ABSTRACT
This chapter of American Literature and American Identity takes up Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. Sedgwick’s novel presents an account of the relations between European Americans and Native Americans that is, in certain respects, unusually accurate and uncompromising in its representation of European American crimes. At the same time, Sedgwick does not idealize Native Americans. The novel also takes up gender issues bearing on both European and indigenous women. As with James Fenimore Cooper, we find in Sedgwick many common techniques for responding to subnational divisions. These include interracial romance, though this seems to be developed with less conviction in Sedgwick than in Cooper. Sedgwick’s representation of racial and ethnic relations in this context is, however, complicated for readers today by her clear advocacy of Christianizing the Amerindians.
