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Monika M. Elbert and Leland S. Person
No scholar is better known for associating the most significant tradition of American novel writing with romance than Richard Chase, who claimed that fiction in this exceptional “native tradition” depended upon a “freedom from the ordinary requirements of verisimilitude, development, and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyl; a more or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency to plunge into the underside of consciousness, a willingness to abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society, or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly” (1957: ix). No writer is more consistently identified with this tradition than Nathaniel Hawthorne. As Joel Porte asserted, “It is no exaggeration to say that without Hawthorne there could be no firm theory of American romance” (1969: 95). Hawthorne defined each of his four long narratives as a romance rather than a novel, and he explained the distinction most significantly in his prefaces to The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In the latter he argued that, whereas the novel presupposes an adherence to the quotidian, or the “probable and ordinary course of man’s experience,” the Romancer “may so manage his atmospherical medium as to bring out or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.” In his advice to the Romancer, he encouraged an interjection of the “Marvellous” simply as “a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor.” He went on, however, to insist that The House of the Seven Gables still includes the stuff of history: “It is a Legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist” (1965: 2).
In “The Custom‐House,” his extended autobiographical preface to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne had already discussed the ingredients of a romance. The Romancer must be inspired by the unusual light of moonlight to uncover a deeper reality not present during the bright light of day: “late at night, I sat in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal‐fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes, which, the next day, might flow out on the brightening page in many‐hued description” (1962: 35). He labels this intersection between the real and spiritual a “neutral territory” located “somewhere between the real world and fairy‐land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” Under the authority of this atmosphere, Hawthorne receives an injunction from the long‐dead Surveyor Pue to tell the story of Hester Prynne: “With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely seen, but majestic, figure had imparted to me the scarlet symbol, and the little roll of explanatory manuscript,” the apocryphal story of Hester Prynne, and exhorted him “to bring his mouldy and moth‐eaten lucubrations before the public” (1962: 33). The description of this discovery seems so convincing that students often think that the materials are real and that Hester is a historical figure. Hawthorne the romancer thus makes history come alive to a readership that might prefer daylight over moonlight – and he gives us a really plausible ghost story.
Hawthorne’s literary progenitors included the British writers Horace Walpole and Sir Walter Scott, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, all of whom anticipated him in declaring romance fiction to be a hybrid form. Walpole, deemed the father of the gothic novel, suggested in a preface to The Castle of Otranto (1764) that he wished to merge two types of writing – the medieval romance and the more realistic writing of the Enlightenment. In the “ancient” romance, he argues, “all was imagination and improbability”; in the “modern romance,” “nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.” He aims for verisimilitude by merging the two types, proclaiming that “in all inspired writings, the personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena, never lose sight of their human character: whereas in the production of a romantic story, an improbable event never fails to be attended by an absurd dialogue” (1982: 7, 8). In thinking of the gothic novel, he advocates an early type of suspension of disbelief, expecting the reader to accept the veracity of supernatural or magical events, such as the appearance of ghostly figures, moving pictures, hidden passageways, and bleeding statues, as well as the gigantic falling helmet that kills Conrad, the family heir, on his wedding day.
In his often‐reprinted introduction to the 1811 edition of The Castle of Otranto, Sir Walter Scott applauded Walpole for reverting to a “Gothic” style. Although Scott approved the use of the marvelous and supernatural, he criticized the excessive use of miraculous events in the novel. Scott’s own definition of the historical romance is best articulated in an 1824 essay, where he blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction but proclaims that “Romance and real history have the same origin”:
It is the aim of the former to maintain as long as possible the mask of veracity; and indeed the traditional memorials of all earlier ages partake in such a varied and doubtful degree of the qualities essential to those opposite lines of composition, that they form a mixed class between them; and may be termed either romantic histories, or historical romances, according to the proportion in which their truth is debased by fiction, or their fiction mingled with truth. (1824: 134)
Scott admits that the Saxon tradition has been more attuned to the “spiritual” romance and the Norman tradition to the “temporal” and more warlike (chivalric) romances. In Scott’s historical romances the underdog is frequently privileged – notably the Highlanders over Lowlanders, and Scottish over English in his wildly popular series of Waverley novels, the first of which was published in 1814. But he seems aware that progress entails the defeat of the old, the courageous warrior Highlanders, and the victory of a more industrialized Lowland culture.
The phrase “historical romance” reflects the tension in the work of James Fenimore Cooper, who was often called the “American Scott.” Despite writing more than 30 novels in various genres, Cooper’s five Leatherstocking Tales became hallmarks for American myth criticism, prominent in the decades following World War II. D.H. Lawrence inaugurated this approach by claiming that the series’ reverse chronological order enacted the “true myth of America” – a movement “backwards, from old age to golden youth” (1923: 54). This ahistorical myth required a special character, or mythic hero. For R.W.B. Lewis, the “evolution of the hero as Adam” begins with Cooper’s Natty Bumppo – “timeless and sturdily innocent,” his world “fresh, free, and uncluttered” (1955: 91, 103). A timeless hero seems an unlikely character to anchor historical romances, but the tension between history and myth often characterizes Cooper’s novels.
Whereas Hawthorne would define a tension in romance writing between the Actual and the Imaginary, Cooper’s early writing demonstrates the challenges of balancing history and fiction. The Spy (1821) is set during the Revolutionary War, although the war provides more background than a central focus. The Pioneers (1823) represents a fictionalized version of Cooperstown and chronicles life in that frontier town more than two decades before. Like The Scarlet Letter, The Pioneers is a novel of first settlement – a fiction set in a “real” place. After writing The Pilot (1824), set along the coast of England and featuring the heroic John Paul Jones, Cooper wrote the first of what he hoped would be 13 Revolutionary War novels. Lionel Lincoln (1825) includes the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. Cooper then resurrected Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827), setting the former during the French and Indian War and the latter in 1805 on the Midwestern prairies included in the Louisiana Purchase. Although set in 1757, The Last of the Mohicans engages the historical context of the 1820s that featured increasingly hostile government rhetoric and actions toward Native American tribes, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears in 1838–1839. In each case, Cooper’s novel enters into an indirect conversation with major events in American political, social, and geographical history. Even when his fiction does not seem to engage cultural issues explicitly, it reflects those issues indirectly.
Citing “several reasons why an American, who writes a novel, should choose his own country for the scene of his story” (2002: 2), Cooper turned to American materials and history – Westchester County, New York, in 1780, with the Revolutionary War in progress – for The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground. The subtitle refers to an embattled territory just north of the Bronx and Manhattan and bordered on the west by the Hudson River. The term “neutral ground” uncannily anticipates Hawthorne’s description of the “neutral territory” necessary for romance writing, although Cooper’s evolution toward an early American historical romance is somewhat halting. The Spy includes behind‐the‐scenes intrigue and a few battle scenes, but it often feels like a drawing room romance in a war zone. Cooper had lived in Westchester County and heard stories about the “neutral ground,” including one about a spy that he would use to create the title character, Harvey Birch. In keeping with its politically neutral setting, the novel features the Wharton family, whose patriarch is determined “to maintain so strict a neutrality, as to insure the safety of his large estate [The Locusts], which ever party succeeded” (2002: 37). Wharton tries to live outside history, and that desire translates into the relationship between history and romance in the novel. With the exception of George Washington, who appears in disguise as a “Mr. Harper,” the primary characters are fictional. Cooper must therefore keep the war in the background, since the historical record obviously would not include such characters.
The war setting, on the other hand, enables Cooper to add a twist to the Austenesque romantic plot. The Wharton daughters, Sarah and Frances, side with the British and American forces, respectively, and are courted by officers on those sides of the war. Cooper’s depiction of romantic relationships that cross national boundaries recalls America’s first play, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). Women infatuated with Billy Dimple, an American‐born but dandified Anglophile, must learn the lesson Cooper’s Sarah Wharton learns when she confronts British Colonel Wellmere’s duplicity. Sarah ends up single and an invalid, while her younger sister, Frances, marries the American Major Peyton Dunwoodie. Along with Washington, Dunwoodie represents the best America has to offer, just as Colonel Henry Manly did in The Contrast.
Cooper’s major innovation in The Spy is the peddler Harvey Birch, a precursor to Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers as a lonely hero who appears periodically to save people in need. A master of disguise, rumored to be allied with “the dark one” (2002: 138), Birch has a closet full of costumes that enable him to move about in the middle of the American–British conflict. With a bounty on his head as a reputed British spy, Birch actually spies for the Americans and ultimately receives a note of thanks and commendation from Washington himself for service his country can never publicly acknowledge. Captured at the end of volume one, Birch escapes by changing places with the washerwoman, Betty Flanagan (234). He saves Sarah Wharton from a bigamous marriage, interrupting her wedding with the revelation that her husband‐to‐be, the British Colonel Wellmere, already has an English wife (271–272). Finally, he saves Henry Wharton from hanging. A British captain, Wharton disguises himself to visit his family, subjecting him to arrest as a spy and putting him on trial for his life. Birch disguises himself as a fire‐and‐brimstone preacher, enters Henry’s cell to provide pre‐execution counseling, and then disguises Wharton as the family’s African American servant, Caesar Thompson. Both men simply walk out the door. These disguises coordinate with the characters’ conflicting allegiances and suggest Cooper’s commentary on the fluidity and ambiguity of identity caused by this first American civil war. Much of the novel’s conflict occurs between Americans – loyalists and rebels.
We can see the development of American romance, at least of the action‐adventure type, in The Pioneers, as Cooper discovers the heroic potential of Natty Bumppo and his companion, the Mohican chief Chingachgook. The first part of the novel, however, recounts a 24‐hour period on Christmas Eve in 1796 and features a remarkable cast of characters and character types. Cooper seems to be writing a novel of manners – a small‐town frontier novel. Chingachgook is little more than a drunken stereotype, especially when he passes out at the Bold Dragoon saloon and must be put to bed. Natty’s physical description and age (68) are difficult to reconcile with his role in the three novels set earlier than The Pioneers. “He was tall, and so meager as to make him seem above even the six feet that he actually stood in his stockings,” Cooper observes. “His face was skinny, and thin almost to emaciation” (1980: 22). A cranky old‐timer, “muttering” about Judge Temple’s “clearings and betterments” – with perhaps a trace of Rip Van Winkle in his character – he talks nostalgically of the good old days. In fact, The Pioneers is firmly rooted in a particular historical moment when rapid increases in population and settlement began to deplete natural resources. Helpless to stem the tide of “progress,” Natty decries the loss of trees and game – deer in particular, but also the fish and fowl that the townspeople hunt en masse when they blast pigeons out of the sky and catch thousands of fish with an enormous net. In the second half of the novel, however, Natty comes alive as an action hero. He bests Billy Kirby in a turkey shoot. He shoots a pigeon out of the air with a single shot. He saves Benjamin Pump from drowning. He shoots a panther that is threatening Elizabeth Temple and Louisa Grant. He saves Elizabeth and Oliver Effingham from the forest fire caused by the settlers’ habit of leaving piles of branches behind after cutting down trees.
Although The Pioneers ends with Natty heading “far toward the setting sun” (1980: 456), forecasting The Prairie, Cooper does not write that sequel immediately. He writes two other, very different, novels: The Pilot; A Tale of the Sea (1824) and Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston (1825) – both situated at important Revolutionary War moments. In both he wrestled with the competing demands and requirements of writing history and romance. In his preface to The Pilot, for example, he notes that the “privileges of the Historian and of the writer of Romances are very different,” adding: “How far and how well the Author has adhered to this distinction between the prerogatives of truth and fiction, his readers must decide; but he cannot forbear desiring the curious inquirers into our annals to persevere, until they shall find good poetical authority for every material incident in this veritable legend” (1986: 3). Cooper blurs the line between fiction and history, justifying his invention of incidents with “poetical authority.” He uses John Paul Jones as a hook for readers, loosely basing sea battles on those Jones made famous, but then inventing an elaborate romantic plot and even inventing a love interest for Jones himself. Set on and off the northeast coast of England, the adventure story relies on that part of Jones’s career when he battled the British – most famously, leading the Bon Homme Richard against HMS Serapis in September 1779. Cooper’s strategy in The Pilot, then, involves choosing a well‐known and appealing historical setting, including a historical figure and events that readers would recognize for their pro‐American value, and then inventing a complex romantic plot on this superstructure.
In Lionel Lincoln, Cooper faced a greater challenge in balancing history and romance because the battles he chose were so well known. With some frustration, he addressed the issue in an 1832 preface. “Perhaps there is no other country, whose history is so little adapted to poetical illustration as that of the United States of America,” he wrote. Because the “dissemination of accurate knowledge” about the country has occurred from the beginning of English settlement, there is “consequently neither a dark, nor even an obscure, period in the American annals: all is not only known, but so well and generally known, that nothing is left for the imagination to embellish” (1984: 6). As he analyzes his effort to write historical fiction, Cooper targets the line between history and fiction – a line across which we identify historical romance. Lionel Lincoln offers a good example – Cooper’s representation of the battles at Lexington and Concord’s Old North Bridge, events to which his desire to write history are so closely tethered. At the same time, these events also represent the places where his desire to write fiction is most compromised.
On one hand, Cooper wanted to describe the early battles of the Revolution as accurately as possible. He asserted that the “battles of Lexington and Bunker’s Hill, and the movement on Prospect Hill, are believed to be as faithfully described as is possible to have been done by one who was not an eye‐witness of those events. No pains were spared,” he insisted, “in examining all the documents, both English and American; and many private authorities were consulted, with a strong desire to ascertain the truth” (1984: 7). The American‐born Lionel Lincoln, a major in the British infantry, volunteers to accompany the British troops on their march to Concord to confiscate arms the colonists have stored there. Lionel serves Cooper as an embedded witness. He observes the British assault on colonists in Lexington, and while he does not participate in this first skirmish, he does call out in protest, “‘Great God!’ what is it you do? Ye fire at unoffending men! Is there no law but force!” (104). His response critiques British aggression and arrogance toward the American colonists. As the British march toward Concord, Cooper registers their over‐confidence and contempt for their adversaries: “Their coarse jests, and taunting looks, as they moved by the despised victims of their disciplined skill, […] exhibited the infallible evidence, that having tasted blood, they were now ready, like tigers, to feed on it till they were glutted” (108). Readers, of course, know what’s in store for these bloodthirsty British “tigers” at the Old North Bridge.
On the other hand, Cooper had to keep that battle at some distance, so he placed Lionel in the center of Concord when the gunfire begins. By the time he gets to the North Bridge, he discovers the British troops already defeated. At the end of the chapter he observes them skulking back to Boston. Troops that had expected to “march through the colonies” are now “dragging their weary and exhausted limbs up the toilsome ascent of Bunker‐Hill,” and the “eyes of most of the officers were bent to the earth in shame” (1984: 121). In just two chapters, Cooper has represented British recklessness, bloodthirstiness, and over‐confidence, and then sent the tigers back toward Boston, tired, defeated, and frightened, with their tails between their legs. These two chapters also illustrate the tension Cooper experienced and noted between history and fiction. Although determined to be as accurate as possible, he did not wish to write history, nor did he wish to claim more insight than he had into the thoughts and feelings of historical characters. Thus, he needed his own fictional characters, especially Lionel Lincoln, to witness but not actually intrude upon historical reality.
Cooper faced the same problem in The Last of the Mohicans, in which he chose a well‐known pre‐Revolutionary battle at Fort William Henry to anchor the first half of the novel. This narrative of 1757 is much better known to readers, of course, because it features Natty Bumppo’s fictional return. Cooper had to take Natty back in time; he was simply too old at the end of The Pioneers to continue to be a romance hero. Depicting Natty in his heroic character, of course, created a different problem if Cooper wished to locate these romances at authentic historical moments. Cooper addressed the challenge in the 1831 edition of The Last of the Mohicans as he reviewed Natty’s character and role in his first three appearances. Depicting Natty as a hunter in The Pioneers, a scout in The Last of the Mohicans, and a “lone trapper” in The Prairie, he wrote, “is poetically to furnish a witness to the truth of those wonderful alterations which distinguish the progress of the American nation” (1983: 7).
In identifying Natty as a hunter, scout, and trapper, Cooper emphasizes his “action‐figure” roles in the three novels. In calling him a “witness,” however, he acknowledges a limitation built into the character: Because of his almost superhuman qualities, Natty cannot be allowed to affect history. This limitation plays out most emphatically in The Last of the Mohicans during the French siege of Fort William Henry, when Natty does little to help the besieged British troops. Cooper discovered a solution when he removed the action and characters to a landscape with little or no history – an open field in which characters could act without the restraints imposed by a historical record. That ahistorical inclination has its climax in The Deerslayer (1841), the final Leatherstocking novel. Although he acknowledges that the “scene of the tale” is intended to be a “close description of the Otsego, prior to the year 1760,” he also notes that the landscape harkens back to the “mists of time,” and points out that the lake does not yet appear on any map (1987: 11, 15, 45). The Last of the Mohicans breaks neatly into historical and romantic halves – pivoting on the siege and massacre at Fort William Henry – as it too goes off the map.
Cooper sends his principal characters (Natty, Chingachgook, his son Uncas, the British major, Duncan Heyward, and the captive Munro sisters, Cora and Alice) away from white civilization into a natural world unburdened by history. The plot becomes an Indian captivity narrative, a genre still popular in the nineteenth century. This move enables Cooper to exploit two of his strengths, a cinematic eye for natural description and a feel for action sequences. He narrates a canoe chase on Lake George in chapter 20, describing some of the action from a bird’s‐eye perspective. He stages several fight scenes including Natty, Chingachgook, Uncas, and their Native American enemies, as well as the renegade Magua, who has taken the Munro sisters captive. Cooper sets the novel’s climactic scene on a cliff from which Magua plummets to his death. This part of the novel does not seem to engage its historical context directly, but Cooper’s disposition of his characters reflects the historical moment of the novel’s inception.
Although the relationship between Uncas and the mixed‐race Cora Munro seems the most compelling romantic relationship in the novel, Cooper has each of them die – their potential as a progressive first couple memorialized only by the Native American women who attend their common funeral. Inheriting the future instead are Alice Munro and Duncan Heyward, who seem pale copies of the other two characters. We learn near the end of The Prairie that Alice and Duncan have married and had two children, including a son named Uncas. Cooper’s inability to imagine a marriage between Cora and Uncas reflects one reason that The Last of the Mohicans has been replaced by such novels as Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie on many college reading lists, as well as in the focus of much critical attention.
Although many twentieth‐century critics moved quickly from Cooper to Hawthorne as they tracked the evolution of American romance, more recent scholarship has emphasized the contributions of writers such as Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. Child’s Hobomok (1824), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) could be considered a multi‐authored trilogy on the subjects of Indian–white relations and especially interracial marriage. Moving from British literary antecedents, such as Walpole and Scott, to their most obvious heir (Cooper) and then to Sedgwick and Child can help us understand both continuities and discontinuities in the political and social treatment of oppressed peoples and pristine natural landscapes – especially in the context of collective beliefs in the nation’s democratic progress. As Kevin Corstorphine has argued, many early American novels “can be classed in the realm of historical romance, and the great master of the genre, Walter Scott, had experienced success in the early nineteenth century, with this same blend of wistful nostalgia and wild adventure, with Scottish Highlanders taking the role of the Native Americans as the last remnants of a vanishing culture, closer to nature and specifically an uncultivated wilderness” (2013: 124). Native Americans and their habitats went hand in hand; diminishing or destroying one often resulted in negative effects on the other. Child certainly understood the horrors of Native American extermination. And Sedgwick, as an early ecofeminist, went even further to show how the deaths of Native Americans presage the end of the natural environment.
Unfortunately, most women’s historical romances were denigrated or ignored until the 1990s. Even as late as 1987, George Dekker, writing about the American historical romance, relegated women writers to a much lower rung. He devotes less than a page to Child and Sedgwick while asserting that “the nineteenth‐century historical romance must be regarded as a predominantly masculine genre” (1987: 221). Such disparagement of writers like Child and Sedgwick would change with the feminist revolution in literary criticism and New Historicism and would encourage us to see nineteenth‐century history from a woman’s point of view. Many recent critics have noted connections between women’s voices (and the Native American point of view) and the possibilities for the American democratic experiment. Nancy Sweet, for example, proclaims that the “defiant heroines created by Sedgwick and Child are an entirely new literary creation, one that reflects a national faith in private judgment so abiding that it could admit, for the first time, the legitimacy of the female dissenter” (2005: 107).
Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times (1824) was a daring book for its time in its depiction of a marriage between a white woman and a Native American in Naumkeak, later named Salem, the first settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Indeed, the novel includes a stunning portrait of the “lawless” protagonist, Mary Conant, who resists her strict Puritan father, first betrothing herself to an Episcopalian, and then, after hearing that her fiancé had died at sea, marrying Hobomok, a gentle Iroquois guide. Child seemed aware that her novel broke with male tradition as she included a warning in the preface that she would be contending with Scott and Cooper: “Scott wanders over every land with the same proud, elastic tread – free as the mountain breeze, and majestic as the bird that bathes in the sunbeams. He must always stand alone – a high and solitary shrine, before which minds of humbler mould are compelled to bow down and worship.” She goes on to include Cooper in this tongue‐in‐cheek praise when she explains, “I did not mean […] that my wildest hopes, hardly my wildest wishes, had placed me within sight of the proud summit which has been gained by Sir Walter Scott, or Mr. Cooper.” This excessive praise is disingenuous, since Child accepts the challenge of creating an American romance from seemingly unpromising materials: “Still, barren, and uninteresting as New England history is, I feel there is enough connected with it, to rouse the energies of my soul” (1998: 3, 3–4).
In what can be viewed as the first American historical romance written by a woman, Child represents both the disempowered female author and the dispossessed Indian. Hobomok and Mary are connected, for example, by their beliefs in the supernatural and their relationship to nature. The story is ostensibly based on “an old, worn‐out manuscript” written by one of the narrator’s Puritan ancestors, who follows Mary into the woods, where she performs a magic spell to discover the identity of her future husband. Beguiled by Mary’s “childish witchery,” the newly arrived colonist also feels mesmerized by the natural landscape, and the haunted atmosphere dividing civilization and wilderness: “The little cleared spot upon which I was placed, was every where [sic] surrounded by dark forests, through which the distant water was here and there gleaming, like the fitful flashes of reason in a disordered mind; and the trees stood forth in all the beauty of that month which the Indians called ‘the moon of flowers’” (1998: 12). Bedeviled in his mind by rationality and sensuality, Christian religion and Indian nature worship, the Puritan onlooker is shocked to find Mary performing a love spell that appears strangely heathen: she took “a knife from her pocket, […] opened a vein in her little arm, and dipping a feather in the blood, wrote something on a piece of white cloth, which was spread before her.” She then whispered some mystical words and made a circle “on the margin of the stream,” where “she stept [sic] into the magic ring, walked round three times with measured tread, then carefully retraced her steps backward, speaking all the while in a distinct but trembling voice.” The incantation sounds very much like a spell the bedeviled girls of the Salem witch trials might have recited in evoking the image of a lover. Mary hopes to evoke the image of her beloved Charles Brown and recites, “Whoever’s to claim a husband’s power, Come to me in the moonlight hour / Whoe’er my bridegroom is to be, Step in the circle after me” (13). Unexpectedly, her spell brings Hobomok into the circle, and she stands shocked, while he explains he has come to perform an act of devotion to the Spirit Rocks. In the next moment, Charles does appear, to Mary’s relief, and the lovers walk back to the settlement.
This magical incantation, as a way to escape the repressive Puritan system, sets the tone and the dilemma for the entire book. Child pointedly critiques the Puritan settlers and their intolerant and harsh ways. Charles tells Mary he appeared in the wilderness on the moonlit night because he dreamed that she was in danger, and Child certainly hints that some of that danger comes from Mary’s father, who “is over fond of keeping folks in a straight jacket,” according to her friend Sally (1998: 19). Among other things, he has destroyed the looks and disposition of Mary’s frail and dying mother (also called Mary). It will take Mary’s Puritan father more than the loss of his wife to come to his senses. The more devastating disappearance of his daughter occurs when she hears the fateful (but erroneous) news that her betrothed Charles Brown has been lost at sea, after his banishment from the Puritan settlement. Mary herself has never felt at home in Salem under the tyranny of the Puritan Church. Brown, a graduate of Oxford and an Anglican, inspires a desire to appreciate a kind of beauty unheard of in her father’s strict Puritan household. Feeling desolate in the Puritan wilderness, Mary writes her grandfather that she doubts Shakespeare could have thrived in such a landscape: “it is harde [sic] for incense to rise in a cold, heavy atmosphere, or for the buds of fancie to put forth, where the heartes of men are as harde and sterile as their unploughed soile” (79).
If the Anglican Brown represents a way out of the repressive Puritan civilization, Hobomok, who is in harmony with nature, initially seems to offer a second alternative, though Child does not seriously entertain the possibility of a permanent union between him and Mary. Mary goes out of her mind when she hears the false news that her betrothed Charles Brown has drowned. Running away from her father’s home and hurling herself in despair at her mother’s grave, she is rescued by Hobomok, who tries to assuage her grieving and gives her a home in the wilderness. They are married in a Native American ritual, with the approval of Hobomok’s mother, and Mary bears his child. But none of this would have happened, Child suggests, had she not gone “mad,” and so when Brown returns, she is all too willing to abandon her marriage. Hobomok, as the “noble savage,” gives up his rights to his wife and child and his own birthright. Equally depressing, we hear that he is unmanned, as he fights back tears, and then recommends his son to English care and prays to the white man’s God: “You have seen the first and last tears that Hobomok will ever shed. Ask Mary to pray for me – that when I die, I may go to the Englishman’s God, where I may hunt beaver with little Hobomok, and count my beavers for Mary” (140). “With a bursting heart,” he lights out toward the sunset and “forever passed away from New England” (141). Though readers might find hope in the son’s naming in a matrilineal fashion, since “[a]ccording to the Indian custom, he took the name of his mother […] Charles Hobomok Conant,” we recognize that all vestiges of his Indian nature will be eradicated. Re‐educated in white culture, he is not taught the Indian language, religion, or culture. Instead, “his Indian appellation was silently omitted,” and he was sent to Cambridge to become an honorable Englishman (149–150). As Carolyn Karcher has noted in her introduction to her edition of Hobomok, in contrast to Scott’s novels, which often sympathize with the vanishing tribal society of the Highlands, the purpose of the American historical romance was to “justify the complete obliteration of the vanquished race” (Child 1983: xv).
Whereas Hobomok takes place during the early Puritan settlement of New England, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie represents the period following the Pequot War (1636–1638), the first war between the colonists and Native Americans. Like Child, Sedgwick is keen on presenting a sympathetic picture of Native Americans, but she, too, ultimately allows for an exceptionalist vision of their disappearance. It may be, as Karcher suggests, that Cooper wrote Mohicans as his “answer” to the “challenge” Child’s Hobomok posed on the subject of miscegenation (Child 1983: xxxv). It is clearer that Sedgwick wrote Hope Leslie in response to Mohicans. Sedgwick goes even further than Child in representing a happy and enduring marriage between a white woman (Faith Leslie, captured during a battle between Puritans and Indians) and a Native American man (Oneco). Like Child, she censures the intolerant Puritans and suggests a redemptive vision for the future in the emancipated female character, Hope Leslie. Sedgwick’s proto‐feminist stance, though liberating, is short‐circuited by the realities of her readership: “Her revisionary history demonstrates the difficulty of carrying on simultaneous revisions of gender and race – of critiquing republican manhood and fully humanizing the Pequot for a largely racist audience” (Gould 1994: 652).
Sedgwick contests colonialist ideas of power and Anglo notions of superiority. Her two strongest protagonists, Hope Leslie and the Pequot Magawisca, become friends and thereby demonstrate possibilities for change within this patriarchal Puritan environment, represented conspicuously by Governor John Winthrop. From the start, Magawisca questions the patriarchal and warlike ways of both Puritans and Indians. She teaches the novel’s hero, Everell Fletcher, about the hypocrisy of the Puritan religion, in reference to her brother’s death: “You English tell us, Everell, that the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts, for ye say it teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness – if ye had such a law and believed it, would ye thus have treated a captive boy?” (Sedgwick 1991: 51). Everell grows in sensitivity and wisdom as he hears Magawisca’s recasting of both the cultural conflict and the Pequot War.
This is not to say that the narrator is sympathetic to the Native American cause or way of life, since she seems to accept the near extinction of both Indians and nature in the name of progress. One can be nostalgic for a moment, but “it is not permitted to reasonable instructed man, to admire or regret tribes of human beings, who lived and died, leaving scarcely a more enduring memorial, than the forsaken nest that vanishes before one winter’s storms” (1991: 83). That progress, as well as the Indians’ defeat, is warranted by an early concept of “manifest destiny” – a sacrifice for the sake of civilization. The narrator, with an effusion of patriotic cant, exhorts readers to appreciate the “noble pilgrims” that “lived and endured for us”; “when they came to the wilderness,” “they did virtually renounce all dependence on earthly supports – they left the land of their birth – of their homes – of their fathers’ sepulchers – they sacrificed ease and preferment, and all the delights of sense” (72). The passage continues with religious fervor: the chosen people sought “to open the forest to the sun‐beam, and to the Sun of Righteousness” and to “restore man […] to religious and civil liberty, and equal rights,” which included the conquest of the Indians – “to replace the creatures of God on their natural level – to bring down the hills, and make smooth the rough places.” This exceptionalist vision entailed the destruction of the Indians and nature in the name of so‐called civilization: they saw “with sublime joy, a multitude of people where the solitary savage roamed the forest – the forest vanished, and pleasant villages and busy cities appeared – the tangled foot‐path expanded to the thronged high‐way” (73).
In the end, like Cooper’s Uncas and Cora Munro, Magawisca and Everell cannot marry; that is not the narrative of the white Puritan colonizer. Like Hobomok, Magawisca drifts off into the sunset, as Everell and his beloved Hope Leslie wave goodbye to her. Although Hope mourns for her friend and bemoans what she imagines as the Indian’s future life in isolation, Magawisca quickly corrects her and maintains her closeness to God in nature: she hears “the Great Spirit” in “the rushing winds – in the summer breeze – in the gushing fountains – in the ripening maize – in the falling leaf.” Hope, who momentarily views this nature worship as pagan, retains a glimmer of hope in her ethnocentric thinking: “a mind so disposed to religious impressions and affections might enjoy the brighter light of Christian revelation – a revelation so much higher, nobler, and fuller, than that which proceeds from the voice of nature” (1991: 332).
Although Sedgwick tries to make Hope Leslie an honorable figure, the twenty‐first‐century reader recoils during several moments of the book, where she expresses her superiority over Magawisca. She is horrified, for example, when she hears that her sister Faith (née Mary) has married Oneco, Magawisca’s brother. “‘God forbid!’ exclaimed Hope, shuddering as if a knife had been plunged in her bosom, ‘My sister married to an Indian!’” Magawisca proudly retorts, “Yes – an Indian, in whose veins runs the blood of the strongest, the fleetest of the children of the forest, who never turned their back on friends or enemies, and whose souls have returned to the Great Spirit, stainless as they came from them” (1991: 188). Later, when Hope sees her sister leaning upon Oneco’s shoulder, “her heart died within her, a sickening feeling came over her, an unthought of revolting of nature” (227). Even worse, Hope hears that her sister has been converted by missionaries to Catholicism and has lost her ability to speak English. When Hope, through Magawisca, asks if Faith would like to return to the God of her father, Faith “took from her bosom a crucifix, which she fervently pressed to her lips” (229).
Hope Leslie finally embraces the vision of what John Winthrop famously described as a “city upon a hill,” the effort to found an ideal Christian society in New England. After his stay with his uncle Stretton in England, Everell Fletcher returns to Boston a less censorious Puritan. He and Hope are finally the happy couple of this historical romance, as they exemplify an appropriate combination of Puritan discipline and Anglican joy and feeling – and demonstrate sympathy for the vanishing Indian. The book does not permit a happy ending for Magawisca, who risked her life out of love for Everell, nor does it encourage us to think of a happy fate for the converted Faith and Oneco, as their days are numbered. As Magawisca had asserted in Winthrop’s courtroom, “The white man cometh – the Indian vanisheth” (1991: 292).
Set in the 1640s, during the same decade as Hope Leslie, The Scarlet Letter (1850) also tests the Puritans’ utopian ideal of a “city upon the hill,” but Hawthorne suggests as early as the first chapter why the Massachusetts Bay experiment is doomed to failure. It does not bode well that the “founders of a new colony” almost immediately allotted “a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison” (1962: 47) – a utopia marked by sinfulness and death. The added description of the mysterious “rose‐bush” that “has been kept alive in history,” or has “sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann [sic] Hutchinson, as she entered the prison‐door” foreshadows the events that will follow. The narrator delves into the realms of history and magic, intermingling the two, as if they were the same province of his imagination. Mentioning Anne Hutchinson as a Puritan rebel prepares us for the appearance of Hester Prynne at the same prison door. The narrator sets us up for the worst, as he plucks a rose from “the inauspicious portal” of the prison, and hands it “to the reader,” to serve as “a sweet moral blossom” or to “relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow” (48). As in the romances by Cooper, Child, and Sedgwick, the Puritan settlement will thrive, but at the cost of free thinkers and outsiders such as Hester and those other undesirables, who will be run out of the Boston settlement: Antinomians, Quakers, other “heterodox religionists,” “idle and vagrant Indian[s],” and “bitter‐tempered” women, like the widow Mistress Hibbins, “who is deemed a witch” (49). The deathlike feeling presented to the reader is counterbalanced by the appearance of the beautiful and sinful Hester Prynne emerging from the door of the prison, bearing her illegitimate child in her arms, but neither she nor her daughter Pearl will ever be integrated into the community. Indeed, Hester ultimately chooses to dwell in a neutral territory, or “magic circle,” of her own making – an isolated cottage between the Puritan settlement and the sea.
With her equally rebellious daughter, Hester scorns Puritan traditions and learns to navigate the wild forest (deemed the hiding place of the devil), which the fearful townspeople avoid. Ironically, only the two men whose lives she has touched most intimately seem at home in the forest, but for different reasons. Her lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, often goes there with John Eliot, the Puritan missionary to the Indians; and her husband, a doctor who assumes the name Roger Chillingworth, haunts the forests as he seeks herbs for his remedies. These three protagonists are inextricably bound through the secrecy of their identities and “sins”: Dimmesdale for his professional pride and refusal to acknowledge his affair with Hester or their daughter, Chillingworth by his abandonment of Hester to pursue his scientific studies, and Hester by privileging natural over religious law. They are also conjoined by their ability to be at home among the dead and dying, as they attend patients on their deathbeds – Dimmesdale as minister, Chillingworth as physician, and Hester as sister of mercy and as the seamstress commissioned to make garments for the dead. Eros, the drive of life and love, and the death drive Thanatos sometimes merge for the characters in the romance, but as the narrator forewarns in chapter 1, Thanatos will win. The last scene of the novel focuses on Hester’s final resting place, a new grave positioned next to an “old and sunken” one, but with “a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle” (1962; 264). The ending is dismal as the reader focuses on the “engraved escutcheon” on the tombstone that serves for both, bearing the heraldic device of the red letter A.
Hawthorne, who changed the spelling of his family name, saw The Scarlet Letter in some sense as penance for the misdeeds, crimes, and evils of his intolerant Puritan forebears, who participated in the witch trials (i.e., his great‐great grandfather Justice John Hathorne) and persecuted Quakers and miscreants on the streets of Salem (i.e., his paternal great‐great‐great grandfather✔ Major William Hathorne), and killed Indians on their home turf (both John and William participated in those atrocities). He, like Hester in the novel, becomes the scapegoat for the Puritans’ sins, as he announces in “The Custom‐House” that he feels both embarrassed and proud to be the offspring of his illustrious Hathorne ancestors, but he does recant of their evils: “I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them – as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race […] would argue to exist – may be now and henceforth removed” (1962: 10). But the sin cannot be purged, as D.H. Lawrence aptly would concede: “The Scarlet Letter isn’t a pleasant pretty romance. It is a sort of parable, an earthly story with a hellish meaning.” Lawrence shows how Hawthorne plays off natural law against civilized law; he critiques Chillingworth for his overdeveloped intellect, and Dimmesdale for his over‐reliance upon the spiritual law, but he gets his portrait of Hester wrong, accusing her of excessive seductiveness under her do‐good nature: “The grey nurse, Hester. The Hecate, the hell‐cat. The slowly‐evolving voluptuous female of the new era” (1923: 89, 101).
The Scarlet Letter may be the darkest American romance. The sins of the fathers cannot be set right, either on a national or a personal level. The competitors for Hester’s love, Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, never make amends to her; at the conclusion of the novel they are no longer doing battle and after their deaths perhaps loving each other in a more ethereal realm. Only Hester has gotten the balancing act between head and heart right as she thinks but also feels. When the Puritan community tells her she can remove the “A” from her breast, she chooses to wear it until her death because she has sewn her own meaning into the emblem. The revolutionary ideas she has felt in her nights alone in her cottage have made her strong, and the romantic love she has experienced turns into a more giving maternal love and, later in the novel, true caritas, as she becomes a compassionate advisor to other fallen or disappointed women. She becomes an amalgam of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s self‐reliant individual and Margaret Fuller’s intuitive, independent woman; at times, Hester unwittingly sounds like a proponent of Transcendentalist ideas, for example when she exhorts Pearl to find and make her own sunshine (Hawthorne 1962: 107). When Dimmesdale desperately asks her for consolation in the forest, she tells him there are other places to start life over, whether in the forest or in old Europe. She exhorts him to “Begin all anew!” (198). But the end of the narrative and Hester’s own fate seem to belie the possibility of beginning anew, since all are too bogged down in the past.
Like Hawthorne coming back to Salem like a bad half penny, as he describes it in “The Custom House,” Hester returns to the scene of her sin and repentance, although she has truly grown in stature from an abandoned woman to a strong independent woman. The irritating voice of the narrator, who often exemplifies Puritan law at its worst, had chastised Hester in chapter 18 by concluding that “Shame, Despair, Solitude […] had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, – and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss” (200). By the end of the romance, the modern reader is disappointed that she could not be the prophetess who would set women free, but her abiding belief is that “at some brighter period […] a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (263). Moreover, the narrator’s proclamation in the conclusion – “Be true!, Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” – is an implicit critique of Dimmesdale and Chillingworth for not exposing their true selves, even at the hour of their deaths (260).
Finally, the child of this failed New World experiment, Pearl Prynne – or Pearl Dimmesdale – inherits Chillingworth’s money, which sets her free to travel, albeit to Europe. Both Hester and Pearl should have been liberated from the restrictions of Puritan thinking, or as D.H. Lawrence negatively assesses the situation, “The devil in Hester produced a purer devil in Pearl. And the devil in Pearl will produce – she married an Italian Count – a piece of purer devilishness still” (1923: 203). Though Lawrence is correct in his assessment that returning to Europe is negative, we do not know if Pearl’s return was to Italy or some other Catholic nation, but we are sure it is not back to England. Upon Hester’s return to New England, we are told that she receives letters “with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry.” And Hester embroiders ornate baby garments “with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult” in the “somber‐hued community” of the Puritans (1962: 262). Certainly, Pearl’s final destination to a Roman Catholic nation seems troubling because it removes her from all that is Anglo‐American, the Anglican religion of England and the Puritan way of life in New England. More disappointing is that Pearl’s final conversion is anathema to all that she knew as a child. Her association with all that was wild, vibrant, and liberating – the forest, the Native Americans, Mistress Hibbins, the sailors – leaves no mark upon her as she returns to an Old World civilization that feeds off superstition, aristocratic hierarchies, and a moldering past, the stuff of romance which was to become the focus of Hawthorne’s final completed romance, The Marble Faun, or The Romance of Monte Beni (1860), set in nineteenth‐century Italy.
In The House of the Seven Gables, his romance about Salem, Hawthorne plays both a local‐color historian, who has read all the books of Salem history, and a mesmerist, who can weave a spell of mystery and enchantment over the willing reader, just as his protagonist Holgrave does with Phoebe Pyncheon. But because he also sees himself as a morally instructive historian/writer, Hawthorne challenges the Puritans and criticizes current Salemites, though in the Preface he distances himself from any censure by stating, “the book may be read strictly as a Romance, having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead, than with any portion of the actual soil of the County of Essex” (1965: 3). Despite Hawthorne’s commitment to a historical reality, his motivation in describing his shadowy Puritan past, on a personal or national level, is to expose the “sins of the fathers.” His moral obligation is to teach a lesson, that “the wrong‐doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” Hawthorne would feel grateful if his “Romance might effectually convince mankind (or, indeed, any one man) of the folly of tumbling down an avalanche of ill‐gotten gold, or real estate, on the heads of an unfortunate posterity, thereby to maim and crush them, until the accumulated mass shall be scattered abroad in its original atoms” (2).
The Puritan elite is embodied in the Pyncheons, who in effect steal the land from the farming (and later working‐class) Maules to erect their illustrious House of the Seven Gables, and whose sin comes home to haunt them. The so‐called wizard, the elder Matthew Maule, the original owner of the Gables property, is accused of witchcraft by Colonel Pyncheon, and is subsequently hanged, so that his land can be confiscated. Maule curses Pyncheon from the scaffold, declaring that “God will give him blood to drink” (1965: 8). The Pyncheon progenitor subsequently dies of apoplexy shortly after the house has been erected by the architect, Thomas Maule. Many conflicts, based on class differences, occur between the Pyncheons and the Maules thereafter: Matthew Maule, the grandson of the original Matthew Maule, works as a carpenter for the Pyncheons but feels snubbed by Alice Pyncheon, the daughter of Gervayse Pyncheon (the Judge’s grandson), and so mesmerizes and destroys her, body and soul. At this point, the wealthy landowning Pyncheons and the plebeian Maules have both committed enough sins to carry on the family feud and be cursed as a result. Fortunately, a simple love story keeps the families from sharing the fate of their feuding ancestors. Holgrave, the nineteenth‐century Maule, has been lodging in the Pyncheon household, although his identity as a Maule is not disclosed until the conclusion of the romance. He has inherited the Maule power to mesmerize, and he might have used it to seduce and destroy Phoebe, the youngest Pyncheon, but his love for her prevents him from doing so. Phoebe, a country cousin of Hepzibah and Clifford, is redeemed from the Pyncheon curse because her mother comes from the working (farming) class and has taught Phoebe a good Protestant work ethic.
Many Pyncheons, however, have suffered as a result of the fathers’ sins. Hepzibah, the old aristocrat, has had to start a cent‐shop because of economic distress; Clifford, her brother, was imprisoned for a crime he did not commit; and Judge Pyncheon, who has sent three wives to an early death, finally succumbs to the ancestral curse, as he dies of apoplexy sitting in the family parlor. He has been trying to press the bewildered Clifford into telling him of the secret deed involving the lost Pyncheon land in Maine, which had actually long since been claimed and settled. Holgrave, as a reformer, author, daguerreotypist, and jack of all trades, is ennobled by his radical views for social progress. In the final chapter, he discloses the hiding place of the secret deed, now deemed worthless, and also proposes to Phoebe. As a result, he becomes a landowner, as he and Phoebe decide to move to the Judge’s country estate. With “a half‐melancholy laugh,” Holgrave realizes that there is something sinister about making these plans in front of the portrait of the “model conservative,” Colonel Pyncheon, who “rendered himself so long the Evil Destiny of his race” (1965: 315). But Judge Pyncheon has also abused his power, and Holgrave blithely agrees to carry on the aristocratic condition by taking over the Judge’s country home. Readers may feel this outcome cannot bode well according to the historical script surrounding the ill‐gotten properties.
Hawthorne, though, considered this romance happier than The Scarlet Letter. In a letter to his friend Horatio Bridge, he declared that reading The Scarlet Letter had broken his wife’s heart and “sent her to bed with a grievous headache” and admitted that the narrative proper “lacks sunshine” (1985: 311; 4 February 1850). In a letter to his editor, James T. Fields, Hawthorne acknowledges a dark side to the ending of The House of the Seven Gables, but insists that he will infuse the romance with “sunshine”: “It darkens damnably towards the close, but I shall try to pour some setting sunshine over it” (1985: 376; 29 November 1850). Hawthorne seems to ignore the fact that the Maules and the Pyncheons are both guilty of seizing Native American lands, if not legally, then morally. When Holgrave reads the “ancient deed” hidden behind the Colonel’s portrait, it is “signed with the hieroglyphs of several Indian sagamores, and conveying to Colonel Pyncheon and his heirs, forever, a vast extent of territory at the eastward.” Holgrave, as a descendant of the Maules, knew the secret hiding place; the original Matthew Maule had hidden “away the Indian deed, on which depended the immense land‐claim of the Pyncheons. Thus, they bartered their eastern territory for Maule’s garden‐ground” (1965: 316). There is, indeed, something unsettling about how the Pyncheons claimed the land of both the Maules (in Massachusetts) and Indians (in the part of Massachusetts that was later part of Maine), but there is something more disconcerting about the fact that the Maules did not realize they had also claimed and inhabited Indian land. And so Hawthorne, in his second romance, is as dismissive of Native American culture as his predecessors of the American romance genre before him. New England territory is home to many atrocities, and the sins of the fathers can finally not be eradicated.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 4 (THE GOTHIC TALE).