Citation

Gould, Philip. “Catharine Sedgwick’s ‘Recital’ of the Pequot War.” American Literature 66.4 (December 1994): 641-662.

Summary Pros Critique 1 Critique 2 Critique 3 Critical dialogue Summary assessment

Gould investigates the extent to which, and in what ways, Sedgwick’s historical romance, Hope Leslie (1827), should be considered a “revision” of Puritan accounts of the Pequot War (1636-8). By “situating the novel in the context of contemporary histories written during the early republic,” he aims to reveal the “ideological underpinnings of the war in early national America” (642). Specifically, he argues that Sedgwick’s novel attempts to revise commonly held ideas about the meaning of virtue. This revision is achieved, Gould demonstrates, through the novel’s account of two massacres (one Indian and one English). By showing that nominally civilized English colonists were capable of the same kinds of atrocities that defined Indians as savage in the eyes of most historians, Sedgwick destabilizes a widely held definition of virtue as manly “martial valor and vigilant patriotism theoretically necessary to the republic’s survival” (642). Moreover, she promotes an alternative view of virtue, one defined by womanly emotional attachment and domestic duty. By portraying both massacres as “equivalent violations of the home,” Sedgwick “inverts the equivalence her own culture drew between Puritan and Pequot valor and recasts republican manhood as a ‘savage’ code of masculine civic behavior” (650-1). One consequence of this revision is that it creates a tension or “contradiction” (652) in the novel: Sedgwick on the one hand wants to critique gendered notions of virtue; on the other, she wants to displace racist depictions of Native Americans. By equating Pequot and English men, she risks reinscribing the historians’ stereotypes of Indian savagery that she wished to subvert. A second consequence is more historiographical and/or epistemological in nature: in offering an alternative “recital” of the war, the novel forsakes the claim for “historical truth” in favor of a more relativistic view of history as “imaginative exercise” (654). Gould’s analysis of the novel’s construction of plot around these two equivalent massacres, and his close reading of Magawisca’s version of events from a Pequot perspective, neatly contextualizes the critical problem of how the novel’s domestic/sentimental elements should be understood with respect to its racial politics. In addition, his argument admirably addresses the broader question of how historical events, and especially the contentious interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, were used by historians and literary writers for the purpose of fashioning an understanding of U.S. culture and society in the early national period. Three aspects of Gould’s argument merit further investigation. First, his definition of virtue seems tied to an overly broad conception of republicanism, one that might have been appropriate to Jefferson, but perhaps not so much to Andrew Jackson. Second, he seems to treat historical accounts of the war by William Hubbard and John Winthrop as somehow contemporaneous with the war itself, as they though were not themselves written in their own cultural contexts. In offering alternative history as an imaginative exercise, Sedgwick is perhaps more successful in exposing the essential fictionality of history than Gould is willing to grant. Third, although Sedgwick explicitly revises Hubbard and Winthrop, it might be useful to place her representation of the Pequot people in the context of other early 19^th century depictions of Native Americans to help assess the extent of those representations’ revisionism. I wonder, for example, how Gould’s analysis might be enhanced by an analysis of Mercy Otis Warren’s depiction of Native Americans in her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution. Another possible avenue to pursue might be Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White, in which she argues that Sedgwick identifies sympathetic identification as a problematic model for virtue. Ultimately, however, these critiques would be extensions of Gould’s analysis, not rejections of it. His survey of the histories of the period, and the definitions of masculine virtue they promote, is especially useful.