . . . that American Indians might assimilate into a dominant
Euroculture . . . was often imagined but always dismissed, chiefly through lndian

characters who themselves reject this option" (Feminism 21 ). But Stephens'

283

stories suggest that it is white man's racial prejudice that precludes such a
possibility. And, contrary to Kolodny's suggestion that nineteenth-century women
writers "continued to concern themselves with the consequences rather than the
underlying causes" of social problems (163), Stephens' frontier novels, while they
do dwell primarily on the consequences of racial prejudice, pointedly indict
patriarchal policies as an "underlying cause." In other words, Stephens depicts
white men not as the heroes they appear in the typical male-centered frontier
story. but as antagonists who create the unhappy circumstances in which women
and Indians must live.

But her larger-than—life female characters constitute her most creative
inversion of the male-centered myth. Malaeska's "superhuman strength" and
indomitable fortitude make her an ideal role model for white women readers.
Malaeska‘s only fault is her overly passionate nature, which is a common
stereotype of Indians in white fiction of the period. However, since Stephens
created white women with that same fatal flaw, including Catherine in Mary
Derwent, these characterizations may be a warning to women readers against
allowing emotion to overrule reason. Despite having this fault, Catherine, white
chief of the Shawnee, fires the imagination. As leader of her people, she
represents the pinnacle of worldly power. Her story graphically documents that
people need not fear women in positions of authority, for under her governance,
the Shawnee flourish. Likewise the courageous Tahmeroo (Mary Derwent)
illustrates how women, if they are not weighed down by uncontrollable passion,
can lead people toward a new, more rewarding life. Though Waupee (Esther)

represents a more typical woman, even she exhibits characteristics worth

284

 

 

emulating, especially her resourcefulness and equanimity in the face of turmoil.
Ironically, Mahaska, the antihero, may be Stephens' most memorable
mythologized female figure. Although her tale symbolizes the caveat that women
must remain womanly to accomplish their goals, her monstrous hatred, her
colossal deviousness, and her calculated callousness nearly succeed in ruining
the happiness of Gaston and Adele. For several years she reigns supreme over
the Seneca, proving women's administrative abilities. These characters not only
focus the drama on women as active agents in the worId, but insist that women
have untapped capabilities that could, if used property, substantially improve
society.
Intermarriage

The sheer number of intermarriages that Stephens inscribes in her frontier
novels deserves closer examination. While both Sedgwick and Child had used
intermarriage to challenge white male perspectives that declared it was "worse
than a thousand deaths," Stephens uses it so often, it is almost as if she were
trying to normalize it. Her mention in Esther that intermarriage "had been no
uncommon thing" in St. Louis, at the borders of the United States and Indian
lands where peOple from the two cultures were more likely to meet, supports this
notion. Not all of the marriages Stephens depicts are successful. In the
marriages that are happy and successful she stresses how the partners were just
that, partners, because both entered into the marriage with true love and fidelity
or because they Ieamed through the trial of fire that honesty and fidelity are
essential to a good marriage. Unsuccessful marriages break apart because one

or both partners did not enter the alliance honestly. Race is a factor in these

285

ruptures only in the sense that the primary duplicity of one of the partners centers
on racial prejudice. Some marriages are more ambiguous, such as Catherine's
marriage to Gi-en-gwa-tah in Mary Derwent.£5 Lasting at least fifteen years but
breaking apart when Gi-en-gwa-tah understands that Catherine's true motive for
marrying him was to save Murray, it can hardly be considemd unsuccessful,
especially since Stephens alludes to their former happiness.

Other than brief scenes, readers see little of the domestic life of these
couples. In marriages based on deceit, Stephens emphasizes discord by
showing separate living quarters (F rontenac-Chileli in Mary Derwent), by
emphasizing the borderlands between two worlds (Malaeska-Danforth in
Malaeska), or by dramatizing scenes of duplicity (Mahaska-Gi-en—gwa-tah in the
Mahaska trilogy). Those couples who are assimilated into white society are
depicted, in the denouements, as totally acclimated to civilization. On the other
hand, of the white marriage partners only Queen Esther (Mary Derwent), who is
masculinized and thoroughly depraved, completely assimilates into native
culture. Although Catherine Montour (Mary Derwent) is assimilated during the
years before the story cpens, she gradually moves away from native culture.
These inscriptions are consistent with Stephens' belief that whites are superior,
that native culture is primitive, and that Indians can be elevated through contact
with whites. At the same time, they suggest that both race and gender are
unstable categories and that the borderlines separating one sex or race from
another are ever-shifting because individuals cross the supposed lines of

demarcation in both directions.

286

Stephens also strategically presents the situation of mixed-blood children
born into these alliances to enlist readers' sympathy for those born of two worlds,
belonging to neither. While they are accepted among Indians, as Tahmeroo
(Mary Dement) and Mahaska demonstrate, whites are not so open-minded.
Mixed-blood characters William Danforth (Malaeska) and Claude La Clide
(Esther) are accepted in white society, but William's lndian identity remains
secret and Claude's has been forgotten. The problems of the mixed-blood child
are pivotal in both Malaeska and the Mahaska trilogy. The young William
Danforth, not only because he has Ieamed to hate Indians, but because he
believes Indians are inferior, would rather die than live as an Indian. Mahaska
aspires to be loved and accepted by whites, but when they reject her, she finds
solace, not so much amongst Indians as in seeking retribution against whites.
Tahmeroo (Mary Derwent) is the only mixed-blood character raised in Indian
culture. She finds happiness in both white and red society, but that white society
is far removed from the United States, in Britain, where "lndian blood . . . [is] no
reproach" (104).

Intermarriages in Stephens' frontier fiction also bear no reproach, as long
as the marriage is based on love and fidelity. Instead of disparaging marriage
itself between whites and Indians, Stephens condemns white males who enter
such alliances falsely. She also castigates the prejudice of whites who will not
accept Indians and the children of intermarriages into white society. Consistent
with her assimilationist beliefs, Stephens suggests that whites cannot

successfully live in Indian society because to do so requires degeneration of

287

character. On the other hand, she posits that Indians can be assimilated into
white culture if whites change their attitudes towards them.
Placing Stephens' lndian Stories in the American Tradition of
Frontier Fiction

Stephens' lndian tales add new dimensions to our understanding of how
nineteenth-century authors dealt with the “Indian problem” as well as the
question of women's place in society. While her stories thematically resemble
those of recovered writers like Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Sedgwick, her
inscriptions move beyond their resolutions to suggest that Indians can, indeed,
be successfully integrated into white society if whites will be more accepting of
them. That Stephens adhered to this belief during the 1860s, as scientific
thought moved more toward the separate (infen'or) species doctrine and as male
writers such as Beadle's Edward Ellis continued to write stories befitting that
ideology, suggests she seriously "encompasses and confronts" a major cultural
and political issue of the day. In her portrayal of the American frontier, Stephens
posits peaceful, alternative resolutions to the "Indian problem." Furthermore, her
themes, though they rely on women characters who have already crossed or are
not bound by the gender restraints of white society, posit women's leadership
potential. They provide women readers with thrilling adventure tales and assert
that women are indeed capable of more significant roles in society. They also
anticipate later women's inscriptions of more autonomous and socially active
white women, such as Parley Kelso in The Silent Partner (1871) by Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps and Christie in Work (1877) by Louisa May Alcott. Because

Stephens is a product of her times and no modem-day feminist, she stresses,

288

through her fictional characters, that women must retain their womanliness if they
are to be truly effective leaders. But her use of Indian women as ideal characters
moves beyond that of her predecessors and anticipates later works such as
Ramona (1884) by Helen Hunt Jackson.

As feminist literary critics have insisted, nineteenth-century women's
literature requires different rubrics for assessing its inherent worth because
women not only wrote from different perspectives than men, their writing
situation, given the anomalous position of women writers at that time, differed as
well. For example, although Stephens uses elements of the romance to depict
her lndian characters and to develop her mythological heroines, her purposes
are antipodal to typical male inscriptions. Whereas the male romantic hero often
must escape civilization, Stephens' romantic heroines substantiate the need for
women's more active involvement in civilization.

Although Stephens' contradictory descriptions of Indians and her use of
Indian women as protagonists have resulted in confusion about her views and
the place of her fiction in the American tradition, feminist literary critic Susan K.
Harris explains that such antithetical messages were necessary to meet the
exigencies of the market. ”For the novels to be published and favorably
reviewed, they had to conform to the strictures [about women's place in society]

. . . ; for them to achieve their 'subversive' objects, they had to find a form that
would embody these dual, and often contradictory ideas" ("Good?" 270).
Stephens chose stereotypes to describe Indians, even as she attempted to break
down the biases on which such descriptions rested because the discursive

contexts of her writing situation (not to mention her own ideological positions

289

regarding Native Americans) require a sense of verisimilitude if her "subversive"
purpose is to be achieved. Similarly, Indian women and women beyond the pale
of "true womanhood" subversively enact Stephens' vision for a more active form
of womanhood because they do not represent a direct challenge to the status
quo, yet they ably demonstrate the underlying message that women can/should
be active participants in society.

In her influential Introduction to Sentimental Designs: The Cultural Work of
American Fiction, 1790-1860, Jane Tompkins asserts that literature should be
read as "powerful examples of the way a culture thinks about itself, articulating
and proposing solutions that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). Read in
this light, Stephens' work provides critics and teachers of American literature a
wider range of views on how mid-nineteenth-century Americans thought and felt
about the Indian problem and about women's roles in society and, therefore,
expands our understandings of this period. Analysis using Burke's rhetorical
approaches to literature demonstrates that Stephens' inscriptions of these social
situations both draw from the literature and ideologies of her day and move
beyond them.

Stephens' lndian stories, while they do contain elements of the
sentimental novel, might more aptly be considered female adventure novels, or
as Bube calls them "women's border tales." They represent a new genre for
women writers and readers. Bube sees "women's western adventure tales as a
subgenre of volatile hybridity" which she argues "elucidates the complexities and
historical value, the multiple ways in which they complicate both literary history

and the history of the constmction of gender" (6). I would argue they also

290

elucidate and complicate our understandings of how nineteenth-century authors
represented Indians in literature, revealing significant disparities in ways women
authors constructed race from the ways it is constructed in the male tradition.
Though mass-market popularity was once considered reason enough to
devalue a piece of fiction, cultural studies’ perspectives have demonstrated the
profound effects of popular culture on so—called "great" literature as well as on
the shaping of ideologies. Stephens’ Indian stories, all of which appeared as
dime novels, obtained wide audiences and thus may have had greater impact
than some of the canonical male-authored stories and those of recovered
women. As Tompkins, Karcher, Jameson, Burke and many others have proven,
literature is a response to the situation in which it arises. Stephens' responses to
the Indian problem and women's place in society are worthy of study because,
while they participate in the ideologies of her time, they also offer new
perspectives on these important social issues and anticipate themes of future

American authors.

291

Endnotes

1This essay suggests that people would do well to reflect upon the "character of our
Saviour" (Ladies Companion 9 (1838): 54).

2 Lydia Sigoumey wrote Sketch of Connecticut (1824), which incorporates themes of
female leadership and illustrates white's deleterious effects on Indian life. Though less well
known to scholars today than Child's and Sedgwick's works, Stephens, especially considering her
close friendship with Sigoumey, was probably especially mindful of it as she wrote her own lndian
stories.

3 Actually, St. Louis was founded in 1763 by the French trader Pien'e La Clede Liguest,
commonly referred to as "La Clede." The similarity between the historical name "La Clede" and
Stephens' fictional "La Clide" is probably not coincidental, given her practice of loosely using
history in her fiction. By 1840, when the novel is set, the population of St. Louis was 16,469 and
by 1860, near the time when Stephens wrote the novel it had grown tenfold to 160,733 ("Physical
Growth"). Since it was incorporated as a city by 1822, Stephens' statement about the "log-cabins
of thirty years ago" is more of a romantic image than a reflection of actual history.

‘ This is not to suggest that Stephens was free of prejudice, nor to excuse her
stereotyped representations of Indians, but rather to explain why those representations are so
ambivalent on matters of race.

5 Keeping the various characters in Stephens' novels straight is made more difficult in
that the name "Gi-en—gwa-tah" is used in two different novels. In Mary Derwent, he has a long
and relatively successful marriage with Catharine, spelled with a "."C In the Mahaska narrative,
a character by the same name marries Mahaska/Katherine with a "K." Part of Stephens' reason
for doing this may have to do with her desire to use recorded history to create verisimilitude. Gi-
en-gwa-tah was an actual person, a Seneca leader. Katherine/Catharine Montour was also a real
person and, according to some nineteenth-century sources, a daughter of Governor Frontenac.

See fn.3, Chapter 4 for more detail.

292

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American Publisher's Circular and Literary Gazette. 1855-61.

Bird, Robert Montgomery. Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay: A Tale of
Kentucky. 1837. The Masterworks of Literature Series. New Haven:
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Brown, Charles Brockden. "To the Public." Edgar Huntley: or, Memoirs of a
Sleep-Walker. 1799. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Chapman, Isaac. Sketch of the History of Wyoming. Wilkes-Barre: Sharp D.
Lewis, 1830.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer or, The First Warpath. 1841. The
Writings of James Fenimore Cooper. Albany: State U of New York P,
1987.

--. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. New York: Bantam, 1981.

---. The Wepf of Wrsh-ton—Wrsh. 1829. Facsimile of 1833 Bentley ed. Charles
E. Merill Standard Ed. Columbus, OH: Charles Merrill, 1970.

Cummins, Maria S. The Lamplighter. 1854. Chicago: Donohue, n.d. (c. 1900).

Ellis, Edward S. Seth Jones; on The Captives of the Frontier. 1860. Rpt. in
Brown Reading 165-268;

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