Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Jennifer Camden

Secondary Heroines in NineteenthCentury British and American Novels

Cover image: “The Confidant.” Fullpage engraved illustration for a story by Mrs L. W. Stewart from Godey’s Lady’s Book, Vol. 40 (March 1850): Facing p. 176 (Philadelphia: Published by L. A. Godey). Caption: “ ’Alas, they had been friends in youth,/But whispering tongues will poison truth.’/Christabel; Engraved expressly for Godey’s Lady’s Book by W. E. Tucker. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared on the Romantic Circles website, “Money, Matrimony, and Memory: Secondary Heroines in Radcliffe, Austen, and Cooper.”

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Jennifer Camden University of Indianapolis, USA

© Jennifer Camden 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Jennifer Camden has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Camden, Jennifer. Secondary heroines in nineteenth-century British and American novels. 1. Heroines in literature–History–19th century. 2. Women in literature–History–19th century. 3. English fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 4. American fiction–19th century–History and criticism. I. Title 823.8’093522-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Camden, Jennifer. Secondary heroines in nineteenth-century British and American novels / Jennifer Camden. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6679-0 (hardback: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9880-7 (ebook) 1. English fiction–19th century–History and criticism. 2. American fiction–19th century– History and criticism. 3. Heroines in literature. I. Title. PR868.H4C36 2010 823’.809352–dc22 2009026054

ISBN 9780754666790 (hbk) ISBN 9780754698807 (ebk.I)

Contents Acknowledgements   Introduction   1

2

3

The Secondary Heroine and the Origins of the Novel  

vii 1 17

Mapping Geographies of Wealth: Inclination and Obligation in Clarissa   

23

Corresponding Coquettries  

33

Silence and Substitution: Romance, Revolution, and Empire in Desmond    

43

Marriage Market: Wealth, Obligation, and Female Friendship  

56

Scott and the Origins of Historical Romance  

59

A Rose by Many Other Names: Rose, Flora, and the Scottish Women of Waverley    

62

The “Fair Jewess” and the Less Interesting Rowena: Race, Femininity, and History in Ivanhoe   

74

Reconciliation and Romance  

92

Cooper’s “Man without a Cross”: Wealth, Race, and Religion in The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans  

95

“Do you forget Louisa?”: Remembering the Rival in The Pioneers   99

4

“Our Graver Sister”: Mourning the Secondary Heroine in The Last of the Mohicans  

107

Conclusion: Who Can Afford Sensibility?  

119

Magawisca’s Missing Arm: Absence and Replacement in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie  

121

vi

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Conclusion: Why Does the Historical Romance Make Us Want What We Can’t Have?  

145

Bibliography   Index  

155 175

Acknowledgements In stark contrast to the plight of the secondary heroines I examine in this book, I have been fortunate to find wonderful mentors in welcoming communities of readers and thinkers. Like all scholarship, this book is indebted to a much wider community of scholars and friends than I can name: the scholars whose work informs my own, the comments of colleagues at conferences, and, more directly, the feedback and support of friends, colleagues, and students. I am especially grateful to my advisers in both undergraduate- and graduate school. Julie Pfeiffer encouraged me to attend my first academic conference and thus introduced me to the collegiality and collaboration of scholarly endeavor. The generosity and wit of Marlene Longenecker continue to inspire my teaching and scholarship. My pursuit of transatlantic studies has been guided by her and by Susan Williams, whose compelling scholarship and commitment to students serves as a model for my own. Our writing workshop still continues via email, albeit with fewer members, and I cannot imagine this project without the many forms of support provided by these friends: Dana Oswald, who knew we needed deadlines, and whose pithy, thoughtful, and often hilarious comments made revision no less difficult, but far more entertaining; Theresa Kulbaga, who read every page with lightning speed, and whose rigorous questions were tempered with generous praise; and Robyn Malo, whose careful reading of Chapter 1 opened new directions for that chapter and the book as a whole. I am also grateful to Susan Allen Ford, Leland S. Person, Clare A. Simmons, Elizabeth Hewitt, Amanpal Garcha, Joel Pace, Lance Newman, Kate Fort, and my wonderful colleagues and students at University of Indianapolis, especially my research assistant, Sara Wright. It has been a luxury to have such a conscientious reader, and only slightly embarrassing to have her discover my mistakes: any errors that remain are my own. A completed manuscript is a very long way from a book, and I am lucky to have found wonderful editors in Senior Editor Ann Donahue, Assistant Editor Whitney Feininger, Lianne Sherlock, and Felicity Teague: their enthusiasm for this project, and, indeed, for their work in general, has made this process a pleasure. Thank you also to the anonymous external reader, whose feedback was invaluable in strengthening and sharpening my argument. I come from a family of voracious readers: we have shared and discussed books all our lives, and this book would not be possible without their love and support. I dedicate this work to them.

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Introduction

There was a mad disorder in my thoughts – a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all – the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth – but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the cheeks – there were the roses as in her noon of life – yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers? – but had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with the thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and disheveled hair; it was blacker than the wings of midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. “Here then, at last,” I shrieked aloud, “can I never – can I never be mistaken – these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes – of my lost love – of the lady – of the LADY LIGEIA!” (Poe 1534)

So ends Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story “Ligeia,” but the transformation of the Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine into Ligeia raises more questions than Poe’s conclusion answers: how has the Lady Rowena been transformed into the Lady Ligeia? What were those ruby drops that appeared in the air before falling into Rowena’s drink? Did our narrator poison Rowena? Is this all an opium dream, or has Ligeia truly been able to conquer death? Who – or what – is the Lady Ligeia? These questions have haunted readers since Poe’s story first appeared in the September 1838 issue of The American Museum and will undoubtedly continue to haunt readers for as long as Poe’s text remains in print. But a different question haunts me: who is the Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? In a text otherwise preoccupied with knowledge – with what we can and cannot know – the Lady Rowena exists as a strange anomaly: our narrator does not tell us very much about her, and, it appears, most readers do not particularly care. Like the narrator, because of the narrator, readers are obsessed with Ligeia. In “Ligeia,” Poe makes horrifyingly visible a sort of narrative violence typical to the nineteenth-century novel: the “forgetting” of one heroine to make way for another. However, because Poe’s story is Gothic, he inverts the typical narrative pattern: the unknowable Ligeia returns to the narrative by possessing the body of the familiar Rowena. Indeed, Poe’s story is Gothic at least in part because he inverts readers’ expectations by unearthing a buried narrative problem: the secondary heroine. Poe gives Ligeia center stage; he makes her unforgettable, unforgotten, and uncanny. In his essay “The Uncanny” (1919), Sigmund Freud takes as a starting point the suggestion of Ernst Jentsch that the uncanny originates from “doubts whether



Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate” (qtd in Freud 201). Although Jentsch is referring to waxwork figures or dolls, this idea certainly has resonance with the story of Ligeia. Freud finds Jentsch’s definition insufficient, but his own definition of the uncanny as the return of the repressed uses similar language: “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (217). For both Freud and Jentsch, the subject’s experience of the uncanny is determined by his own memory: is the doll alive, and if so, was it previously inanimate? Is this object something new or something seen before? In “Ligeia,” Poe’s narrator’s experience of the uncanny, and thus the reader’s, is determined by his memory: is this corpse the body of Rowena, or the oncefamiliar but since repressed Ligeia? The return of the repressed body of Ligeia at the conclusion of Poe’s tale points to a history of forgotten heroines: women who exist outside the primary courtship plot but return to challenge the resolution of the narrative. This book, Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels, focuses on the marriage plot in order to amend the history of the novel and its concern with woman and nation by recovering the role of this forgotten heroine, a figure I term the secondary heroine. Readers of novels tend to be preoccupied with the main character. We wait to see if the heroine will marry the hero, or suffer tragically. In doing so, we overlook the other woman, the secondary heroine. I call these women “secondary heroines” to point to a paradox: these characters are not mere stock background figures, but they are not protagonists either. Secondary heroines are defined by a particular and peculiar narrative pattern, a pattern I described above as “uncanny”: they begin the novel as significant characters, but then disappear, only to return at the narrative’s conclusion. In novels concerned with the construction of national identity, the literal translation of Freud’s term “unheimlich” is significant: although most translators use the term “uncanny,” the word literally means “un-homelike.” The novels I examine create a stable national identity, a sense of the familiar or homelike, through the marriage of heroine and hero. The return of the secondary heroine is, quite literally, the return of the repressed: she returns an alternative construction of femininity and nationhood (the un-homelike or uncanny) to a text struggling towards resolution. Thus, her return destabilizes and complicates the very categories of femininity and nationhood these texts render familiar. Poe draws our attention to the destabilizing power of the secondary heroine through Ligeia’s “strangeness” (1526); she is always just out of descriptive reach. Every description of her is over-determined, multiplying her significance in so many strange directions that it is impossible to pin Ligeia down: she is vaguely Eastern, vaguely beautiful, vaguely intelligent, vaguely rich – all of which makes her dramatic resurrection all the more startling, for Poe teases the reader with the promise of Ligeia’s materiality, dares us to think that we finally might know just who Ligeia is, even as he withdraws that possibility by concluding his tale. Instead of forgetting Ligeia, the narrator juxtaposes the unforgotten memory of

Introduction



Ligeia with the body of Rowena, whose materiality is further underscored by the mention of both her last name, Trevanion, and her home, Tremaine – two things, it is important to note, that the narrator cannot remember about Ligeia. In contrast to the excess of descriptors for Ligeia, the Lady Rowena is presented as if already known. By inverting narrative priority – that is, by focusing on the “strangeness” of Ligeia rather than on the more typical heroine Rowena – Poe calls attention to the uncanny return of the secondary heroine in the nineteenth-century novel. This pattern appears in some of the earliest novels written in English and persists, on both sides of the Atlantic, throughout what is typically termed “the rise of the novel.” For novels to introduce secondary characters – rivals, friends, villains – and then dismiss them from the plot is not surprising. But when novels introduce secondary heroines only to forget and then remember these secondary heroines – that, I think, requires explanation. This study undertakes that explanation by arguing that British and American novels ask readers to embrace the primary heroine as a representative of national ideals while displacing the anxiety produced by those ideals onto the figure of the secondary heroine. These texts work to stabilize national identity through the marriage of the heroine and hero by drawing a parallel between home and nation: their happy and secure home is a microcosm of the nation. My understanding of nationhood is informed by two seminal texts in literary and cultural studies: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Katie Trumpener’s Bardic Nationalism. I single out these texts for their radically different understandings of nationhood. Anderson theorizes nationhood as an imperial construct: the nation is defined by the majority. The “imagined community” of his title is one that necessarily excludes the “other” in the interests of group cohesion. Trumpener’s model locates nationalism on the borders – she is interested in the marginalized groups exiled by Anderson’s model. In this sense, Anderson and Trumpener provide a paradigm for understanding the tension between primary and secondary heroines: the primary heroine’s marriage to the hero consolidates the nation by providing the “model couple” that serves as the basic unit on which the larger nation is constructed. The secondary heroine – rebel, outcast, or merely forgotten by other characters – pulls readers’ attention to the margins. Thus, while Trumpener focuses on marginalized writers – the Scottish, Irish, and Welsh writers typically ignored by critics – this study applies Trumpener’s understanding of nationhood to texts typically understood as serving a monolithic, imperialist nationalism. Thus, I move beyond the either/or paradigm implicit in Trumpener’s and Anderson’s readings to claim that these texts chart the struggle between center and fringe understandings of nationhood. Part of the work of this study is to suggest that, while the narrative pattern of the secondary heroine remains fairly consistent throughout the Romantic novel, the secondary heroine herself assumes different forms to respond to different historical and literary tensions. Such forms have heretofore been the apparatus for studies of character in the novel. For example, scholars have examined representations of sisters in the novel under this rubric. Although I do consider secondary heroines who are sisters in Chapters 1 and 3, this project is not a study of sisterhood.

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels



Such studies exist, and have already amply covered the peculiar psychological relationship between sisters and the representation of that relationship in literature. I am instead interested in a broader notion of “sisterhood” that examines the power dynamics among women through biological sisters, adopted sisters, and female friendships. Similarly, while I consider secondary heroines who might be termed “exotic” or “savage” in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, this project does not limit “otherness” to race, but rather suggests that the historical romance uses race as a way of delimiting the secondary heroine as insurmountably “other.” These forms of (insurmountable) difference are complicated by the tension between female friendship and the marriage plot. The romantic happiness and financial security promised by marriage and the emotional support provided by female friendships are mutually complicated by a monolithic understanding of nationhood in both Britain and America. The literary histories of Britain and America are linked by a common concern with national history and the construction of national identity through historical narrative. I draw heavily on the research of Cathy Davidson, Nancy Armstrong, and Felicity Nussbaum, among others, to make certain historical claims; namely, that British and American citizens were preoccupied with constructions of femininity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that they understood the (fluctuating) definition of womanhood to be intrinsically linked to the (fluctuating) definition of nationhood. Although I bring together British and American texts through these shared concerns, this study does not collapse cultural or historical difference: I am instead interested in the ways authors deploy the same genre, and the same type of character (the secondary heroine), to serve different national contexts. The connection between female protagonists and national identity has been long established in literary criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, although it has most often been understood in “Andersonian” terms: the heroine’s marriage consolidates national identity and ensures the continuation of the nation through the offspring of that union. This study supplements such readings by turning to the unproductive bodies of secondary heroines. Unmarried and removed from the communities they inhabit through exile or death, the secondary heroine’s connection to nationhood is not located in her progeny, but instead in her troubling and unresolved return to the narrative. Thus my understanding of the links between femininity and nationhood moves beyond the work of earlier critics whose studies have been limited to the primary heroines of each text. Ian Watt, for example, suggests in The Rise of the Novel that Pamela embodied a new Protestant individualism, nascent in Richardson’s contemporary England. Watt’s reading necessarily ignores the multiple and contrasting images of women presented in Richardson’s novels. While Nancy Armstrong writes against Watt in Desire and Domestic Fiction, she   See, for example, Sarah Annes Brown’s Devoted Sisters, also a transatlantic study; or Amy Levin’s The Suppressed Sister, which focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British texts; or Helena Michie’s Sororaphobia, which expands the definition of sisterhood from a purely biological fact to incorporate metaphorical sisterhood in British texts. 

Introduction



too claims that narrative shapes national identity. In particular, Armstrong argues that the creation of desire for the domestic woman in the novel creates desire for the domestic woman in the British nation, but such a reading ignores representations of anti-domestic women, or women denied the opportunity to establish hearth and home through marriage. In a similar vein as Armstrong (and, ironically, just after rejecting a transatlantic approach in the first edition of Revolution and the Word), Cathy Davidson claims, “[m]y concern is with the ways in which a small body of Americans used the novel as a political and cultural forum, a means to express their own vision of a developing new nation” (Revolution and the Word 11). Davidson focuses on the development of an American literature “against the overwhelming impact of their nation’s residual Colonial mentality” (11); I am interested in exactly where and how American literature embraces or rejects the literature of the parent nation. My project connects Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction and Davidson’s Revolution and the Word to write a transatlantic history of the novel via the figure of the secondary heroine. The protagonists of British and American Romantic novels embody stable national identities. This point of similarity suggests a transatlantic history of the Romantic novel in which both British and American authors equate the primary heroine with a cultural ideal of femininity. Yet both traditions also challenge that cultural ideal through the figure of the secondary heroine. The struggle for authority in the novel (and thus the nation) is staged in the relationship between primary and secondary heroines. Thus, these texts are constantly engaged in what I see as the paradox of nationalism: in order to define the nation, one must have something to define it against. Therefore, Britain and America, in their attempts to push apart from one another, remain as entangled as ever. Thus while the primary heroine embodies national ideals – Britain for British citizens, America for Americans – the secondary heroine pulls against the narrative drive towards resolution, pointing to the instability of national identity. I understand the changing power dynamics between primary and secondary heroines in the novel as the representation of a struggle to define womanhood and nationhood – a desire for a pat conclusion (and thus for a secure national identity and understanding of femininity) that is always already undone by the very presence of the secondary heroine, the other. This “loose end” embodied by the secondary heroine is particularly striking in the history of the novel because of the pat conclusions common to the Romantic novel. Such novels typically end in the comforting certainties of marriage or death. In The Rise of the Novel Watt argues that Samuel Richardson’s development of the courtship plot marked the origin of the novel proper in England. I argue that the courtship plot becomes the dominant plot of the nineteenth-century novel in Britain and America not only because it offers structural unity, as Watt claims, but,   In her introduction to the recent reprint of Revolution and the Word, Davidson acknowledges that, if she were going to write the book again, she would consider a transatlantic approach.



Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

perhaps more importantly, because it operates to stabilize inconstant definitions of nationhood and womanhood – that is, the courtship of the heroine and hero offers a romantic fantasy of stable national identity through the figure of the heroine. The early novel is populated with dangerous rakes and rather anemic heroes: one path leads to happy marriage, the other to seduction and death. The fate of the plot, and thus the fate of the nation, lies in the heroine’s hands. Thus, the secondary heroine functions in two ways: she is both an embodiment of national anxieties and a proto-realist alternative to the romanticized femininity of the heroine. In my attention to constructions of femininity and nationhood in both British and American novels, I bridge the disconnect between feminist scholarship and current work in transatlantic studies. The methodologies employed by transatlantic scholars are wide-ranging and I will return to the problem of defining transatlantic studies later in this chapter: at its most basic, transatlantic studies rejects the premise that one should only study literature within one national context and brings together texts from the Atlantic world. Despite Frederic Jameson’s assertion that “feminism, taken in its broadest sense, certainly projects an ‘interdisciplinary’ coherence which is neither that of the period, nor of the area study” (18), with a few notable exceptions, very few feminist studies of nineteenth-century literature offer a transatlantic perspective. This mononational focus is belied by the scholarship itself, as feminist scholars essentially “sneak in” transatlantic readings of texts. For example, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s seminal work, Madwoman in the Attic, focuses almost exclusively on British women writers from Jane Austen to George Eliot, with the exception of their last chapter: “Strength in Agony: Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Women.” In this chapter, American authors including Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe seem to proliferate in company with Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti – as if an embargo of sorts had been lifted – but Gilbert and Gubar do not address their sudden switch to a transatlantic perspective. Indeed, their only invocation of the transatlantic is to hope that Woolf read Dickinson, and to offer a reading of Dickinson’s marginalia in her copy of Jane Eyre, gesturing to (but without commenting on) the transatlantic book trade that made such sites of exchange possible. In part, one might suggest that Gilbert and Gubar’s work is thus constrained by its own historical location: written at a moment when transatlantic studies were out of vogue, one wonders if Gilbert and Gubar felt compelled to limit their focus. The wide-reaching influence of their work provides a sort of de facto transatlanticism, as other scholars apply their theories to a variety of texts from different national traditions. Often a few floating signifiers – such as “separate spheres” or “true womanhood” – serve both nineteenth-century Americanists and scholars of nineteenth-century British literature, with very little discussion of the implications of the common use of these terms. For example, two anthologies – Monika Elbert’s Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830–1930 and Davidson and Hatcher’s No More Separate Spheres! – address the prevalence of the idea of separate spheres in American literature, but do not gesture to similar discussions

Introduction



in British literature, even as they invoke Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, or Virginia Woolf’s now more famous invective against her. Readings of Realist fiction by Nancy Armstrong and Amy Kaplan gesture to the commodification of the domestic interior, but do not discuss the transatlantic implications of the nearly simultaneous appearance of Lady Clementina Hawarden’s photographs of upper-middle-class women in domestic interiors and Edith Wharton’s “interior architecture” (Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism 80). Until recently, discussions of race focused entirely on the very specific national context of race identity; work by Paul Gilroy and others provides a welcome corrective by considering race in a transatlantic context. Missing from the critical conversation are articles and monographs that pull together these disparate strands of race, nation, and femininity. An important corrective to these separate spheres of feminist literary criticism is Sarah Annes Brown’s Devoted Sisters, although Brown’s rationale for comparing British and American texts is brief: Very early in my research I decided that this was to be a study of both British and American literature. Despite the important differences between the two traditions, both draw on the same tropes of sisterhood, and there is much evidence of influence and exchange between these nations’ sister texts, although some local phenomena (such as the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act) may certainly be identified. (viii–ix)

Brown essentially disengages from the questions raised by transatlantic study: she notes that British and American literary traditions have similarities and differences, but sidesteps any discussion of the implications of national difference. The secondary heroine serves as an apt starting point for such a discussion, as she is a figure common to both British and American texts, while the cultural and national ideologies she represents as repressed or discarded often diverge, thus illustrating the tension between union and disunion inherent in this transatlantic relationship. The “transatlantic feminism” I advocate here provides a way to articulate the common terms of feminist literary criticism without sacrificing historical or cultural specificity. With this in mind, I want to return to my earlier discussion of “Ligeia” to further illustrate the possibilities of transatlantic feminism as a critical approach. Editors have frequently suggested that Rowena in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe is the literary antecedent of Poe’s Lady Rowena of Tremaine. I dwell on this connection not to posit a Bloomian anxiety of influence, but rather to suggest an intentional reference that uncovers anxieties about femininity and nation. As is the case with Scott’s Rowena, Poe’s description of Rowena Trevanion depends on two Western stereotypes of femininity: beauty and dependence. Her fair hair and blue eyes link her to a stereotype of beauty, while her last name and home locate that beauty as a commodity within existing patriarchal structures.

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels



The second description of Rowena more firmly locates her within such structures by depicting her marriage as the product of the traffic in women: “Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved?” (Poe 1504). The exotic bridal chamber, so often read as a sort of psychomachia, is importantly an Eastern space full of “Arabesque” patterns, “candelabras of Eastern figure,” “the bridal couch of an Indian model,” and “a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor” (1504). This Eastern space – this apartment so bedecked – underscores the bride’s family’s greed; they have sold her into a foreign and potentially dangerous space for their own economic gain and without regard for her safety. In revisions to the tale, Poe more specifically evoked an opposition between this Eastern space and the English abbey that contains it by claiming that the visitor to the chamber “saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk” (1504). The juxtaposition highlights the unsuitability of “halls such as these” to house the Lady Rowena, whose physicality is decidedly non-Eastern, and whose unplaceable but known genealogy and hometown, Trevanion and Tremaine respectively, point at least to a Western, if not British, nationality. Poe’s treatment of these questions functions as a return of the repressed, asking us to re-read Ivanhoe, and Romantic novels more generally, with the Gothic knowledge revealed in Poe’s short story. “Ligeia” takes up questions of transatlantic or transnational commerce on several levels: the imported objects that decorate the halls of the English abbey echo the juxtaposition of the exotic Ligeia and the domestic Rowena, which in turn resonates with Scott’s juxtaposition of Rebecca and Rowena. Transatlantic trade, more broadly conceived, has been the focus of recent study as scholars interrogate transatlantic literary relationships. Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic has offered important insight into the Atlantic slave trade and the cultural power of the black diaspora; Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have posed the intriguing possibility that Samuel Richardson’s Pamela was inspired by American captivity narratives; and many scholars, including Susan Manning, Paul Giles, John Carlos Rowe, Lawrence Buell, and Robert Weisbuch, have looked at the possibilities of transatlantic transmission through literature and culture. In doing so, each of these scholars has forwarded some understanding of “the transatlantic” connected to the construction of national identity. Lawrence Buell’s work posits a “postcolonial” transatlantic; others interrogate a “comparative transnationalism” that offers a critique of nationalism even as it appropriates nationalist rhetoric, as in the work   Although I will not push the connection between Poe’s story and Scott’s Ivanhoe here, let me briefly note that Poe’s choice of “Norman” superstition and the “guilty slumbers of the monk” pair nicely with Scott’s novel.   It is interesting to note that Poe’s Gothic landscape is an English abbey – as opposed to the Italian and French landscapes popular in British Gothic fiction. 

Introduction



of John Carlos Rowe. Alternatively, transatlanticism is comparative and reflective, according to Paul Giles and Susan Manning; or a one-way transmission of cultural imperialism, as we see in Robert Weisbuch. Central to these understandings of “the transatlantic” is white America’s status as both colonial subject and colonial power. Implicit in the very terms “subject” and “power” is the compelling question of how America has negotiated this dual and apparently contradictory position, as well as its attendant politics. American historical romances attempt to reconcile the expansionist politics of manifest destiny (and the concurrent suppression or extinction of indigenous identities) with the more insular project of defining American communities. In focusing solely on the transatlantic relationship between Britain and America, I examine the constitution of national identity both internal to these nations – Britain’s changing relationship to the rest of her Commonwealth, particularly Scotland, and America’s own attempts to answer Crèvecoeur’s question, “What is an American?” (66), and evident in the unique relationship between them. The starting point shared by all of these variations of transatlanticism is the exchange of cultural artifacts and ideas between Britain and America, from the first settlement through today. In moving towards a definition of transatlantic studies, then, I too begin with this historical fact: Americans read British books, and, despite Sydney Smith, Brits read American books. British citizens also read accounts of America in travel narratives and occasionally, as we see in the cases of Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and even Maria Susanna Cummins, met Americans themselves. Despite America’s attempts to distinguish itself from Britain through the formation of a distinct national culture, and despite Britain’s attempts to disavow its relationship to its lost colonies through a disdain for the new nation’s culture, America and Britain remained inextricably linked. This tension between union and disunion, between a shared language and history and the historical events that divided Britain and America, as well as the threats of rupture from within, serves as the foundation for my understanding of transatlantic studies. Transatlantic studies reunite text and context in at least three key ways: by examining the multiple audiences, both national and transnational, to which a work speaks, often directly (as we see in Henry David Thoreau’s famous musing about John and Jonathan); by considering the representation of other nations and national cultures within texts (as we see when Clarissa considers emigrating to Pennsylvania, or in Henry James’s great international scenes); and by analyzing    This claim is subject to much debate. I am here siding with Paul Giles and Edward Watts to claim that America was both post-colonial (former colonial subject of England) and imperialist (having colonized America by oppressing the indigenous people and then working to establish itself as a national power post Revolution).    For this reason, I do not examine (for example) French novels. America and England’s “special” relationship persists to this day, as was made evident in Tony Blair’s speech after George W. Bush’s second inauguration.    Smith famously asked, “Who reads an American book?” (16).

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Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

the common deployment of generic or characterological strategies, which are the primary focus of this book. In my attention to character, I am indebted to Alex Woloch’s groundbreaking work, The One vs. The Many. Woloch’s book articulates a notion of character “space” to address “the tension between the authenticity of a character in-and-of-himself and the reduction of the character into the thematic or symbolic field” (15). He argues that reconfiguring our understanding of character as a “distributed field of attention” resolves this tension: the novel stages the struggle for referential significance between the protagonist and minor characters. This study builds on Woloch’s attention to character in the novel of social realism, and singles out the secondary heroine as a particular type of minor character doing a particular sort of cultural work in the historical romance. In Chapters 2, 3, and 4, I examine the cultural work performed not only by the secondary heroine, but also by the historical romance as a genre. The historical romance bridges romance and realism, the novel and the romance. Samuel Johnson differentiated between novel and romance as follows: the novel is “a small tale, generally of love” whereas the romance is “a military fable of the middle ages; a tale of wild adventures in war and love” (qtd in Joshua 282). Over time, of course, definitions shift, and we find Hawthorne explaining the nature of romance, not quite a hundred years later, in very different terms. While Hawthorne acknowledges that his House of the Seven Gables “comes under the Romantic definition … in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us,” it is important to note that Hawthorne wants to connect the “bygone time” with the present, and believes that the way to do so is through the use of the marvelous, or the “legendary mist” he employs to create a “picturesque effect” (vii). Thus, for Hawthorne, romance is to some degree detached from history, even as it relies on the sense of a present past. Still later, in Northrop Frye’s seminal work, The Secular Scripture, he describes realism as conservative, and romance as revolutionary, arguing that “In prose, the popular literature signalizing such new developments has usually taken the form of a rediscovery of the formulas of romance” (28). In contrast, Essaka Joshua has compiled an impressive list of critics who view romance as conservative. Writing from a still later moment in literary criticism, I use the term “historical romance” to define a subgenre of the novel, often said to originate with Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Like Frye, Ian Duncan, and others, I suggest that Scott positions his work within the category of romance (not least because the subtitle of Ivanhoe is “A Romance”), and that this category is a critically useful term. In an Encyclopaedia Britannica article published in 1826, Scott differentiates between romance and novel as follows: a romance is “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents”; the novel is “a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance, because accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and to the modern state of society” (qtd in    However, as Margaret Anne Doody notes in True Story of the Novel, Scott acknowledges the work of several earlier writers (295).

Introduction

11

Humphrey 43). By his own definition, Scott’s Waverley and Ivanhoe are romances, despite their engagement with historical events. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series, if Mark Twain’s “Literary Offenses” is taken seriously, also “turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents,” as does Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie. But without stretching Scott’s distinction too far (and, indeed, his own definition points to the similarities between novels and romances), I argue for the critical usefulness of the categories “romance” and “historical romance” in general, and particularly as they apply to my study of the secondary heroine. For my purposes, historical romance is a genre that brings into conversation several periods of history, several nations and models of nationhood, and several definitions of romance. The novels I consider in this book are “historical” in that they are set in a period antecedent to the time of composition: thus, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, published in 1814 near the close of the Napoleonic Wars, is considered “historical” because it is set during the 1745 Jacobite uprising. Like the Gothic novels that preceded them, Waverley and other historical romances narrate the past to comment on the present. Katie Trumpener has suggested that, “Between 1760 and 1830, British literature is obsessed with the problem of culture … At the same time, British novelists are rethinking the political and epistemological bases of the novel” (Bardic Nationalism xiv). Falling near the end of Trumpener’s time period, Scott’s Waverley nevertheless meets her criteria. Both the setting of Waverley and the period of the novel’s composition are fraught with anxieties about the nature of the British nation: in 1745, will Scotland Highlanders revolt against Britain with the aid of the French? In 1814, will Britain defeat Napoleon? The period outlined by Trumpener coincides with the founding of America through the removal of indigenous Americans: a period also clearly crucial to the formation of American culture and national identity. Cooper and Sedgwick, writing in the period immediately preceding the Indian Removal Acts of 1830, set their novels in the early American past, and use their texts to address concerns about the nascent American identity: will America establish a nation independent of Britain? What is the role of the Native American in the new nation? Cheryl Walker has suggested that the American Indian is necessary to the formation of an imperial US identity. The figure of the Indian serves as both an outcast “other” and as that which differentiates Americans from other European nations. Although the figure of the Indian is used to justify American exceptionalism, the broader trope of an internal “other” is common to the historical romance in Britain and in America. Thus Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick each tell a story of the national past that also confirms the national present: by telling the history of the nation, they create an imagined community, to borrow Anderson’s term, which invites the “right sort” of Englishman or American to belong to the imperial nation. Yet, as Trumpener has argued, Anderson’s model of nationhood overlooks a very different form of nationalism – the nationalism of the rebel, the fringe, the outcast. Even as Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick present an imperial nationalism – the triumph of British or American imperial identity over the racial or foreign other – they also narrate a

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much more radical nationalism, that of Fergus and Flora MacIvor or Mononotto and Magawisca. While Trumpener dismisses Scott and his ilk in favor of recovering lesserknown Scottish, Welsh, and Irish authors, I return attention to the ways in which Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick attempt to contain these rebellious nationalisms, and I argue that they ultimately fail to do so. Although I name Fergus and Mononotto above, their threats to the nation are effectively contained by the progress of the narrative: Fergus’s execution and Mononotto’s death end their ambitions, leaving the grieving Flora and Magawisca behind. As Susan Gillman notes in Blood Talk, “From within a nominally allegorical relation between fiction and history, the U.S. race melodramas force us to rethink the grounds of that relation. What the novels leave unresolved or unreconciled are historical forces generated by, but not limited to, race” (22). Preserved at least in part in deference to their sex, as objects of desire Flora and Magawisca trouble the resolution of historical narratives. While Edward and Everett find more appropriate spouses in Rose and Hope, their interest in Flora and Magawisca leaves open the possibility of another conclusion. Thus the secondary heroine and not the villain undoes narrative closure and troubles the homogenous nation. The secondary heroine’s exclusion from the marriage plot also focuses attention on the second half of the term “romance.” Certainly the potential for a romantic attachment between secondary heroine and hero – present in all of the novels I include in this study – is one aspect of the term. In addition, as I note above, the representation of a distant past – and the sorts of historical license and nostalgia this affords – in the romanticization of the past, is an equally important facet. Yet two additional facets require our attention: first, the grouping of these novels under the aegis of Romanticism, and second, the more technical generic distinctions between novel and romance, or between romance and realism. The term “romance” points to the ideological heft of these texts. Their function is not simply to inform or to entertain, but to provide a vision of the past that explains the present and perhaps shapes the future. Thus the term “romance,” as opposed to “realism,” points to the liberties these texts take with the “real” history on which their narrative is based – liberties that, in the case of Sedgwick and to some degree Scott, are acknowledged in their prefaces, and that are, I argue, ideologically motivated. The persistence of the genre “romance” throughout history is one testament to its ideological usefulness. In her massive The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody gives the following account of the historical romance: Romance seemed to make a better comeback in another and more exalted form – the only one of the newly invented forms not to be shifted (at least at first) into the enduring “minor” category. The modern historical novel was invented … In the historical novel, epic strengths were freshly reunited with the respectable realistic novel, mediating public and private life, and drawing the history of the common people. (295)

Introduction

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Doody’s tome necessarily moves on quickly from these genres, but by emphasizing the incorporation of romance into a genre increasingly preoccupied with realism, she points to the synthesis and occasionally the conflict central to historical romance: the romance that drives the narrative is always reconciled to “realism” at the end, and almost always at the expense of the romantic happiness of the secondary heroine. As Scott notes in his explanation to readers, Rebecca cannot marry Ivanhoe because of the “prejudices of their age” (12): the potential marriage of secondary heroine and hero is unrealistic. The use of the term “romance” also separates these texts from both earlier and later novels. Northrop Frye has suggested that “romance” appears at moments of innovation, and certainly the historical romance straddles the early modern novel that precedes and the realist fiction that succeeds this genre. In my first chapter, I investigate the role of the secondary heroine in early modern fiction: beginning with Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa, I follow the appearance of the secondary heroine in epistolary works on both sides of the Atlantic. Although it is obvious that in an eighteenth-century epistolary novel the heroine must have another young woman with whom she can correspond, I argue that critics have overlooked this correspondence. By focusing solely on the plight of the heroine (Clarissa, Eliza, or Geraldine) scholars have overlooked the interesting course of the other heroine: Anna, Julia, and Fanny. Our collective inattention to these other women is all the more surprising in that, with the possible exception of Julia Granby, they tend to better embody twenty-first-century ideas of womanhood and thus are, at least theoretically, more appealing to the present-day reader. In comparison to the bland, dutiful primary heroine, secondary heroines are sassy, intelligent, brave, and rebellious – qualities one finds in twenty-first-century heroines. Even within the nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising that later novels become far more interested in “secondary heroines” – as I explain in Chapters 2 to 4. Although my primary focus in these chapters is the historical romance as a subgenre, I also chart the “Rise of the Novel,” in particular the ways in which the changing form and content of the novel as a genre reflects or shapes British and American culture and national identity. In addition, as I note above, “romance,” at least etymologically, is linked with Romanticism, and I think it is important to recoup the Romantic novel as such. Thus my study participates in what Joel Pace and others have termed “Transatlantic Romanticism,” and seeks to recover connections among British and American Romantic fiction. My reading of Charlotte Smith’s Desmond in Chapter 1 provides a crucial link between the early modern seduction novel, represented by Clarissa and its American counterpart, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, and the historical romance. Like Clarissa and The Coquette, Desmond is an epistolary novel; its cast of characters also includes a virtuous young woman, her well-meaning friends, and a rake. Yet Desmond is clearly a later work of fiction,   Indeed, although this study is not the place for such a discussion, I do think that too little work has been done to connect Romantic poetry with the Romantic novel.

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concerned not with the seduction of Geraldine – who is already married to the rake – but with the reformation of a society that would encourage such a marriage. Again, like Clarissa and The Coquette, Desmond is interested in national politics and national character, but it is far more interested in the French Revolution, occurring as the novel is being penned. In its preoccupation with the Revolution, and with reform in general, it more nearly resembles Romantic poetry and the historical romance. Indeed, Trumpener has linked Desmond and Waverley to argue that Scott is indebted to Smith and to the national tale in general. However, while Desmond and Waverley may be linked under the common term “Romanticism,” or under their joint concern with nationhood, they are very different texts. I argue that it is important to contrast the treatment of minor female characters in the early novel, as represented by Desmond, Clarissa, and The Coquette, with the increasingly prominent role of similar figures in the works of Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick. Thus I preserve a strict definition of historical romance, limiting myself to works of historical fiction published in the early nineteenth century, from approximately 1814–30, and focusing especially on select works by Scott, the first and most famous British practitioner; Cooper, his American counterpart; and Sedgwick. My first chapter, “The Secondary Heroine and the Origins of the Novel,” examines early British and American seduction novels in which the secondary heroine survives to write the story of her dishonored and deceased friend. I demonstrate that these secondary heroines cover up or write over the transgressive narratives of the primary heroines. The survival of the secondary heroine in these early texts points to the instability of national identity and femininity in the early American republic and early imperial England: the fallen woman at the center of each text belongs to a still-nascent and thus uninhabitable new world order. In contrast, the marriages that conclude Desmond uncover the connections among romance, revolution, and the secondary heroine, and appear to reflect Smith’s progressive political agenda: the French Revolution’s overthrow of a tyrannous aristocracy promises to explode domestic tyranny. In Smith’s novel, however, the promise of revolution is undercut by the vestiges of French and British Empire and the reassembly of patriarchal authority at the novel’s conclusion. In the years following the American and French revolutions, just as Victoria takes the throne, the seduction novel cedes to the domestic novel. Courtships end successfully in marriage, not in death. The marriages that conclude the Romantic novels I examine in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 look forward if not explicitly to progeny then to future happiness under the auspices of the happy couple. Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick all rely on the concluding marriage of hero and heroine to solidify national identity against internal and external threats, threats that take shape in the hero’s attraction to the secondary heroine’s racially othered body. Chapter 2, “Scott and the Origins of Historical Romance,” argues that the romantic resolutions of Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1820) are also figured as national resolutions: by attending to the ways in which Scott makes these resolutions uncomfortable through the deployment of secondary heroines, we

Introduction

15

can better understand how these secondary heroines complicate the incipient nationalism these novels appear to endorse. Each novel offers a point of origin for the historical romance and charts a moment of historical tension. Waverley depicts the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the last effort to reinstate the Pretender on the throne of Britain; Ivanhoe famously (and inaccurately) imagines the tension between Saxon and Norman in the 1190s, over a century after the Norman Conquest. Thus both novels narrate a sort of last stand against an already-changed world order, and in each novel the secondary heroine registers the cost of that shift. In Chapter 3, “Cooper’s “Man Without a Cross”: Wealth, Race, and Religion in the Historical Romance,” I claim that the pairs of heroines in The Pioneers (1823) and its prequel, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), contrast the controversial ties of race and faith with the apparently stable discourses of wealth and Anglo lineage. Examining these novels together reveals that the typical pair of strong heroine and weak heroine is inverted: Bess and Cora are each strong, fearless women, contrasted with their weaker companions, Louisa and Alice. Yet while The Pioneers concludes with Bess’s marriage to the hero, The Last of the Mohicans ends with Cora’s funeral. I connect this role reversal to issues of wealth, religion, and race in each novel: the suppressed narratives of Louisa and Cora’s suffering, allied to their respective positions as minister’s daughter and descendant of West Indian slaves, posit alternative hierarchies of value that reveal the economic underpinnings of early America. In my fourth chapter, “Magawisca’s Missing Arm: Absence and Replacement in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie,” I argue that the women of Hope Leslie (1827) embody distinct possibilities and dangers for the new republic. Each of these women represents a possible model of femininity for the nation as well as for the genre of historical romance and, more broadly, the novel. The self-exile of Esther and Magawisca at the conclusion of the novel enables Hope and Everell’s marriage at the expense of alternative visions of national identity. Magawisca’s departure conforms to the historical exile of Native Americans from the colonies; by writing this exile as a choice, Sedgwick emphasizes the choice of duty over desire. Esther’s decision to remain single is significantly more complicated and has received very little critical attention: Sedgwick contrasts Esther’s life of public service with Magawisca’s inaccessible and vanishing happiness. Esther’s continued circulation in the colonies ensures that she will be a part of the new nation as an unmarried woman. By splitting the role of the secondary heroine in two, Sedgwick is able to recast spinsterhood as a positive choice, unattached to the racial logic that informs both Rebecca’s and Magawisca’s exile. I conclude by returning to Ivanhoe with a reading that understands Poe’s “Ligeia” and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena (1850) as radical revisions of Ivanhoe that underscore the significance of the secondary heroine in the historical romance. Poe and Thackeray render the secondary heroine “uncanny”: these later texts conclude with the return of the repressed secondary heroine. The famous conclusion of “Ligeia,” with which I began this introduction, is a Gothic representation of the return of the secondary heroine: it is, quite literally,

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the return of the repressed. Lady Ligeia returns from the dead by possessing and revivifying the body of Rowena. Thackeray’s novella is more closely allied to Ivanhoe. Thackeray literally attempts to replace Rowena with Rebecca; however, the narrator’s revisions empty Rebecca of national and racial difference in order to enable her to occupy the place of conventional heroine. Thus while Thackeray and Poe appear to restore attention to the secondary heroine, by depicting Rebecca and Ligeia as each literally inhabiting the place of Rowena, these texts call attention to the traffic in women implicit to the narrative of Scott’s Rowena and the historical romance in general. In each text, the swap of heroines does not provide a more satisfying conclusion; instead, these texts gesture towards the reader’s desire for resolution as a desire that narratives cannot, ultimately, fulfill. The inversion of primary and secondary heroines, the exchange of Rebecca and Rowena, does not eliminate repression; instead, it represses something else. By turning away from the comforting fiction of resolution to these loose ends – the alternative versions of nationhood and femininity embodied by the secondary heroine – we can better understand the cultural work performed by the Romantic novel in Britain and America.

Chapter 1

The Secondary Heroine and the Origins of the Novel This chapter begins not quite at the beginning, but, perhaps more appropriately for a discussion of secondary heroines, with Richardson’s second novel, Clarissa (1747–48). While Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, was wildly successful, it was the format of Clarissa that attracted imitators in England and America well into the late eighteenth century. Thus Clarissa, rather than its precursor, serves as my entry point for a transatlantic reading of heroines. Although my remaining chapters focus on the secondary heroine in historical romance, this chapter examines the origins of the secondary heroine in tandem with the origins of the novel to examine the shift from an internal construction of nationhood (as theorized by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities) to the invocation of an “other” – in these novels, an “other woman” – against which the nation is defined. The three novels I discuss in this chapter are located at the intersection of national and literary revolutions. Richardson’s novels are an (albeit contested) point of origin for the genre as a whole; Clarissa popularizes the epistolary seduction novel and grapples with the rise of the middle class in Britain. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond (1792) interrogates the Richardsonian model in the midst of the French Revolution. Finally, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) revisits this model in a post-Revolution American context. The question of filial obedience (or disobedience) as a metaphor for the fealty of the British subject on each side of the Atlantic has already been explored by critics; I argue instead that Clarissa and its imitators work to displace the absolute authority of the parent to the collective authority of a judging community, often composed of women or feminized figures. In each of the novels I examine in this chapter, the community’s focus on one fallen individual suppresses an alternative narrative, that of the secondary heroine. While readers may focus on Clarissa’s plight, Anna’s narrative is nonetheless    See Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Americanization of Clarissa,” and Ruth Perry for accounts of Clarissa’s imitators and publication history.    This debate begins as early as Watt, who locates Richardson at the origin of the novel despite earlier picaresque works (e.g. Defoe).    A note on chronology: although Foster’s novel is chronologically later than Smith’s, I read Foster’s novel first in this chapter. Smith’s introduction of a French secondary heroine anticipates the use of racially and nationally “other” heroines in the historical romances I examine in Chapters 2 to 4.    See Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims.

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present, and persists: Clarissa’s story serves as the model for the seduction novel in England and America, but the Anna Howe subplot remains a part of that model as well. Thus, Clarissa’s plight is not the only model of femininity presented in the early epistolary novel; the secondary heroines in these texts manipulate the social obligations imposed by their communities to achieve their desires. In texts notorious for the punishment endured by the primary heroines (a punishment to which, in the cases of Clarissa and Eliza, they ultimately succumb), these secondary heroines model a survival strategy. While Clarissa is often read as the exemplar, her mercurial counterpart is more socially successful, and by the end of the novel has control over the representation of the deceased Clarissa to the community. As readings by Jay Fliegelman, Nancy Armstrong, Leonard Tennenhouse, and others have suggested, Clarissa drew on and engendered a transatlantic literary culture. Too often, however, critical attention has remained on the fallen woman, or on the community response to her plight. In contrast, I examine the role of her correspondent – the secondary heroine – in Clarissa, Desmond, and The Coquette to argue that these novels teach readers to manipulate the representation of themselves and others, or face victimization and early death. By teaching women to navigate the marriage market, these novels create a slightly more sinister image of the “Republican mothers” and “Angels in the House” endorsed by their communities, and instead provide models of women finding access to power at home and thus in the nation. The broader similarities between Clarissa and its American successor, The Coquette, are striking: both feature a well-educated heroine who has refused several offers of marriage only to be seduced and abandoned by the local rake; in both, the heroine ultimately dies, leaving a corpus of letters addressed to her friends and relatives – a textual body to supplant her corpse. The rake in both novels has a correspondent to whom he reveals his plots (and his vanity), which renders his schemes transparent to the reader. Finally, both feature a secondary heroine, a correspondent who follows the heroine’s plight, offers advice, and survives the heroine to tell her tale. At first glance, Desmond shares many characteristics with both of these novels: like Clarissa and Eliza, Geraldine is threatened with a mercenary marriage. Unlike Clarissa and Eliza, however, she has already succumbed to her parents’ wishes and married. Despite her marriage, she is pursued by a rake – or, rather, by several – but she is also pursued by the hero, Desmond. Geraldine jokingly suggests that “there is no modern man of fashion, who would take a hundredth part of the trouble that Richardson makes Lovelace take, to obtain Helen herself, if she were to return to earth” (242). However, the action of the novel demonstrates that there is such a man: Desmond. In his disguises and stratagems, he very much resembles Richardson’s anti-hero, albeit rendered heroically chaste. Geraldine, too, is a white-washed Clarissa: she is threatened with rape, but she is never attacked, nor is she seduced. Instead, Geraldine’s “fall” is displaced onto her French double, Josephine, whose future is uncertain at novel’s end, but who, nonetheless, does

The Secondary Heroine and the Origins of the Novel

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not die. Smith’s use of an “other” woman figure anticipates the role of such secondary heroines in the historical romance. Whereas Clarissa and The Coquette are relatively inward-looking in their construction of nationhood, as evidenced by the contrast between heroines of the same nationality within the confines of the domestic landscapes of one nation, Desmond grapples overtly with the tensions among romance, revolution, and nation by contrasting English and French women, and English and French landscapes. Despite these changes, Desmond is still very much a novel concerned with wealth, and with the connections between money and matrimony. In this respect, it is similar to Clarissa and The Coquette in that it teaches Anglophone women how to navigate the marriage market. Thus Clarissa, Desmond, and The Coquette are texts fundamentally concerned with marriage and money, but also with national and transnational politics. To marry for love or to marry for money, and so fulfill one’s obligation to one’s parents: this choice is presented to the heroines of these novels. Clarissa’s troubles, one might argue, begin because of her grandfather’s will. The independence afforded Clarissa by wealth, and the anxiety that attends that independence, drives the plot of the novel. In brief, the change in Clarissa’s class status resulting from her grandfather’s will enables her individualism. As Ian Watt, Nancy Armstrong, and others have argued, Clarissa’s individualism reflects a larger cultural shift in Britain, connected in part to the rise of the middle class and an increasing acceptance of companionate marriages. Detaching wealth from inherited estates alters the organizing class structures of British society and thus changes the image of Anderson’s imagined community of British citizens. Desmond lays bare the other side of this coin: each heroine marries for money, albeit in obedience to her mother. Geraldine and Josephine are both forced into marriages with dissolute men when they are young, but even Fanny’s marriage to Montfleuri only garners her mother’s approval because of his wealth. Geraldine and Desmond’s romance intersects with the ongoing French Revolution: as the French aristocracy falls, Geraldine is liberated from her mercenary marriage. Smith’s novel challenges Anderson’s notion of nationhood in its attention to transnational concerns and reveals the role of the “other,” in this case the other woman, in the construction of national identity. In contrast to each of these predecessors, in The Coquette, Eliza’s lack of fortune prevents Sanford from marrying her, for although Sanford appears wealthy, he is actually deep in debt. While Clarissa’s unsettled class identity occasions much of the conflict in Clarissa, Sanford’s deceptive class identity is marginal to the plot of The Coquette, which, as Julia Stern and others have argued, is more concerned with the political implications of domestic actions. In this respect, the novel draws on the connection between the private sphere of domestic life and national revolution illustrated in Desmond. The Coquette opens with the death of authority, manifested in the death of Eliza’s father and her aged fiancé, Mr    Josephine’s letters never appear in the text; Geraldine corresponds with her sister, Fanny Waverly, who ends the novel married to Josephine’s brother.

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Hale. Eliza’s individualism is not primarily located in her class status, but in her refusal to submit to the yoke of obligation once the strictures of paternal authority are removed. This absence of paternal authority resonates clearly in the early republic given America’s recent rebellion against the paternal authority of Britain. Ultimately the questions of filial obedience raised in each of these novels have political implications: when is rebellion just? However, if, as John Adams said, “Democracy is Lovelace, and the people are Clarissa” (qtd in Barnes 41), then what does that make Anna Howe? Or Julia Granby? Or Fanny Waverly? Each occupies the same precarious position as Clarissa, Eliza, and Geraldine once did: each is a young, unmarried woman who must negotiate decisions about marriage and class status, and who leaves an epistolary record. Unlike the primary heroine, the secondary heroine is always aware that her letters circulate beyond their intended recipient, and that her image in society, linked to her reputation and thus to her marriage prospects, can be circulated and manipulated as well. Thus the “private” letter becomes a public document; the home-bound heroine a matter of public discourse. By trading on these representations, the secondary heroine is able to navigate the multiple economies in which she participates: marital, filial, social, and national. The secondary heroines of these texts realize that a letter is always both public and private, both an indicator of presence and absence. Jürgen Habermas has called the eighteenth century “the century of the letter” (48), and has argued that the epistolary novel rose from the already semi-public nature of the letter: “Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience (Publikum). The opposite of the intimateness whose vehicle was the written word was indiscretion and not publicity as such. Letters by strangers were not only borrowed and copied, some correspondences were intended from the outset for publication” (49). But the historical fact of the circulation of private letters to unintended or intended audiences does not give sufficient attention to the complicated relationship between the public and the private in the epistolary novel. Habermas quickly dismisses the epistolary format of Pamela by suggesting that the novel in letters actually changes the interactions among author, work, and public into a more private and intimate relationship. This relationship only becomes public, according to Habermas, because [T]he familiarity (Intimität) whose vehicle was the written word, the subjectivity that had become fit to print, had in fact become the literature appealing to a wide public of readers. The privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process of enlightenment which they together promoted. (51)

In other words, the epistolary novel creates private relationships among author, reader, and work, which only become public when readers share their private reading experiences with each other.

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However, the epistolary novel, as embodied in Clarissa, Desmond, and The Coquette, is not a simple dialogue between two correspondents that is published, consumed by the bourgeois reading public, and then (ideally) “re-published” in the discourse of the public sphere. Instead, the intrigue of the epistolary novel depends on the various minor acts of publication that are interior to the text, which in turn complicate the didacticism and the reception of the published novel. In other words, the epistolary novel does not just model “participation,” nor is it merely anxious that its readers will retreat into the private sphere of “politeness” and cease to practice public virtue, nor is it simply a representation of interior subjectivities to be internalized by a reader and then discussed in the public sphere of other readers. Rather, the epistolary novel disrupts the fiction of private correspondence by publishing narratives in which private correspondence, theoretically a closed circuit in which one subjectivity/correspondent writes to one other subjectivity/ correspondent, is made at least partly public by acts of enclosure, transcription, and circulation. Correspondents enclose letters within other letters, transcribe letters into other letters, and circulate letters among friends. These fictional partpublications echo both the advantages and dangers of circulation in the “real” public sphere. The publication of the primary heroine’s narrative, via gossip and, in the case of Clarissa and The Coquette, through the posthumous publication of her letters, rends control of the narrative from the private correspondents to the public sphere, and, ultimately, the nation. The secondary heroines of these novels repeatedly ask to hear the heroine’s story: in doing so, they control the rhetorical situation in which the heroine’s narrative appears and coordinate the publication of that narrative. In the opening letter of Clarissa, Anna Howe asks Clarissa to write “the whole of your story” (40). Clarissa eventually asks Belford to assemble the letters as a defense of her actions and reputation, but it is Anna who has been provoking Clarissa’s narrativization of events, and Anna who survives Clarissa’s ordeal to marry Hickman, thus highlighting Clarissa’s unmarried death. In contrast, The Coquette overwhelms private correspondence with public letters: namely, Eliza’s tombstone and the account in the “public papers” (Foster 161) survive, whereas Eliza’s final writings are suppressed by Julia Granby, who trades on Eliza’s troubles to form her own esteemed reputation. Julia’s control over Eliza’s narrative distinguishes her from the other women who crowd the text. Eliza and Clarissa fall in part because they assume that their representation in letters reflects their immanent identity; in contrast, Anna and Julia are fully aware of the potential disparity between representation and immanence. Anna’s suggestion that Clarissa treat their correspondence as public record is contrasted with Julia’s reportage, which publishes Eliza’s actions to Lucy via letters; these opposite strategies are linked by their manipulation of the boundaries between private and public. Julia’s and Anna’s representational authority is contingent on the absence of the represented: without Eliza’s or Clarissa’s countermand, their versions of events become public record.

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As in Clarissa and The Coquette, Smith’s novel is interested in reminding readers of the physical distance between correspondents: the setting shifts between paranoid British aristocrats gossiping in Bath to the variously optimistic and desolate scenes of revolutionary France, with a few rural English retreats for good measure. This attention to physical distance is echoed in the letters themselves: characters frequently call attention to each other’s silences, or substitute one letter writer for another (as we see when Montfleuri writes to Bethel on behalf of Desmond to narrate Josephine’s story, or, more simply, when Desmond asks the surgeon to write a letter to Geraldine for him). In Clarissa and The Coquette, such strategies are used to control the representation of the fallen heroine and to shore up national identity. Anna Howe and Julia Granby each construct memorial documents that ask the community, and thus the nation, to unite in mourning the silent, fallen primary heroine. While Clarissa and The Coquette are each fiercely nationalistic texts (one need only remember Clarissa’s horror at the thought of emigrating to Pennsylvania), Smith’s novel is much more interested in traversing national borders. Her correspondents, too, cross the borders of genre as they alternately narrate the romance plot and the French Revolution. Smith makes clear the link between the romantic fates of her heroines and the larger political context of the French Revolution through her use of substitution: Desmond oscillates between accounts of the Revolution and Geraldine’s plight. When Geraldine and Desmond are united in revolutionary France, effectively bringing together these two otherwise disparate narrative interests, the novel hastens to its conclusion. Such a reading might suggest that Smith’s narrative, which ends with the marriages of her major female characters, Geraldine and Fanny, expects the overthrow of aristocratic tyranny to liberate women as well as the French working classes. Desmond, however, is ultimately more ambiguous than either Clarissa or The Coquette; it lays bare the larger cost of its happy ending through the exiled figure of Josephine de Boisbelle. Moreover, Smith suggests that such happy endings are only ever possible when sanctioned by the law, wealth, or empire – each manifestations of patriarchal order. These three texts link the marriage market to nationalism through the discourses of inclination and obligation: the heroines of these texts aspire to happy marriages, secure homes, and thus secure homelands. The economic underpinnings of marriages and nations open a chasm between inclination and obligation: does one marry for money in obedience to one’s parents and in the interests of security (both domestic and national) or does one marry according to one’s inclination and sacrifice the protections afforded to obedient daughters and loyal citizens? The fates of the primary heroines offer a bleak answer, linking disobedience with death; the coquetry of the secondary heroines provides an alternative narrative that grants women power in the home and nation through social manipulation. By managing their social, filial, and national obligations, secondary heroines find the happy endings denied to their more famous counterparts.

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Mapping Geographies of Wealth: Inclination and Obligation in Clarissa Like its American imitators, Richardson’s first novels are concerned with filial disobedience. In Pamela, the titular heroine’s dutiful letters to her parents narrate her virtuous resistance to Mr B, which eventually results in her marriage to the reformed rake. Pamela’s successful social climbing bodes well for the British middle class, but Richardson paints a far bleaker picture in Clarissa: Clarissa’s marital prospects pit filial obedience against inclination and separate wealth from social status. Clarissa struggles to remain a dutiful daughter without resigning herself to a potential future of married misery with the bourgeois Solmes. On the other hand, the aristocratic rake Lovelace is notoriously love-less, and apparently incapable of reform. Clarissa’s letters to her parents attempt to politely refuse their choice of husband without being able to proffer a legitimate alternative. Although Clarissa dutifully corresponds with her family, her letters to Anna Howe make up the bulk of her narrative. It is Anna’s advice that Clarissa seeks and often follows; Anna frequently makes Clarissa’s “hidden” feelings apparent and, in effect, teaches Clarissa how to act. Richardson’s anxiety over presenting a virtuous text prevents him from including the bulk of the early correspondence between Clarissa and Lovelace; instead, Richardson displaces that seduction onto the correspondence between Anna and Clarissa. After Clarissa’s fall, Anna’s correspondence lessens, while Lovelace’s increases: Lovelace insists that he can repair the wrong he has done to Clarissa at any moment by marrying her and placing her under his financial and social protection. Anna slips out of the narrative like the seducer out of the bedroom, heedless of the consequences of her actions for Clarissa, but anxious to secure her own reputation. Anna’s “seduction” of Clarissa has been ignored in service of readings that focus on Clarissa as exemplar. Such readings forget that Anna’s friendship with    As Victor Lams has observed, at Harlowe Place, “Clarissa’s correspondence with Miss Howe consumes 645 of the 670 page total, or 96 percent of the stage time” (10). Although Clarissa’s correspondence with Miss Howe eventually cedes the epistolary stage to Lovelace’s correspondence with Belford, when Clarissa does write, it is most often to Miss Howe.    Anna’s previous mésalliance has been overlooked by critics. While Anna is frequently termed “a rake,” the motive for her distrust (or disgust) of men might in part be her own narrow escape, which has made her suspicious of her own impulses as well.    See, for example, Julia Genster’s “Belforded Over: The Reader in Clarissa,” which dismisses Anna to focus on Belford. Other critics, such as Nancy Armstrong in “Reclassifying Clarissa: Fiction and the Making of the Modern Middle Class,” focus on Clarissa’s frugality, but not Anna’s offers of economic assistance. In a similar vein, Jerry Beasley (Clarissa) has focused on Clarissa’s speech acts, but not Anna’s. Melinda Rabb discusses pairs in Clarissa, but only focuses on Lovelace and Clarissa as dualistic, not their correspondents. In an article titled “Richardson the Advisor” that discusses the role of advice in Richardson’s novels, Kevin Cope does not once mention Anna Howe. William Warner contends that Clarissa and Lovelace determine how we read the text, a position

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Clarissa is her only apparent link to her community: she has been exalted above her peers as the model for the neighborhood, and she is then removed from her acquaintance by her family as the rebel daughter. With her family constituted as a phalanx against her, and suitors invading on all sides, Clarissa has no one to turn to for rational advice except for Anna. In an early letter, Clarissa describes Anna’s influence: “Had you, I say, been witness of my different emotions as I read … you would have seen the power you have over me; and would have had reason to believe that, had you given your advice in any determined or positive manner, I had been ready to have been concluded by it” (243). Terry Castle has pointed to Anna’s power over Clarissa as a reader and advisor: “Clarissa, Lovelace, Anna, Belford, and the rest – these characters are present to us first as readers of texts: they exist in that they participate in a vast system of epistolary exchange. Their own letters preserve interpretations of previous texts: those of their correspondents” (19). However, Castle does not account sufficiently for Anna’s motivation. Certainly, I agree with Castle’s claim that “Anna’s scenario” (80) plays a large role in Clarissa’s seduction, but what is Anna’s role in, to borrow Castle’s term, the “politics of meaning” (183)? After her rape, Clarissa’s excessive piety replaces social with spiritual distinction, but her ascetic isolation leads only to death. In contrast, Anna’s strategies of alliance enable her to secure political power within the text by navigating the social milieu that Clarissa rejects. Jay Fliegelman has termed the correspondence between Anna and Clarissa a “rational friendship” (29), and, in keeping with recent scholarship, has suggested that Anna and Clarissa demonstrate the necessity of choosing one’s family via affective relationships, rather than relying on the chance biological ties that bind us to one another. Although Clarissa’s family is horrifying, I contend that Clarissa’s reliance on Anna is tied into a more complex social dynamic. In Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, social class was one of the chief obstacles to a union between Pamela and Mr B. Most readings of Clarissa, therefore, ignore class as a significant factor in the plot because the disparity is not as large as that between Pamela and B. Clarissa is notoriously unspecific about the location of Harlowe Place; it is a novel more concerned with geographies of wealth than of location.10 echoed by Terry Castle. One exception is Ramona Denton’s “Anna Howe and Richardson’s Ambivalent Artistry in Clarissa”; however, she fails to account for Anna’s decreasing presence later in the novel.    A stunning exception is, of course, Nancy Armstrong’s “Reclassifying Clarissa: Fiction and the Making of the Modern Middle Class.” However, Armstrong is mostly concerned with accounting for the shift from public abuse to private writing. Armstrong does have an excellent reading of the economics of Clarissa’s courtship in which she explains why the Harlowes prefer Solmes. In The Rise of the Novel, Ian Watt persuasively suggests that the small class disparity between Lovelace and Clarissa is what teases out the social and moral implications (220). 10  I am indebted to Marlene Longenecker for her observation that Richardson’s geography seems impossible and often contradictory. How can Harlowe Place be in the

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Mapping these geographies of wealth reveals the economic logic underpinning each character’s choices, and explains both Anna’s survival and Clarissa’s fall. Clarissa’s wealth should enable her individualism, but her attempt to act in her own interests ultimately condemns her; in contrast, Anna’s precarious financial status as the daughter of a widow who may remarry, and thus cede control over her finances, encourages the strategies of alliance that secure her fiscal and social survival. Burdened by her grandfather’s legacy and her family’s class ambitions, Clarissa’s financial situation dictates the plot of the novel. The post-script of Anna’s first letter asks for a copy of the preamble to Clarissa’s grandfather’s will so that Anna may show it to an Aunt Harman who only reappears in the text near the conclusion.11 Again, though ostensibly a device to allow the reader to look over Anna’s shoulder and read the will, the weight placed on Clarissa’s estate is surprising in a novel purportedly about virtue and courtship. The will itself establishes the prosperity of the Harlowe family and reveals that they are all provided for, with the exception of Clarissa, by other relatives. Clarissa’s virtue is the last reason given for the special favor her grandfather shows her. Similarly, Clarissa’s resignation of that estate to her father curries the favor of her uncles, which is a source of concern to her brother, who remarks, “This little siren is in a fair way to out-uncle as well as out-grandfather us both” (80). James’s greed and his desire to make a fine figure in the county induce him to forward Solmes in preference to Lovelace.12 Clarissa’s grandfather’s will, intended to provide for her financial independence, becomes instead a target for the male characters; each hopes to gain control over Clarissa’s estate by manipulating the laws of coverture. Clarissa’s marital prospects provide a choice between the nascent middle class and the declining aristocracy. Solmes’s noble settlements tempt the family, who seek to raise themselves through wealth, but are unappealing to Clarissa, who observes, “The upstart man, I repeat, for he was not born to the immense riches he is possessed of; riches left by one niggard to another, in injury to the next heir, because that other is a niggard” (81). Clarissa does not want to impoverish Solmes’s family by accepting the settlements originally designated for his relations, but her very terms suggest that she privileges Lovelace’s established wealth over the bourgeois commercial wealth of Solmes. Indeed, Clarissa’s letter to Lady Betty Lawrance after her fall claims, “I must own to you, madam, that the honour of being related to ladies as eminent for their virtue as for their descent was country, but still near a major thoroughfare and close enough for Anna to pick up Clarissa’s letters every day? For a reading of place in the novel, see Doody’s “A Fine and Private Place” in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson. 11   Anna Howe visits Aunt Harman in the Isle of Wight towards the conclusion of the novel. 12   As Armstrong has noted, “the Harlowes still feel that Clarissa will be giving Lovelace access to property that belongs to them since they stand to lose the capital that would come to them from trading her to Solmes” (“Reclassifying Clarissa” 28).

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at first no small inducement with me, to lend an ear to Mr. Lovelace’s address” (984). Clarissa links virtue with descent, which is surprising given her ancestry on her father’s side. Anna, much to our delight and Clarissa’s dismay, discloses the Harlowes’ pride in their own name, discerning that Harlowe House is not a paternal seat, but an acquired manor.13 Anna’s careful reading of the situation contradicts Clarissa’s: despite Clarissa’s attempts to minimize her personal wealth, her value seems equally located in her virtue and in the Grove, and it is her ability to justly dispose of her grandfather’s inheritance in her will that becomes the final testament (excuse the pun) of Clarissa’s virtue.14 While Clarissa seeks to detach her virtue from her wealth, Anna connects the preservation of Clarissa’s estate with the preservation of her virtue. Anna and Lovelace each endeavor to persuade Clarissa to resume her estate: in doing so, Clarissa would both disobey her parents and gain financial and thus political power outside of coverture. To assume her estate without her father’s permission and while unmarried is to control real property in her own name, and thus to claim publicly a place in the patchwork of estates and manors that comprises Britain. Clarissa refuses to do so, trusting instead to the protections of private life: family, community, and virtue. Within the confines of private life, Clarissa is always writing, contriving, and circulating letters among her family members and then sending them on to Anna. Clarissa forwards letter after letter, artifact after artifact, if you will, in order to demonstrate the truth of what she says. Anna, on the other hand, filters all conversations through the medium of herself. Anna retells conversations, verbal performances, rather than textual ones.15 Her orality, which seems connected to her quick wit and mercurial strategies of alliance, is contrasted with Clarissa’s meditative (and pre-meditated) letters.16 Despite Clarissa’s faith in the written word as evidentiary, she initially excludes the letters between herself and Lovelace, which she transcribes into her letters to Anna. By transcribing his letters within her own, Clarissa controls 13

  Armstrong’s and Watt’s readings, though compelling, overlook Anna’s role in the revelation of Clarissa’s class status, as well as her part in encouraging Clarissa to choose Lovelace. 14   Watt’s reading of Clarissa’s death in terms of contemporary funeral rites and psychology is fascinating, but overlooks the material element of her will, as do many readings of the novel. 15   Since she is imprisoned, of course, Clarissa does not have many conversations to report. 16   Tom Keymer’s claim (in Richardson’s Clarissa) that Clarissa teaches its readers to doubt and scrutinize letters as rhetoric doesn’t mention Anna as a model of such a resisting reader. Anna’s letters, which often include transcripts of conversations, are less premeditated than Clarissa’s. Scott Paul Gordon also undervalues Anna when he claims that Richardson wanted readers who read with the heart, not the head (487). Similarly, Melinda Rabb’s claim that “correspondence, under- and over-plotting in Clarissa stress words over deeds” (70), ignores Anna’s orality.

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the rhetorical context in which Lovelace’s words appear. She does not enclose a letter from Lovelace until she begins to suspect him of artifice; then she encloses Lovelace’s letter and her response in a letter to Anna, subjecting Lovelace to Anna’s scrutiny.17 She asks Anna to peruse all of her letters, particularly her letters to Lovelace, to review her conduct. Anna replies: “I shall not open either of your sealed-up parcels, but in your presence. There is no need. Your conduct is out of all question with me: and by the extracts you have given me from his letters and your own, I know all that relates to the present situation of things between you” (292). Yet after Clarissa flies with Lovelace, Anna chastises her for her “first fault, the answering his letters” (403). In contrast to her earlier desire to keep the intrigue sealed up, post-flight, Anna begins to discuss Clarissa’s letters in terms of the public talk: “You lay the blame so properly and unsparingly upon your meeting him, that nothing can be added to that subject by your worst enemies, were they to see what you have written. I am not surprised, now I have read your narrative, that so bold and contriving a man – I am forced to break off – ” (403). As Anna changes strategies to consider Clarissa’s public plight, her own narrative authority slips. Anna’s letters to Clarissa take on a fragmented and interrupted tone, with Anna frequently jesting about her own fear of being “Harlowed” (404). Aware of Clarissa’s potential fall, and its consequences for her own reputation, Anna distances herself from Clarissa in favor of more secure alliances with her family and Mr Hickman. Because of her mother’s intervention, Anna relies on Hickman to help her communicate with Clarissa, and the discourse of obligation enters the text.18 Anna and Clarissa must each balance inclination and obligation. Clarissa hopes to collapse these terms: to oblige her parents without sacrificing her inclination. In Clarissa’s first letter to Anna after the narrative of her flight, she concludes with a meditation on obligation. She begins by considering her relationship with Lovelace: “But tricked away as I was by him, not only against my judgment, but my inclination, can he, or anybody, expect that I should immediately treat him with complaisance, as if I acknowledged obligation to him for carrying me away? – If I did, must he not either think me a vile dissembler before he gained that point, or afterwards?” (410). She has to rely on Lovelace and “place some confidence in him” (408), as Anna advises, because he is her only protector, yet to have confidence in him would be to acknowledge obligation, which would suggest inclination and thus coquetry in her earlier refusal of him. Instead of acknowledging her obligation to Lovelace, Clarissa displaces it onto Hickman for the assistance he gives in helping her to correspond with Anna, and laments that her own state of obligation prevents her from being able to be obliging. This tricky rhetorical formulation is followed by an explanation, in which Clarissa advises 17   This also marks the second occasion in the novel that Clarissa reminds Anna of the date of her last letter, indicating Anna’s unexpected silence. 18   This discourse of obligation is also a key factor in Foster’s adaptation of Richardson in The Coquette.

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Anna to be kinder to her relations, or, in other words, to oblige them. Yet it is Anna’s resistance to obligation that enables her to remain unseduced and free. As Ramona Denton has suggested, we might attribute this to the absence of Anna’s father (56). Without any sort of patriarchal authority seeking, to borrow Armstrong’s terms, to trade her for capital, Anna has claim to a freedom denied Clarissa. While Clarissa is imposed upon by her grandfather’s will, her uncles, her father, and her brother, Anna has only her mother to contend with. She is, throughout the text, leery of incurring any obligation to Hickman and only concedes such an obligation to advise Clarissa. Anna more successfully manages her obligations to suit her inclinations. It is notable that Hickman’s entrances and exits are marked in all of Anna’s previous letters as interruptions, or as comic stories for Clarissa’s diversion, until Clarissa runs off with Lovelace and Hickman becomes a sort of go-between for Anna and Clarissa. Then, Hickman appears constantly at Anna’s side, while Anna’s mother, under Uncle Anthony’s advice, becomes “so busy, so inquisitive” (452) that Anna no longer rehearses their conversations in her letters. Instead, Mrs Howe becomes the interruption, Mr Hickman the constant presence and consultant: “And here she is continually in and out – I must break off. Mr. Hickman begs his most respectful compliments to you, and offer of services. I told him I would oblige him … but that he must not imagine he obliged me by this” (452). Anna’s frank attempt to claim the terms of obligation is in this respect similar to Clarissa’s predicament, but by displacing the obligation onto Clarissa’s virtue, Anna delays her inevitable marriage to Hickman.19 In Anna’s letter to Belford she explains that she has been essentially tricked into a regard for Hickman by the pressure of her friends and her mother, who “prevail upon me to promise him encouragement,” and later, “both held me to it … having obtained my promise (made, however, not to him, but to them)” (1457). Here Anna privileges the community opinion (them) over personal obligation (him). Hickman’s patience extends to a full six months after Clarissa’s demise, when Anna finally consents to put aside her mourning and marry him. Although Clarissa’s deathbed wish that Anna marry Hickman is the attributed cause for their nuptials, we learn from Hickman’s own earlier letter that the settlements were drawn up long before Clarissa’s illness. Anna’s ostensible devotion to her friend is instead a manipulation of the terms of obligation to secure her financial and social future through marriage to Mr Hickman.

19

  Here I disagree with Denton, who argues that Anna marries Hickman because he is “a man she can control” (53). Similarly, Jocelyn Harris’s claim that Anna “speaks like the liberal courtesan of erotic texts who questions established values: she is indeed a rake in her heart when she fails to see why Clarissa should not marry Lovelace, and torments her own suitor” (113), overlooks that Anna ultimately marries her suitor. Christine Roulston’s claim that “Anna’s willingness to do without the masculine altogether […] eventually markers her as a flawed version of femininity in the context of the novel” (39) is puzzling given her marriage to Hickman.

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Anna’s increasingly absent voice in the text is not a result of Lovelace’s forgeries, or the confusion occasioned by Clarissa’s hasty and frequent removes, but rather is typical of Anna’s shifting alliances throughout the novel. In the aftermath of Clarissa’s ruin, she resorts to the same tactic, ultimately abandoning her connection with Clarissa in favor of others that are more useful to her.20 In Clarissa’s earlier distresses, Anna had suggested that Clarissa form alliances with other female characters, such as Dorcas or Miss Partington, and chastised Clarissa for her over-niceness in forming such connections. Indeed, Clarissa’s virtue is also her fault, for, in seeing herself as the model of the neighborhood, she has prevented herself from learning how to rely upon her neighbors. Even after her flight with Lovelace, she dispenses advice to Anna; after her rape, once she has recovered her senses, she becomes even more evangelical. Anna, in contrast, has always promoted alliance. Despite Anna’s desire to live single, and despite her notorious “warmth,” Anna constantly encourages Clarissa to abandon her tenacious claim for reconciliation with her family and place herself under the protection of Lord M. or the Misses Montague, or any handy protector, even the villain himself. Victor Lams has suggested: “While Clarissa considers the world one great family, Miss Howe thinks that human relations are entirely power-based” (145). For Lams, this is one of Miss Howe’s failings, part of her Hobbesian view of the world that is dismissed in favor of Belford’s “other-reflective” persona (156). Anna’s preference for alliance, however, is a survival tactic in a complex and changing social milieu. Anna is convinced that only some form of public alliance can save Clarissa, for she conceives of reputation as a public and changeable thing. She frequently reminds Clarissa of their other female friends, who desire news of her, thus providing Clarissa with an opportunity to control the representation of her narrative; Clarissa’s refusal to tell her own story leaves her narrative prey to gossip. Resigned to Clarissa’s refusal to manage her reputation through social discourse, Anna suggests that Clarissa either prosecute Lovelace publicly or marry him. Either decision subjects Clarissa to the laws of coverture: she may submit to Lovelace as husband, or ask her father to represent her in court. Clarissa’s faith in individual immanence prevents her success. To marry Lovelace would be to retreat from her professions of virtue and cower under the shelter of a barely preserved reputation. To sue Lovelace for rape would require testifying to her loss of virtue in public court. Instead, Clarissa chooses death. In her repentance, she proves to be a model for the Smiths and for Belford. In her will and posthumous letters, Clarissa temporarily regains narrative power.21 Belford’s 20

 Despite her frequent fights with her mother and Hickman, Anna has kept up a network of spies and gossip to look into Lovelace’s actions, not to mention her alliance with Clarissa. 21   Here I disagree somewhat with William Warner, who claims that Clarissa’s death grants her final control over the narrative. Instead, I would argue that Belford, Anna, and Lovelace all complicate what Warner would term the “whole meaning.”

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reformation, effected by Clarissa, and his praise of her deportment endorse Clarissa’s letters and encourage us to read them favorably, as just and tempered reproaches.22 But her stainless virgin white gown and near-supernatural power of moving her auditors prevent Clarissa from seeming approachable.23 Lovelace admits he must drug her to compromise her, and claims that she is indeed more angel than woman – a praise echoed by all Clarissa’s acquaintance. Clarissa’s angelic qualities allow her to transcend mere personhood and stand in for English virtue. Lovelace’s frequent appellation – my Gloriana – reminds us of Spenser’s Gloriana, a stand-in for Queen Elizabeth.24 Clarissa more frequently is praised as the finest woman in all of England, a compliment that confirms her standing. Colonel Morden’s father wants a sample of her needlework to take abroad, “to show the curious of other countries … for the honour of his own, that the cloistered confinement was not necessary to make English women excel in any of those fine arts, which nuns and recluses value themselves upon” (1468–9). Leonard Tennenhouse, among others, has argued for Clarissa as a model of Englishness. He claims that, in the English editions of Richardson, “The putative author – though a woman – was the model for ‘the individual,’ and her discourse presumed that virtually anyone with sufficient literacy could emulate a brand of interiority that denoted a superior quality of Englishness” (186). Clarissa’s desire to leave England is representative of her awareness that she may no longer serve as a paragon of English femininity after her fall. However, Belford asks Anna to give a character of Clarissa: “I am more especially curious to know, says he, what was that particular disposition of her time … to account for … how, at so tender an age, this admirable lady became mistress of such extraordinary and such various qualifications” (1465).25 In asking Anna to give Clarissa this character, Belford both re-establishes Clarissa as the model of English virtue and, more interestingly, gives Anna power over Clarissa’s representation.26 We know from Anna that Clarissa kept an account 22   Thus Belford has been the subject of much recent criticism, with scholars dismissing Anna to focus on Belford’s assumption of narrative authority at the end of the text. See, for example, Lams, Clarissa’s Narrators, and Julia Genster, “Belforded Over: The Reader in Clarissa.” 23   See Doody’s A Natural Passion for a reading of Clarissa’s angelic qualities via art history. 24  Doody has suggested that Lovelace takes his cue from Nathaniel Lee’s Gloriana, “forgetting that Gloriana was ultimately the victor in the sexual battle” (A Natural Passion 111). One could argue that Clarissa is the victor (and it’s surprising that Doody doesn’t make that claim); however, I think Spenser is a more compelling, if more distant, reading of Lovelace’s term. 25   Armstrong has argued that Belford’s fascination with Clarissa’s schedule indicates her role as a stand-in for the emergent middle class. 26   Lams has argued that Belford allows Anna to give a character of Clarissa in a scene “which should be Lovelace’s” because “Miss Howe knows her as the most amazing young

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book in which she recorded the very information Belford desires, but rather than publish her individual diary, Anna usurps the representation of Clarissa, asking “if you do anything in this way, you will let me see it – If I find it not to my mind, I will add or diminish, as justice shall require” (1466). By claiming editorial control over Belford’s publication, Anna challenges Clarissa’s own attempt to gain control over her final representation. Whereas Clarissa had attempted to represent herself through the inscriptions on the coffin, her will, and her instructions to Belford (who had made clear his willingness to be instructed by her), Anna’s assertion of authority reminds us that Anna had never been successfully governed by Clarissa’s instructions.27 The Conclusion, “[s]upposed to be written by Mr. Belford” (1489), might seem to be a last attempt to endow Clarissa with agency. The characters’ histories are given, with everyone appearing to meet his or her just deserts. Yet in a novel full of epistolary manipulation – from Lovelace’s overt forgeries, to Clarissa’s own allegories and deceptions – the tentative authorship of the Conclusion undermines the apparent restoration of order. Belford has claimed control of the narrative as Clarissa’s executor, but it is perhaps more significant that Belford is the rake whom Clarissa has reformed. Belford is the only example of Clarissa’s agency in the text, which is why Richardson must privilege his account of events. By casting doubt on the certainty of Belford’s authorship, however, Richardson resumes editorial control. Any anxiety that readers might ascribe Belford’s summation to self-interest is allayed, but so is Clarissa’s power. Anna’s final history, given in the Conclusion, and thus outside the epistolary frame, provides a different model of courtship and marriage: In every other case, there is but one will between them; and that is generally his or hers, as either speak first upon any subject, be it what it will. MR. HICKMAN, she sometimes as pleasantly as generously tells him, must not quite forget that she was once MISS HOWE, because if he had not loved her as such, and with all her foibles, she had never been Mrs. Hickman. (1492) woman their neighborhood ever produced, while Lovelace, having put aside his ‘reptile envy’ (VII.399), knows her as the ‘kind and cross dear’ (VIII.132) who wanted to help him. As different as their perspectives are, their testimonials taken together constitute a memorable commemoration of Clarissa” (47). This does not seem entirely sufficient to me. See also Terry Castle’s Clarissa’s Ciphers, which suggests that Clarissa’s will reveals her new distrust of textual authority. Although I agree with Castle’s claim that Clarissa is anxious about how her last testament will be read, I’m not entirely convinced that Clarissa has given up the fight for textual power. Finally, William Warner has argued that Anna’s memorial is intended “as part of an attempt to silence critics of the heroine” (124), but this understates the filter of Anna’s “self” too much. 27   See, for example, William Warner, who notes: “Midway through the novel’s last installment we find Clarissa planning the editorship of the novel we are reading. This is her bid to turn all the contradictory movements of the text into a unified sign of her virtue and triumph” (3).

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This is quite a different model for relationships than Lovelace’s trial of Clarissa’s virtue, and suggests that Richardson wishes to endorse this version of companionate marriage; one that is really almost feminist in its assertion of equality, and humanist in its desire that we each be loved for our foibles. Anna preserves a measure of individualism – “that she was once MISS HOWE” – because she has compromised to the “one will between them,” or, more broadly, to community opinion. That we close with an account of each of our characters, excluding Clarissa, reminds us that the novel privileges community over individual identity.28 It has often been noted that Clarissa falls because of her own excellence. Clarissa’s individualism, re-exemplified in her excessive directions for her funeral, is ultimately overwhelmed by the community. Clarissa dies for her individualism and leaves a monument to herself in her funeral, while dispersing that same self through letters and legacies. Her dangerously unstable class identity is also dispersed through the legacies. Clarissa’s faith in immanence – in things being exactly what they seem – enables her to trust in the power of her letters to exonerate her virtue in opposition to Lovelace’s disguises or representational stratagems. The final authority, however, rests with the editor of Clarissa’s letters, and, Clarissa implies, with her readers. The readers within the novel, the recipients of her letters, model a reading of Clarissa’s letters, and thus Clarissa herself, which reinforces her virtue, but also memorializes it as lost to both community and nation. In contrast, Anna’s alliance with Hickman preserves her identity and agency, for although she is now Mrs Hickman, and must compromise to the “one will” they share, she lives and acts in the community. Her perhaps equally tenuous class identity, as the daughter of a widow, is stabilized by her marriage: Hickman now possesses her wealth. Notably, Anna never speaks for herself in the conclusion. She writes a memorial to Clarissa that competes with Clarissa’s self-representation in letters, but Anna’s epilogue is given by the editor. While her class identity is fixed by her marriage to Hickman, her orality, strategies of alliance, and representational mutability prevent us from fixing Anna’s identity as we do Clarissa’s. Anna offers readers a way out of the text: we do not have to die with Clarissa, we can live with Anna Hickman.

28

 Doody has argued that Clarissa’s individualism is Richardson’s opposition to the “social-minded fiction of the mid eighteenth century” (A Natural Passion 106). It’s worth noting that although Doody speaks of the contemporary student, who “may well feel startled” (106) by the difference between Richardson’s fiction and that of his contemporaries, Richardson’s contemporaries would have been equally startled; indeed, their reading habits would have trained them to see the socially assimilated characters as successful. Her focus on Clarissa and Lovelace as “dramatic” characters thus ignores the social characters such as Anna Howe.

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Corresponding Coquettries Clarissa serves as a prototype for Foster’s novel, The Coquette; the text itself acknowledges this when Mrs Richman cautions Eliza: “I do not think you seducible; nor was Richardson’s Clarissa, till she made herself the victim, by her own indiscretion. Pardon me, Eliza, this is a second Lovelace” (38). While The Coquette has often been dubbed “Richardsonian,” insufficient attention has been given to the specific relationship between Clarissa and The Coquette. In particular, just as Anna escapes critical attention, critics have all but ignored the role of the secondary heroine Julia Granby in Eliza’s demise. The novel presents two primary role models for Eliza: Lucy Freeman and Julia Granby, with Lucy’s role usurped by Julia after Lucy’s marriage.29 After her marriage, Lucy requests that Julia visit her friend Eliza; now that Lucy is enmeshed in her new role as wife and potential mother, she cannot attend to her single friends. While Richardson’s heroines are whisked away from the comforts of home by their would-be ravishers, Foster’s women trundle about on a seemingly endless round of visits. Some visits are pleasurable, others are visits of obligation. The disparity between inclination and obligation, and the social necessity of appearing not to distinguish between the two, in effect create coquetry. By linking the social coquetry apparent within the novel with the coquetry of Foster’s text, which teases the reader with omissions and enclosed letters, Foster’s characters teach each other, and readers, a more successful coquetry than Eliza’s: one that is more concerned with the social plot than the seduction plot.30 Foster’s heroines learn to manage the terms of obligation to suit their inclination: Eliza’s fall, like Clarissa’s, is a failure to reconcile social, financial, and national obligations with personal inclination. Though many critics have noted that Lucy seems to be intended as a role model for Eliza, most overlook the omission of Lucy’s letters until Letter XIII.31 Eliza appears to have received replies to her own missives, but Foster does not make Lucy’s correspondence available to the reader. In her second letter, Eliza makes it clear that she has received a response from Lucy to her first letter:

29

  Stern does not offer much by way of explanation for Julia’s rise, except to suggest that Julia is Eliza’s successor as the belle of the county, and that Julia is the spokeswoman for the “female chorus,” a claim that I will complicate later. 30   This is rather different from Grantland Rice’s assertion of the coquetry of Foster’s text. 31   See, for example, Jeffrey Richards’s “The Politics of Seduction: Theatre, Sexuality and National Virtue in the Novels of Hannah Foster,” or Bruce Burgett’s Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic. For a more in-depth reading of Lucy, see Jared Gardner’s “The Literary Museum and the Unsettling of the Early American Novel.”

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Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels I have received your letter; your moral lecture, rather; and be assured, my dear, your monitorial lessons and advice shall be attended to. I believe I shall never again resume those airs, which you term coquettish, but which I think deserve a softer appellation; as they proceed from an innocent heart, and are the effusions of a youthful and cheerful mind. (7)

In a novel that later encloses letters between friends and lovers to other parties, the omission of Lucy’s “monitorial lessons” seems striking. Lucy’s letters are not made available to the reader until after Boyer and Sanford have appeared in the text, and only then at Eliza’s invocation: “I immediately retired to write this letter, which I shall close, without a single observation on the subject, until I know your opinion” (26). The effect of Lucy’s absence, I argue, is to enable the reader to assume the role of Lucy for the beginning of the novel. Eliza’s constant entreaties for advice place the reader, in the absence of Lucy, in the role of advisor. When Eliza responds to letters that are not included in the text of the novel, it is as if she is responding to our unwritten advice. By installing the reader as the moral center, while controlling our advice through Eliza’s responses, Foster ensures that readers do not identify with Eliza, the future fallen woman. Instead Foster aligns us immediately with Lucy, the future wife, and ensures that we are not seduced by the text. In this respect, Foster revises Richardson’s model to create a stronger moral authority: Lucy’s advice, whatever it may be, is strictly within the confines of propriety. In contrast to Anna’s shifting stratagems, Lucy seems to sound only one tediously moral note. However, like Anna’s absence, Lucy’s missing letters foreshadow her marriage and subsequent removal from the social obligations of an unmarried woman. Lucy’s letters only appear when Foster is afraid the reader might not be perceptive enough to discern the connection between Eliza and Sanford – “Methinks I can gather from your letters, a predilection for this Major Sanford” (26) – and to reveal Eliza’s class ambitions: “I know your ambition is to make a distinguished figure in the first class of polished society” (27). If Lucy did not make Eliza’s class and her social ambitions transparent to us, we might have guessed at them anyway. Eliza’s visit to the Richmans’ home already makes her dependent upon other, wealthier friends; this dependence is echoed by her unwillingness to make a “single observation” (26) on Boyer’s proposal without knowing Lucy’s opinion. A few letters later, Eliza actually terms Lucy “your ladyship” (32). Though the women generally seem on equal terms, Eliza receives advice more often than she gives it, suggesting that her social position is lower.32 Eliza’s class ambitions make her anxious to secure a husband above her station, while also making it necessary that she garner the approval of her wealthier friends. Her friends provide a “haphazard schooling” in the 32   See Claire Pettengill’s article “Sisterhood in a Separate Sphere: Female Friendship in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette and The Boarding School” for a fuller version of this argument.

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“arts … of virtue” (244), as Jeffrey Richards notes, but they are insufficient because they cannot teach Eliza to do what they have never had to do themselves. Instead, they proffer what Sharon Harris identifies as maxims about “women’s place” (9), while simultaneously working to “acculturate Eliza into patriarchy” (13). In contrast to the social-climbing Harlowes of Clarissa, Foster locates bourgeois ambition in her heroine, and punishes Eliza for overtly seeking social advancement. Surprisingly, Foster’s American revision of Clarissa initially appears far more socially conservative: to keep Eliza in her place, Lucy establishes the terms and nature of their correspondence. While Eliza proclaims in her third letter, “I must write you the impulses of my mind; or I must not write at all” (8), Lucy tells Eliza: “My swain interests himself very much in your affairs … Not that I am going to betray your secrets. These I have no right to divulge; but I must be the judge what may, and what may not be communicated” (31). Eliza never comments on this breach of confidence, which suggests to me that Lucy has the authority to make such a breach.33 Lucy is literally Eliza’s “judge”; Eliza’s submission to this hierarchy suggests that it is one imposed on their friendship by their relative social positions. The status of women as femme-covert, and Lucy’s own admission that her husband watches her write, renders the privacy of her correspondence with Eliza suspect and reminds us that Lucy, too, is subject to authority, however lax the reins. Whereas Clarissa’s inheritance prompted the marital maneuverings in Richardson’s text, wealth, in The Coquette, is possessed by the men, and is only significant in respect to the marriage plot. The novel teaches its readers that wealth in the new republic is not fixed or stable, and that a politic demeanor, that is, a coquetry that masks the disparity between private and public, is a more suitable strategy to negotiate the social matrix. Eliza’s insistence on inclination, her refusal to play the coquette by masking obligation as inclination, or public necessity as privately desirable, is the cause of her fall. Though Eliza may narrate her perception of the public results of her public displays, she seems to view letters as private.34 In her first letter to Boyer, aware that her wit may startle the sedate cleric, Eliza writes: “I cannot conveniently be at the pains of restraining its sallies, when I write in confidence” (48). She thus suggests that she does restrain these sallies in public, or when not “in confidence.” As I have noted earlier, Foster has already called this confidence into question. Lucy’s decision to share portions of Eliza’s letter with her future husband may keep Eliza’s correspondence “private” in that it is not shared with the public 33   Stern reads this scene as part of Eliza’s pain at being “scrutinized and commodified by the gaze of a community that includes both Lucy herself and her husband-to-be Mr. Sumner” (113). 34  David Waldstreicher suggests that, even in her “private” letters to Lucy Freeman, “Eliza always moves on to describe the visible manifestations of sensibility and the results of such display” (207). Waldstreicher does not place sufficient emphasis on Eliza’s conscientious differentiation between private and public.

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at large – Eliza’s letter does not circulate beyond their home; however, Eliza’s letters to other characters, and letters concerning Eliza, are frequently circulated among the other characters, thus making them public.35 For example, Eliza’s letters are enclosed in Selby’s letter to Boyer, causing Selby to remark: “I have heard so much in praise of Miss Wharton’s penmanship, in addition to her other endowments, that I am almost tempted to break the seal of her letter to you; but I forbear” (46). In contrast, Eliza does not enclose copies of Boyer’s first rejection of her; readers only know what Boyer has written because he has enclosed copies in his letter to Selby, thus making his rejection of Eliza public. When Eliza does circulate the content of letters, she transcribes them into her own text – Sanford’s billet asking her to meet him, for example, is included in this fashion. Rather than publishing letters, in effect, by appending copies to her own correspondence, Eliza preserves the private nature of the letters she receives by transcribing them into her own text as part of her own narrative. Eliza’s strategy also prevents the reader from forming an independent judgment of the letters by couching them in her own terms; in effect, she re-authors them. Like Clarissa, Eliza initially seeks to control the representation of her own narrative within the one-to-one correspondence of a private letter. However, like Clarissa, Eliza’s faith in the privacy of a letter is misplaced: by ignoring the potential publication of private documents, Eliza forfeits her reputation and thus her social position in the republic. Foster modifies Richardson’s use of the epistolary form by including both billets and letters: billets are brief notes requesting a meeting; letters replace physical presence with words. Sanford uses billets to ensure Eliza’s affection by posing questions that he claims can only be answered in person. Boyer, alternately, maintains an epistolary correspondence with Eliza that alienates her emotionally as she is literally alienated by his physical absence. Sanford’s method is, of course, the more successful, but as Julia Granby later wonders, what induces Eliza to fall under his spell? When Eliza narrates Sanford’s intrusion into her garden and his depiction of the confinement of life with Boyer, she claims: “My heart did not approve his sentiments, but my ear was charmed with his rhetoric, and my fancy captivated by his address” (36). Strangely, we already know that her heart does approve Sanford’s sentiments; a few letters earlier, Eliza had written to Lucy regarding her potential future marriage to Boyer: I recoil at the thought of immediately forming a connection, which must confine me to the duties of domestic life, and make me dependent for happiness, perhaps too, for subsistence, upon a class of people, who will claim the right of scrutinizing every part of my conduct; and by censuring those foibles, which I am conscious of not having prudence to avoid, may render me completely miserable. (29)

35   As I argued earlier, by forwarding the letters to an unintended audience, the recipient “part-publishes” them.

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Here Eliza clearly realizes that the “confinement” of a life with Boyer will make her miserable because of Boyer’s situation. The “class of people” upon whom they will be dependent, presumably Boyer’s parishioners, will be the moral yoke she dreads. In contrast, Sanford’s wealth and status as a gentleman protects his reputation, and would also cover Eliza’s imprudent foibles. Despite Eliza’s claim that she “restrains” herself in public, as this letter makes clear, Eliza finds it difficult to mask her follies with an acceptable “public” self. In this sense, Eliza is quite different from Clarissa, who Richardson describes as an exemplar of virtuous public behavior, and whose exemplary behavior tempts Lovelace to prove if she is truly as angelic as her reputation. Eliza’s difficulty in restraining her follies points to a key question in the early republic, as authors and politicians alike struggled to impose order and government on the recently rebellious American nation. Eliza lives on the border of freedom and restraint, and her eventual fall serves as a warning to the young nation. Like Clarissa, Eliza succumbs to the temptation posed by the physical presence of her suitor: Sanford’s oratorical skills enable him to “charm” and “captivate” Eliza in a manner that Boyer’s cold, didactic letters cannot.36 Throughout the novel, in fact, Eliza seems to privilege face-to-face encounters: letters indicate the absence of the correspondents and allow for misreading; physical presence prevents dissembling, or so Eliza believes. As she replies to Boyer’s first letter, “In regard to the particular subject of your’s [sic] I shall be silent. Ideas of that kind are better conveyed, on my part, by words, than by the pen” (47). The suitor who approaches Eliza with words, rather than with letters, ultimately prevails. Aside from the occasional dramatic billet, Eliza never hears from Sanford via letter, not even during his long absence on his southward tour. Sanford’s idleness, enabled by his wealth, allows him to be near Eliza if he chooses. In contrast to the community of women who surround Eliza and constantly advise her, Sanford appears to be writing into the void. We, as readers, are in the privileged position of being able to read Sanford’s one-sided correspondence with Mr Charles Deighton. Eliza is not, and indeed, if she had access to Sanford’s sloppy prose, she might think differently of him. We never read anything from Sanford’s correspondent, Deighton, nor do Sanford’s letters suggest that Deighton has offered any particularly moral advice; thus we never read ourselves into Deighton in the manner I have earlier suggested we read ourselves into Lucy.37 Perhaps these one-sided relationships are intended to mirror one another: the lack 36   Here I disagree slightly with Stern, who claims, “The significant absence of a correspondence between Eliza and Sanford is an index of the emotional limitations of their exchange” (100). 37   Stern has suggested that the absence of letters between Sanford and Deighton or Sanford and Eliza makes Sanford’s writing “onanistic.” Further, “this suggests that Sanford’s agency to do Eliza harm is, in the end, secondary to the totalizing power of the female chorus” (109). Certainly, Deighton’s absence denies Eliza the power accorded to Clarissa in her relationship to Belford.

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of advice that Sanford so desperately needs must make us more conscious of the over-abundance of advice to which Eliza is subject. An example of this super-abundance occurs immediately after Boyer’s rejection, when Eliza receives a letter from Mrs Richman, who “through the medium of my friends at Hartford” (96), has heard all about the progress of Eliza’s affairs. Perhaps to keep Eliza more closely under guard, Mrs Richman invites her to stay with them again. Unlike Eliza’s last visit to the Richmans, which occupied the bulk of Eliza’s first letters, Eliza condenses this trip into one letter, written after the visit has ended, which barely recounts any events, other than to inform Lucy that she has decided to write to Boyer per Mrs Richman’s advice, and that she is puzzled not to have heard from Sanford. Eliza encloses a copy of her letter to Boyer, and his reply, in her next letter to Lucy. As I have observed earlier, Eliza does not usually make private letters public by enclosure, which raises the question of her change in conduct. Like Clarissa, Eliza loses control over the representation of her own narrative. Eliza’s enclosure of Mr Boyer’s letters suggests a transformation that has been subtly occurring throughout the novel; though frequently branded a coquette, Eliza does not actually appear to be one until the end of the novel. Eliza’s countenance has always betrayed her true emotions – Boyer, for example, is jealous that she appears more brilliant with Sanford than in his company – but it is not until the end of the novel that Eliza consciously and seriously attempts to dissemble. While she might have pretended to “fix [her] phiz” for Boyer (61), Eliza truly changes countenance to appease her concerned mother: “I am therefore, obliged to conceal my disquietude, and appear as cheerful as possible in her company” (106). However, Eliza is not solely responsible for this change of course: her slide into coquetry is abetted by the visit of Julia Granby. Julia initially functions as an intermediary between Lucy and Eliza. She is eager for amusement and dissipation, as Eliza once was; however, she frequently speaks of marriage as improbable, and seems content to shuffle from household to household. But perhaps this apparent content is merely an example of Julia’s ability to “fix her phiz.” She assumes Lucy’s role of advisor towards Eliza, while simultaneously usurping Eliza’s role of writer. Julia begins by offering parallel accounts of Eliza to Lucy, at one point saying, “I need not repeat to you anything relative to Major Sanford’s conciliatory visit. Eliza has given you a particular, and I believe, a faithful detail” (121). The implication, of course, is that her letters serve as a corrective to Eliza’s increasingly shorter missives. In her last letter to Lucy before returning to Boston, Julia writes: “Her mind is surprisingly weakened! She appears sensible of this; yet adds to it by yielding to her own imbecility. You will receive a letter from her with this; though I had much difficulty to persuade her to write. She has unfortunately become very averse to this, her once favorite amusement” (131–2). Here Julia’s letter literally corrects Eliza’s, which appears first and in which Eliza seems perfectly astute. Despite Julia’s claims that Eliza’s mind is weakened, Eliza’s own letter reveals a stronger mind than the thoughtless Eliza of the earlier pages of the novel.

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Aware of the disparity between how she feels and how she must appear to feel in order to placate her friends, Eliza gives an account of her changed attitude towards writing: I believe, my friend, you must excuse me if my letters are shorter than formerly. Writing is not so agreeable to me as it used to be. I love my friends as well as ever; but I think they must be weary of the gloom and dulness [sic] which pervades my present correspondence. When my pen shall have regained its original fluency and alertness, I will resume and prolong the pleasing task. (127)

Eliza is hardly “yielding to her own imbecility”; her friends have already chastised her gloom and dullness. Mrs Richman’s last letter had encouraged her to be cheerful; Lucy has written, “I received yours of the 24th ult. and thank you for it; though it did not afford me those lively sensations of pleasure, which I usually feel at the perusal of your letters” (112).38 Eliza quite correctly perceives that unless she can dissemble her usual vivacity her friends will be disappointed in her. Thus Eliza’s behavior shifts: initially, Eliza has faith in immanence – in the truth of physical presence; by the end of the novel, Eliza has learned the necessity of coquetry, of the ability to mask the disparity between private feeling and social obligation. However, Eliza’s solution to the problem of coquetry is silence: by not writing, Eliza refuses coquetry, but loses control over the representation of her story. Like Clarissa, Eliza discovers that the only true physical presence is a dead body, and even it is written over by the multiple narratives of tombstone, newspapers, and memorials composed by Julia. Julia’s letter to Lucy immediately follows Eliza’s and is titled “to the same,” collapsing the distinction between Julia and Eliza. Typically the heading “to the same” also assumes that the author of the letter is also the same. This practice reinforces the presence of an authorial editor who has collected and titled these letters for the audience of “American Fair” invoked at the end of the text, and also suggests that Julia has replaced Eliza. Stern describes their relationship in similar terms: “Eliza cedes her social stakes to Julia, who … assumes the lead in the patriarchal drama of proper female comportment” (141). Eliza refuses to visit Lucy or Mrs Richman because, after the deaths of her father and Mr Hale, she refuses to make obligation appear like inclination, or, to use the language of her letter, transform “dulness” [sic] into “alertness” (127); Julia goes where she is summoned, even if she demonstrates polite resistance, as one might argue she does when Lucy recalls her from Eliza’s side: “I regret leaving Eliza! I tremble at her danger!” (131). Despite such occasional melodramatic outbursts, Julia’s language is usually couched in a rhetoric of obedience. When she arrives at the Wharton’s, her first letter to Lucy begins: “Dear Madam, You commanded me to write you respecting Miss Wharton; and I obey” (110). 38   Eliza uses this same formal heading in her first letter to Boyer. Lucy’s adoption of this formality reveals the estrangement of the two friends.

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As I have suggested earlier, Eliza is clearly not Lucy’s social equal. She has the power to request Julia’s company, but she does not have the authority to summon her from Lucy. When Julia leaves for Boston, Eliza writes: “I very much regret the departure of Julia; and hope you will permit her to return to me again, as soon as possible. She is a valuable friend. Her mind is well cultivated; and she has treasured up a fund of knowledge and information, which renders her company both agreeable and useful in every situation of life” (127). Despite the entreaties of Eliza and Julia, and Lucy’s claimed concern for Eliza as her childhood friend, Lucy withholds Julia and perhaps, in effect, causes Eliza’s ruin. Even granting Lucy’s sincerity in attempting to have Eliza join them in Boston, Lucy’s unwillingness to send Julia home is suspect. As Julia writes: Little did I intend, when I left you, to have been absent so long; but Mrs. Sumner’s disappointment, in her plan of spending the summer at Hartford, induced me, in compliance with her request, to prolong my residence here. But for your sake, she now consents to my leaving her, in hopes I may be so happy as to contribute to your amusement. (136)

Julia’s language, however subtly, reveals that her own apparent intentions (to return to Eliza) are at odds with Mrs Sumner’s orders: Julia is “induced” to “comply” with her “request.” Julia’s ability to play both sides is what enables her to successfully negotiate the complex social matrix of the novel. Julia’s letters to Eliza suggest a desire to be near her; however, when near Eliza, she seems to sabotage rather than contribute to her happiness. Julia’s reaction to Eliza’s confession of her fall belies her social ambitions, which Julia casts in economic terms. First, she counsels suicide, à la Lucrezia: “Wretched, deluded girl! Is this a return for your parent’s love and assiduous care; for your friends’ solicitude and premonitory advice? You are ruined, you say! You have sacrificed your virtue to an abandoned, despicable profligate! And you live to acknowledge and bear your infamy!” (142). Julia places Eliza’s undoing in terms of a sort of economic exchange between friends; Eliza’s fall is a “poor return” for the care and advice her friends have invested in her. It is only when it seems as if Eliza may actually kill herself that Julia “fixes her phiz” to appear conciliatory. However, on their ride the next day, she broaches the topic again, once more in economic terms: I observed to Eliza, as we rode, that with her natural and acquired abilities, with her advantages of education, with her opportunities of knowing the world and of tracing the virtues and vices of mankind to their origin, I was surprised at her becoming the prey of an insidious libertine, with whose character she was well acquainted, and whose principles she was fully apprised would prompt him to deceive and betray her. (145)

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To read Julia at all sympathetically, we must assume that she feels she is acting up to the “conduct book” expectations of Lucy, whom she has already held up as a model in a letter to Eliza. However, I would argue that the language of this letter, addressed to Lucy, reveals Julia’s aspirations. Given the same abilities, advantages, and opportunities as Eliza, Julia implies she would have made better use of them. Julia’s letter to Lucy ostracizes the Whartons and secures her friendship with Lucy: “Think what a scene rises to the view of your Julia! She must share the distresses of others, though her own feelings, on this unhappy occasion, are too keen to admit a moment’s serenity! My greatest relief is in writing to you; which I shall do again by the next post” (147). Julia’s use of the third person distances herself from actual experience: “She,” not “I,” shares the distresses of the Whartons. Julia/ “I” enjoys the relief of writing to Lucy, of acting the part of the recording angel. Unlike the recording angel Eliza imagines, however, Julia gives a complete account: “To relieve your suspense, however, I shall write you every circumstance, as it occurs. But at present, I shall only enclose Eliza’s letters to her mamma, and me” (152–3). These private letters, Eliza’s final words to her mother and her “dear friend,” are thus made public by Julia’s direction, and Julia assumes control of the representation of Eliza’s narrative to secure her own social position. In her third letter, Eliza informs us: “I have been taking a retrospect of my past life; and a few juvenile follies excepted, which I trust the recording angel has blotted out with the tear of charity, find an approving conscience, and a heart at ease” (9). The “recording angels” that surround Eliza, however, rather magnify her errors than charitably blot them. The image of the tear of charity recurs several times in the novel, most significantly, in Julia’s letter to Lucy that recounts Eliza’s death, when Eliza hands Julia letters of explanation: “[Eliza said:] For this purpose, what I have written, and what I shall yet say to you, must close the account between you and me. I certainly have no balance against you, said [Julia]. In my breast you are fully acquitted. Your penitential tears have obliterated your guilt, and blotted out your errors with your Julia” (149).39 Clearly, Eliza’s penitential tears have not blotted her errors out of Julia’s letters. Julia continues to record Eliza’s errata with a faithfulness that would please Benjamin Franklin. Even in death, Eliza’s body is literally written over: first by the public papers, then by Julia. As Julia writes to Lucy, “You have doubtless seen the account, in the public papers, which gave us the melancholy intelligence. But I will give you a detail of circumstances” (161). Julia’s desire to fill in the public account appears to align her with Foster, whose novel, though founded in fact, functions as a “detail of circumstances” to the public papers of Elizabeth Whitman. However, Julia withholds what might be considered the most important details: the “scraps of [] writing” found with Eliza. Julia describes these papers as “valuable testimonies 39   Again, notice the banker’s terms Julia employs: “account” and “balance.” One cannot help but think of Sanford’s comment about Julia’s “eye” here – clearly her perceptive eyes will not be clouded by tears.

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… calculated to sooth and comfort the minds of mourning connections” (162–3), and therefore suggests that these writings are intentionally public. Unlike Eliza’s private letters, these “testimonies” are “calculated” to appeal to Eliza’s friends and family.40 By refusing to enclose Eliza’s writings, Julia maintains control over Eliza’s image. In fact, Lucy has not seen the papers that announced Eliza’s death; Julia’s letter, intended to follow such accounts, instead becomes the “first information of this awful event” (167). Unconditioned by the public papers or by Eliza’s scraps of writing, Lucy’s response to Julia’s letter appears to address a larger audience: “Upon your reflecting and steady mind, my dear Julia, I need not inculcate the lessons which may be drawn from this woe-fraught tale; but for the sake of my sex in general, I wish it engraved upon every heart, that virtue alone … can secure lasting felicity” (167–8). Lucy writes with the pen, but wishes to engrave her sentiments on the hearts of the American Fair. Instead, Lucy orders the engraved inscription on Eliza’s tombstone. Whereas Clarissa dictated her own elaborate funeral and engraved coffin as a means of controlling the representation of her life, Eliza’s tombstone inscription reinforces the judgment of the community. The recording angel, in this case, is literally Lucy Sumner, but the inscription is narrated to Eliza’s mother (and to the reader) by Julia Granby. Julia’s final letter, far from authorizing her as the novel’s moral authority, points once again to her obedience to Lucy Sumner: “The day after my arrival, Mrs. Sumner proposed that we should visit the sad spot which contains the remains of our once amiable friend. The grave of Eliza Wharton, said she, shall not be unbedewed by the tears of friendship” (168). Julia faithfully records Lucy’s suggestion, phrased as a command, and begins her next paragraph by recording their obedience: “Yesterday we went accordingly” (168). Again, Julia gains control over the depiction of Eliza’s final hours; knowledge gained at second hand through her conversations with the people of the town. As she narrates to Mrs Wharton and the reader, “The minutest circumstances were faithfully related; and from the state of her mind, in her last hours, I think much comfort may be derived to her afflicted friends” (168). In these concluding paragraphs, Foster draws our attention to the ways in which Julia manages information; the reader does not have access to the “minutest circumstances” but rather must take Julia at her word, and the text has previously demonstrated that Julia’s words are suspect. Despite her rhetoric of obedience and the fact of her obligation, Julia’s coquetry, her ability to make obligation appear to be inclination, also enables her to manipulate those obligations into opportunities. Julia is now the preferred companion of Mrs Lucy Sumner; the history of Eliza Wharton concludes with trite platitudes to Mrs Wharton, thus confirming Eliza’s usefulness to Julia. Foster appears to include Julia as a model for what Eliza might have been, had she been able to resist Sanford.41 However, what Foster actually depicts is a more socially able coquette, one who is able to successfully circulate her image 40

 In this respect they are similar to Clarissa’s posthumous letters.   See also Ivy Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendship for a reading of Julia’s role.

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via the tarnished image of Eliza Wharton. Eliza privileges face-to-face encounters because she believes that she cannot be misread in person, but her “fall” is just such a misreading: Boyer sees her and Sanford in the garden and assumes the worst. Eliza forgets, repeatedly, that in letters and in person one is always observed. The cessation of her letters at the close of the novel and her eventual death reflect her attempt to cope with this state of constant surveillance by trying to disappear. In contrast, Julia successfully manipulates her appearance by billing herself as observer. While Eliza presumed on a “large stock in the bank of friendship” (9), Julia’s metaphors for interactions are the terms of economic exchange. Julia does not save, as Eliza does by waiting for the virtues of Boyer and Sanford in one man; she circulates. Eliza’s narrative becomes Julia’s currency: she trades Eliza’s story for influential friendships and social position. Like Anna before her, Julia, in effect, creates the community that gathers to mourn Eliza by circulating Eliza’s narrative among friends. Secure in her social position via female friendships, Julia has no need, and no obligation, to marry. By locating her value in social obligations and gossip, Julia evades the marriage market and remains in circulation. Silence and Substitution: Romance, Revolution, and Empire in Desmond Charlotte Smith’s Desmond serves as a counterpoint to these seduction novels, illustrating the connections among romance, revolution, and the secondary heroine. While Clarissa and The Coquette are each located at moments of domestic revolution (the rise of the middle class and the early American republic, respectively), Desmond interrogates British nationalism via the French Revolution. Published in 1792 and set during the early days of the French Revolution, Desmond mixes political debate with the cruelties of the marriage market, at times conflating the treatment of women with the oppression of the French people by the ancién regime.42 Smith’s political agenda is reflected in the conclusion of her novel: whereas the conclusions of Clarissa and The Coquette re-establish order by memorializing the death of the heroine, Desmond concludes with the double weddings of Geraldine and Fanny. Instead of writing over Geraldine’s distress, Fanny’s letters pull Geraldine from Clarissa-worthy thoughts of suicide to a happy marriage with the titular character. Like Anna before her and Julia after, Fanny serves as a confidante to the increasingly beleaguered Geraldine, and benefits from Geraldine’s negative example. The novel contrasts Geraldine’s death march in the name of duty with Fanny’s sprightly sensibilities. In the wake of Geraldine’s disastrous marriage, Fanny learns to stand up to her elders and manipulate her social position as a 42

  Here I disagree with Eleanor Wikborg’s claim that politics and romance are separate, even antithetical forces in Smith’s novel. Instead of the “gap” Wikborg suggests, I argue that the novel’s narrative strategies of silence and substitution encourage readers to connect romance and revolution.

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woman in eighteenth-century England. However, she and Geraldine each end the novel happily married. Smith contrasts Fanny and Geraldine with Geraldine’s French double, Josephine. The reader is unsure, at the end of the novel, whether Josephine will remain under the protection of the ci-devant Comte d’Hauteville, enter a convent, or marry her cousin, Monsieur de Rivemont. My reading of Geraldine, Fanny, and Josephine, therefore, highlights the ways in which Fanny and Josephine each serve as a secondary heroine to Geraldine by focusing on the parallels between domestic and political alliances. While the secondary heroines of Clarissa and The Coquette construct elaborate rituals of mourning to honor the dead heroines and simultaneously secure their own social positions, Desmond ends with marriage for British heroines. Smith displaces domestic anxieties about femininity and nationhood onto the exiled French mistress, Josephine. Scholars have repeatedly turned to Geraldine and Desmond’s relationship to understand the novel’s political or social position. With the notable exceptions of Susan Allen Ford, Allison Conway, Diana Bowstead, and Katherine Binhammer, little attention has been paid to Fanny’s or Josephine’s role in the novel. Notably, Ford focuses primarily on Geraldine and Fanny, whereas Conway and Bowstead center their arguments on Josephine alone. Like Binhammer, I am interested in the interplay among all three heroines, and how these three heroines respond to romance and revolution via the apparently opposing discourses of empire, law, and aristocracy. In particular, I connect the narrative’s emphasis on silence and substitution to a buried colonial subtext. Janina Nordius has already explored the more overt “colonial Gothic” of Smith’s The Old Manor House, but similar, if brief, references to British and French colonies inform Fanny and Josephine’s romantic attachments. Smith introduces Fanny Waverly through other characters to highlight her social aptitude; in this respect, Fanny is similar to Anna and Julia. At the start of Volume II, Geraldine addresses a letter “To Miss Waverly at Bath,” but the first description of Fanny comes from Desmond’s correspondent, Bethel. At first he claims she is “inconsistent and incoherent” in her account of Desmond’s injuries, but later suggests she is “naturally satirical” when the conversation turns to Geraldine’s husband (164–5). Bethel’s account of Fanny is itself ironically inconsistent: her verbal skill disappears when discussing Desmond, but she’s clearly capable of manipulating language to highlight the “dark shades” of her brother-in-law’s character (165). Fanny’s verbal facility serves as a counterpoint to the numerous silences, omissions, and occlusions that characterize this novel. The major correspondents frequently complain about silence. As other critics have noted, early in Volume I, Desmond wonders why Bethel hasn’t replied to his letters; later, Bethel will interrogate Desmond’s omission of date and location in his letters; Fanny worries about Geraldine when she doesn’t hear from her after her arrival in France; Geraldine is concerned when Desmond asks the surgeon to write a letter to her instead of relying on his French friends. In this last example, however, Geraldine is not as concerned with Desmond’s silence on the subject of Madame de Boisbelle or the Marquis de Montfleuri as she is with his substitution.

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As Desmond’s injury prevents him from writing himself, Geraldine is surprised that he asks the hired surgeon to write instead of his French friends. Although an apparently minor concern when considered by itself, the novel is full of such substitutions. The novel begins with correspondence between Bethel and Desmond, but once Geraldine and Desmond are reunited in person, his correspondence with Bethel diminishes and is replaced by Bethel’s correspondence with Fanny. Later, near the conclusion of the novel, Montfleuri enters the correspondence, first in a letter to Desmond that the reader might initially expect to come from Bethel, then as a substitute for Desmond in a final explanatory letter to Bethel. This flurry of silences and substitutions serves to highlight the only significant character that does not send or receive a letter: Josephine de Boisbelle. Josephine’s obscured suffering is erased from the text and overwritten in the substitute narrative provided by her brother. However, the frequent doubling of Josephine and Geraldine, coupled with Fanny’s marriage to her brother, returns Josephine’s repressed narrative to the forefront of the novel to raise questions about the role of women in the construction of national identity. The action of the novel is divided between England and France, and much less evenly between English and French protagonists.43 Until Montfleuri’s letters appear near the conclusion of the novel, all of our correspondents are British. Mountfleuri is a former fop and aristocrat who has since adopted the cause of the people, but his avowed republican leanings are supported by his efforts to rescue his sisters, victims of tyrannous inheritance laws and an estate left fiscally embarrassed by his deceased father. Desmond spends time with the Montfleuris in France in an effort to forget Geraldine, but Smith quickly highlights the parallels between Geraldine and Josephine’s situations, lightly underscored by their rhyming names. Like Geraldine, Josephine has been forced into marriage with a reprobate in order to shore up the finances of her family. Like Geraldine, Josephine has been more or less abandoned by her husband (indeed, as it turns out, Geraldine and Josephine’s husbands run in the same set) and has come to rely on the kindness of others.44 Yet, Geraldine’s sufferings are presented to the reader in her letters to Fanny,45 and in the letters written about her that circulate among the other protagonists. Josephine’s sufferings are instead the text’s dark secret. Desmond first mentions Josephine in a letter to Bethel. Unlike Desmond’s vague encomiums of Geraldine, his description of Josephine is very specific and explicitly connected to her national identity: “Yet all she does has much of national character in it, that it would become only a French woman, and I think I should not admire one of my own countrywomen, who possessed exactly the person, talents and manners of my friend’s sister. – I do not know whether you perfectly understand me, but I 43

  See Binhammer for a reading of Frenchness vs. Englishness in the novel.   See Eleanor Ty’s Unsex’d Revolutionaries for a reading of Josephine and Geraldine as doubles. 45   Alison Conway and others have rightly noted that Geraldine’s suffering is presented as an eroticized spectacle for Desmond, Bethel, and the reader. 44

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understand myself; though, perhaps, I do not explain myself clearly” (111). Desmond’s insistence that he understands himself, although he cannot make his meaning clear to Bethel, is the first rift in understanding between these correspondents and opens up a wider gap in meaning in the text, a gap connected to Josephine’s indescribable but quintessentially French identity. From this point forward, Desmond begins keeping secrets from Bethel, and thus from the reader as well. As Alison Conway and Katherine Binhammer have argued, this secret is allied to Josephine’s “Frenchness.” Bethel’s response to Desmond makes the stakes of Josephine’s national identity perfectly clear: “And as to any engagements, you know, such as her having a husband, and so forth, those little impediments ‘make not the heart sore’ in France” (120). Bethel’s claim that the French care less about amorous proprieties is underscored by Desmond’s own comments about Josephine’s brother, the Marquis de Montfleuri: “He has … much freer notions than I have about women” (134). In a novel that so often alternates between an account of the French Revolution and the plight of female protagonists, these “freer notions” connect the Revolution’s promise of “liberté” to libertinism. The parallel narratives of liberté and libertine are suppressed within the text by Desmond’s secrecy and Josephine’s decision to give her child up and enter a convent, but these narratives are not completely exiled from the novel with Josephine. They persist in the marriage of Josephine’s brother, a reformed fop, to Fanny, and in the adoption of Josephine’s illegitimate child by her double, Geraldine, and thus destabilize the solidification of English national identity promised by the conclusion. Desmond first imagines Josephine as a double for Geraldine when he is visiting with Montfleuri: “I have once or twice, as Madame de Boisbelle has been walking with me, tried to fancy her Geraldine, and particularly when she has been in her plaintive moods. I have caught sounds that have, for a moment, aided my desire to be deceived” (119). Desmond imposes the image and sound of Geraldine on Josephine’s body, using their shared sadness and domestic situation to efface national difference. In turn, Josephine is also overwritten by Geraldine herself, who hears of Josephine’s attentions to Desmond from Bethel: “Beautiful and accomplished as Mr. Bethel describes her to be, methinks I envy her nothing but the opportunity she has had to sooth his hours of pain and confinement” (190–91). Although Geraldine initially imagines Josephine’s attentions as “sisterly” (190), she quickly retracts this euphemism: “I have persuaded myself that his long stay in France is now more owing to the tender gratitude he must feel for this lady” (191). Geraldine’s “envy” of Josephine is in fact a projection of her own desire for Desmond: by imagining that Josephine will become “his Josephine” if “her husband should not return” (191), Geraldine fantasizes about the possibility of her own husband’s death, projected safely onto the distant French landscape.46 46   Here I differ from Conway, who insists that Smith reinscribes the differences between Josephine and Geraldine, and Binhammer, who suggests that Geraldine remains “steadfastly Anglicized” (32) and emphasizes Geraldine’s lack of sexuality (32, 37).

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In this respect, as Katharine Ellis has noted, Smith borrows from Gothic fiction: whereas Gothic fiction obliquely comments on contemporary events by locating them in the distant past of another nation (say, sixteenth-century France), Smith projects the domestic concerns of her English heroine onto the landscape of revolutionary France. Geraldine uses Josephine as a way to cope with her own desire for Desmond, and wrongly imagines that her own reputation is intact, and her own duty to her husband unflinching. Indeed, Geraldine attempts at several moments to project her “platonic” feelings for Desmond onto Josephine and Desmond’s relationship. When Colonel Scarsdale suggests that Desmond has an alliance with Josephine, Geraldine attributes Scarsdale’s thoughts to “malice, that will not allow it probable mere friendship should exist between two persons of different sexes” (222). But these “malicious” statements are in fact correct: Desmond and Josephine do have a romantic liaison. The confusion between Geraldine and Josephine results in the most serious damage done to Geraldine’s reputation: the rumor that she has given birth to Desmond’s child. This rumor makes clear the stakes attached to female virtue: like Clarissa and Eliza before her, Geraldine’s reputation is put in jeopardy by public talk. Geraldine’s decision to brave public scandal to preserve Desmond and Josephine’s secret is impressive, but belies Smith’s use of Josephine: just as Geraldine projected her own desire for Desmond onto others, Smith transfers Geraldine’s potential ruin as a pregnant adulteress to the safely “foreign” Josephine. Geraldine assures Fanny that Desmond has confided in her and that his confession serves to “vindicate him from my unjust and improper suspicions, of having come here clandestinely, on account of the foreign lady, of whom we heard so many idle reports” (257). Instead, Desmond has abandoned the “foreign lady” to seek out Geraldine in hopes of enlisting her help to raise his illegitimate child. The reader remains unaware of this fact for most of the novel; all that Geraldine shares with Fanny is that she is looking forward to being of “service” to Desmond. Although Desmond has not at this point brought his mistress to England, Montfleuri and Josephine later return to the neighborhood for her confinement, giving rise to Mrs Waverly’s suspicion that Geraldine is “still at that farm-house in Herefordshire, where she lived before – where she has lain-in – yes, Miss, lain-in of a girl, and is the declared mistress of that villain, Desmond, who has been there with her; and, perhaps, is with her yet!” (352). The confusion between Desmond and Montfleuri and Josephine and Geraldine seems remarkable, even contrived, and I argue that it is indeed contrived, part of the logic of substitution that informs this novel. The transgressing Brits are revealed, in fact, to be a French brother and sister: British virtue remains safely intact. Although at times Josephine is mistaken for Geraldine, the reader never hears very much about Josephine until she has already disappeared from view to a convent in France. The text is full of obscure hints, but until Montfleuri’s correspondence appears, the reader can only guess at what has happened. Montfleuri’s narrative serves as a substitute for Josephine’s own version of the story for the curious reader, but within the narrative, Montfleuri explains his letter as a substitute for

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Desmond’s account to Bethel: “I have acquitted myself in informing you of what, though Desmond owned it was necessary you should know, he could not prevail on himself to relate to you” (411). Desmond’s inability to convey this information to Bethel is in keeping with his astonishing secrecy about his affair with Josephine and his clandestine surveillance of Geraldine, but seems particularly striking in this case because Desmond has employed the brother of the victim to literally publish her transgression. Montfleuri is careful to suggest that he and Josephine are entirely to blame for Desmond’s mésalliance, but might this simply be another substitution, filling in another silence? The Marquis de Montfleuri substitutes for both Josephine and Desmond (and their now-ended affair) in his letter to Bethel. In turn, Josephine is replaced as mother and lover by Geraldine after Verney’s death. If Geraldine thus becomes a substitute for Josephine (as Desmond once had tried to imagine that Josephine was a substitute for Geraldine), the Marquis de Montfleuri stands in for Bethel in his romance with Fanny. While the text prepares the reader for Desmond and Geraldine’s eventual romantic union, Fanny’s marriage comes as much more of a shock. Desmond himself acknowledges this fact in his letter to Bethel by expressing his great relief that “this unguarded introduction was not made to her instead of to me; for in her present state of mind I know not what might have been the consequence” (409). Why is Fanny’s marriage to Montfleuri so surprising? Because the reader expects that our male–male and female–female correspondents will, at novel’s end, form a happily married quartet. Geraldine successfully replaces the “foreign lady” in Desmond’s affections – indeed, Desmond claims that Josephine served as a substitute for the unattainable Geraldine. The union of Geraldine and Desmond rights the wrongs of mercenary marriages: it solves the problem faced by Clarissa and Eliza by matching inclination to obligation. Turning our attention to the other wedding reveals a different story: the substitution of the French Montfleuri for the staid English Bethel destabilizes the consolidation of national identity promised by the conclusion. Throughout Bethel’s correspondence with Fanny, the reader is encouraged, mostly by Desmond, to see them as a potential match. Bethel himself first suggests that Desmond “would smile … in figuring to yourself your sage Mentor making an assignation with a sprightly girl of nineteen or twenty. – But this is the only way by which I can obtain an opportunity of talking with her alone” (231). Fanny’s sisters-in-law also tease Fanny about her friendship with Bethel: “Since he has been gone, she has perceived the dejection of my spirits, and whenever she has had an opportunity has affected to condole with me on the departure of my sage lover – and my disappointment” (318). Although Bethel rightly observes that Fanny is very young – only eleven years older than his daughter, Louisa – Fanny has been taking care of Louisa during their time at Bath. She is, in effect, already a surrogate mother, just as Geraldine has, before the reader is truly aware of what has happened, become a surrogate mother to Desmond’s illegitimate daughter. But Fanny is different from Geraldine and Josephine in one important aspect: whereas Geraldine and Josephine

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are each sold into marriage by their mothers before they know any better, Fanny is described throughout the novel as a flirt. Fanny’s ability to resist the obligations imposed by courtship while freely circulating in society draws on the model established by Anna and Julia. Just as Anna carefully manages her obligations to Hickman, so too does Fanny control her relationships with Bethel, Major Danby, and others. Like Julia, Fanny makes use of her social network to get what she wants. Fanny is initially interested in Desmond. In fact, Bethel first meets her in Bath because of Desmond: “This little wild girl seems half frantic, and does nothing but talk to every body about you, in which she shews more gratitude than discretion” (164). Geraldine hopes that Desmond will return Fanny’s affection – another example of Geraldine displacing her socially-forbidden affection for Desmond onto a double: “Let me, Desmond, as your grateful friend, point out where, without any of these drawbacks, all the little advantages you found or fancied in me may be met with. – My Fanny possesses them all” (402). Bethel, too, encourages Desmond to interest himself in Fanny, as he earlier recommended the Miss Fairfaxes. While Bethel immediately concurs that the Miss Fairfaxes are not exactly right for Desmond, his affection and interest in Fanny persists throughout the entire novel, suggesting that Bethel, too, might be displacing his interest in Fanny onto his mentee. Before she meets Bethel, however, Fanny has already made another conquest that illustrates her willingness to manipulate the marriage market to get what she wants. Fanny attempts to get information about Desmond from his uncle, Major Danby, but the result is grist for the rumor mill: “The gossiping people here … have already observed our tête-à-tête, and begin to whisper to each other that Miss Waverly has hooked the rich old Major – I like of all things that they should believe it, and am in hopes of being in the London papers very soon among the treaties of marriage” (186). Fanny jokes about the very marriage market that trapped her sister in marriage with Verney. She doesn’t appear to have any serious apprehensions about meeting the same fate, although Desmond clearly worries about her and recommends her to Bethel on the grounds that “[s]he deserves a better fate than she will probably meet with, if her hateful mother is to dispose of her” (310). Fanny’s tête-à-têtes with Major Danby, like her later meetings with Bethel, are a means of sharing information. Under the guise of various “courtships,” Fanny is able to move independently of her mother, and aid her sister despite her mother’s protests. Fanny’s social manipulation provides an alternative narrative: rather than being used as a pawn in her mother’s marriage brokering, Fanny herself manipulates the marriage market to procure information and assistance for her sister. She abandons Major Danby for Bethel because the Major is not a reliable source of information. Bethel is, of course, Desmond’s correspondent; Fanny is Geraldine’s; between Bethel and Fanny (and local gossip) they can piece together the increasingly suppressed narrative that links Geraldine, Desmond, and Josephine. Fanny’s reliance on Bethel suggests that her feelings, too, might be stronger than they appear. Once Bethel leaves Bath, thus preventing further clandestine meetings in the bookshop, Fanny sends him several letters that presume upon

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Bethel’s friendship: “You lately accustomed me, dear Sir, to confide to you the cruel uneasiness that preyed upon my heart, in regard to my sister Verney; and surely you will forgive me, if I once more intrude upon you – when I am, on her account, infinitely more unhappy than ever, and when I have no friend but you to whom I dare speak of her” (350). Bethel is Fanny’s only male correspondent; they share the letters that they have received from Desmond and Geraldine, providing a model of an egalitarian relationship. Each, at one point, forwards a letter to the other after confessing – this from Fanny – “I really do not know what I am about; and never in my life had so much occasion for that friendly advice” (355), and later, from Bethel to Fanny: “I am too much confused, by the contents of this letter, to be able to make any remarks on it; or, indeed to advise what should be done. Let me hear as soon as you have received and considered it” (368). Their mutual efforts to assist Geraldine before she leaves for France and their shared confusion at this point in the narrative brings Bethel and Fanny together, and leads the reader to believe that their marriage might follow that of Desmond and Geraldine. However, Fanny notes that “it is well understood that he does not intend to marry again” (318), and she appears to take Bethel’s stance to heart. Despite Fanny and Bethel’s mutual denials of affection, for the reader, the swap of the foppish and inconstant Montfleuri for the staid and slightly aged Bethel is puzzling. Montfleuri himself notes that he isn’t sure he believes in happy marriages, but hopes that “Fanni” will prove the exception to the rule. For her part, Fanny’s quick interest in Montfleuri is equally surprising, as she only ever notes to Bethel that her mother likes him – and her mother is hardly considered a good advisor or an astute judge of character. We might read Fanny and Montfleuri’s marriage as entirely conservative, if only because it gains Mrs Waverly’s approval: For him, she seems to have conquered her aversion to foreigners; and her peculiar aversion to Frenchmen – nay, she is almost persuaded, that since he is a partizan of the French revolution, it cannot be quite so dreadful a thing as people have represented it … But it must, however, be added, that she has pretty good intelligence as to his fortune, knows it to be a very large one, at present, and likely to be much encreased by his accession to the estate of the Count d’Hauteville, his uncle, whose only heir he is. – You know my mother well enough to understand, that were Monsieur Montfleuri a Cherokee, or a Chicksaw, his country would be no objection to a place in her esteem, if he had a good property; and his manners and understanding, though they were the first in the world, no recommendation to her favor without it. (366)

Fanny frankly acknowledges her mother’s mercenary preference for Montfleuri, and the attendant shift in her mother’s political leanings. Thus the reader wonders: has Fanny, like Geraldine before her, merely been disposed of to the wealthiest suitor, and will she, like Geraldine, suffer from his foppery and infidelity? Montfleuri himself encourages this view in a letter to Desmond: “If my wife should be ill tempered, I shall run away from her. – If she should be dull, I shall

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be weary of her – fatigued, if she have the folly to be jealous of me – and if she be very much a coquette, I shall be jealous of her … There are a good many chances of being reasonably happy with her, at least, for three or four years, and that is as much as any body has a right to expect” (372). Coupled with Desmond’s own concerns about Montfleuri’s treatment of women, the marriage does not bode well for Fanny. That said, perhaps Fanny’s flirtatiousness will continue after marriage: she does appear capable of conquering her own passions, as she says of Desmond earlier: “No predilection of that sort can last long, after a conviction of its never being returned” (319). Should Montfleuri cease to care for Fanny, it is likely that she will be equally able to cease caring for him. As I suggested above, her request to care for Bethel’s daughter Louisa, coupled with her earlier comments about “smart young aunt[s]” (186), suggest that Fanny is not immune to Bethel’s charm, but she manages to suppress her interest in Bethel. However, in contrast to her egalitarian friendship with Bethel, her encounter with Montfleuri is described in terms of physical desire – albeit an uncomfortable sort of desire, as Montfleuri scrutinizes her regard for Desmond. Like Geraldine, Fanny appears to have displaced her attraction to Desmond onto another, but where Geraldine imagined potential female love interests for Desmond, Fanny follows Desmond in substituting an attainable French lover for an unattainable British one: “I had not time to analyze the confused emotions I felt, before a gentleman entered the room, who appeared to me one of the most elegant men I had ever seen. – If his person prejudiced me in his favor, you may believe that favorable prejudice was not lessened, when he announced himself to be Monsieur de Montfleuri; the intimate and beloved friend of Desmond” (364). Fanny’s interest in Montfleuri is a confused mix of physical attraction (explicitly connected to his social position and French nationality) and another deferral of her initial desire for Desmond. When Fanny enquires a little too pointedly into Desmond’s whereabouts, Montfleuri’s response suggests he is aware of her feelings: Monsieur de Montfleuri, whose eyes are the most penetrating I ever saw, looked at me as if he would read my very soul. – I shrunk, I believe, from his enquiring and piercing eyes; for, I own, they distressed me extremely – nor did what he said serve to relieve me. – “Desmond,” said he, “is a very fortunate man, to occasion you, Mademoiselle, so much friendly solicitude.” – I believe I looked very foolish, and, though I hardly know why, I was discouraged from repeating my question. (365)

Fanny’s deferred desire for Desmond, replaced by this strange series of suitors, occasions some concern for Montfleuri: in the early days of their marriage – which Smith takes the unusual step of narrating – Montfleuri notes, “my love is really of so humble a species, when put by the side of this sublime passion of my friend’s, that I am afraid my amiable Fanchon will discover the difference, and be discontent with me” (410). Smith ultimately discounts Fanny’s flirtatious maneuvering by

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pairing her with her mother’s dream man: wealthy, if occasionally inconsiderate. The potential for women to control the terms of the marriage market to their own advantage secedes to the model of mercenary marriage critiqued in Clarissa and responsible for Geraldine’s and Josephine’s suffering. The conclusion of the novel appears to re-establish English romance as a national ideal: although sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, Desmond and Geraldine are presented more often as its victims. Desmond must rescue Geraldine from bandits who have taken advantage of the disorder and anarchy in the wake of the overthrow of the government: despite her protests to the contrary, Geraldine’s journey into France is, in fact, fraught with danger. This narrative, like the account of Josephine’s pregnancy and exile, is suppressed within the text, narrated only at the very end in a letter from Geraldine to Fanny that insists on her duty to her husband even as she confusedly negotiates her regard for Desmond. At one point, Geraldine tells Fanny that, “if I knew that you [and Desmond] united in giving to my luckless little ones that generous tenderness you are both so capable of feeling; and sometimes, in deploring together, with the soothing sympathy of kindred minds, the fate of your lost Geraldine! This is the only plan I, at this moment, look forward to with any degree of satisfaction” (402). As Geraldine indicates, the “sublime passion” that Geraldine and Desmond harbor for one another is associated with death. Geraldine’s thoughts frequently turn to suicide when she thinks of her “duty” to her husband: she imagines life as a choice between duty and death. Desmond, too, is well aware that he will only be free to marry Geraldine if Verney dies, and, when he witnesses Verney’s death in Geraldine’s arms, tells Bethel, “if I had not hopes of living with her, such a death would excite my envy” (408). Indeed, Verney’s dying words to Desmond are related to this “envy.” Assured of Geraldine’s obedience to “duty,” Verney acknowledges Desmond’s affection for his wife and essentially bequeaths her to Desmond. Ostensibly intended to sanctify Geraldine’s marriage to Desmond by granting it the approbation of her dying husband, Verney’s will in effect forces Geraldine into marriage with Desmond and carries uncanny resonances with Verney’s earlier efforts to sell Geraldine to the highest bidder. Desmond and Geraldine each understand the darker intentions of Verney’s friends: Scarsdale’s constant attendance on Geraldine mirrors his tenancy of Geraldine’s property in Yorkshire; the Duc de Romagnecourt’s promises of asylum, too, are another way in which Verney has “sold” Geraldine to cover his own debts. Major Danby suggests that Desmond purchase Geraldine from Verney: “It is well enough known, that Verney is a savage and a scoundrel, who will sell his wife to the best bidder. – Why don’t Lionel offer him her price at once, for now you may depend upon it he’ll be sued, and Verney will get devilish damages” (349). Here, too, money and the law are entangled: if Desmond pursues a relationship with Geraldine without Verney’s consent, Verney can sue him for “criminal conversation” and collect damages; the better route, according to Danby, is to pay Verney directly. This plan might appear to avoid the scandal of a public trial, but as Verney’s sales of his wife are “well enough known,” it seems likely

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that any illicit attachment will be dissected by the gossips of Bath immediately. In contrast, Verney’s will stipulates that Desmond “would be the guardian of his children, jointly with [Geraldine]; and expressing his wishes, that if ever she took a second husband, it might be his friend Desmond” (407–8). Thus both Fanny and Geraldine’s apparently radical marriages become, in fact, sanctioned by law and order. Each marries a man approved by their legal guardians: Fanny’s mother and Geraldine’s dying husband, respectively. Despite Desmond’s French dalliance and Fanny’s foppish French fiancé, these marriages put an end to speculation – both fiscal and conversational – in favor of settled married life at Sedgewood. The conservative impulse of the conclusion is undermined by the concluding letters from Montfleuri and Desmond and the reintroduction of Josephine to the plot. In his letter to Bethel, Montfleuri explains, in an effort to squelch gossip and preserve Geraldine’s reputation, that the fourth child is not Geraldine and Desmond’s, as Mrs Waverly presumed, but Desmond and Josephine’s illegitimate daughter, adopted by Geraldine and Desmond. For the first and only time in the narrative, we hear Josephine’s story. According to Montfleuri, he encouraged the attachment between Desmond and Josephine, but assumed that Josephine was immune to his gibes because of her longstanding affection for a cousin, Monsieur de Rivemont. Like Desmond, therefore, Josephine has an extramarital attachment, and one that Montfleuri hopes may eventually be consummated, provided that Montfleuri is correct in doubting Josephine’s commitment to “her convent scheme” (372) and provided Rivemont does not object, for Montfleuri vows he will not conceal what has happened. For Josephine, therefore, Desmond served as a substitute for Rivemont, just as she served as a substitute for Geraldine. Readers might hope that Rivemont will return and fill Desmond’s place, giving Josephine the happy ending that Desmond and Geraldine have garnered; this is, however, by no means certain. While Desmond haunted Geraldine’s every step, Rivemont has spent time in the East Indies as a naval officer – a dangerous location, especially given France’s weakened presence in the region after the Seven Years’ War. Moreover, Rivemont may not be thrilled about, as Montfleuri delicately puts it, “what has happened in his absence” (411) – even if he is French and therefore, within the world of the novel, morally flexible on such points. Thus, Montfleuri’s otherwise laudable attempts to rescue his sisters from unhappy marriages and the convent have failed entirely. Desmond describes Montfleuri’s youngest sister, Julie, in pessimistic terms: I perceive that there is, at times, a very painful struggle in her mind, between her wish to obey and gratify [her brother] in entering into the world, and her fears of offending Heaven by having failed to renounce it; and, I am afraid, there are moments which any absurd bigot might take advantage of, to persuade her, that she should yet return to that state whither Heaven has summoned her. (111)

Julie’s precarious spiritual state echoes Josephine’s uncertain future. Josephine’s illegitimate child has found a legitimate home in the blended family of Desmond

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and Geraldine, but the child is a girl, subject to the same marriage market as Geraldine, Josephine, and Fanny. The ambiguous fates of Josephine and Fanny cast a foreboding shadow over the future of Josephine’s daughter. Although the happy conclusion of Geraldine and Desmond’s romance suggests they might privilege companionate over mercenary marriages, as I have argued, their marriage is fundamentally conservative, sanctioned by Geraldine’s dying husband. Fanny’s manipulation of the marriage market is also closed down by her inexplicable desire for the potentially inconstant Montfleuri, which dovetails with her mother’s interest in his title and estates. Thus Josephine’s daughter, in gaining the security of a British home, also is subject to the constraints placed on British femininity. Geraldine and Josephine serve as extreme examples of what happens to deferred desire: for Geraldine, the demands of duty leave death as the only imaginable fulfillment of desire; for Josephine, giving in to desire leads to social death, as indicated by Desmond’s omission of her in the concluding letter. Fanny remains as a sort of middle ground: able to manipulate the terms of desire to procure information, able to restrict her own desires, she successfully navigates the social milieu of the novel. Smith appears, however, to remain fundamentally ambivalent about women’s happiness in marriage: the incandescent happiness of Geraldine and Desmond is dearly bought with scandal (justified and unjustified) and death, and, ultimately, as I have argued above, is a conservative consummation. Geraldine is, to be cynical, once more sold by her husband. Josephine’s future is uncertain and bleak: her husband may be dead – but he may not be; Rivemont may return and marry her – but he may not. The only certainty for Josephine is that she no longer belongs to the community the novel narrates. Finally, Fanny’s apparently successful manipulation of the marriage market appears to backfire: like Montfleuri, she resisted previous attempts to pin her down into matrimony, but it is entirely unclear whether she and Montfleuri will be happy together. In Fanny’s marriage to Montfleuri, the novel reintroduces its latent colonial subtext: Montfleuri is a member of the (recently removed) French nobility, but he is also connected to the American Revolution.47 His father, a colonel in the regiment of Nassau, took his son with him to America. Montfleuri’s position on the American Revolution is difficult, but worth exploring. Although Montfleuri claims that he was left with “utter abhorrence for all who … can deliberately animate the human race to become butchers of each other. – Above all it has given me a detestation of civil war” (106), he also asserts that, on a return visit to America, the country is “recovered of those wounds … and in the most flourishing state of political health” (106). Thus, for Montfleuri, the American Revolution becomes a sort of prophecy for the outcome of the French Revolution. Montfleuri connects revolution to romance specifically when declaring his affections for Fanny in a letter to Desmond: “having escaped till now, and having borne away an unwounded heart, from eyes, the brightest that France, or England, or America 47  Diana Bowstead has connected the Epicureanism of minor characters and Major Danby to the West Indies and the American Revolution.

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could produce, I am desperately in love – Mad! for your Mrs. Verney’s sister, and shall most certainly marry the lovely little Fanni, if she will accept of me” (370). Montfleuri extends his swath through three continents, linking England, France, and America through the image of his “unwounded heart” – a heart that has escaped both literal and emotional wounding. Fanny’s joking claim that, as far as her mother is concerned, Montfleuri could be “a Cherokee, or a Chicksaw, his country would be no objection to a place in her esteem, if he had a good property” (366), is perhaps a little less of a joke than it might appear, as it reminds readers of the original Native American inhabitants of the land contested during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. In Montfleuri’s final letter, he reintroduces a different colonial subtext: the East Indies, where Josephine’s lover and his cousin, Monsieur de Rivemont, is stationed as a naval officer. This particular locale has some personal significance for Smith: her husband’s father was a director with the English East India Company. Rivemont’s naval career would have been sharply curtailed by the loss of French colonies after the Seven Years’ War, but the recently reformed French East India Company might have required naval protection. Thus, Fanny and Josephine each connect the marriage market with the larger concerns of empire. The martial careers of Montfleuri and Rivemont simultaneously encourage and suppress revolution: Montfleuri abets the American Revolution, but – as Fanny’s joke makes clear – helps to suppress the Native Americans who rightfully own the land.48 Similarly, Rivemont’s career may enable him to support Josephine – presumably the major objection to their marriage in the first place – but embroils him in France’s losing battle over Indian territories and potentially in the last gasp of the recently reformed French East India Company (1785–93), disbanded under suspicion of loyalty to the monarchy. Thus the revolt against parental dictum and bourgeois morality that Rivemont and Josephine’s potential marriage might appear to endorse is undercut by his ties to imperial expansion and the counter-revolutionaries. Most bizarre in its implications for the connections between romance and revolution is the tie linking our heroines to the d’Hautevilles. Geraldine and Desmond attempt to take refuge in the château d’Hauteville during their terrifying journey through France, but the Count has fled to Italy. At the end of the novel, however, Geraldine’s double, Josephine, takes refuge in Italy “under the protection of Monsieur d’Hauteville” (411). Finally, Montfleuri describes his marriage as … the only thing I have done these four years, that will please Monseigneur le Comte d’Hauteville … He may now flatter himself that his family will not 48  I am mindful here that I am superimposing a European notion of “ownership” on Native practices. On another point: although one might claim that the French and Indian War created an alliance between the French and Native Americans, Montfleuri describes the French role in the American Revolution as part of the French monarchy’s “restless desire of conquest”; moreover, by aiding the colonists, they are engaging in a de facto suppression of the Native Americans (106).

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Published before the unsuccessful Austro-Prussian invasion of France in August 1792 but after the Declaration of Pillnitz, in the world of Smith’s novel and its contemporary readers, d’Hauteville’s hopes are well founded. Like Verney’s will, Fanny’s marriage and Josephine’s refuge reintroduce the protective umbrella of an aristocratic patriarch in the unlikely form of the Comte d’Hauteville. Stripped of his title and living in exile in Italy, he nonetheless operates as a powerful conservative force in the novel’s conclusion. The Comte d’Hauteville provides a potential safe haven for Josephine and for France, once more linking romance and revolution: Josephine’s refuge in his home is only possible if that home is restored to him via counter-revolution. With his title secure, he can provide financial support and social protection. In a similar vein, the Comte serves as the parental authority for Montfleuri: like Fanny’s mother, he approves of Montfleuri and Fanny’s nuptials. Their transatlantic, love-at-first-sight, radical marriage becomes profoundly conservative. Although the Comte d’Hauteville’s hopes for a counter-revolution would have seemed legitimate to Smith’s readers, they remain exactly that: tenuous hopes. Like Josephine’s future, the future of France remains unknowable at the end of Smith’s novel, and Smith’s text explores the implications of revolution for both imperial centers like England and France, and the larger colonial outposts of each nation. Desmond’s final letter attempts to draw a domestic circle that encloses Bethel and his daughter, Fanny and Montfleuri, and Geraldine and himself together in the British Eden of Sedgewood, but his omission of Josephine sends the reader beyond this secluded circle of domestic happiness, past national borders, and into the far murkier realms of empire. Marriage Market: Wealth, Obligation, and Female Friendship Readings of Clarissa and The Coquette have tended to focus on the individualism of their heroines: Clarissa’s status as the model of her community is part of what tempts Lovelace to see if she is an angel or a mere woman; Eliza wishes to distinguish herself from her peers, and does so, in part, by insisting that she will inscribe herself “Eliza Wharton” until she is satisfied with a suitor. Ultimately, each of these heroines falls, and each novel concludes with a reconstituted community. Similarly, readings of Desmond have focused on the romance between the titular character and Geraldine, and have mostly ignored Fanny and Josephine, much less commented on Fanny’s inclusion in the reunited group at Sedgewood, or that Josephine is not a member of that circle. Anna and Lovelace both memorialize

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Clarissa, as do her posthumous letters and the collected letters we have been reading, but the novel closes with the Conclusion’s final summation, which devotes equal attention to the members of the community. The Coquette also closes with a nod to community opinion: Eliza Wharton is remembered in the public papers and by the correspondence that comprises the novel, but the tombstone that Julia and Lucy erect in her memory is for the edification of the American Fair. Critical preoccupation with the fall of each of these heroines, or with the ever-impending but never realized fall of Geraldine, has resulted in the neglect of the plight of their correspondents. Fanny’s, Julia’s, and Anna’s survival of the narrative depends in great part upon their strategies of alliance and their manipulation of the terms of obligation. However, Desmond ends with Fanny’s conservative marriage and the exile of Josephine. In the other novels, the primary heroines Clarissa and Eliza begin as individuals, but end in self-imposed exile and death, whereas the secondary heroines Anna and Julia, despite their virtues and faults, end each novel in their chosen communities. But these communities are very different: Anna ends the novel as Mrs Hickman; Julia ends the novel as Lucy Sumner’s chosen friend. Ruth Perry has argued that Richardson’s imitators valued the friendship of the female correspondents as “essential to their emotional survival. Like Clarissa and Anna Howe, the pairs are often split between the sweet and the salt, the exemplary and the pert, the good and the spirited” (125) – certainly this distinction holds true for Desmond; Perry also claims that “Hannah Foster’s The Coquette: or, The History of Eliza Wharton, for example, published in Boston in 1797, is a late variation on the theme” (124). She does not note that, in Foster’s text, the pair is reversed: Eliza is the pert, and Julia the exemplary. The lateness of The Coquette, as well as its American location, suggests that Foster is writing in a different historical and social milieu, but why, then, does she return to Richardson’s example? By returning the historical narrative of Elizabeth Whitman to the realm of the fictional, Foster grants herself a sort of poetic license to fill in the details of the historical record.49 Her reliance on the most famous and successful model of a tragic seduction plot is perhaps not terribly surprising, especially if, as Cathy Davidson has claimed, Foster no longer had to write to readers who were convinced of the immorality of the novel. Foster’s decision to include a secondary heroine may have more to do with the necessities of the epistolary form; however, Deighton never writes to Sanford, and the precedent for a one-sided correspondence is certainly set in Pamela. Instead, I would argue that Foster retains Richardson’s model, and the secondary heroine, because in a novel about the fall of one type of femininity, another must rise. Although Armstrong has read Clarissa as the model for the emergent middle class, Anna more closely resembles the trading hucksters Armstrong describes. In turn, Eliza’s lost voice, which Stern suggests is drowned out by the Federalist chorus of female voices, is actually supplanted by Julia Granby’s voice. In both cases, 49   As Cathy Davidson has noted in her section on The Coquette in Revolution and the Word.

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an individualistic voice that stands apart from community opinion by relying on immanence is replaced by an individual voice that can successfully negotiate communities via representation. Anna’s marriage to Hickman accords with the community standards, but it is one that she has managed on her own terms, and in part through her displacement of obligation onto her friendship with Clarissa (i.e., she would not be under obligation to Hickman, except she must find a way to communicate to her friend Clarissa). The variety of marriages depicted in Desmond appears to offer a more complex take on matrimony, but paints a grimmer view of the economic imperatives underlying any marriage. In The Coquette, Julia manages to increase her value to Lucy Sumner by replacing Eliza’s voice with her own. Instead of climbing the social ladder through marriage, as Eliza intends to do, Julia advances through friendship. Power, in The Coquette, seems to lie outside of the marriage economy.50 Lucy Freeman is under the surveillance of her husband, Mr Sumner; Mrs Wharton is remarkably ineffective; the Richmans’ marriage is tarnished by the death of their child; and Eliza’s first intended dies. Even to enter into that marketplace through coquetry, as Eliza does, imperils the individual. The choice before Eliza, Boyer or Sanford, is really a choice of deceptions. If Eliza marries Boyer, she must deceive the community of his parish that she is sedate and without foibles. If she marries Sanford, she will find herself deceived in her estimation of his wealth. Eliza’s coquetry, therefore, ultimately fails because it is directed towards men and matrimony. Foster’s revision of Richardson and Smith proffers another choice, one that Anna and Fanny had hinted at in their privileging of friendship, but abandoned in marriage. We never know Julia’s parentage, and we know her marriage is unlikely; rather, we see Julia circulate in communities of women and in the company of men. Rather than suspending a woman’s value between the family she is born into and the family she marries into, Julia places her value in society and thus prospers.

50

 In this respect, I both agree and disagree with Tennenhouse’s reading of the Americanization of Clarissa. Tennenhouse reads Charlotte Temple as a bad Clarissa for English readers, and better than Clarissa for American readers, because it holds out the promise of a strange sort of reconciliation with England (or at least Englishness) through Charlotte’s child. Tennenhouse, rather unfairly, does not look at The Coquette, a novel discussed by both Fliegelman and Davidson (who are in turn discussed in Tennenhouse’s review of criticism on Clarissa and America). All of the children in The Coquette die in infancy, which troubles Tennenhouse’s reading.

Chapter 2

Scott and the Origins of Historical Romance The secondary heroine of the early seduction novel survives through social manipulation: her astute navigation of social codes secures her position in society at the expense of the fallen woman. Through the figure of the fallen woman, these novels interrogate filial obedience, but ultimately displace the authority of the parent onto the judgment of the community. United in grief for the fallen woman, the community, and thus the nation, is reformed from within. In Clarissa and The Coquette, the secondary heroine is the architect of the elaborate rituals of mourning that give meaning to the primary heroine’s death. In Clarissa, Belford’s plan to publish Clarissa’s daily schedule as a model for Englishwomen is vetted by Anna, who insists “if you do anything in this way, you will let me see it – If I find it not to my mind, I will add or diminish, as justice shall require” (1466). In contrast, in The Coquette, Julia Granby restricts the circulation of Eliza’s private papers to shift focus to the description of her fall engraved on her tombstone as a warning to American women. As I argued in the last chapter, Charlotte Smith’s Desmond reframes the seduction plot by displacing the seduction of the heroine onto an outsider: the French mistress, Josephine. In doing so, Smith anticipates the historical romance, which resolves national tensions at the expense of the racially othered secondary heroine. Like Desmond, Sir Walter Scott’s first novel, Waverley (1814), narrates a revolution. Whereas Smith’s Jacobin novel is sympathetic to the French and somewhat optimistic in its treatment of the revolution, Scott’s account of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 is famously composed “Sixty Years Since,” long after any hope for the return of the Stuarts to the throne had vanished. Unlike Smith, who narrates the French Revolution as it happens, Scott retells the story of a failed revolution at a historical remove. In doing so, Scott rewrites history to create nostalgia for the rebels and for the Highland clans obliterated by legislation after the rebellion. Scott’s novel, often cited as a point of origin for the genre of the historical romance, deploys female characters to create meaning within an otherwise male-dominated historical narrative.    Here I obviously disagree with John McWilliam’s claim that “[Susanna] Rowson and Foster were developing the apolitical seduction novel of Richardson’s Clarissa, whereas Cooper was writing within Walter Scott’s decidedly political tradition of historical romance” (64).   In Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, Ian Duncan notes that 1745 is “the moment of classical formation of the British novel, in the rivalry between Fielding and Richardson” (8).

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In this chapter, I pair Scott’s first historical romance with the first novel that Scott titled “a Romance,” Ivanhoe (1820), to argue that the romantic resolutions of these novels also figure as national resolutions: the marriage of the hero and heroine that concludes each novel also promises to unify the nation at a point of historical crisis. The heroes of each of these novels carry the weight of romantic resolution: Waverley must return to England and reconcile with the Hanoverian government, the Baron, and Rose; Ivanhoe must return home from the Crusades and reconcile with his father in order to marry Rowena. The marriage of the heroine and hero stands in for the resolution of national identity: Waverley and Rose’s marriage provides a model of Scottish and British union; Rowena and Ivanhoe’s marriage resolves the tension between Saxon and Norman. Each novel offers a point of origin for the historical romance and charts a moment of historical tension. Waverley depicts the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the last effort to reinstate the Stuart monarchy on the throne of England; Ivanhoe famously (and inaccurately) imagines the tension between Saxon and Norman in the 1190s, over a century after the Norman Conquest. Thus both novels narrate a sort of last stand against an already-changed world order, and in each novel the secondary heroine registers the cost of that shift. The historical romance emphasizes the plight of the racialized secondary heroine as one whose threat to the home, as a woman attractive to the hero, is perceived also as a threat to the nation because of her race. Flora and Rebecca are each described in terms of race, and each represents the “other”: the race or culture excluded in the consolidation of British identity that concludes each novel. Significantly, Scott preserves historical distance between readers and the subject of the romance: the romance narrates the formation of a national identity that readers of the romance already possess. In Waverley, Scott revisits the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 to memorialize the loss of a separate Highland culture in the consolidation of British identity. The deaths of Fergus MacIvor and Evan Dhu serve as symbols for the near-eradication of the political power of the clan system, but Flora MacIvor connotes the corresponding cultural void left by the exile of the last Highland bard. In Ivanhoe, Scott appears to encourage readers to see English identity defined by the conflict between Saxon and Norman, yet   I am, of course, not the first critic to connect Waverley and Ivanhoe: in Secret Leaves, Judith Wilt notes Scott’s compulsive treatment of Waverley’s and Ivanhoe’s names as “originless”; the repetition of the phrase “splendid but useless” to describe the ’45 and Richard; and the multiple languages incorporated in each novel (20–22).    Katie Trumpener, among others, has importantly complicated the origins of historical romance by demonstrating Scott’s debt to the national tale. I focus on the figure of the secondary heroine as she appears throughout the rise of the novel, and understand the genres I examine as interrelated categories.   I build here, of course, on Alexander Welsh’s famous distinction between “Blonde and Brunette” – dark and light heroine – in the Waverley novels. Welsh’s analysis distinguishes between prudent blondes and passionate brunettes; I focus instead on the historical context and nationalist implications of the plights of these contrasted heroines.

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by continuing the Saxon/Norman conflict of 1066 in the 1190s reign of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, Scott suggests that the construction of national identity is not so easily located within history. In focusing on Waverley and Ivanhoe, therefore, I examine Scott’s treatment of character in racialized terms, paying particular attention to the figure of the racialized secondary heroine, but also attending to the ways in which Scott describes Highland Scots, Lowland Scots, Englishmen, Jews, Saxons, Normans – in short, the whole messy collision of people one might lump together under the label “British.” Scott’s slippery conception of race appears to include what we might today call “ethnicity”; even “faith” seems to constitute some type of race in the Waverley novels. In short, “race,” in Scott, provides a language of difference, and the attempt to resolve various forms of difference into a homogenous sense of self and nation structures the plot of many of the Waverley novels. Waverley begins by narrating the hero’s split childhood, divided between his Whig father and Tory uncle. Waverley’s loyalties would have remained in this perpetual seesaw if not for the introduction of “Saint Cecilia,” a local girl who propels Waverley on the first of his several journeys north, further away from home. As a result of the negative example of Cecilia, Waverley overlooks the beautiful Lowlander Rose and is instead captivated by the more exotic Highlander, Flora. Waverley’s shifting romantic predilections match his changing political allegiances: his brief romance with Jacobitism parallels his interest in Flora; he lays down his claymore and takes up an interest in Rose simultaneously. Yet Waverley’s change of heart is in fact dictated by Flora herself: she works in concert with other Scottish female characters to restore Waverley to Rose and then to England. Scott works to naturalize Flora’s departure, but in doing so, erases women from the romanticized image of the Highlands that Waverley helps to create. In contrast to the ordered separation of Whig and Tory or Englishman and Scot in the first chapters of Waverley, Ivanhoe opens in chaos. Richard is imprisoned abroad, but his corrupt brother, John, holds the throne; Ivanhoe is exiled from his family home and is purportedly fighting in the Holy Land while the Normans BoisGuilbert and the Prior have descended on his home. Already the tension between the national and the domestic should be clear: Ivanhoe’s narrative is an echo of Richard’s; when Ivanhoe is restored to Rowena, Richard will be restored to the throne of England. The transgressive possibility inherent in Rebecca – socially forbidden as a Jew, but privately appealing as a virtuous and beautiful woman – must be eliminated in order for England to be English. Yet by favorably contrasting a member of an “accursed race” (400), the Jewish Rebecca, with the Saxon heiress Rowena, Scott empties lineage of significance and questions its central role in the sort of national myth-making that Rowena’s marriage to Ivanhoe represents.

   Cedric’s preoccupation with marrying Athelstane to Rowena is depicted as ridiculous, also raising questions as to the value of lineage and race in the formation of national identity.

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The disconnect between the prejudice against Rebecca’s lineage and the favorable portrayal of her character challenges the resolution of the historical romance. Discourses of history and of nation-building rely on narratives of cause and effect as well as genealogy; Scott challenges these narratives by depicting the effect of nation-building on racialized identities written into history even as they are excluded from the genealogy of the new nation. In Waverley, Scott plays on the romanticization of the Scottish Highlands as a lost but separate culture through his paired heroines, the genteel Lowlander, Rose, and Flora, the sister of a Highland chief. While Rose appears entirely disengaged from politics, and without any allegiances outside of her father and later Waverley, Flora’s complex allegiances to French culture, Catholic faith, Stuart monarchy, and Highland clan contribute to her exile from Britain at the novel’s conclusion. Scott labors to make Flora’s sacrifice appear necessary to the reader by installing her as mentor to her successor in Waverley’s affections and by stripping her of beauty – and even reason – in the final scenes of the novel. Flora’s political allegiances contribute to her exile, but also enable Scott to uncover the price of a politically unified Britain: the loss of a distinct Highland culture. Similarly, in Ivanhoe, Rebecca’s exile points to the limits of English identity. Although Rebecca considers herself “of England” (298), her lineage and faith – often conflated in Scott under the term “race” – prevent her assimilation into the new England of the novel’s conclusion. Readers of Ivanhoe protested Scott’s conclusion, asserting that Scott should have married Rebecca to Ivanhoe – a fantasy that William Makepeace Thackeray indulges in his brief novella Rebecca and Rowena (1850). However, as Scott makes clear in his Introduction, Rebecca cannot marry Ivanhoe; the cultural weight of race prejudice makes such a marriage impossible in “the[ir] age” (12), and perhaps in Scott’s own. Rowena, whether readers like it or not, gets her man. At the conclusion of Ivanhoe, Rebecca must leave England in order to pursue her disinterested kindness. Scott’s portrayal of Rebecca and Flora highlights the loss of these secondary heroines as the most tragic cost of nation-building. A Rose by Many Other Names: Rose, Flora, and the Scottish Women of Waverley Although Scott claimed that he selected Waverley’s name because it was “uncontaminated” and “euphonic” (Waverley 3), critics have long understood that Waverley’s name is not an entirely innocent choice. Waverley does, in fact, waver 

 Daniel Cottom has made a similar argument in more general terms: “the interest of romance flows from a wound in experience so deep that a cure is not even desirable” (137). That said, I cannot agree with his reading of Flora MacIvor as an “oppressive and humiliating force” (162), or with his claim that Ivanhoe’s verbal duel with Rebecca on the merits of chivalry is pure self-castigation (160).

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a good deal between English and Scottish allegiances, both personal and political. In this chapter, I uncover the connections among Waverley’s political allegiances, their attendant legal questions, and the novel’s central female characters. Scholars have already examined in some depth the novel’s emphasis on politics and the law, issues that are the province of the novel’s male characters. Despite its attention to such “masculine” issues, Waverley is filled with women, and women play a significant and recurring role in shaping its plot. As will be the case in his later historical romances, in Waverley Scott writes a simultaneously national and domestic history, paralleling the hero’s shifting political allegiances with his shifting love interests. The hero’s position as landowner literally connects these two spheres of narrative action: WaverleyHonour is both a titled estate, enmeshed in the legal strictures of primogeniture and the social class structure of Great Britain, and a home, inhabited by a family. This double valence calls attention to gender roles within Scott’s novels: while the fate of the hero is always connected to his patrimony and therefore to his country, the women in Scott’s novels are literally imperiled by the intersection of home and nation. Unable to participate in the masculine spheres of politics and land ownership, Scott’s women must find their place through their relationships. By juxtaposing male-biased inheritance laws, politics, and war with the “sisterhood”10 of Waverley’s love interests, Rose and Flora, Scott attempts to recast nationhood as an extended network of personal and familial connections. In doing so, however, he exiles the bardic Highland figures associated with Scottish nationalism. Scott’s sister-like pairing of Rose and Flora serves to highlight their significant differences: he contrasts Rose, a victim of primogeniture and the Baron’s attachment to that custom and thus desperately in need of a husband, an inheritance, or both, with Flora, a favorite of the exiled Princess whose ardent Jacobitism and clan loyalty are echoed by that of her brother, the Highland chief Fergus. However, despite Rose’s uncertain economic future, her position within the Hanoverian social    Moreover, as Wilbur Cross was the first to note, Waverley’s name is not “uncontaminated” – it appears in Charlotte Smith’s Desmond and in a novel by Jane West. See Trumpener’s work for a reading of Scott in the context of the predominately femaleauthored national tale (“National Character”). See also Welsh’s The Hero of the Waverley Novels for the classic reading of Scott’s “passive” hero.   Ina Ferris has provocatively described this “generic doubleness” as providing a way for “male subjectivity to enter into a female genre without losing its masculine purchase on truth and fact” (Achievement 88). That said, I disagree with Ferris’s claim that Scott “displaced the whole plot of courtship … shifting it to the periphery of narrative interest and so altering novelistic attention” (Achievement 98). Instead, I argue, Scott connects the romance plot to the public/national plot: our dissatisfaction with one impels our dissatisfaction with the other. 10  In fact, Waverley literally describes each girl as his sister: “the very intimacy of their intercourse prevented his feeling for [Rose] other sentiments than those of a brother for an amiable and accomplished sister,” and later: “Of Flora he thought with the regard of a brother for a sister; of Rose with a sensation yet more deep and tender” (293).

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order is clear: she is the daughter of the Baron of Bradwardine, a title recognized by the English king, despite the Baron’s barely concealed Jacobite tendencies.11 In contrast, Fergus has “a parchment, with a huge waxen seal appended, purporting to be an earl’s patent” (93), with no land or wealth attached until the Stuarts are restored to the throne; he has already had to repurchase the lost Scottish estate of his ancestors with potentially ill-gotten gains. Flora, therefore, has no clear place in the social order other than her position as sister to a Highland chief. As Scott’s readers would already be aware of the outcome of the 1745 rebellion, and the ensuing laws suppressing the clan system of the Highlands, the precariousness of Flora’s social standing would be immediately apparent. Scott gives readers a corresponding visual image of this precariousness in Waverley’s first encounter with Flora: sent in advance to her favorite wilderness retreat, Waverley witnesses Flora’s approach as a “fair apparition” crossing a “precarious eminence” (105). For Scott’s readers, Flora would already seem to be a ghost from a previous age,12 and Scott plays on this association by aligning Flora with the romanticized image of the Celtic Bard. Flora translates a Gaelic ballad for Waverley and plays a Scottish harp, “taught to Flora by Rory Dall, one of the last harpers of the Western Highlands” (106). Thus, Scott connects Flora to both the Jacobite and bardic traditions of the Scottish Highlands: sister of a chieftain and pupil of the last harpers and bards of the Highlands, Flora represents the last gasp of an independent Scottish identity.13 With her exile, Scottish nationalism will become literally wedded to English identity in Rose and Waverley’s marriage. Re-reading Flora in the context of the Scottish women that form the backdrop for Scott’s novel, and against the conservative impulse of the conclusion, reveals an alternative narrative of Scottish nationalism. Early in the novel, when Waverley first expresses his interest in Flora to her brother, Fergus replies: “And is this your very sober earnest, or are we in the land of romance and fiction?” (133), and, indeed, Scott’s narrator has placed us in the “land of romance and fiction” throughout Waverley’s encounter with Flora: she is alternately “one of those lovely forms which decorate the landscapes of Claude” and a “fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto” (106). But to dismiss Flora as part of the novel’s overarching romanticization of the Scottish Highlands is to ignore the fact that the narrator has taken Waverley’s perspective in this scene. The impressionable English gentleman who journeyed to the Highlands to view 11   The Baron does, of course, lose his estate as a result of the uprising. I’ll return to the effect of this loss on Rose later in the chapter. 12   We might also connect Flora with the Bodach Glas Fergus witnesses near the conclusion of the novel: like the Bodach Glas, Flora appears as an apparition that simultaneously embodies Highland culture and foreshadows the death of that culture. 13   Here my argument differs slightly from those of Duncan Forbes, P. D. Garside, James Buzard, and David Oberhelman. Although Flora’s ballads are indeed translations from the Gaelic originals, I will demonstrate that Flora is a legitimate, rather than a solely theatrical, proponent of Scottish nationalism.

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their romantic splendor has created Flora as a romantic image, as she reminds him during his proposal: “But consult your own good sense and reason rather than a prepossession hastily adopted, probably only because you have met a young woman possessed of the usual accomplishments, in a sequestered and romantic situation” (136).14 To see Flora only as Waverley sees her is to ignore her double role as Jacobite rebel and Highland bard, which I will return to later in this chapter. Flora and Rose are certainly the most prominent Scottish women described in the novel, but Waverley’s visit to Scotland is punctuated by his repeated encounters with local women. The chapter “A Scottish Manor House, Sixty Years Since” begins with a description that explicitly contrasts the manners of Scottish and English men and women: [A] mere Englishman in search of the comfortable, a word peculiar to his native tongue, might have wished the clothes less scanty, the feet and legs somewhat protected from the weather, the head and complexion shrouded from the sun, or perhaps might even have thought the whole person and dress considerably improved by a plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum sufficit of soap … Yet the physiognomy of the people, when more closely examined, was far from exhibiting the indifference of stupidity; their features were rough, but remarkably intelligent, grave, but the very reverse of stupid; and from among the young women, an artist might have chosen more than one model whose features and form resembled those of Minerva. (33)

At once beautiful and dirty, stupid and intelligent, earthy and godlike, these Scots baffle our narrator, or at least require him to mimic the wavering attitude of our hero in the imagined speeches of “a mere Englishman” and “an artist.”15 Scott describes the Englishman as an intruder, a tourist “in search of the comfortable,” which is in turn a word “peculiar” to England – in other words, Scott suggests the English quest for the comfortable is something strange and unusual. In contrast, an “artist” might see Scottish women as a model for Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and of war, thus connecting Scottish women to a heroic tradition that reaches past 1814 or 1745 to the Classical period. Scott thus slyly overturns the English perception of Scottish women, as he will throughout the novel. 14

  James Kerr observes that Scott uses third-person perspective to distinguish between the narrator and Waverley. Kerr’s focus on Flora’s artifice in staging the performance of the ballad overlooks Flora’s efforts to deconstruct her own performance and undervalues her authentic artistry. 15   Most readings of this scene focus on Scott’s use of the language of the “picturesque”; by calling attention to gender, I hope to connect this scene to Scott’s treatment of female characters throughout the novel. Among readings that do note that binary between the “picturesque” (often associated with Waverley’s point of view) and the “realistic” depiction of poverty, David Brown and others ignore Scott’s association of “realism” with Englishness, as opposed to the perspective of the “artist.”

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Despite the discomfort that mere Englishmen feel in the presence of Scottish women, in Waverley Scottish women work in concert to restore Englishmen to England. The earthy Highland lasses described above find their counterpart in the canny clanswoman Alice Bean, whose mute attendance on Waverley results in an act of disloyalty to her father, and thus to the efforts to enlist Waverley and his men in the Jacobite cause. The packet Alice filches and sneaks into Waverley’s portmanteau contains both his family seal and the missing letters that caused his rupture with the Hanoverian army: she literally restores him to family and country by returning to him his family seal and the means of reconciling with the army, and thus with the reigning monarch. Scott tempts the reader to believe Waverley’s good looks and breeding are the source of Alice’s solicitude, but Janet Gellatly reveals that it is Rose’s kindness to Alice that restores Waverley’s health and possessions. In other words, the friendships among women enable the hero’s restoration to the larger political realm. Janet’s confession serves a double turn: by reimagining Rose as the agent of his salvation, Waverley learns to value her over Flora. This network of sisterhood is in explicit opposition to the wars between monarchs, clans, and men that are often considered the chief interest of the plot of Waverley. While Alice and Rose together undermine Donald Bean Lean’s plot and restore Waverley’s good name, Flora proclaims herself Rose’s tutor and literally educates Rose as Waverley’s future bride. In sum, the women of Waverley work to restore the titular hero to himself – a self that is domestic in every sense: wealthy, Protestant, English, and settled at his estate with his wife. In so doing, our Scottish heroines write themselves out of history – but by returning attention to their suppressed narratives, and particularly to Flora, we can better understand the cost of national unity in Scott’s first historical romance.16 If, as I’ve argued above, Scott’s novels equate romantic resolution with national resolution, then Fergus MacIvor illustrates the darker side of the conflation of home and nation. Fergus’s plans for Waverley, Rose, and Flora are actuated by his own political agenda. Scott notes that “at the moment he should unsheathe his claymore, it might be difficult to say whether it would be most with the view of making James Stuart a king or Fergus Mac-Ivor an earl” (100), and Fergus’s pretensions to an earldom are also at the root of his attempt to unite Flora and Waverley: “his own interest would be exalted in the eyes of the ex-monarch, to whom he had dedicated his services, by an alliance with one of those ancient, powerful, and wealthy English families of the steady cavalier faith, to awaken 16

 Duncan’s take on Rose and Flora is a bit tricky to pin down: at one point he suggests that Flora “donates her own magic to the domicile” (Modern Romance 71); at another, that “Waverley’s height of romance is represented to be a female project, a collaboration between Rose’s dream and Flora’s” (Modern Romance 70); and later “the ‘height of romance’ prophesied by Flora is actually Rose’s project” (Modern Romance 71). I follow Ina Ferris’s claim that Scott is interested in “the margins rather than the centers of culture” and thus deconstructs the resolutions of his novels by pointing to the margins – the irresolvable plight of the secondary heroine (“Story-Telling” 100).

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whose decayed attachment to the Stuart family was now a matter of such vital importance to their cause” (129). Fergus’s schemes collapse the distinction between family and nation, and he imagines the effect of Waverley’s union with Flora in terms of political benefit to himself and to the Jacobite cause. As others have noted, Fergus’s schemes rely on and further the masculine prerogatives of wealth, power, and lineage. Fergus’s pretensions to Rose are similarly motivated and have been more or less ignored by critics: he imagines Rose’s estate as a means of financing his own ascendancy under the new Stuart monarchy. Like the Baron of Bradwardine, Fergus reveals a strange predilection for the trappings of aristocracy. His desire to retain the name of Glennaquoich might appear to demonstrate loyalty to his clan and ancestral home, but his detailed knowledge of heraldry belies his concern with political prominence: To have spoke to the Baron before I had assumed my title, would have only provoked a premature and irritating discussion on the subject of the change of name, when, as Earl of Glennaquoich, I had only to propose to him to carry his d——d bear and boot-jack party per pale, or in a scutcheon of pretence, or in a separate shield perhaps – any way that would not blemish my own coat of arms. And as to Rose, I don’t see what objection she could have made, if her father was satisfied. (253)

Fergus’s concern about “blemishing” his coat of arms reveals that he is solely interested in his own ascendancy, rather than the kinship structures and alliances that make such ascendancy possible. Thus, Fergus’s loyalty to the Jacobite cause, as well as his more personal allegiances to Flora and Rose, is called into question. Rose is fit as the mother of a future Earl of Glennaquoich; beyond that, she has no say in the matter of her marriage or national politics. Fergus’s schemes parallel Scott’s own narrative agenda: like Fergus, Scott engineers romantic resolutions to national conflicts. In narrating the failure of Fergus’s ambitions, both romantic and political, Scott undermines the logic on which his own historical romance is based. For this reason, I turn to Scott’s confederacy of women, and particularly to Flora. Without question, Flora is the more appealing heroine of the novel, but attention to her tragic heroism undervalues her relationship with Rose. Although Flora initially rejects Waverley because he does not fully embrace the Jacobite cause, she leaves herself several loopholes: if Waverley switches sides, she may change her mind. In response to Waverley’s parting question, “‘And should I be so happy as thus to distinguish myself, might I not hope–,’” Flora responds: “‘how [my feelings] might be altered by a train of events too favourable perhaps to be hoped for, it were in vain even to conjecture. Only be assured, Mr. Waverley, that, after my brother’s honour and happiness, there is none which I shall more sincerely pray for than for yours’” (137). Surely these “events too favourable perhaps to be hoped for” include the return of the Stuarts to the throne, and Waverley’s potential

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service in that cause. Although Flora cautions Waverley against joining Fergus in “his present enterprise” (136), she also encourages him to return home and change his political convictions: “‘having publicly freed yourself from every tie to the usurping government, I trust you will see cause, and find opportunity, to serve your injured sovereign with effect’” (137). If, as Fergus claims, Flora’s ruling passion is loyalty, she clearly hopes that Waverley’s loyalty to herself and her brother, coupled with the family inclination towards Jacobitism, will bring him around to her side. However, once Flora discovers Rose’s feelings for Waverley, she quickly renounces her own interest and begins to promote Rose’s. In doing so, she simultaneously foils and inadvertently fulfills her brother’s plans: as Fergus tells Waverley, Rose “‘is a very pretty intelligent girl, and is certainly of one of the very first Lowland families; and, with a little of Flora’s instructions and forming, will make a very good figure’” (252). Flora does take on Rose as a pupil, but she educates her for a domestic life with Waverley, not to appear as a viscountess in a restored Stuart court. In doing so, Flora privileges family life and home over court intrigues and national politics, sapping her brother’s ambition by forgoing an alliance based on wealth and political maneuvers in service of her friend. For Fergus, his plans are rendered nil by the defeat of his forces and his own impending execution: he remains ignorant of the domestic forces that have equally impeded his plans. It is ironic, therefore, that it is the Young Pretender’s interference as “lady’s confidante” that first causes a breach in Waverley and Fergus’s friendship, and helps forward Waverley’s defection from the Jacobite cause. In Scott’s novel, the Prince is cast more as “brother adventurer” and local wag than “Prince Regent”: Lay my pretensions entirely out of view, and consider your own honour, and how far it is well, or becoming, to give our enemies the advantage, and our friends the scandal, of shewing that, few as we are, we are not united. And forgive me if I add, that the names of the ladies who have been mentioned crave more respect from us all than to be made themes of discord. (273)

The Young Pretender sets aside any claims to princely authority in favor of the claims of honor and unity, which he locates in the “ladies,” Flora and Rose. We might stretch this point to argue that, via the Pretender, Scott replaces political intrigues with domestic intrigues. Certainly these family concerns feature more prominently in the Pretender’s court than Fergus’s political ambitions (thwarted by the Prince Regent because he believed that Rose and Waverley were already engaged) or court ceremony (as illustrated in the comic treatment of the Baron’s request to resume his ceremonial role as a sort of Groom of the Bootjack). The Hanoverian court that the Jacobites seek to overthrow is rarely mentioned, except through very distant subsidiaries such as Colonel Gardiner, or the political intrigues of Waverley’s father: even in these cases, political success or failure is

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linked to domestic unity, as Waverley’s father’s political problems parallel his domestic failures. The interrelatedness of politics and the home is evident in the situation of Colonel Talbot, whose family happiness and professional success depends, oddly enough, on his political opponent and one-time romantic rival, Sir Everard. Sir Everard’s rejection of the kind of marriage market that Fergus espouses – e.g. his unwillingness to marry a girl against her will for the sake of inheritance law or political expediency – comes full circle in Waverley. Authorial providence dictates that Sir Everard’s good deed should benefit Colonel Talbot, who in turn seeks to rescue Waverley, who merits this kindness by rescuing the Colonel from certain death (albeit without being aware of their connection) and then releases him from his parole so that he can return to his sick pregnant wife (the very wife released by Sir Everard). Although these men each take part in the political conflicts narrated in Waverley, they are connected by their domestic responsibilities This complicated chain of events circles back to Scott’s attempt to privilege domestic ties over politics, which brings us, in turn, back to Flora MacIvor, and her exile from Britain at the conclusion of the novel. In part, Flora’s exile naturalizes the wedding of Rose and Waverley and the united Britain it represents. In his final meeting with Flora, Waverley discovers her in the company of an elderly nun, preparing to depart for a French convent. These two details underscore Flora’s strangeness: her childhood spent in France and her Catholic faith distance her from both England and her Highland brethren. They also connect her to an earlier Gothic tradition of immured bad women. Flora’s exile therefore is written as both strange and antique, out of place with the proto-modern Britain that Rose and Waverley will inhabit. Flora’s body itself is preternaturally aged, as if to suggest that she is already part of a bygone era: “Her fine complexion was totally gone; her person considerably emaciated; and her face and hands, as white as the purest statuary marble, forming a strong contrast with her sable dress and jet-black hair” (322).17 Scott’s revisionist aging of Flora also empties her of desirability: she is no longer the beautiful, educated, and mysterious sister of a Highland chieftain; now, Scott describes her as an aging mourner whose future is dictated by the routines of a French convent. Scott’s revisions extend beyond Flora’s person to her association with speech in general, and the Highland bards in particular. In earlier encounters with Waverley, Flora asked for time to compose her thoughts; her habit of self-composition is similar to her efforts at poetic composition. In this last meeting, however, she breaks down under the strain of her emotions and is literally unable to compose herself. When Waverley questions her strength of mind, she retorts, “‘there is a busy devil at my heart, that whispers – but it were madness to listen to it – that 17

  Here I concur with Garside’s description of this scene, but Garside’s focus on the comic deflation of Flora’s poetry (interrupted by a dog in the first recital and by dinner in the second) undervalues the emphasis placed on Flora’s habits of composition throughout the novel.

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the strength of mind on which Flora prided herself has– murdered her brother!’” (322). Waverley’s reply, “‘Good God! how can you give utterance to a thought so shocking?’” (322), underscores the connection between Flora and speech throughout the novel. Whereas Flora’s early speeches are associated with reason and with the bardic tradition of the Highlands, Scott has gradually disassociated Flora from both rational and poetic modes of speech. At the Chevalier’s palace, Waverley learns to prefer Rose’s taste in literature and language to Flora’s, and this trend is carried to its logical conclusion in the final meeting between Flora and Waverley: Flora’s speech is “shocking” to Waverley, and alien to Flora herself, prompted by a “busy devil” that “haunts” and “intrude[s]” on her thoughts (322). Edward resorts to “every incoherent argument that occurred to him” (323) to defend Flora to herself, suggesting that Scott, at this late point in the novel, rewrites the rebellion as illogical and doomed to fail; as Flora notes, “‘I do not regret his attempt, because it was wrong: O no; on that point I am armed; but because it was impossible it [the rebellion] could end otherwise than thus’” (323).18 And, of course, for Scott’s readers, it is impossible that it could end in any other way, as the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 is already “sixty years since.” However, with Flora’s exile to the convent of Scottish Benedictine nuns in Paris, the narrative also loses its last Highland bard. Typically described as a tradition of male poets, in Waverley Flora adopts the bardic tradition as a replacement for her lost Continental culture: “When settled in the lonely regions of Glennaquoich … in order to fill up her vacant time, she bestowed a part of it upon the music and poetical traditions of the Highlanders” (101). Indeed, although Fergus initially posits that “Mac-Murrough admires your version of his songs upon the same principle that Captain Waverley admires their original,– because he does not comprehend them” (102), he later explicitly suggests that Flora is at least partially responsible for Mac-Murrough’s songs: “To-day your joint composition, for I insist you had a share in it, has cost me the last silver cup in the castle” (103). Thus, Flora is not solely an antiquarian collector of Highland songs, as she has often been described by critics. Instead, I argue that Flora’s connection to the bardic tradition is much more legitimate than scholars have claimed. While Fergus views the Highland bard as a sort of one-man propaganda machine, intricately connected to wealth and politics, Flora sees Highland customs as connected to her “clan” or family. 18   Here I disagree with Harry Shaw’s claim, in The Forms of Historical Fiction, that Flora “is engaging in the illusory but humanly necessary process of trying to make sense of history by reducing historical causality to the terms of individual morality” (186). While Shaw sees Scott as extending sympathy to safely dismissed characters, I think Scott is still quite anxious about Flora’s appeal at this point in the novel. Flora’s aged body and irrational grief are not “humanly necessary” – they are, in fact, quite out of character, and point instead to Scott’s efforts to limit our sympathy for Flora. This directly contradicts George Dekker’s reading of Flora: Dekker suggests that Flora’s departure is “tragic” because “she is possessed of sufficient moral intelligence to blame herself [for Fergus’s death] … and she [is] capable of a great and enduring sorrow” (The American Historical Romance 232).

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Flora’s habits of poetic composition are similar to her strategy of requiring a few minutes to compose herself, as we see when we compare the following passages: when Fergus asks Flora to show Waverley her translation of the Highland song, she replies, with a blush, “If you will give me a few moments for consideration, I will endeavour to engraft the meaning of these lines upon a rude English translation, which I have attempted of a part of the original” (104), and her response to Waverley’s marriage proposal utilizes similar language: “Permit me then to arrange my ideas upon so unexpected a topic, and in less than an hour I will be ready to give you such reasons for the resolution I shall express, as may be satisfactory at least, if not pleasing to you” (131). In these two scenes, Flora connects self-composition to poetic composition, and thus connects her individual identity to the larger kinship structure of the clan, recorded in that endless list of names and deeds recited by Mac-Murrough. By the conclusion of the novel, however, their roles are reversed: Flora is incapable of self-composition and Scott removes her from the world of the novel by reminding the reader of her links to France and Catholicism. Instead, in the concluding scene, Waverley must compose himself by writing a letter home to Rose. In doing so, he fulfills Flora’s prophecy: “high and perilous enterprize is not Waverley’s forte … I will tell you where he will be at home, my dear, and in his place – in the quiet circle of domestic happiness, lettered indolence, and elegant enjoyments of Waverley-Honour … and he will repeat verses to his beautiful wife, who shall hang upon his arm; – and he will be a happy man” (250). However, if we look back at Rose’s actions, one might suggest that, in the late pages of the narrative, Scott has rewritten Rose as a second Flora: she barters with Donald Bean Lean for Waverley’s safety as Flora had made peace among Bean Lean, Fergus, and the Baron before; she tends to Waverley and preserves her anonymity by speaking the Highland tongue otherwise associated with Flora; and, by kidnapping Waverley, she has inadvertently participated in the Jacobite rising.19 Scott’s retelling of events that confounded Waverley and the reader earlier in the novel is a striking attempt at a sort of consolationist history: Rose has been shaped by Flora, but also by Scott, to bring her more in line with Waverley’s idea of a heroine/wife. However, the happiness that Flora prophesizes for Waverley is slightly tainted by Waverley’s passive courtship of Rose. He only begins to admire Rose when Fergus courts her: “What is it to me that Fergus Mac-Ivor should wish to marry Rose Bradwardine? – I love her not – I might have been loved by her perhaps – but I rejected her simple, natural, and affecting attachment” (254). In fact, Fergus himself has to encourage Waverley to take Rose away from Scotland, much to 19

  Here I disagree with Catherine Frank’s otherwise excellent reading of Rose and Flora. Jane Millgate has offered an inverse reading, suggesting that “The shadowy form of Tully Veolan can, in fact, be discerned behind each moment of the Glennaquoich visit, establishing its own human norm against the hectic and histrionic world of the Mac-Ivors” (48).

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Waverley’s surprise: “[Rose] loves you, and I believe you love her, though, perhaps, you have not found it out, for you are not celebrated for knowing your own mind very pointedly” (275). Waverley’s interest in Rose is also repeatedly pointed out to him by minor female characters in the novel: by the Scottish landlady, who interrupts him to say, “Ah, pass for the other; simplicity may be improved, but pride and conceit never” (291); by Janet’s description of Rose as “a leddy, that has na her equal in the world” (304); and later by the little old ladies of Tully Veolan, who smirk, nod, and smile throughout Edward and Rose’s courtship. Once again, Scottish female characters restore Waverley to his proper place. In contrast to the female characters, the male characters have vested political and financial interests in Rose and Waverley’s marriage. I’ve already noted Fergus’s role, and if we compare his comments to those of Colonel Talbot, Duncan Macwheeble, and the Baron, there is a marked similarity. Just as Fergus renounces his political ambitions at the moment he renounces his claim to Rose’s hand, the other male characters support Rose and Waverley’s marriage for political and financial reasons. The Baron, of course, is interested in his “three ermines passant,” and Colonel Talbot also claims that his interest in forwarding the match is a sort of retribution for depriving Sir Everard of Lady Emily all those years ago. However, if we remember Rose’s opinion of Colonel Talbot – “He looks as if he thought no Scottish-woman worth the trouble of handing her a cup of tea” (249) – it seems clear that Talbot’s sudden interest in the Scottish lass has more to do with securing Waverley to Waverley-Honour and a quiet life in England than returning Sir Everard’s kindness. Marriage to Rose, in Colonel Talbot’s eyes, stabilizes the Scottish/English breach. Duncan Macwheeble’s interest in the match is, unsurprisingly, financial – he goes as far as to vouch for Rose and the Baron’s respective consents once he is apprised of Waverley’s net worth. Even Waverley first realizes his interest in Rose in terms of debt: To Rose Bradwardine, then, he owed the life which he now thought he could willingly have laid down to serve her. A little reflection convinced him, however, that to live for her sake was more convenient and agreeable, and that, being possessed of independence, she might share it with him either in foreign countries or in his own. The pleasure of being allied to a man of the Baron’s high worth, and who was so much valued by his uncle Sir Everard, was also an agreeable consideration, had anything been wanting to recommend the match. His absurdities, which had appeared grotesquely ludicrous during his prosperity, seemed, in the sun-set of his fortune, to be harmonized and assimilated with the nobler features of his character, so as to add peculiarity without exciting ridicule. (309)

This passage illustrates the peculiar power game Waverley plays: he chooses to live life with Rose instead of “serving” her through his death. He sees alliance with the Baron as a virtue because the Baron is now “in the sun-set of his fortune”

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– Waverley’s prosperity ensures that he has the upper hand with the Baron, and Rose’s meek and obliging nature ensure that he will have the upper hand with her.20 If the Waverley who proposed to Flora sought a wife he could idolize as a rebel Scottish clanswoman, the Waverley who proposes to Rose looks to be idolized as a powerful political figure and aristocrat in Great Britain. This is, of course, in keeping with traditional readings of this novel, and of Scott’s novels in general, but Scott disrupts the traditional narrative arc by reintroducing the condemned, already-lost Fergus and Flora. Fergus already anticipates his idealization as folk hero in Flora’s eyes and in the eyes of the Highland clan he leaves behind, an idealization that will reach even the Lowlands, in the portrait of Edward and Fergus that graces the Bradwardine manor house. He asks Waverley to help provide financial and legal protection for his clan, but notes that Waverley does not possess the “Open Sesame” to their hearts: he is not a member of the clan.21 Fergus’s newfound focus on kinship ties culminates in his proclamation to Waverley: “You, Waverley, will soon know the happiness of mutual affection in the married state – long, long may Rose and you enjoy it! – but you can never know the purity of feeling which combines two orphans, like Flora and me” (327). By writing Fergus and Flora as orphans, the last, lost children of an already-vanishing Highland clan system, Scott sets them outside of the new family structures of wealth and kinship that will dominate unified Britain and appears to complete the consolidation of British identity through Flora’s exile and Fergus’s death. In Fergus’s claim, however, that Waverley can “never know” a feeling as pure as the love that “combines” Fergus and Flora, Scott points to a lost national unity. Flora’s fervent devotion to the Jacobite cause and her less-acknowledged preservation of Scottish Highland culture enable the pure union of self, brother, and clan that Fergus acknowledges to Waverley on his deathbed. Ironically, it is only in the face of death that Fergus merits the selfless sacrifice made by Evan Dhu and others. But Fergus is right, and we might read the “purity of feeling” that “combines” Flora and Fergus as a more controversial sort of purity: with the death of Fergus and the exile of Flora to a French convent, the potential future inheritors 20   Here I disagree slightly with Ian Duncan’s reading of the Baron (Modern Romance 97–100). Duncan claims that Edward is notably absent in the final pages of the novel, replaced by the Baron; however, as other critics have noted, the restoration of Tully Veolan entails a loss of the succession so prized by the Baron, and consolidates Waverley’s power. 21   James Kerr has suggested that Fergus’s fear of the “Bodach Glas” reveals the “true Highlander beneath the artificial surface of courtly manners and mores” (7), but that Waverley and the reader remain affiliated with reason (and thus with the progress of society), while Fergus’s superstition marks his allegiance to a vanishing way of life. I concur instead with Fiona Robertson’s account of Scott’s manipulation of the Gothic to suggest that Fergus’s encounter with the Gray Ghost points to his (perhaps self-conscious) adoption of a mythic, Gothic status, rather than the revelation of an always-already present secret self.

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of Scottish nationalism also vanish. To return to the catalogue of Scottish women with which I began this chapter: Alice Bean’s intended, Evan Dhu, is executed with Fergus, thus preventing an alliance between two powerful Highland families. All of the other named Scottish female characters are old: Janet Gellatly and Aunt Rachel will not be the sources of a new generation of Highland chiefs, and Janet’s slightly daft son has already been adopted by the Bradwardines. Instead, the last gasp of Scottish nationalism is enshrined in an already-romanticized portrait of Fergus and Edward in Highland garb, erasing the alternative narratives of Highland lasses, and, indeed, erasing women altogether from the narrative of Scottish history. The “Fair Jewess” and the Less Interesting Rowena: Race, Femininity, and History in Ivanhoe If Scott’s final portrait of Fergus and Edward Waverley works in tandem with exile, age, and marriage to silence Flora and her sister Scottish heroines, in Ivanhoe one is struck by Rebecca’s presence.22 It is with good reason that Ian Duncan terms Rebecca “one of the sublime heroines of nineteenth-century fiction” (“Introduction” xxiii), yet to single out Rebecca is to undervalue the marriage/reunion plot that structures the novel. By any standard definition of romance, Rowena is clearly the conventional heroine.23 She is beautiful and fair, she has an impeccable lineage from the “true” kings of England (Alfred), she possesses personal wealth, and she marries the hero, who is also truly “English” and her childhood companion. Their marriage is supposed to restore order at the conclusion of the novel, but generations of readers have refused to accept the idea of two heroines – one who marries the hero and one who doesn’t. These readers have wished for a union between the hero and Rebecca, to confirm her heroic status at the expense of Rowena’s.24

22   With the exception of David Brown, who describes Ivanhoe as “inferior” and suggests that one might have been “bored by a school edition” (1) of the novel! 23   Samuel Coleridge never finished Ivanhoe, laying the blame at least in part on the heroines: “Perhaps the foreseen hopelessness of Rebecca – the comparatively feeble interest excited by Rowena, the from the beginning foreknown bride of Ivanhoe … – these may, or may not have been the causes, but Ivanhoe I never have been able to summon the fortitude to read thro’. Doubtless the want of any one predominant interest aggravated by the want of any one continuous thread of events is a grievous defect in a novel” (qtd in Scott: The Critical Heritage 182). Coleridge’s frustration lies in the fact that Rebecca cannot marry the hero (her foreseen hopelessness) and that Rowena (who should marry the hero, and is thus the conventional heroine) is not particularly interesting as a character. 24   As Ina Ferris has observed, early reviewers were not particularly enthralled by the “chivalric parade and equipage” of the novel, but were enamored of Rebecca (Achievement 240). The instability of the marriage plot is further evidenced by the readers who wrote to Scott, chastising him for marrying Ivanhoe to Rowena, and by the numerous rewrites of Ivanhoe, which I discuss later in this chapter and in the conclusion.

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Scott replies to this desire in his Introduction: Rebecca’s decision to squelch her attraction to Ivanhoe is the story that he hopes the fair readers of romances will wish to emulate, whereas Rowena’s conventional romance plot is portrayed as dangerous: “[I]t is a dangerous and fatal doctrine to teach young persons, the most common readers of romance, that rectitude of conduct and of principle are either naturally allied with, or adequately rewarded by, the gratification of our passions, or attainment of our wishes” (12). The question we must ask is: why does Scott retain the conventional plot of romance and the conventional romantic heroine? And, more importantly, what are the implications of this alternative model of racialized femininity for readers of historical romance? In Ivanhoe, Scott abandons his own racially marked title as the “author of the Scottish Novels” (5) in order to focus on a different racial battle: the conflict between the Saxons and the Normans, and the distant conflict in Palestine between Christians and heathens.25 Thus race is always already an issue in this novel (and certainly one that would also resonate with Scott’s reading public just over a hundred years after the union of Scotland and England and in the aftermath of Napoleon).26 Rebecca does not fit within the Saxon–Norman conflict, but Scott does place her firmly within the love-plot that also structures the novel – and he does so in terms of race. Interestingly, Scott’s characters seem to be able to reconcile the racial prejudice between Saxons and Normans – even the staunchly nationalistic Cedric the Saxon learns to tolerate the Normans – but none of the characters is able to fully overcome their anti-Semitism towards Rebecca or her father. Perhaps this is because the conflict between Saxons and Normans is effectively in the past; indeed, Scott very famously rewrites history to make the tension between Saxon and Norman present in the world of the novel, whereas historically it had long since dissipated. In contrast, the tensions between England and its Jewish population were present in the 1190s, and are still present in Scott’s day and well after. The resolution of the national tale in the marriage of Rowena and Ivanhoe covers the tension between Saxon and Norman and occasions the exile of Rebecca and her father. In his extensive introduction to the Oxford edition of Ivanhoe, Ian Duncan suggests: “Scott’s romance of cultural origins shows the modern ‘separation of spheres’, the gendering of public and private life, to be founded on a primal violence – the threat of a force that reduces persons to bodies – rather than on any ethical fitness” (xxii). For Duncan, these categories (public and private) map onto the generic constituents of the historical romance: the national tale and the Gothic. Duncan reads Ulrica’s narrative as the Gothic center of the text, and one that complicates the comic–national marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena 25

  Although “Scot” is not always considered a race category, my use of it is in keeping with the blurred nineteenth-century definition of race. 26   See Clare Simmons’s Reversing the Conquest for a reading of the English preoccupation with the Saxon and Norman conflict from the eighteenth century through the death of Victoria.

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at the conclusion of the novel. Michael Ragussis’s reading further explores the implications of Ulrica’s story: “Precisely insofar as Ulrica’s story demonstrates the way in which conversion functions as a sexual transgression that is at the same time a racial erasure, her story represents a narrative model that threatens to overtake the stories of the two other major female characters in the novel, Rowena and Rebecca” (193). Ulrica’s suicide is atonement for her complicity in the Norman invasion, but that invasion (even with Scott’s revised timeline) is well within the past of the novel. In perhaps a further irony, Ulrica’s death enables the victory at Torquilstone of a combined Saxon and Norman force (King Richard, Cedric the Saxon, Robin Hood and his men).27 Rebecca, however, has no form of miscegenation to atone for. Indeed, her conscientious resistance of her attraction to Ivanhoe troubles this otherwise compelling account of the tensions between the Gothic and the national tale in this new genre of historical romance, as Duncan acknowledges in the concluding paragraph of his introduction to the novel: Rebecca’s exile in the last pages of Ivanhoe brings home the anomaly that the final marriage is an inter-cultural but not an inter-ethnic union, despite the rhetoric about racial blending. Although Ivanhoe has assumed the manners of Norman chivalry, he and Rowena are both Saxons. Scott’s text continues to register the pressure of the categories – sexuality and race – that will mark the limits of ‘culture’, the fluid space of national identity formation, in nineteenth-century discourse … Rebecca’s stately withdrawal offers something more critical than a pre-emption of nationalist racism by the internalization of its decree of purity … More Christian than the Christians themselves, who are united in nothing but their anti-Semitism, the Jewess diminishes the English future from which she is shut out. (xxv–xxvi)

Duncan’s reading highlights the novel’s preoccupation with the construction of nationhood and its elision of culture and race. My reading of Ivanhoe picks up where Duncan’s leaves off, with an extensive reading of Rebecca’s role that more fully explores the complex relationship between the two heroines and its implications for the English nation. As I have argued, Rowena is clearly the conventional heroine of romance. The opening chapter of the novel prepares the reader to sympathize with the Saxons, and Rowena is, genealogically, the most noble of all Saxons. In contrast, Rebecca’s Eastern apparel and faith would seem to mark her as an enemy, especially during the Crusades, but Scott’s careful presentation of Rebecca instructs the reader to see her as a model, while effacing Rowena’s agency. Scott places Rowena and Rebecca in parallel scenes to contrast the two heroines: we often see the effect of Rebecca’s action before we know the agent, thereby preventing readers from importing racial prejudice into their understanding of her conduct. In contrast, Rowena’s actions 27   Judith Wilt has noted that Scott revises Robin Hood from a Norman landowner to an outlaw of roughly the same class status as the Saxons (Secret Leaves).

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are emptied of subjectivity by her conscription within terms such as “fair Saxon”; Rowena’s behavior does not reflect merit or blame upon her, but rather on her race. Ivanhoe falls neatly into three major scenes that pair Rebecca and Rowena: Ashby, Torquilstone, and Templestowe. As readers, we witness Rowena’s response to a difficult situation, and then see Rebecca’s. This comparison always reveals Rebecca as the stronger and more interesting character. By teaching readers to value Rebecca over Rowena, the novel undoes its own resolution of the national romance, revealing that resolution – like Rowena’s ringlets – can only be formed with the assistance of art. The first description of each heroine establishes the contrast between them. Rowena is described to the reader in the Prior’s conversation with Bois-Guilbert: “‘Cedric is not her father,’ replied the Prior, ‘and is but of remote relation: she is descended from higher blood than even he pretends to, and is but distantly connected with him by birth’” (43). Rowena’s worth is established by her impressive lineage, and confirmed by her beauty – itself a marker of her heritage. However, Rowena’s typical Saxon beauty is defamiliarized by Bois-Guilbert’s stare and by our narrator’s insistence on the effects of nurture and art: Formed in the best proportions of her sex, Rowena was tall in stature, yet not so much as to attract observation on account of superior height … If mildness were the more natural expression of such a combination of features, it was plain, that in the present instance, the exercise of habitual superiority, and the reception of general homage, had given to the Saxon lady a loftier character, which mingled with and qualified that bestowed by nature. Her profuse hair, of a colour betwixt brown and flaxen, was arranged in a fanciful and graceful manner in numerous ringlets, to form which art had probably aided nature. (59–60)

The narrator’s description of Rowena’s features suggests that they are striking only because of her care in arranging her hair, and Cedric’s care in raising her as a Saxon heiress.28 Without her hairdresser and her haughty demeanor, Rowena might be nothing more than a tallish girl in unfashionable clothes.29 Rowena will be deprived of both during her imprisonment in Torquilstone, revealing that lineage does not grant real superiority any more than artificial ringlets do. 28

  Chris Vanden Bossche’s assertion that Normans represent artifice as opposed to Saxon/nature underestimates the constructedness of Rowena’s Saxon beauty. Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “portrait” of Rowena makes this connection: “Rowena is an ingenious blending of the natural and the artificial, so generally at war with each other in society. Born timid, sweet, and yielding, she is brought up to pride, reserve, and authority” (Blanchard 118). 29  I will later discuss Rowena’s “fictiveness”: her artificial beauty belies what Scott calls her “fictional dominance,” uncovered at Torquilstone. In turn, this allows us to question the “truth” or immanence, to borrow a term from Chapter 1, of her Saxon heritage and its import.

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In contrast, the opening description of Rebecca emphasizes an exotic beauty that the narrator renders natural: The figure of Rebecca might indeed have compared with the proudest beauties of England, even though it had been judged by as shrewd a connoisseur as Prince John. Her form was exquisitely symmetrical, and was shown to advantage by a sort of Eastern dress, which she wore according to the fashion of the females of her nation … The brilliancy of her eyes, the superb arch of her eyebrows, her well-formed aquiline nose, her teeth as white as pearl, and the profusion of her sable tresses, which, each arranged in its own little spiral of twisted curls, fell down upon as much of a lovely neck and bosom as a simarre of the richest Persian silk, exhibiting flowers in their natural colors embossed upon a purple ground, permitted to be visible – all of these constituted a combination of loveliness, which yielded not to the most beautiful of the maidens who surrounded her. It is true, that of the golden and pearl-studded clasps, which closed her vest from the throat to the waist, the three uppermost were left unfastened on account of the heat, which something enlarged the prospect to which we allude. (93–4)

The narrator’s coyness should not prevent the reader from noticing the sexualized description of Rebecca’s body; but it is a naturalized sexuality. Rebecca’s dress is flattering, but it is also “the fashion” of her country; Rebecca’s simarre is of rich silk, but it presents flowers in their “natural colors”; Rebecca’s neck and bosom are exposed, but only because of the heat. In a conceit that Scott will continue to use throughout the novel, Rowena appears unveiled, whereas Rebecca is always veiled. Rowena’s rank, however, is protection enough, whereas Rebecca’s exotic beauty exposes her to the gaze of everyone; her veil, meant to protect her from the gaze, is itself a marker of her exotic otherness. Rebecca is dangerous precisely because she is an outsider to the chivalric codes of rank and honor that give Rowena power and, to a degree, protection. The contrast between Rebecca and Rowena makes the narrator’s insistence that Rebecca can be compared to the “proudest beauties of England” even more striking. Rebecca’s beauty attracts the attention and praise of the spectators because it is exotically “other,” but when that otherness is explicitly linked to her father, and thus to her Jewish identity, the crowd turns. Although Rowena is crowned the “Queen of Love and Beauty” (117), Rebecca is a controversial but no less qualified contender for the title.30 Having thus established Rowena and Rebecca as rival femininities, Scott introduces them to one another. Rowena and Rebecca first meet on the road from the tournament at Ashby. Isaac attempts to beg the Saxons’ protection, but it is only Rebecca who secures their good will, “throwing back her veil” (206), and claiming the interest of Rowena, who is prominently visible on horseback. Rebecca

30

 Indeed, Rowena’s alliance with Ivanhoe gives her a bit of an unfair advantage.

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is initially disguised by her veil;31 her removal of the veil foreshadows its removal at Templestowe. There, as well as here, the discovery of her beauty and dignity renders her audience more tractable. Despite the narrator’s emphasis on racialized difference – Rebecca’s “Oriental fashion” as opposed to the “Saxon lady” Rowena (206) – Rebecca’s appeal to Rowena is made on the basis of common ground; rather than focusing on the difference between a Christian and a Jew, she appeals to their shared belief in God and the Ten Commandments. In contrast to Rowena’s haughty demeanor that emphasizes her separateness, her difference as a Saxon heiress, Rebecca, like the secondary heroines I examined in the last chapter, always approaches others in terms of alliance and similarity. Because of her race, and the prejudice she encounters, this is a strategy of survival for Rebecca, but the novel transforms Rebecca’s rejection of difference into a virtue. We later discover that God and the Laws of Mount Sinai are not the only things Rebecca and Rowena share; the “one dear to many” hidden in the litter is Ivanhoe (207). Scott keeps this secret, however, for almost a hundred pages. Our suspense over the identity of the mysterious stranger is, of course, one of the pleasures of the text, but I would like to suggest a more nuanced understanding of Scott’s narrative strategy. By withholding Ivanhoe’s identity, Scott is able to build sympathy and admiration for Rebecca in opposition to Rowena and thus establish the possibility of romantic conflict.32 As readers of romance, our sympathy naturally lies with Rowena.33 The text has marked her as the heroine by her beauty, wealth, lineage, and previous attachment to Ivanhoe. To convince readers to switch allegiance requires a lot of maneuvering; Scott relies on the standard Gothic device: captivity. Shortly after Rowena accepts Rebecca into their train, the party is attacked, captured, and taken to Torquilstone. Within the narrative, Maurice De Bracy’s elaborate scheme to kidnap and then rescue Rowena really has nothing to do with Rebecca, but it is convenient that she is there, for her presence allays De Bracy’s anxiety that Bois-Guilbert might also be interested in Rowena.34 Bois-Guilbert retorts: “I care not for your blue-eyed beauty. There is in that train one who will make me a better mate” (222). Rowena is dismissed as nothing more than a “blueeyed beauty,” whereas Rebecca is elevated as a “mate.” Within the narrative, this distinction may seem insignificant or trifling, but by positioning Bois-Guilbert and De Bracy’s respective conversations with Rebecca and Rowena side by side, 31   See also the conclusion of the novel, which I will discuss later. It is worth noting that Rebecca’s removal of her veil to carry Ivanhoe away from Ashby is what initially subjects her to the notice of Bois-Guilbert. 32   This is indeed the strategy that Scott uses throughout the text to overcome readerly prejudice towards Rebecca. 33   Again, although critics have termed Rebecca “the heroine,” it is important to remember that such a maneuver is the work of Scott’s text; the reader of romance would expect Rowena to fill that role. 34   Bois-Guilbert’s dismissal of Rowena is all the more interesting since he had yielded to Prior Almyer’s claim that she was the most beautiful woman in England.

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Scott further exalts Rebecca’s complex agency in opposition to Rowena’s bland passivity. Rebecca’s agency is attributed to her social location outside of those constructs of race and primogeniture that grant Rowena authority. Scott connects Rowena’s bland passivity and her position as Saxon heiress, undermining the authority of genealogy in the construction of English identity. Although genealogy is a powerful ordering force, creating the class structure and properties that are at the center of the novel’s plot, Rowena’s passivity provides an ironic comment on the role of women in a patrilineal system. Rowena’s lineage and inheritance attract suitors, but she is expected to passively accept her father’s choice, a preference dictated by his vested interests in the political and financial considerations attached to lineage. Although she rejects Athelstane, the Saxon prince whom Cedric would like her to marry so that they might reclaim the throne of England,35 she does so in the safety of her father’s home and under his protection. Removed from her father’s house, Rowena relies on the protection of social codes of politeness and chivalry. Rowena’s captor is aware of her social position: she is lodged in “the apartment of the castle which had been judged most fitting for the accommodation of the Saxon heiress” (239), the apartment that had belonged to the Norman Front-de-Boeuf’s deceased wife.36 While the distinction between Saxon and Norman is predominantly political (conquered and conqueror), it is also portrayed as a class distinction: the rude but noble Saxons are contrasted with the chivalrous but ignoble Normans.37 De Bracy’s strange wooing of Rowena reveals that his courtship is not necessarily concerned with personal happiness, but with public esteem: Thou art proud, Rowena, and thou art the fitter to be my wife. By what other means couldst thou be raised to high honour and princely place, saving by my alliance? How else wouldst thou escape from the mean precincts of a country grange, where Saxons herd with the swine which form their wealth, to take thy seat, honored as thou shouldst be, and shalt be, amid all in England that is distinguished by beauty or dignified by power? (241–2)

De Bracy’s courtship operates to dismantle the rhetoric of courtly love and romance as ultimately political and economic. When faced with Rowena’s refusal, De Bracy further underscores the very unromantic nature of his suit: “Rowena,” said De Bracy, “art thou, too, deceived by the common error of thy sex, who think there can be no rivalry but that respecting their own charms? 35

  Athelstane is the “last sprout” of Edward the Confessor, the sainted, childless, and last King of England prior to the Norman Conquest. 36   This is especially appropriate since De Bracy would like to make Rowena a Norman wife. 37   The Saxons make their money from their land, especially from swineherding; the Normans inherit their money, or conquer its previous possessors.

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Knowest thou not there is a jealousy of ambition and of wealth, as well as of love; and that this our host, Front-de-Boeuf, will push from his road him who opposes his claim to the fair barony of Ivanhoe, as readily, eagerly, and unscrupulously as if he were preferred to him by some blue-eyed damsel?” (242–3)

Rowena’s value to De Bracy is not located in her subjectivity, but rather in her lineage and thus in her potential inheritance, here figured as the fair barony of Ivanhoe. One might expect Rowena to reject De Bracy, as Rebecca later does, but Rowena’s inability to act is a dark rewrite of the cultural expectation that women accept suitors based on property negotiations. Rowena’s sense of self-worth is also located in this construct of entitlement. We have already learned that Cedric has raised Rowena to consider herself a Saxon heiress, and that De Bracy values her for that haughty demeanor. In her captivity, however, Rowena is forced to strip away all fictions. Duncan has claimed that “Rowena understands immediately that the courtly-love blandishments of De Bracy are nothing more than a new-fangled mask for primitive coercion; in his earlier phrase (Chapter XV), ‘the work of the Conquest should be completed’” (“Introduction” xxi), but it is perhaps more accurate to say that Rowena comes to understand the coercion behind De Bracy’s courtly sentiments because he has revealed their underpinnings to her. The potential romance of a captivity in which one is treated well and according to the laws of chivalry – and one need only turn to Athelstane’s expectation of board according to his rank to prove that the captives do not actually consider themselves in danger – is debunked before Rowena, and reveals her strength as empty show: Her haughtiness and habit of domination was, therefore, a fictitious character, induced over that which was natural to her, and it deserted her when her eyes were opened to the extent of her own danger, as well as that of her lover and her guardian; and when she found her will, the slightest expression of which was wont to command respect and attention, now placed in opposition to that of a man of a strong, fierce, and determined mind, who possessed the advantage over her, and was resolved to use it, she quailed before him. (244)

Rowena throws her arms to heaven and begins to pray. While Rowena’s behavior makes De Bracy slightly uncomfortable, he has proceeded too far to turn back, and so her action, or rather inaction, is utterly useless. It is not surprising that when Cedric bursts into the apartment to rescue Rowena, she is still praying: “The noble Saxon was so fortunate as to reach his ward’s apartment just as she had abandoned all hope of safety, and, with a crucifix clasped in agony to her bosom, sat in expectation of instant death” (336). The narrator’s assertion that Cedric was fortunate to find her because of her dangerous state of mind, as opposed to any immediate danger to her person, emphasizes the almost comic nature of her agonized inaction. Paul DeGategno’s claim that “Rowena’s Pamela-like trial, in which she shows superior strength over De Bracy … accords her a kind of

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recognition she has long sought but always been denied” cannot fully account for Rowena’s tears, especially not when contrasted with Rebecca’s strength under duress (57). Rowena’s helplessness once she realizes that her Saxon lineage carries no weight with De Bracy is juxtaposed with Rebecca’s resourcefulness in captivity. The narrator invokes a comparison between these two candidates for Ivanhoe’s hand: Rebecca was now to expect a fate even more dreadful than that of Rowena; for what probability was there that either softness or ceremony would be used towards one of her oppressed race, whatever shadow of these might be preserved towards a Saxon heiress? Yet had the Jewess this advantage, that she was better prepared by habits of thought, and by natural strength of mind, to encounter the dangers to which she was exposed. (249)

DeGategno suggests that Scott equates property with political responsibility (32), but such a reading overlooks the political responsibility figured in Rebecca. While Rowena’s education has rendered her incapable of action unless she can deploy her status as “heiress,” Rebecca’s much more precarious position as a wealthy and wise woman who is simultaneously the victim of prejudice as the homeless “daughter of a despised race” (250) fits her for the task ahead: “Thus prepared to expect adverse circumstances, she had acquired the firmness necessary for acting under them” (250). It is, according to our narrator, Rebecca’s qualities of mind as well as her social situation that enable her to act with resolution. The conversation between Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca centers on race and heritage, further underscoring the difference between Rowena’s fictions of inherited superiority and Rebecca’s apprehension of her precarious social status. As a Jewish woman, Rebecca is suspicious of a Christian’s advances.38 As a Templar, Bois-Guilbert cannot marry. But, unlike Rowena, Rebecca realizes the danger of her position immediately and engages in a charged debate with BoisGuilbert, one that, it is worth noting, she wins.39 If De Bracy requires Rowena’s pride in order to elevate her from Saxon heiress to Norman wife but ultimately resorts to a political power play over lands and wealth, Bois-Guilbert tries to tempt 38

  Alice Chandler’s suggestion that, “To [Bois-Guilbert’s] late medieval opportunism, the Jewess counters with the chivalric code” (192) is troubled by Rebecca’s critique of chivalry in her conversation with Ivanhoe, a critique that Chandler reads as overcome by Ivanhoe’s response, “the incipient voice of the law itself, magisterially protecting the weak from the strong” (193). That Ivanhoe is bedridden while Rebecca stands in armor at the window renders this reading suspect, and indeed, almost ironic. 39  Duncan correctly identifies Rebecca and Bois-Guilbert as “the true antagonists of Ivanhoe” in his introduction (xxiv). Judith Wilt provocatively notes that Bois-Guilbert “has chosen the fate of deracination” and offers a fascinating reading of Rebecca’s value to BoisGuilbert (Secret Leaves 44–5).

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Rebecca with wealth and then with power but ultimately values her for her inherent virtues: “‘Rebecca! she who could prefer death to dishonour must have a proud and powerful soul. Mine thou must be! – Nay, start not,’ he added, ‘it must be with thine own consent, and on thine own terms’” (256). While the Templar initially began his suit with exotic and erotic endearments, such as “rose of Sharon” (252), after Rebecca’s argumentative victory, he begins to behave less like a conqueror and more like a suitor. Bois-Guilbert’s preference for Rebecca, especially as he had previously judged Rowena the fairest in England, fully establishes Rebecca’s beauty and worth, and overturns racial prejudice. As I have been arguing, Rebecca’s merits, contrasted with Rowena’s fictitious dominance, are revealed through the parallel challenges each heroine faces. After the reader watches Rebecca more successfully weather captivity and dismantles his or her own potential prejudices towards her, Scott returns to the initial encounter between Rebecca and Ivanhoe. Scott opens the scene by framing it in the context of a romance: “The youngest reader of romances and romantic ballads, must recollect how often the females, during the dark ages, as they are called, were initiated into the mysteries of surgery, and how frequently the gallant knight submitted the wounds of his person to her cure, whose eyes had yet more deeply penetrated his heart” (294). Readers might expect, then, the account of Ivanhoe and Rebecca to proceed in similar fashion. But the narrator interjects race and rejects Rebecca’s potential role as romantic heroine: “But the Jews, both male and female, possessed and practiced the medical science in all its branches” (294–5). Rebecca’s skill is here dismissed by the narrator as proper to her race, much in the manner that her exquisite and flattering dress had been naturalized in the opening scene. Our narrator’s prefatory comments thus prepare the reader to expect that the following scene will not be a romance, yet it seems to follow the genre, at least at first: “I know not whether the fair Rowena would have been altogether satisfied with the species of emotion with which her devoted knight had hitherto gazed on the beautiful features, and fair form, and lustrous eyes of the lovely Rebecca” (299). Ivanhoe is clearly susceptible to Rebecca’s beauty and skill, and it is only Rebecca who rewrites the scene into the narrative we have been lead to expect: But Ivanhoe was too good a Catholic to retain the same class of feelings towards a Jewess. This Rebecca had foreseen, and for this very purpose she had hastened to mention her father’s name and lineage; yet – for the fair and wise daughter of Isaac was not without a touch of female weakness – she could not but sigh internally when the glance of respectful admiration, not altogether unmixed with tenderness, with which Ivanhoe had hitherto regarded his unknown benefactress, was exchanged at once for a manner cold, composed, and collected, and fraught with no deeper feeling than that which expressed a grateful sense of courtesy received from an unexpected quarter, and from one of an inferior race. (299)

By recounting her history, literally her genealogy, Rebecca rejects her potential position as romantic object. Alide Cagidemetrio has suggested that Rebecca

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represents a “very successful compromise between ‘dress and lineage’ on the one hand and tongue and Englishness on the other … Rebecca consistently embodies contemporary England much more than does the novel’s canonic mediator, Ivanhoe” (18–19). However, the resolution of the novel makes clear that Rebecca embodies what is lost to contemporary England. When they first meet, Rebecca corrects Ivanhoe (who addresses her in Arabic) by responding, “I am of England, Sir Knight, and speak the English tongue, although my dress and lineage belong to another climate” (298). As the subsequent plot of the novel makes clear, Rebecca’s dress and lineage keep her on the outskirts of English identity. From that vantage point, Rebecca offers a critique of a homogenous concept of English nationalism. Rowena’s descent from the line of Alfred and her subsequent tenancy of both property and title make her an object of interest to De Bracy because they establish her place in history through men. In contrast, even as Scott renders Rebecca appealing to the reader, her Jewish ancestry and her father’s profession of usurer chill Ivanhoe’s attraction. Moreover, Rebecca’s realization that her race and her faith are equivalent to Ivanhoe (a consideration not faced by the Saxons or Normans as Catholics) complicates her internal conflict.40 She may bridge the differences in their faiths by pointing to the Ten Commandments, or their shared God, but she cannot overcome racial or national identity. Much of the interest of the rest of the novel comes from our privileged position as we watch Rebecca struggle with her feelings towards Ivanhoe, and thus with her desire to bridge differences and her sense of her own definitive racial identity. Although Rebecca describes her decision to leave England as her own choice, it is a choice determined by Ivanhoe’s fidelity to Rowena, and thus to a constricted notion of Englishness. Rebecca’s attempt to reconcile national identity with racial difference remains unresolved as she instead works to return Ivanhoe to his proper sphere. Rebecca heals Ivanhoe’s wounds, and to some degree his racism, but she also returns Ivanhoe to the domestic by devaluing chivalrous exploits. While Ivanhoe is bedridden from his wounds, the castle is stormed by their rescuers. Impatient to be a part of the action, or at least to be aware of what is happening, Ivanhoe asks Rebecca to look out the window. Literally armed for battle to protect herself from the archers, Rebecca reports the action to Ivanhoe, while at the same time expressing her regret at the bloodshed.41 It seems an unlikely time for a discussion 40

  Clare Simmons has argued that part of the appeal of Saxon identity to the English after the Reformation was that it enabled them to imagine a better pre-Norman, preCatholic England (Reversing the Conquest). In Ivanhoe, however, Saxon and Norman alike are Catholics; Ulrica is the only remaining practitioner of what Scott terms the religion of her ancestors. 41   See John Morrillo and Wade Newhouse for an interesting reading of the narration of the battle in terms of readerly expectation. I disagree, however with their claim: “Scott’s description of the scene consistently reminds us that the debate between historical and romantic modes of narrative is itself opposed by a greater ‘truth’ that ultimately defies any attempts at narrative control. This larger truth is the truth of an outside world experienced

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of the merits of chivalry, but such a discussion ensues.42 While many readings of Ivanhoe address the role of chivalry in Scott, they tend to focus on chivalry as a marker of Ivanhoe’s Norman-ized identity, or on the fascination with chivalry that Scott’s novels encouraged – and that Mark Twain blamed for the condition of the American South. In the discussion of chivalry within Ivanhoe, however, Rebecca reveals that chivalry imperils the English nation. Ivanhoe vaunts the honor and glory of chivalric battles, and the fame that they garner for their heroes. Rebecca retorts: “[I]s there such virtue in the rude rhymes of a wandering bard, that domestic love, kindly affection, peace and happiness, are so wildly bartered, to become the hero of those ballads which vagabond minstrels sing to drunken churls over their evening ale?” (316). Ivanhoe resorts to claiming that Rebecca’s race keeps her a stranger to “those high feelings which swell the bosom of a noble maiden when her lover hath done some deed of emprize which sanctions his flame” (316). This argument is significant for two reasons. The first is that Ivanhoe cannot face Rebecca’s claims without resorting to race. It is true that Rebecca is a stranger to feeling pleasure at the deeds of her lover, but this is not because she is incapable of those feelings because of her race or faith. Rather, her Jewish identity prevents any Christian knight from entertaining those feelings for her.43 The second is that Rebecca’s view of chivalry is the one that the novel ultimately endorses. Ivanhoe’s knight-errant escapades in Palestine by Richard’s side must end in order for him to be restored to his father’s graces and marry Rowena. The tournaments and conquests that pepper this novel are finally insufficient to restore order to England; the resolution of the novel’s domestic conflicts is a precondition for the resolution of national tensions.44 It is no coincidence that Scott pays this homage to Richard just before the conclusion of the novel: In the lion-hearted King, the brilliant, but useless character, of a knight of romance, was in great measure realized and revived; and the personal glory

through the senses, and suggests a sublimity beyond the conventions of either history or romance” (280). Particularly unsatisfactory is their conclusion that Rebecca embodies the nexus between history and romance because of the oral tradition of Judaism. 42   This discussion troubles Vanden Bossche’s claim that Ivanhoe (Wilfred) mediates between Saxon and Norman through his right understanding of chivalry and through his knowledge of languages – Rebecca is clearly a much more skilled linguist than Ivanhoe (58–9). 43  Ivanhoe’s rescue of Rebecca does, of course, occasion these high feelings in her bosom. But more importantly, it provides a counterpoint to Rowena’s coronation as Queen of Love and Beauty at the beginning of the novel. Clearly, Ivanhoe’s defense of Rebecca to preserve her life is a more important victory. 44   Here I complicate DeGategno’s claim that, “By unifying both cultures under a banner of law and order, Scott suggests the final failure of chivalry and its heroic code” (9).

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Ivanhoe is in grave danger of becoming a similarly useless character, and Rebecca’s argument and care restore him to home and a more responsible course of action. Similarly, Rebecca’s triumph, for I must consider it a triumph, both in the Templar’s court and in the lists, is not a triumph of chivalry or of the rule of law, but rather of her own struggle for political rights in the face of these ordering structures. Although Ivanhoe eventually appears as her champion, it is not the blow of his lance, but the violence of Bois-Guilbert’s “contending passions” (490) that preserves Rebecca and kills Bois-Guilbert.45 In order to fully understand Rebecca’s agency in her own preservation, it is necessary to recover the source of Bois-Guilbert’s “contending passions.” Rowena is safely rescued from Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, and has “recovered all the dignity of her manner” (346), secure in the knowledge that Ivanhoe is safe, and (mistakenly) convinced that Athelstane is dead.46 Rebecca, however, has been carried off by Bois-Guilbert to Templestowe, where Malvoisin convinces the Grand Master that Rebecca is a witch and has used magic arts to enthrall BoisGuilbert. The Grand Master of the Templars writes Rebecca into history, quite literally, by recording the trial into the Templar’s Chronicle. However, Rebecca’s request for a champion contains an alternative to this history: “‘God will raise me up a champion,’ said Rebecca – ‘It cannot be that in merry England – the hospitable, the generous, the free, where so many are ready to peril their lives for honour, there will not be found one to fight for justice’” (414).47 Rebecca’s attempt to distinguish between honor and justice is a tacit claim that a coherent English identity already exists and so the tournaments pitting Saxon against Norman (such as the tournament at Ashby) do not determine English identity, but are simply a quest for honor. Rebecca casts her request for a champion as an opportunity for 45   Graham Tulloch has traced the source of this phrase to Scott’s reaction to Lauchie’s death. See Kenneth Sroka for a reading of Ivanhoe’s “failure” as a sign of Scott’s revisions of romance towards realism (“The Function of Form”). 46   Strangely enough, Athelstane “dies” when he mistakes Rebecca for Rowena and attempts to save her. It is also worth noting here that just after Bois-Guilbert carries Rebecca off to safety, Richard appears to rescue Ivanhoe: “And seizing upon Ivanhoe, he bore him off with as much ease as the Templar had carried off Rebecca” (314). 47  In the form of her challenge, Rebecca offers the Saxons and the Normans the possibility of a united English identity – to fulfill her request for a champion is to confirm that Saxons and Normans both are English. This foreshadows Rebecca’s final encounter with Rowena when she describes the people of England as “a fierce race,” conflating Saxon and Norman into one English race.

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the English to accede to the identity she has spoken for them – the hospitable, the generous, the free – in opposition to the nation-less Templars, particularly BoisGuilbert. Bois-Guilbert’s conscience is troubled by his knowledge of Rebecca’s innocence and his contempt of the excessive laws that govern the Templars. Yet Bois-Guilbert considers himself trapped by his desire for power. In his final encounter with Rebecca, he offers to forsake the Templars for her, but imagines that they will instead achieve power and wealth in another nation. In answer to his claim, “England, – Europe, – is not the world” (431), Rebecca asserts two reasons she will not go with him: “Enough, that the power which thou mightest acquire, I will never share; nor hold I so light of country or religious faith, as to esteem him who is willing to barter these ties” (432). Bois-Guilbert cannot tempt Rebecca because the power he pretends to offer her is the inaction of a queen. In essence, Bois-Guilbert offers to transform Rebecca into Rowena. Rebecca’s second objection concerns the ties of race and nation. Although Rebecca’s race has been subject to discussion for most of the novel, her inclusion of “country” as a mitigating factor is striking. Despite the frequent characterization of Jews as “homeless,” Rebecca appears to value those who have a sense of home. As I noted earlier, she encourages Ivanhoe to privilege home over fame, and here chastises Bois-Guilbert for his willingness to abandon England in service of the quest for power. As in Waverley, Scott uses racially othered women to return the hero and heroine to the imperial domestic space. In arguments concerning herself, however, Rebecca situates herself in the context of all women. It is only the narrator’s interjection that marks her as a Jewess, and thus different from other women: “Bois-Guilbert,” answered the Jewess, “thou knowest not the heart of woman, or hast only conversed with those who are lost to her best feelings … I am myself a woman, tenderly nurtured, naturally fearful of danger, and impatient of pain – yet, when we enter those fatal lists, thou to fight and I to suffer, I feel the strong assurance within me that my courage shall mount higher than thine.” (432–3)

Such universalizing claims are Rebecca’s common strategy of defense (we might remember that she appealed to Rowena based on their shared belief in God and the Ten Commandments). The narrator’s interjection, “the Jewess,” reminds us that Rebecca is viewed by all other characters as a Jew, not as a woman. Bois-Guilbert is unable to forget Rebecca’s difference, her race, and can only imagine a happy ending if one of them forsakes their faith. In part, Scott may be drawing on the historical persecution of the Jews in the 1190s and the early nineteenth century. In particular, Scott’s insistence that Rebecca and her father are from York may connect Isaac and Rebecca to the infamous massacre at Clifford’s Tower in 1190. Built by William the Conqueror in 1068 to quell anti-Norman sentiments, the Tower became the refuge of 150 Jewish citizens who fled an angry mob, incited by anti-infidel propaganda for the

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Crusades and, in some cases, by a desire to avoid paying their own debts to Jewish usurers. As a place, therefore, Clifford’s Tower links the tension between Saxon and Norman shortly after the Conquest to the persecution of the Jews in the 1190s. The accounts of citizens committing suicide rather than facing the angry mob of Christians outside the Tower is eerily resonant with Rebecca’s threats to leap to her death from the tower at Torquilstone rather than succumb to Bois-Guilbert. Although Bois-Guilbert might wish Rebecca a “Christian” and “noble in birth” (433), such desires only underscore the impossibility of such a transformation in the twelfth-century world of the novel. Rebecca’s Jewish faith appears to be the obstacle to Bois-Guilbert, but the real obstacle is her social position as a member of that “race.” It is a testament to the power of Rebecca’s rhetoric that Bois-Guilbert imagines that he might be the one to switch faiths: “[W]hen I gaze on thee, and think when and how we are next to meet, I could even wish myself one of thine own degraded nation … this could I wish, Rebecca, to be near to thee in life, and to escape the fearful share I must have in thy death” (433). To become Jewish is not only to switch faiths, but to become a member of a “degraded” community. It is, of course, Bois-Guilbert’s unwillingness to renounce his ambitions, not his unwillingness to renounce Christianity, that necessitates his complicity in Rebecca’s sentence. Although Bois-Guilbert claims ignorance of the source of Rebecca’s power over him, she has, as he says, “well-nigh unmanned [him]” by troubling his complacent acceptance of the value of power and prestige (435). The contending passions that kill Bois-Guilbert are his desire for Rebecca and his desire for ambition and fame, not the blow of Ivanhoe’s lance. The death of Bois-Guilbert marks the end of the Templars, and the restoration of Richard to the throne. It also marks the end of Ivanhoe’s obligation to Rebecca – an obligation that, one might argue, he has hardly repaid – and thus completes his restoration to Rowena and his family. Of course, Ivanhoe has already been reunited with Rowena and his family – in the middle of Rebecca’s distress. It is significant that this restoration is a very public and political one. Richard, unknown to Cedric in his disguise as the Black Knight, had requested a “boon” of him, in recompense for his rescue. Yet when Richard returns to claim his reward, he must reveal himself as Richard Plantagenet in order to compel Cedric’s compliance. In response to Cedric’s claim, “in that which concerns the honor of my house, it is scare fitting that a stranger should mingle” (470), the Black Knight must claim his prerogative as ruler to interfere in Cedric’s affairs, and more so, must redefine himself as “Richard of England,” rather than Richard of Anjou, “whose deepest wish, is to see her sons united with each other” (470). In thus assuming the interests of England, Richard turns a private family dispute, a dispute that we must remember arose because Ivanhoe and Rowena’s attachment foiled Cedric’s political plans to marry her to Athelstane, into a public matter, indeed a matter of national import. The conversation quickly shifts to the question of Richard’s right to the throne, which Richard can only end by returning to the personal, requiring Cedric to make good his word, even if he “hast refused to acknowledge [Richard’s]

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lawful sovereignty” (471). This collapse of difference between home and nation governs the conclusion of the novel. Once Ivanhoe and Rowena are permitted to marry, they each disappear from the scene: Rowena flees to her room, and Ivanhoe flees to return Rebecca’s kindness by acting as her champion. It is only after Ivanhoe has attempted to repay his debt to Rebecca and after Richard has expelled the Templars and convinced Cedric through personal attention that the Normans aren’t that bad that Ivanhoe and Rowena are married. Their marriage is contingent on the resolution of the national tale and the restoration of public order.48 But their marriage, the celebration that we are anticipating from the opening pages of the novel, is barely narrated. We are told that the King attended, and “the countenance which he afforded on this and other occasions to the distressed and hitherto degraded Saxons, gave them a safer and more certain prospect of attaining their just rights, than they could reasonably hope from the precarious chance of a civil war” (498). Gurth and Wamba form the entirety of the “domestic retinue” and our narrator casts the wedding as a public affair that “marked the marriage of two individuals as a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have become so completely mingled that the distinction has become wholly invisible” (498). As Duncan and Tulloch have noted, the narrative’s claim that Ivanhoe and Rowena’s marriage marks the end of conflict between Saxon and Norman is troubled for two reasons: their own, untainted Saxon heritage, and the historical location of the novel in the 1190s, well after the Conquest of 1066. What is perhaps most compelling about this contrived restoration of order is that it does not seem sufficient, not even to Scott, who instead concludes the novel with a meeting between Rowena and Rebecca. Scott’s choice of a private, domestic scene for the conclusion of his romance calls into question readings of the novel that ignore the domestic in favor of various politicized readings of the “greenwood” or the novel’s critique of chivalry.49 The national romance, which we expect to conclude in the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena, actually concludes with Rebecca’s exile. The making of Englishness is unmade. Duncan has suggested that Scott’s “normative solution” is … the restoration of romance power from women to men. In exorcism of the spectre of castration, women pour forth their natural–magical energies of healing upon the hero, disoriented and disabled at the labyrinthine centre of his adventure. The complicity of women is the source of energy – the private current of romance – that flows behind the scenes of male history. Its familiar end is in self-cancellation, a consenting exclusion from those scenes, absorption into the male as its shadow. (Modern Romance 72)

48   Tulloch has noted that “Richard of England” didn’t really spend that much time in England after the Crusades, but instead returned immediately to France. 49   See, for example, DeGategno, The Mask of Chivalry, and Wilt, Secret Leaves.

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While this reading appears to map quite nicely onto the plot of Ivanhoe, Rebecca’s complicity with the national romance is troubled by her inability to “cancel” herself from Ivanhoe’s thoughts, and by the unraveling of order in the final paragraphs of the novel. The “complicity of women” is rendered explicit in the concluding scene of Ivanhoe, and if the women do not entirely end “in power,” neither do the men. Scott concludes the novel with an image of Rebecca at the height of her powers: beautiful, wealthy, and confident in her own opinion. Elgitha tells Rowena that a “damsel” wishes to speak with her, and our narrator begins by describing her: “She entered – a noble and commanding figure, the long white veil, in which she was shrouded, overshadowing rather than concealing the elegance and majesty of her shape. Her demeanor was that of respect, unmingled by the least shade either of fear, or of a wish to propitiate favor. Rowena was ever ready to acknowledge the claims, and attend to the feelings, of others” (498–9). This passage is remarkable for several reasons, not the least of which is the strange white veil, reminiscent of a bridal veil but also of a death shroud, that Rebecca wears. In a domestic space filled only with women, this bridal veil/shroud is, for the first time, not a marker of Rebecca’s otherness, but rather indicates her similarity to all women. Yet what is perhaps most interesting is the narrator’s tacit claim that Rowena has misread Rebecca.50 Rowena’s readiness to acknowledge any “claim” contradicts the narrator’s description of Rebecca’s demeanor. Indeed, Rowena continues to misread Rebecca, and the state of the English nation, through the entirety of their encounter. By claiming that Ivanhoe or Richard’s personal intercession will prevent Rebecca from encountering prejudice in England, Rowena overlooks the global picture, a picture Rebecca paints in graphic terms that undermine the novel’s heretofore comic conclusion: “the people of England are a fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbors or among themselves, and ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other. Such is no safe abode for the children of my people” (499). Here Rebecca reverses the terms of prejudice, reminding the English that they too possess a racial identity that can be subject to stereotype.51 50   Here I disagree somewhat with Michael Ragussis’s otherwise fascinating reading of Rebecca in terms of contemporary debates over the “Jewish Question.” While Ragussis claims that Rebecca’s suitors might emblematize different national attempts to address the “Jewish Question,” his reading of this final meeting between Rebecca and Rowena as a “psychic intrusion” (202) on Rowena and the consciousness of England undervalues Rebecca’s agency and ignores the distinction between the public trial at Templestowe and this private, domestic scenario. I should also note that my reading diverges here from Wilt’s claim that both women “uncovered … recognize in each other the competing principle which animates each” (Secret Leaves 48). 51   Cagidemetrio has suggested, in response to this passage: “In a nation that aims as representing itself as safe, pacified, and unified in the name of marriage and citizenship, there is no place for the Wandering Jewess … As Rowena says to Rebecca, there is nothing to flee from or to fear in the new England” (43). Cagidemetrio argues that the gulf between Rebecca and Rowena is race, and that Rebecca can only bridge that gulf through miscegenation.

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Despite the contention between Saxon and Norman, Rebecca’s final barb unites the English as a race and grants them a national identity that they are not yet sure they possess. But this Englishness is one of isolation and argument; Rebecca’s retirement from the world is actually a more active involvement in it: the “works of kindness to men” (501) that she leaves England to pursue are a surer cure than Rowena’s offer of Christianity and sisterhood.52 Despite the novel’s apparent privileging of domestic order, Rowena’s incompetent grasp of nationhood, and her desire always to substitute the personal (sisterhood) for the national (the end of prejudice), reminds us of what is lost with Rebecca’s departure. Rebecca’s race, and the double consciousness it engenders, foregrounds the national. Rowena’s privileged status as Saxon heiress has enabled her to efface the national, as she in turn is effaced by the national. In other words, Rowena’s privilege shelters her from concern with national identity and allows her to view the world in terms of her personal dominance and personal desires. However, this fictitious dominance is subject to the national, as her encounter with De Bracy, and even her eventual reunion with Ivanhoe, attests. With Rebecca’s departure, the narrative concludes in two paragraphs. But they are two paragraphs of loss. Rowena’s marriage is “long and happy,” but our narrator tells us, “it would be inquiring too curiously to ask, whether the recollection of Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity did not recur to his mind more frequently than the fair descendant of Alfred might altogether have approved” (502). This sentence effaces Rowena’s subjectivity in favor of her lineage, while leaving Rebecca’s beauty and magnanimity intact in Ivanhoe’s recollection. Richard’s reign and Ivanhoe’s success, the very public and political ends that Rowena and Ivanhoe’s marriage should have supported, also vanish. We learn that Ivanhoe succeeded, and “might have risen still higher, but for the premature death of the heroic Coeurde-Lion”; and with Richard’s death, “perished all the projects which his ambition and his generosity had formed” (502). The tenuous union of Saxon and Norman, as well as home and nation, occasioned by Rowena and Ivanhoe’s wedding is only a union in ritual, but it is the foundational ritual of the historical romance. The secondary heroine, in whom home and nation are united internally, is lost

52   Here I obviously agree with Sroka’s claim that Rebecca’s decision to leave England “undermines the reconciliation scene” (“The Function of Form” 654). While I concur with Sroka’s claim that Ivanhoe and Richard are as culpable as Prince John or Bois-Guilbert, I would suggest that Rebecca’s self-exile does more than move villainy from private individuals to larger social problems; the loss of Rebecca is significant because it is the loss of a solution to the difficult mediation of private and public. I am also reminded here of Welsh’s quip: “Property is the right to things as presently constituted; realty is practically the same thing as reality” (68). The exile of Rebecca, and of Flora, constitutes a loss of property: exiled from England and from the world of the novel, each occupies a tenuous space – whether that space is Flora’s sanctuary in a French convent, or Rebecca’s in Muslim Spain – but is ultimately homeless.

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to England, although she remains a necessary feature of the genre of historical romance. Reconciliation and Romance I began this chapter by discussing the secondary heroine as she functions within the genre of historical romance. Enmeshed in the national conflict that opens each novel, she is the cost of the national resolution that concludes each novel. Jacobite and Hanoverian may have reached a sort of peace, but the Highland Scots who enlisted in the cause to fight their southern neighbor cannot flee to France with the Chevalier; Saxon and Norman may be reconciled, but Jew does not fit easily within that resolution. However, Flora’s plight is indeed only “sixty years since” – it is difficult to imagine Scott’s readers seriously hoping that she had married Waverley, or even believing in the possibility, given her political leanings. In contrast, Rebecca’s exile from England underscores the tenuousness of the reconciliation between Saxon and Norman, which might lead contemporary readers to question the work the novel does to consolidate English origins and to deploy Saxon and Norman as differently valued terms to describe English national identity in their own century. The secondary heroines of historical romance embody romantic possibilities that the knowable facts of history render impossible. In Waverley Scott works to substitute Flora with a convincingly palatable, but much less threatening, Scottish Rose. Although Scott gestures to the loss incurred by Flora’s departure by affiliating her with the bardic tradition, by the conclusion of the novel he has stripped her of beauty and reason – perhaps suggesting that not so very much is lost after all. Rose’s Lowland birth and placid manners ensure a peaceful union of Scotland and England, while romanticizing the lost cause in the stirring portrait of Edward and Fergus. Portraits, however, only comfort the elderly with a memory of times past: with Flora’s exile and the deaths of Fergus and Evan Dhu, the clan of MacIvor, and indeed all of the Highland clans, cannot move forward politically or in the chains of inheritance and loyalty that have consolidated their power thus far. Ivanhoe, however, tells a different story. The historical location of Ivanhoe, so far removed from Scott’s contemporary Britain, defamiliarizes national conflict to Scott’s readers: in the safely distant national past, the tension between Saxon and Norman is nostalgic, and Scott’s historical inaccuracies go relatively unnoticed. Indeed, Ivanhoe’s afterlife in opera and in Thackeray’s light-hearted novella, Rebecca and Rowena, underscores the escapist pleasure of the text. Scott’s insistence on historical accuracy regarding Rebecca, his dogged determination to remain faithful to the “prejudices of the age,” is all the more puzzling. While the prejudices of their age make a marriage between Ivanhoe and Rebecca impossible, Scott has challenged the prejudices of his own age to make such a marriage desirable to his readers. Rebecca’s appeal to Ivanhoe and readers alike troubles the novel’s consolidation of English identity as Anglo-Saxon, but

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she also challenges the idea of what constitutes a heroine. While Flora, Rose, and Rowena are each immured within ordering structures of nation, class, and faith, Rebecca continually seeks to traverse these boundaries. Independent of the hierarchies that create conflict in homes and in nations, Rebecca has no place within either. Thus, although Rebecca is exiled from England, it is her notion of Englishness that the novel ultimately endorses: the hospitable, the brave, the free. Having rejected hospitality and freedom in favor of the consolidation of wealth, power, and lineage emblematized by Ivanhoe and Rowena’s marriage, the nation is doomed to the failure our narrator describes in the concluding paragraph of the novel. England is, indeed, a place where men are “ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other” (499), and the King falls victim to the violence inherent in a nation governed by the accrual of power, wealth, and political interest in the name of chivalry and at the expense of others. Bidding farewell to Rowena with beauty, reason, and goodness intact, Rebecca is enshrined in the memory of Ivanhoe and of readers, challenging the value of lineage and nationalism that the novel appears to endorse.

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Chapter 3

Cooper’s “Man without a Cross”: Wealth, Race, and Religion in The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans After the success of The Pioneers (1823), James Fenimore Cooper was famously dubbed “the American Scott” – a title he abhorred – and Scott himself gave a slightly backhanded acknowledgement of Cooper’s fame in a later preface to Waverley by suggesting that his brother had planned to write something similar (359). Although Scott snidely claims that his brother might have been equally capable of composing the Leatherstocking tales, Cooper’s novels are powerful because they provide an American perspective on the formation of American identity. Like Scott’s Waverley novels, the Leatherstocking series foregrounds crises of national identity; both Scott and Cooper deploy similar strategies to different national ends. As I argued in the previous chapter, the concluding marriages of Waverley and Ivanhoe attempt to resolve national tensions surrounding English identity through romantic resolution. These novels consolidate national identity at the expense of an “other” identity, whether that identity is Jewish or Highlander; thus, the novels are not actually in service of a British national identity, but an explicitly English one. Following Scott’s pattern, the concluding chapters of The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) consolidate American national identity through the marriage of the heroine and the hero. However, Cooper’s novels quite literally examine the cost of nation-building by revealing the ways in which wealth is a precondition for political power. In Scott, wealth is politically valuable only when connected to lineage. By contrast, Cooper’s landowners are unable to legitimate their claims to authority via ancestry: there is no inherited estate or title. Instead, the novels center on land disputes as characters affiliated with Native Americans challenge white claims to the land. Without the organizing structures of land and title, Cooper’s characters rely instead on the accrual of wealth and property as a means of creating the influence necessary to impose order on the new nation. Class position is created by the male characters’ property and wealth, but displayed in the heroine’s sensibility, which masks the instability of both property and wealth in the emergent nation. The impact of the cult of sensibility on the history of the novel has been well demonstrated by scholars. Robert Jones opens his review of five recent books on this subject by remarking, “Earlier conceptions of sensibility as a particular literary, artistic or social mode – most often described as the ‘cult’ of sensibility – have given way to a history of the late eighteenth century that regards sensibility as the

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animating force for the whole period” (395). Recent considerations of sympathy, such as Audrey Jaffe’s Scenes of Sympathy (2000) or Kristin Boudreau’s Sympathy in American Literature (2002), extend the influence of sensibility well into the nineteenth century. To possess sensibility, as Margaret Anne Doody has defined it, is “to possess the capacity of human sympathy, as well as the capacity for aesthetic responsiveness” (“Introduction” xiv). The demonstration of an appropriate sensibility is a marker of social position: only the educated elite respond correctly to suffering, the picturesque, and other triggers of sensibility. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith suggests that observing a fictional sentimental hero or heroine’s response to an occasion for sympathy and the narrative reward of that appropriate behavior (or punishment of inappropriate behavior) enables the reader to internalize sentimental ideals. In turn, the reader’s appropriate response to the representation of a scene of sympathy allows the reader to claim to possess sensibility. Thus Smith uncovers the ways authors narrate the spectacle of suffering to provoke sympathy in characters and readers alike, and then use that sympathetic response to cement national identity or reshape social policies. However, attention to this spectacle, the scene of sympathy, has obscured the role of the secondary heroine, whose lack of sensibility reveals the limits of sympathy and national identity. In the novels I examine in this chapter, the heroine of sensibility embodies national ideals that the ideal reader internalizes via sympathy. In contrast, the secondary heroine’s lack of sensibility limits readers’ sympathy for her character and thus, at least initially, for the alternative possibilities of nationhood and womanhood she represents. While the primary heroines of each novel possess sensibility, interrogate the place of Native Americans in the colonies, and end happily married, the secondary heroine in each of these novels illuminates the work of sensibility, race, and the marriage plot in stabilizing constructions of femininity and national identity, and suggests, quite literally, the cost of sensibility. These secondary heroines suffer because of their lack of independent financial resources; they make visible the structure of wealth girding the nation, which is masked by the sensibility of primary heroines. In doing so, these secondary heroines reveal that the fresh start promised by American mythologies of nationhood is in fact a reworking of British aristocracy: land and wealth provide political power.



 I do not wish to conflate sympathy and sensibility; for the purposes of this chapter, I consider sympathy to be one of the qualities necessary to possess sensibility. The power of sympathy, according to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), is to bridge this divide between individual minds: “As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation” (10–11).    Thus, sympathy is inherently tied to questions of class identity and nationalism, issues also central to the resolution of the marriage plot in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury novel.

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The possibility of a meritocracy, as embodied by the secondary heroine, is lost to the nation as imagined at each novel’s conclusion. In The Pioneers, Cooper’s heroine, Bess, is the heroine of sensibility who rightly appreciates the beauty of the American landscape and is able to respond appropriately to scenes of distress. Bess also establishes American domesticity through her management of Judge Temple’s house and his wayward subordinates, and in her marriage to Oliver Edwards. In this way, Cooper establishes a new American sensibility able to face both the wilderness and the management of the hearth. In contrast, Bess’s friend Louisa is unable to properly keep house or negotiate the wilderness because of her poverty, a direct result of her father’s position as minister. In privileging Bess’s sensibility, which is financed by her father, the novel rejects the potential for a meritocracy in favor of a conventional aristocracy. In The Last of the Mohicans, however, Cooper imagines a pre-revolutionary America. It is important to note that his characters are all British, French, or Native American and therefore, as Cooper notes in his Preface to the novel, will not retain custody of the land. With the possible exception of Natty – who does not fit neatly into the category of colonist or Briton – one expects that each of the main characters will remain Loyalist in the American Revolution almost twenty years later. Thus, Cooper’s heroines do not stage a struggle for American identity; instead, they represent different, but equally doomed, colonial identities. In the secondary heroine, Cora, Cooper memorializes the lost possibility of interracial marriage (and the corresponding national resolution of white and native conflict); whereas in her half-sister Alice, Cooper creates an image of British–American femininity so fragile that it will not survive life in the colonies without constant surveillance and protection. Alice and Cora are half-sisters, ensuring a common biological background on their father’s side, but establishing two forms of difference via their maternal lineage: race and sensibility. Alice’s grandfather attempts to regulate his daughter’s sensibility by controlling her marriage prospects. However, Munro’s marriage to Alice’s mother – which results in Cora’s racialization – is only made possible by the wealth he acquired from his first wife, the West Indian descendant of slaves. Thus, Cooper’s novel links wealth, race, and sensibility. Alice’s frequent fainting fits are both a manifestation of her sensibility and a result of her encounter with racial difference. Her confrontations with the Huron forcibly remind her of Cora’s “blood”; to escape this knowledge, she faints. This excessive sensibility may appear cloying to readers, but it garners Alice the attention of both Duncan and Cora as it marks her vulnerability as a white woman in the colonial landscape. In contrast, Cora’s “sense” is connected to what Natty would call the “cross” in her blood. Cora’s race prevents her from participating in the marriage plot; as a   That said, Alice and Heyward’s children survive and appear in The Prairie.   Here I build on arguments by Diane Price Herndl and others.    The definition of “sense” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has received far less critical attention than “sensibility.” I take as my starting point Jane Austen’s opposition  

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woman in early America, she has no other way to secure her future and therefore becomes far more rational than her sister. Munro attempts to cover up Cora’s racial difference by erasing her gender: he treats Cora’s sense as a masculine characteristic that makes her fit to lead an army, as her father jokes, but unfit for marriage. Race is, of course, also a central issue in The Pioneers. However, Cooper locates the threat of miscegenation in his male characters, especially Oliver. Whereas Cora’s “sense” is depicted as a result of her lineage, Oliver’s manifestations of an appropriate sensibility – his hand resting naturally on the piano, for example – assure Bess and the reader that the apparent markers of racial identity (his name and knowledge of the Delaware language, his time with Natty and Indian John) must be misleading. Cooper’s conclusion not only erases the threat of miscegenation, but also reveals that Oliver is the rightful heir of Templeton, reinstating the importance of primogeniture in legitimating America’s claim to the landscape. Because of the novel’s attention to primogeniture as a legitimating discourse for land rights in post-revolutionary America, Cooper insists that Louisa and Bess are different – both emotionally and biologically – and Louisa’s social status is the key marker of this difference. As the sole surviving daughter of an impoverished minister, Louisa has developed a degree of housewifely sense. In contrast, Bess’s sensibility is linked to her class status; like Oliver, it reveals, rather than obscures, her rightful social position. The secondary heroines I examine in this chapter – Louisa and Cora – receive little sympathy from their sister heroines of sensibility. Cooper intentionally limits readers’ sympathy for these figures in order to consolidate national identity under the auspices of the heroine of sensibility. In doing so, however, his novels reveal how sensibility masks the link between money and matrimony. In Cooper’s novels, the construction of American identity is literally underwritten by wealth and solemnized by weddings and funerals. In these two novels, Cooper uncovers the networks of trade and sale that finance the sensibility of the primary heroines, and thus of the nation.

of the terms in the title of Sense and Sensibility (admittedly, scholars have deconstructed this binary), and use “sense” as we understand the term today.    Elizabeth Barnes’s States of Sympathy is particularly useful here. In it, she suggests that early sentimental seduction novels and the domestic fiction of the 1850s are connected by a common preoccupation with sympathetic identification: “Whereas seduction fiction depicts the middle-class family as a closed system – a nuclear and potentially incestuous unit based on the affiliation of blood ties – the domestic story represents the family as a collection of shared values and emotional experiences” (15). Cooper ensures that Louisa is, in effect, always already forgotten – exterior to the family unit of Templeton.   Despite her notoriously bad taste in art and needlework, Reverend Grant relies on Louisa to do his housekeeping, a duty that Bess mostly resigns to Remarkable (as we see when she asks Remarkable to see if her room has a fire).

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“Do you forget Louisa?”: Remembering the Rival in The Pioneers In the wake of the American Revolution, The Pioneers assembles a socially diverse group of characters, but ultimately reimposes the aristocracy as the best means of ordering the previously “composite order” of Templeton. This “composite order” governs the architectural style of Templeton, but is also an apt metaphor for the polyglot cast of characters Cooper assembles to constitute the settlement. However, the Dutch lawyers, French shopkeeper, and Irish barmaid are auxiliary to the novel’s preoccupation with mapping a conventional marriage plot onto the American landscape. The marriage of Elizabeth and Oliver at the close of The Pioneers, as many critics have argued, establishes the ideological stakes of the new nation, while attempting to reconcile or erase alternative possibilities: Chingachgook dies, Natty heads west, and Edwards/Effingham’s complex ancestry seems to satisfy all of the quibbles over land ownership and law that have plagued Templeton. However, one alternative remains: Louisa Grant. Critics have long dismissed Louisa Grant as a bland foil who renders Elizabeth (Bess) more brilliant, but to dismiss Louisa requires that we ignore Cooper’s insistence on her presence in the text. At the close of the novel, when Bess and Oliver mourn the deaths of Chingachgook and Major Effingham as they plan their wedding, when, indeed, Louisa Grant is the last thing on readers’ minds, Bess asks Oliver: “Do you forget Louisa, and her father?” (448). As Oliver and Bess debate, readers are reminded that they have, indeed, forgotten Louisa. Louisa’s exile at the close of the novel removes the last impediment to Oliver and Bess’s marriage – Bess’s rival10 – and reveals that Bess does, as she claims, “manage more deeply than you imagine, sir” (449). By resigning the future of Templeton, and by extension, America, to Bess’s management, Louisa is written out of the novel and 

  Additionally, Natty has trained Oliver to be both a good shot and a conservationist. Elizabeth’s affection for and debt to Natty ensures that they both will abandon the “wasty ways” that had threatened the natural resources of Templeton. See also Janet Dean’s excellent article, “The Marriage Plot and National Myth in The Pioneers,” for a reading of Elizabeth as contested property. See Robert Clark, History and Myth, for a reading that connects William Cooper’s purchase of the Croghan patent to The Pioneers.    See, for example, Joy Kasson: “Elizabeth Temple’s education shines more brightly when she is contrasted with simple Louisa Grant” (57); John Scheckter: “In The Pioneers, references to ‘the delicacy of her sex’ and ‘natural feminine timidity’ almost always occur in connection with the thoroughly conventional Louisa Grant, to contrast her lack of imagination and her cowardice with the energy and courage of Elizabeth” (41); or Abby Werlock, for a similar reading. Even John McWilliams’s fascinating reading of Cooper’s women overlooks Louisa (“More Than”). Dana Nelson rightly connects the Louisa/Bess pairing with Cora/Alice (“Cooper’s”). 10   Critics have been too quick to dismiss Louisa’s potential as Bess’s rival, as I will argue later. In this scene, after their marriage, Bess questions Oliver’s feelings towards Louisa: “fixing her eyes with a searching look on his countenance, where they met only the unsuspecting expression of manly regret” (449).

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with her the alternative subjectivity she represents. In doing so, Cooper’s novel chooses the stable narratives of aristocratic primogeniture to consolidate the new nation even as he raises, if only to dismiss, the possibility of a meritocracy.11 I use the term “meritocracy” advisedly. I do not mean to suggest that Louisa is “better” than Bess – Louisa’s racism and timidity are unappealing qualities. Rather, I argue that Bess’s class status is what enables her lack of fear as she encounters the frontier landscape and its inhabitants. Louisa’s racism is at least partially engendered by her precarious social position. By writing Louisa out of the novel, Cooper affirms class hierarchies at the expense of any alternative system of order, including the religious hierarchy suggested at times by Richard Jones, Reverend Grant, and Bess herself, as well as a similar secular hierarchy that would privilege Louisa’s suffering as a mark of merit and work to eradicate poverty and class difference. Scholars have productively complicated the idea of a meritocracy by noting that it is often a useful cover for privilege, and it is clear that Bess and Louisa are each more privileged than the Native or African American characters in Cooper’s text. While Cooper’s novel works frantically to displace or resolve issues of race, and more particularly Native American claims to the land, The Pioneers leaves mostly intact the race hierarchies that govern eighteenthand nineteenth-century America.12 Through the death of Chingachgook and the revelation of Oliver’s entirely white bloodlines, Cooper’s text removes race from the social order of Templeton. In the secondary heroine, Louisa, Cooper’s text provides a challenge to social hierarchy within the white community, and thus renders the cover of privilege more difficult to ignore. The first appearance of each heroine is significant in determining her relationship to the possible direction of the nation: Louisa and Bess are each initially obscured from the reader’s gaze, but both become visible and audible when they resolve an awkward situation. When Bess and Judge Temple approach Templeton, Bess is buried beneath layers of garments. She remains silent during the quibbling over the deer, and her father disenfranchises her voice in that debate: “There is Aggy, he can’t vote, being a slave; and Bess is a minor – so I must even make the best of it” (24). However, she casts aside her cloak and her silence to tend to the young hunter, Oliver: “During this scene the female arose, and, regardless of the cold air, she threw back the hood which concealed her features, and now spoke, with great earnestness” (25). As Janet Dean has already noted, something of Bess’s character 11

  Scott Bradfield has read the Temples as an “aristocracy of merit” (38): my reading differs from Bradfield in noting that Judge Temple has also re-established an aristocracy of wealth. 12   Cooper’s treatment of African Americans has been examined by Andrew Doolen and others. Although African American characters remain in the community at the close of the novel, their place in the social order is more clearly delineated – and their characters much less fully developed – than the Native American characters. Moreover, as a woman, Louisa provides a challenge to the patriarchal structure of the white community. Last of the Mohicans more fully explores the intersection of race and gender via Cora.

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is revealed in this action: her sensibility to the young hunter’s dangerous wound overcomes her prudence in sheltering herself from the cold air. This early example typifies Bess’s behavior throughout the novel as she braves the elements of the American frontier – scaling the Vision, paddling in the canoe, walking unattended in the woods; as she says, “My father’s daughter fears nothing, sir” (188). Her temerity – attached to her status as heiress – is requisite for the frontier, where she must be willing and able to meet the challenges of the wilderness. Her selfidentification – “my father’s daughter” – underscores the literal genealogy of this temerity. By deploying her status as heiress, Bess establishes her authority over the American landscape. In contrast, the reader is introduced to Louisa at the first formal service held at the new church, where her compliance with the rules of the service distinguishes her from the other residents of Templeton. The parishioners, accustomed to a rotating minister, do not know what the appropriate responses are in the Episcopalian service; they may, in fact, be somewhat suspicious of the service because of its ties to England. The narrator informs us that, after the American Revolution, the Episcopalian church “languished” until American ministers could be ordained in England: “Pious and suitable divines were at length selected, and sent to the mother country, to receive that authority, which, it is understood, can only be transmitted directly from one to the other, and thus obtain, in order to preserve, that unity in their churches, which properly belonged to a people of the same nation” (103). The Episcopalian church, therefore, appears to function as a transatlantic bridge between England and America, and suggests an alternative to nationalism, one that incorporates the English, the Americans, and the Native Americans under the umbrella of Christianity and, more specifically, Protestantism. Cooper makes clear that the authority of the Episcopal divines is more tenuous than the authority of law, as embodied in Judge Temple. While Judge Temple’s questionable legal practices are always effective in achieving the desired end, Cooper’s history of the Episcopal church in America, his description of the first Episcopal service in Templeton, and Reverend Grant’s unsuccessful attempt to perform the last rites for Chingachgook all depict the church as ineffective. Although Cooper privileges secular law over religious authority, the Episcopal church operates as an index of value in the novel, albeit one the narrative ultimately rejects. Notably, it is the only measure of worth that Bess fails. In the first service performed by Reverend Grant, his daughter, Louisa, is the only member of the congregation familiar with the correct responses and willing to speak them out loud. Bess and Oliver, we later discover, have been raised in the city and are familiar with the service, but neither is brave enough to speak alone. Bess cannot speak until she hears Oliver join Louisa, and certainly her motivations are not as pure as Louisa’s piety: it is only once Oliver tacitly rebukes her silence that she joins the prayer to maintain his good opinion. Bess has remained silent out of a sort of social pressure: no one else in the church knows what the correct responses are in the Episcopalian service. Richard Jones’s attempt to impose one permanent church in Templeton is unsuccessful because the only attendees familiar with the proper

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responses are those who have spent time in the city, as opposed to the frontier. In this respect, Bess’s decision to return Louisa and her father to “one of the towns on the Hudson” (449) seems to promise greater success for Reverend Grant: she will return him to the city where his ministry will find an audience familiar with the rites of the church. Bess, however, emphasizes that her decision is meant to benefit Louisa. Bess’s comment overshadows her rejection of the Episcopalian church’s authority with the sentimental narrative of a potential marriage for Louisa, just as Bess and Oliver’s marriage smoothes over the mock revolution (and very real disorder) that had erupted outside the cave. Although the church appears as an ordering structure in the new colonies, alongside government and the law, it does not carry the authority of these other structures of order. Reverend Grant’s attempts to convert Native Americans are stunning failures, as Chingachgook’s deathbed incantations reveal. Grant’s inability to build on the work of Moravian missionaries and fully convert Chingachgook to Christianity further limits the place of the indigenous in America. Despite her piety, his daughter, too, fails to connect with the inhabitants of the frontier, native or otherwise. Yet it is important to note that Reverend Grant could have united Templeton spiritually, and thus gained political power. Similarly, Louisa could have married, and gained social standing through marriage. Reverend Grant and Louisa’s penury prevents their success: as Louisa’s narrative reveals, her father has been unable to remain in one place long enough to build a congregation; poverty has kept them moving. Their poverty also prevents Louisa from marrying: she is her father’s only support. Bess’s marriage to Oliver at the conclusion erases the threat of the many claims to Templeton through primogeniture, and exiles Louisa and her father to the east. The ideological impact of the conclusion of the novel is so forceful that it is easy, perhaps, to forget that Louisa’s attachment to Oliver is not entirely unfounded; in the early chapters of the novel, Oliver’s attentions seem devoted to her: “Drawing her arm through his own, he lifted his cap from his head, allowing the dark locks to flow in rich curls over his open brow, and walked by her side, with an air of conscious pride, as if inviting an examination of his inmost thoughts” (139–40). Oliver’s “conscious pride” is in his position as Louisa’s escort, and the narrator suggests that he invites Louisa to get to know him better, to learn his “inmost thoughts.” Solicitous of her comfort, Oliver’s attention to Louisa saves her from a falling branch: “the figure of Louisa, slowly yielding in her saddle; and but for his arm, she would have sunken to the earth” (240). By constantly placing Louisa in situations where she is dependent on Oliver, and that demonstrate his attentiveness to her, Cooper seems to forward a romance plot between them. In contrast, Bess repeatedly refuses Oliver’s aid. Until she can ascertain his real identity, she will not be dependent on him in any way. Bess’s status as heiress makes it particularly important for her to keep her distance from this unknown quantity. Louisa, on the other hand, finds the various potential identities for Oliver – Native American, for example – troubling, but not troubling enough to prevent her attachment to him. Louisa’s insistence on seeing the good in Oliver overwhelms

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these other considerations, and highlights Bess’s distancing strategies. Bess sees the transformation of the American landscape; Louisa notices the transformation in Oliver. Bess sees a subject to sketch; Louisa sees how superior Oliver is to his companions. Bess may see the American landscape in its totality, but she does so because her class status requires her to consider herself superior to the landscape and its inhabitants. As the novel progresses, sympathy develops between Oliver and Bess, but Oliver is consistent in his attentions to both young women. After Louisa and Bess’s near escape from death by panther attack, Oliver inquires after Louisa’s health, provoking Bess’s jealousy. Whereas Louisa constantly praises Oliver and requires his aid, Bess’s frequent silences and disdain for his attention mark her own affection. The paradox is that Cooper narrates Bess’s silences as part of the romance plot, signposting for the reader that Bess’s feelings are perhaps greater than she expresses and suggesting that silence is appropriate for heiresses, especially when faced with so mysterious a character as Oliver Edwards. Bess and Oliver’s most telling examples of sympathy occur in asides (such as when Bess discovers Oliver speaks French), and their disclosure of mutual affection occurs behind closed doors. The narrator, and therefore the reader, witness scenes of sensibility of which the other characters remain unaware. Bess and Oliver’s shared sensibilities are evident despite their attempts at secrecy: for example, Oliver’s hand rests naturally on the piano, as if he is accustomed to the accoutrements of upper-class drawing rooms. Bess reads Oliver’s sensibilities as evidence of his true identity, and only waits for more tangible confirmation of his worthiness. Cooper foregrounds these scenes of sensibility to prepare readers for the revelation of Oliver’s identity, but his narrator distances us from Louisa by limiting our perception of her to the perspectives of the other characters. Readers see Louisa as an object of sympathy for the other characters, not as a feeling subject. However, Cooper complicates the novel’s endorsement of Bess through depictions of Bess’s jealousy. Bess’s envy reveals the merit of Louisa, and that Bess’s social success in the novel is a result of her carefully laid plans to discover Oliver’s identity and eventually exile Louisa from the community. In the concluding scene, when Oliver expresses surprise at her desire to send Louisa away, Bess questions his fidelity: “fixing her eyes with a searching look on his countenance, where they met only the unsuspecting expression of manly regret” (449). Oliver passes her test, but Bess’s jealousy forces readers to question her motivations for exiling Louisa at the end of the novel and reveals the economics lurking beneath the sentimental plot. Bess is right to be jealous, for Louisa is the only other woman in the Patent who is her equal; indeed Remarkable Pettibone, admittedly for selfish reasons, prefers Louisa to Bess: “Now, to my reckoning, Lowizy Grant is much more pritty behaved than Betsy Temple” (176). Remarkable’s stress on Louisa’s behavior (as opposed to her net worth) creates tension between a hierarchy of merit and one of social position, while simultaneously revealing multiple and competing hierarchies of social position. Although Louisa’s “pritty” behavior may merely be the respect she shows Remarkable, Louisa’s kindness to Remarkable is

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contrasted with Bess’s rudeness: Bess reminds Remarkable of her position within the Temple household. Despite her awareness of social hierarchy, Bess acknowledges that Louisa possesses one form of social superiority, although her sincerity is questionable: “‘Nay, Louisa, humility carries you too far. The daughter of a minister of the church can have no superiors. Neither I nor Mr. Edwards is quite your equal, unless,’ she added, again smiling, ‘he is in secret a king’” (279). Remarkable and Bess each assign an alternative form of value to Louisa. Remarkable suggests that Louisa’s “pritty” behavior, demonstrated by the respect Louisa shows Remarkable, surpasses Bess’s temerity; Bess suggests that Louisa’s place in the Christian hierarchy, as the daughter of a minister, gives her a higher station than herself or Oliver, unless Oliver is “in secret a king.” Bess quickly changes the compliment to Louisa into a prying barb at Oliver’s secrecy, one that reveals her own anxieties about Oliver’s social status and national identity. Louisa’s social status can be located, and is confirmed by her lack of sensibility, but Oliver’s is a contradiction: his sensibilities suggest that he is from the same social class as Bess, but his attire and association with Natty and Chingachgook complicate Bess’s reading of his sensibilities. Oliver is also Young Eagle: both his Native American and English names prevent Bess from reading his social status because neither name provides a genealogy; rather, each links Oliver to competing claimants for the land. Oliver is an assumed name and Young Eagle is a name given to him by Chingachgook to mark his adoption: it is only at the close of the novel when Oliver’s true name is revealed that Bess can reconcile his sensibilities with his social position. Once Bess has verified Oliver’s social position, she is able to accept his proposal. By marrying Oliver, Bess reconciles competing land claims and establishes a clear social hierarchy in Templeton. In contrast, Louisa’s legible social status obscures her merit, especially in conversations between Oliver and Bess. It is easy to lose perspective of the “real” Louisa in the complex motivations behind all of these speeches, until Louisa speaks for herself: It is sometimes dangerous to be rich, Miss Temple; but you cannot know how hard it is to be very, very poor … Ah! Miss Temple, you little understand the troubles of this life, I believe. My father has spent many years as a missionary, in the new countries, where his people were poor, and frequently we have been without bread; unable to buy, and ashamed to beg, because we would not disgrace his sacred calling. (304–5)

This almost untold story of Louisa’s past opens a gap in the history of Louisa narrated in the text. We have, of course, seen a glimpse of Louisa’s history in the opening pages of the novel, when Oliver first visits the Grants: Reverend Grant “was a widower, and … the innocent and timid maiden, who had been his companion, was the only survivor of six children. The knowledge of the dependence, which each of these meek christians [sic] had on each other, for happiness, threw an

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additional charm around the gentle, but kind attentions, which the daughter paid to the father” (141). Mr Grant’s dependence on Louisa is underscored by his desire that she not spend too much time with the Temples and ignore her responsibilities at home. Mr Grant’s dependence on Louisa’s housekeeping is contrasted with Bess’s refinement, and reminds us of the class disparity between them. While the Louisa visible to Bess and Oliver lacks the polish of Bess’s education, wears garments inappropriate to the season, and is in general “timid” and “maidenly,” Louisa has known “the sick and the hungry” (305), the death of her siblings and the horrors of poverty. Louisa’s class position as minister’s daughter has not granted her the respect and superiority that Bess and Oliver imagine, but instead has ensured nothing but suffering and hunger as the Grants conscientiously attempt to maintain the same level of subsistence as their parishioners. The text limits readerly sympathy for Louisa’s suffering by presenting her as the occasion of Bess’s sensibility. When Bess ascertains that the Grants are now amply provided for, Louisa’s response gives way to tears. United in this demonstration of sensibility, Bess and reader are apt to forget the sense of Louisa’s reply: the Grants are amply provided for because Louisa’s mother and siblings are all dead. Bess’s status as “the heiress” may make her the more obvious choice for Oliver, but it has also preserved her from the suffering Louisa has endured. Bess deploys her status to justify a sort of exceptionalism: as her “father’s daughter” she may board a canoe or witness a turkey shoot without impinging on her maidenly delicacy. She assumes her position as mistress over Remarkable Pettibone by adopting the title Miss Temple and exiles Oliver from her walk with Louisa because she does not want to entertain “particular attentions” from someone whose family history is unknown. Bess’s apparent fearless independence is tempered by a rather Old World sense of social propriety and class distinctions. Louisa’s experiences of poverty and suffering complicate the novel’s attempt to dismiss her as unfit for the frontier: instead, it becomes clear that Louisa’s merit is overshadowed by her class identity. Cooper introduces the possibility of an alternative system of value, but forecloses it in favor of a conclusion that establishes the legal right of white Americans to the land through the strictures of primogeniture. After her indirect rescue of Bess and Oliver, Louisa never reappears in the novel. However, she is discussed by Oliver and Bess,13 and narrated once by Cooper, during the strange comedy of Monsieur LeQuoi’s proposals. Dean has 13

  Geoffrey Rans is one of few critics to comment on this discussion: “Elizabeth tells Oliver of the arrangements she has made to improve the prospects of Reverend Grant and Louisa; her management...is complete and can be so because it concerns two people so clearly ensconced within the European power structure. It is a telling prelude to their imminent failure on a comparable mission to Natty” (67). Rans’s connection of Louisa and Natty is provocative, but to my mind complicates his claim that the Grants are “ensconced within the European power structure.” Moreover, Bess is clearly most interested in disposing of Louisa – her plans for Louisa do not “absorb” her, as Rans suggests, but send her to the east in an inverse of Natty’s voyage west (68).

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read these proposals as “the connection between marriage and nationhood,” arguing that Bess, should she accept Monsieur LeQuoi, would become French, and relinquish her property in Templeton and, by implication, “the promise of the American future” (1–2). Dean ignores Monsieur LeQuoi’s subsequent proposal to Louisa, which is also rejected. Monsieur LeQuoi’s proposals are offered “as a duty which a well-bred man owed to a lady in such a retired place” (444), and remind us that Louisa is as qualified as Bess to receive them. Louisa’s refusal, however, is significant in that through it Louisa exiles herself from the marriage plot. There are no other young men in Templeton, as Oliver observes: “I really don’t know any one hereabouts good enough for her” (448), and by refusing Monsieur LeQuoi, Louisa, in effect, refuses marriage.14 Aside from Cooper’s account of her refusal, Louisa is removed from the novel. Bess’s plans for Louisa’s future are, as Oliver notes, evidence of how deeply she manages, but seem unlikely to agree with Louisa’s own desires or tastes. It is almost impossible to imagine Louisa in a situation where she “may meet with such society, and form such a connexion, as may be proper for one of her years and character” (449): society has never been Louisa’s forte. Thus Cooper requires the reader to imagine Louisa’s future as one outside the marriage plot Bess and Oliver imagine, and allows for the possibility of spinsterhood, although he prevents the reader from ascertaining Louisa’s feelings.15 Louisa, therefore, has a double function within The Pioneers: she represents, on one hand, a possible alternative to the marriage plot by choosing independence rather than a marriage of convenience with Monsieur LeQuoi.16 On the other hand, Louisa also represents what is lost through the solidification of American identity emblematized in the marriage between Bess and Oliver. For while their marriage can be read as reconciling competing nationalisms – British, American, and Native American – in favor of a new, legitimate order, the exile of Chingachgook, Natty, and Louisa from that new order points to what is absent from this new American identity. Natty and Chingachgook live on in the rest of the Leatherstocking tales, but Louisa’s prehistory and subsequent fate are left unnarrated, pointing to the erasure of women by history unless they are allied to the dominant hierarchies of power. But the forgetting of Louisa also suggests the significance of women in consolidating national identity: the possibility of Oliver and Louisa’s marriage must be eliminated, and is, in fact, so frequently raised and discarded that it persists even after the marriage of Bess and Oliver. The narrative’s inability to 14   Although popular with the ladies, Monsieur LeQuoi is, admittedly, no prize. However, Louisa is here presented with the choice to be married; with Oliver she had no choice or opportunity. 15   Louisa’s exile might be compared to Natty’s – although it is difficult to think of the timid Louisa as “the foremost in that band of Pioneers” (456). 16   We see this same pattern rehearsed in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, the subject of the next chapter, in which Esther declines any future offers of marriage once her engagement to Everell is broken off.

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forget Louisa underscores Bess’s methodical elimination of any other claim to the American landscape she and Oliver inhabit. Bess’s sensibilities surmount the American wilderness, but she indulges her sensibilities at the expense of the secondary heroine who remained at home. Louisa’s suffering, allied to her status as a minister’s daughter, poses an alternative hierarchy of value that reveals the economic underpinnings of the legal unification of Templeton, and thus America. “Our Graver Sister”: Mourning the Secondary Heroine in The Last of the Mohicans Like The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans concludes at a grave, but in this case, there is no danger of forgetting the secondary heroine. In this novel, the grave belongs to that heroine, Cora, and the novel concludes by mourning her loss. Whereas The Pioneers juxtaposed fragile Louisa with fearless Bess, in Cooper’s prequel to that novel, The Last of the Mohicans, the role of the heroines is inverted.17 The younger, more delicate Munro sister, Alice, is contrasted with her older and “graver” sister, Cora (150). From the opening passage, however, Cora’s gravity gives way to her keen sense of humor and arresting intelligence. In turn, Alice’s cloying vulnerability resembles Louisa’s: Alice frequently gives way altogether in numerous fainting fits. Why, then, does the novel conclude with the death of the stronger and more interesting heroine? The answer is, in part, connected to the novel’s revisionist history. Set in 1757 during the French and Indian Wars, The Last of the Mohicans is a prerevolutionary text that simultaneously mourns the “Vanishing Indian”18 and establishes Britain’s failure in the nascent colonies as grounds for the American Revolution. In this respect, the novel writes two kinds of history: Cooper uses the myth of the “Vanishing Indian” to solve the contemporary problem of Native American land rights, but parallels this fictional resolution with the historical fact of the American Revolution. The effect is to create a usable past that establishes a clear causal sequence for both the already-past American Revolution and the not-yet-accomplished removal of the Native Americans. The fate of the half17   William Kelly, in Plotting America’s Past, and Rans, in Leather-Stocking Novels, suggest that we read The Last of the Mohicans with a double-edged history: readers anticipate the ways in which the novel will set up the plot of The Pioneers (or relies on readers already familiar with The Pioneers), and also read the novel as an account of an already-determined history. 18   This term was first used by Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (1950) to describe the fortuitous “disappearance” of Native Americans in the literature of the early nineteenth century. Such texts, including the novels by Cooper and Sedgwick examined in this book, claimed that the indigenous peoples of North America “faded away.” These narratives portray the forced removal of the indigenous (especially those occasioned by the Indian Removal Acts of the 1830s) as already past.

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sister heroines, Cora and Alice, provides the domestic counterpart of the national resolutions Cooper crafts in this novel: the character affiliated with Native Americans dies, while her weaker half-sister Alice barely survives to marry the British “hero,” the impressively doltish Duncan. Through the marriage of Alice and Duncan, Cooper narrates Great Britain’s fall from grace and draws a proto-revolutionary distinction between Britain and the colonies, represented primarily by Natty Bumppo: “… the colonists, though innocent of [Great Britain’s] imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly believed invincible … saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian boy” (13). Cooper’s coy reference to Washington distinguishes colonist from imperial power, and winks at the reader who knows how the larger national tale ends. This martial aspect of the tale is foregrounded in Cooper’s Preface: “It was in this scene of strife and bloodshed that the incidents we shall attempt to relate occurred, during the third year of the war which England and France last waged, for the possession of a country, that neither was destined to retain” (12).19 The struggle between Munro and Montcalm for Fort William Henry, therefore, is ultimately futile – perhaps one reason why their names are so similar, or why Montcalm allows Munro to depart with full military honors: as the ambush of the Hurons makes clear, white war and white diplomacy have little control over this new land. As a result of the American Revolution, both French and British governments will cede America to the colonists, who in turn will have to cope with the Hurons and other Native American tribes. White diplomacy finds its Native counterpart in the conferences between Huron and Delaware. Barbara Mann has admirably contextualized Cooper’s novel within the Iroquois League.20 Uncas’s preternaturally good looks, bravery in battle, and woodcraft are displayed throughout the novel so that the reader is prepared, with the unveiling of the blue tortoise tattoo, to see Uncas as a natural aristocrat within the Native American community.21 Uncas’s death as he attempts to save Cora from Magua closes the possibility of a consolidation of native power: left with only the aging Tamenund as leader, the Delawares mourn Uncas and their own “inevitable” demise simultaneously. The novel thus parallels tribal conflicts with colonial conflicts, and asserts that each will end in a form of national death: France and England will cede control of the colonies; the Native Americans, too, will cede control of their land to the colonists. The novel’s obsession with dead Indians and 19

  John McWilliams rightly notes that Cooper includes “the hardy colonist” in the British army, and thus implicates the colonist as well (Last of the Mohicans 28). 20   See also Clark’s chapter on The Last of the Mohicans in History and Myth for a reading of Cooper’s use of Iroquois and Delaware. 21   John McWilliams has importantly complicated this reading of Uncas by focusing on his less “desirable” aspects; namely, scalping the Oneida and the charge that he is a traitor “in the pay of the Yengeese” (Last of the Mohicans 56–7).

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Native American gravesites22 culminates in the double funeral of Uncas and Cora, which symbolically rejects a potential resolution of the competing land claims of white colonists and Native Americans. In the death-marriage of Cora and Uncas, solemnized but also mourned, Cooper lays to rest the possibility of intercultural marriage. Both cultures unite to mourn the loss of Cora and Uncas. Just as Cora and Uncas are, according to the Delaware girls, married only in heaven, so too the story of the white girl and Indian boy will unite these disparate cultures in one shared legend. The Delaware women who sing Uncas’s death song are puzzled by his interest in the white woman, but they accept it and sing her praises; they clearly believe that, on earth or in heaven, Cora and Uncas are wedded to one another. Alice, Heyward, and Munro are shattered with grief, but also retreat from the scene with a wish that they will meet the Delawares again in heaven – a wish that Natty refuses to translate. Natty’s slippery positions on the nature of heaven for Indians and whites has been the focus of recent criticism: Natty’s claim that Cora and Uncas will not meet in a shared heaven completes the logic of racial separation the novel endorses and refuses to participate in the sentimentalization of Cora’s death. Her death, tied as it is to the novel’s interrogation of wealth and race politics, creates an inverse Darwinian logic. By killing off the novel’s strongest characters and replacing them with Duncan and Alice, Cooper foreshadows Britain’s loss of the colonies. Racial purity is achieved at the cost of the secondary heroine; her death in turn points to the weakness of the British Empire. The racially pure British characters, those “without a cross,” perform sensibility appropriate to the drawing room, but are unable to survive in the American wilderness. In this respect, The Last of the Mohicans is importantly a prequel to The Pioneers. Bess unites Alice’s sensibility and racial purity with Cora’s bravery in the new post-Revolution American nation. In The Last of the Mohicans Cooper introduces race in a pre-Revolution America. Like Scott’s Rebecca, Cora is a completely desirable character, suffering under the racial prejudices of her day, and therefore lost to the future of England and America.23 But The Last of the Mohicans importantly forecloses the possibility of interracial marriage between Cora and Uncas through their death and through the complex love triangle that

  See Lora Romero for an excellent reading of death and mourning in The Last of the Mohicans (“Vanishing Americans”). 23   Here I differ slightly from Dennis’s otherwise excellent reading of Waverley and The Last of the Mohicans. Dennis claims, “there is no suggestion that things have somehow all worked out for the best, or resulted in the kind of domestic resolution of social contradictions that – at least in a superficial reading – concludes most Scott novels. The marriage of Alice and Duncan does not compensate for the loss of Uncas and Cora” (“Worthlessness” 12–13). Here Dennis distinguishes between the resolutions of Scott’s and Cooper’s novels, but I argue that they function in exactly the same way: the marriage of Rowena and Ivanhoe certainly does not compensate for Rebecca’s loss. 22

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structures the novel: Uncas’s affection for Cora is unrequited,24 and has its dark parallel in Magua’s love-lust for Cora. Cora, in turn, suffers from her unrequited love for Duncan and her awareness that he is in love with her sister, Alice. In each pair, save for Duncan and Alice, race is the significant obstacle to the romance. Moreover, each racially marked character is described in terms of sense, in contrast to the hero and heroine of sensibility: Duncan and Alice. Cooper describes Uncas and Magua as opposites, but that should not prevent us from noting the similarities between them: each is interested in Cora, each is skilled at woodcraft, and each is attempting to navigate the shifting American landscape. Magua’s alliances and double-crosses are, as critics have noted, not simply an indication of his “evil” nature, but also an effort to find a space from which to acquire political power. Similarly, Uncas is frequently described as adapting or abandoning native custom in his treatment of Cora and Alice. When Uncas’s heritage is revealed near the conclusion of the novel, the implications of his actions are startling: while Magua attempts to acquire political power within and for the Native American community through cunning, Uncas tempers his power within the tribe by his alliances to white culture via Cora. Like Cora, Magua and Uncas both are associated with sense and political agency. In contrast, Alice and Duncan are each associated with sensibility. Duncan’s blunders have already received critical discussion, but I want to highlight that they are almost always connected to the overwhelming power of sensibility: overpowered with admiration or desire for Alice, in short, immobilized by the power of the sentimental narrative, Duncan is incapable of action. The novel opens with a comparison between the Alice and Cora that eerily echoes Scott’s juxtapositions of Rowena and Rebecca: in this case, however, the heroines are half-sisters. The narrative quickly establishes their characters through physical description and, as is true for the heroines of The Pioneers, suggests that they both share the attention of the romantic hero, Duncan Heyward: One … permitted glimpses of her dazzling complexion, fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes, to be caught, as she artlessly suffered the morning air to blow aside the green veil which descended low from her beaver … nor was the opening day more cheering than the animated smile which she bestowed on the youth, as he assisted her into the saddle. The other, who appeared to share equally in the attention of the young officer, concealed her charms from the gaze of the soldiery with a care that seemed better fitted to the experience of four or five additional years. (18)

The narrator compares Alice’s beauty to that of the natural world: her blush is like the sunrise, her smile like the dawn. The narrator suggests that Alice’s beauty is 24   Most readings of the novel overlook this point: there is no evidence in the text that Cora cares for Uncas. Here I disagree with Romero’s claim that Cora’s “gentle tyranny” – her poor education of Uncas – seals his demise (“Vanishing Indians” 400).

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natural and appropriate. In contrast, our narrator’s description of Cora, whose face is revealed when she watches their Indian guide dart past, is described in terms of blood: “Her complexion was not brown, but it rather appeared charged with the color of the rich blood, that seemed ready to burst its bounds. And yet there was neither coarseness, nor want of shadowing, in a countenance that was exquisitely regular and dignified, and surpassingly beautiful” (19).25 The narrator’s focus on Cora’s blood in this passage is our first hint of the nature of Cora’s “rich blood,” which here exceeds appropriate “bounds,” followed shortly by her defense of the Huron guide: “‘Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?’” (21). Cora’s defense of the Huron proves to be misplaced – Magua does indeed betray the group – but is consistent with her sensitivity to race throughout the novel. The reaction of her companions to this comment establishes Cora’s position on race as one that the other characters would like to at least appear to adopt: Alice instantly follows the guide, and Duncan remains behind to admire Cora: “The young man regarded the last speaker in open admiration, and even permitted her fairer, though certainly not more beautiful companion, to proceed unattended, while he sedulously opened the way himself for the passage of her who has been called Cora” (22). But the novel instead connects Duncan’s regard for Cora with a more troubling sort of gaze: one that conflates Cora’s defense of the racially other with otherness itself (as, indeed, Munro will reveal she is) and connects Duncan’s admiring gaze at Cora to the way white characters stare at Uncas. Several chapters later, when Alice admires Uncas’s form “as she would have looked upon some precious relic of the Grecian chisel” (53), Cooper teases the reader with the possibility Michael Mann’s film version of the novel picks up: perhaps the gentle Alice will marry Uncas, and Heyward will marry Cora. Cooper’s language here is coy, but he appears to be suggesting that Alice is imagining Uncas’s body, even if it was “more than usually skreened [sic] by a green and fringed hunting shirt, like that of the white man” (52). She interposes the gaze of a tourist looking at a work of art to preserve her modesty and to efface the difference in race between them, but if marble Greek statues are white, they are also typically nude. While Alice’s comments erase race in order to make her desire for Uncas acceptable, Cora’s response reinscribes race difference, even as it ostensibly obliterates the value of race. Looking at Uncas, she asks, “who, that looks at this creature of nature, remembers the shade of his skin?” (53). It is important to remember, however, that Cora addresses this comment to Heyward. Uncas serves merely as one of the ongoing exemplars by which Cora seeks to forestall Heyward’s potentially racist reaction to her own parentage. Cora’s admiration of Uncas is not, therefore, as the Delaware women might suggest, the first signs of attraction, but an object lesson to the man who already has her heart: Duncan Heyward.

25   Shirley Samuels has noted that Cora’s “rich blood” brings together her gendered and racial identity (104).

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In the novel, Cora’s race is made visible through her words and through the ever-shifting color of her skin. Cora’s legible “blood,” however, is often connected to female modesty. When the reader first becomes aware of Cora’s interest in Duncan, her “blood” is simultaneously described as a blush that reveals her interest and a sign of her ancestral difference: “‘Remember, Duncan, how necessary your safety is to our own – how you bear a father’s sacred trust – how much depends on your discretion and care – in short,’ she added, while the telltale blood stole over her features, crimsoning her very temples, ‘how very deservedly dear you are to all of the name of Munro’” (67). Cooper’s contrast between her “deadly paleness” and “tell-tale blood” foreshadows the revelation of Cora’s “blood” heritage, and her death (67). Ironically, Duncan misreads both her pallor and her blush and instead turns to Alice: “‘If anything could add to my own base love of life,’ said Heyward, suffering his unconscious eyes to wander to the youthful form of the silent Alice; ‘it would be so kind an assurance’” (68). Cooper consistently uses Cora’s skin as an index of feeling that vacillates from “ashy paleness” to “tinged with blood,” but in every scene, Duncan calls forth this response from Cora only to immediately turn to Alice. Thus Cooper establishes Cora’s hopeless love for Duncan in terms of race, while revealing Duncan’s own predilection for her weaker, silent sister as evidence of his sensibility. Uncas, in his turn, begins to imitate white manners in order to win Cora’s affections. Magua sneers, “‘The pale faces make themselves dogs to their women … and when they want to eat, their warriors must lay aside the tomahawk to feed their laziness’” (42), and this, in fact, is exactly what Uncas does, under the guise of hospitality. Uncas immediately shows a marked preference for the “rich, speaking, countenance” of Cora (56), and it is tempting to suggest that he hears a sort of voix du sang. Although their races are different, both are described in terms of their rich blood: Cora’s as a result of her mother’s descent, and Uncas’s from his father’s lineage.26 As the novel continues, however, Cora and Alice are no longer compared in terms of physical beauty, but emotional steadiness, thus providing the reader with an alternative hierarchy of value, a different way to judge Cora’s and Alice’s respective worth. In each conflict with their Huron attackers, Cora proves her emotional stability and Alice her frailty. Indeed, Cooper is careful to extend this opposition into the action prior to the novel: Cora and Alice’s journey to visit their father begins, as Munro suggests, thanks to “the spirit of my noble-minded Cora that leads them … Would to God, that he who holds the honor of our royal master in his guardianship, would show but half her firmness” (61). Cora is described as a leader, a rival to the soldiers under Munro’s command, whereas Alice is only spoken of in “endearing epithets” (61). Thus Cora’s sense demonstrates her potential role in colonial America – she is like a soldier, and capable of surviving the wilderness. In turn, Alice’s sensibility is endearing, but she remains an object 26   As Mary Chapman has noted, mothers are absent from both Native American and white communities in the novel (“Infanticide and Cultural Reproduction”).

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of worship and description, rather than a woman capable of thinking and acting for herself. Cora’s alternating associations with deathly pallor and rich blood, white and other, life and death, suggest that Cora’s race, already linked to sense, is also linked to a death wish. She is often the force that prompts even her protectors to action and salvation. When Uncas, Chingachgook, and Natty are all preparing for death in the face of an apparently insurmountable Iroquois foe, Cora urges them to escape and provides their escape route, encouraging each to return with assistance. Natty understands her advice in terms of race: “… what might be right and proper in a red-skin, may be sinful in a man who has not even a cross in blood to plead for his ignorance” (78). In other words, to wait for death may be the right path for Native Americans, but it is not appropriate for white Christians without “a cross in blood.” Cooper’s irony, of course, is that this idea comes from a woman with a cross in her blood, who remains to wait for rescue or death. I do not think that Cora’s apparent death wish should detract from her heroic status; like Uncas’s overdetermined lineage, Cora’s bravery is both an index of her value and a harbinger of her early death. Within the pre-revolutionary America represented in the novel, Cora does not belong in any of the worlds she might inhabit: by the blood logic of the novel, she is neither Native American nor fully British. Duncan’s anxiety that Alice might meet “evils worse than death” and Cora’s own horror at the possibility of marrying Magua are strangely ironic (80). Cora’s own parentage, her “cross,” is explained to Duncan and to the reader by Munro. Munro frames the conversation in terms of wealth, kinship, and blood, playing on the multiple connections among these terms. Munro begins by charting his own connection to Duncan in terms of kinship: “‘Duncan Heyward, I have loved you for the sake of him whose blood is in your veins; I have loved you for your own good qualities; and I have loved you, because I thought you would contribute to the happiness of my child’” (158). In this sequence of reasons for Munro’s affection, he moves from Duncan’s own lineage to the possible union of their families through marriage. Munro shares the story of Cora’s mother and of Alice’s as a sort of genealogy: “‘You would be my son, Duncan, and you’re ignorant of the history of the man you wish to call your father’” (158). Despite Munro’s focus on father and son, his narrative primarily concerns daughters, and reveals the interdependence of wealth, race, and lineage that dictates so much of the plot of this novel via the marriage market. Munro explains that his family was “both ancient and honorable … though it might not altogether be endowed with that amount of wealth that should correspond with its degree” (159). In contrast, his beloved, Alice Graham, was “the only child of a neighboring laird of some estate” (159), and therefore wealthy in her own right. Munro asserts that “the connexion was disagreeable to her father, on more accounts than my poverty” (159), although he does not explain why, and his subsequent journey to the West Indies – the nineteenth-century equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme, albeit one that actually worked – suggests that, if poverty was not the sole factor, it was certainly the primary obstacle. While in the West

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Indies, Munro marries Cora’s mother, a nameless woman defined solely by her wealth and her race: “She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady, whose misfortune it was, if you will … to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. Ay, sir, that is a curse, entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people” (159). While this statement appears to make Munro’s politics clear, his sudden shift from his wife to Scotland’s curse works to erase the spectacle of slavery, as Munro quite literally backs away to safer shores. He begins by describing his wife, then her parents, then “that unfortunate class,” and then the “foreign and trading people” with whom Scotland is “unnaturally” united, until his own “unnatural” union with a descendant of West Indian slaves is obscured in the larger national politics of trade between nations. This slippery confusion between woman and nation, and the ways in which the politics of the nation can obscure individuals, is echoed by the conclusion of the novel in the description of Cora’s funeral. Cora’s body is obscured first by funeral winding sheets, then by graves, then by death songs, and finally by the legends of the Indian man and the white woman that persist into the narrator’s present. Like Munro’s description of her mother, the multiple layers of narrative cover Cora’s story with ritual and legend until she exists solely in the always-already impossible story of the “white” woman who loved an Indian. Munro’s narrative and Cora’s fate point also to the erasure of mothers in this novel and in The Pioneers as well. In The Pioneers Bess and Louisa’s mothers are deceased and are, in fact, rarely mentioned in the novel. In The Last of the Mohicans both Cora’s and Alice’s mothers are central, if absent. The separate histories of these absent mothers implicate women in the novel’s larger politics. Duncan’s concern, of course, is to uncover the maternal parentage of the Munro sisters and thus satisfy his own anxieties about racial purity. Sensing Duncan’s lack of interest in Cora, Munro rages, “‘You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards, with one so degraded – lovely and virtuous though she be?’” (159). Although he withstands Munro’s challenge and denies that he holds Cora’s racially mixed parentage against her – “Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!” – our narrator interjects that he was “at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been engrafted in his nature” (159). But is it Duncan’s nature or nurture? Cooper is unclear, but he is careful to point out, via Munro, that Major Heyward was born “at the south, where these unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own” (159). The geopolitics of nation and race, wealth and slavery, inform Duncan’s conception of each heroine, and thus Duncan is relieved that Alice’s mother is the Scottish heiress, without realizing that it is the wealth that Munro acquired, “enriched by the marriage” in the West Indies (159), that enables him to return to Scotland and marry Alice’s mother, also named Alice. So, too, it is Cora’s death that enables Duncan to wed this second Alice. Lurking beneath the sentimental marriages of each Alice, therefore, is a darker narrative of race prejudice and unnatural unions, geopolitical and domestic. Alice’s mother’s early death underscores the fragility of

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the sentimental narrative, and suggests a similar fate for her daughter if she, too, is abandoned. The novel parallels the first and second generation: the fates of the nameless mother of Cora and the first Alice are echoed by Cora’s death and do not bode well for Alice. Moreover, this parallel suggests that Alice and Duncan are indirectly responsible for Cora’s death. Duncan’s attempt to rescue Alice before Cora is part of the series of events that leads to Cora’s eventual murder.27 Cora, too, is implicated in the novel’s race politics and fails to rise above them: she must confront Magua’s desire for her.28 A dark double of Uncas’s interest and care, Magua’s unprincipled bargain reveals Cora’s own double standard. Cora initially defies Magua in terms that appear to transcend race: “And am I answerable that thoughtless and unprincipled men exist, whose shades of countenance may resemble mine?” (103). The clever play on “resemble” returns race to the conversation. Cora’s countenance “resembles” a white face, but, by the blood logic of nineteenth-century discussions of race, it is emphatically not white. However, Cora does not see any similarity between her own race identity and Magua’s; she finds his proposal “revolting” (104) and views it as that “horrid alternative … worse than a thousand deaths” from which Duncan hoped to guard them (109). It is unlikely, therefore, that Cora would have been able to surmount race prejudice and form a relationship with Uncas. Indeed, we have no evidence that Cora feels any interest in Uncas. In this scene, however, Cora’s belief in Duncan’s superiority is also challenged. Cora’s encounter with Magua also reveals Duncan’s limitations to Cora for the first time: in a “most painful pause, while the conviction forced itself on her mind, that the too sanguine and generous Duncan had been cruelly deceived by the cunning of the savage” (104). Although this may appear to be a typically racist barb at “Indian cunning,” I read it instead as discounting white “superiority”: Cora expects Duncan to triumph because he is white; however, Magua and Cora are each cleverer than Duncan, as demonstrated by Magua’s plan and Cora’s apprehension of that plan before Duncan realizes his mistake. And yet, despite the novel’s emphasis on Uncas’s, Magua’s, and Cora’s “sense,” the sensibility of Alice and Duncan is carried forward at the conclusion of the narrative. Alice acknowledges Cora’s worth in her helplessness: she spends the novel alternately looking to Duncan and Cora to tend to her. In each threat faced by the sisters, Alice frequently faints and requires Cora’s care. As Diane Price Herndl has noted, this spectacle of suffering serves as an index to the value of the male characters. For example, when Cora attempts to release Alice from her shackles at the risk of her own liberty, the narrator notes, “Any other than a monster would have relented at such an act of generous devotion to the best and purest affection; 27

  Here I build on the work of Dennis (“The Worthlessness of Duncan Heyward”), Barbara Mann, and Chapman (“Infanticide and Cultural Reproduction”), who have offered similar readings of Munro’s first marriage. 28   As Robert Emmet Long has suggested, Magua is mostly interested in using Cora to avenge his humiliation by Cora’s father (58).

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but the breast of the Huron was a stranger to any sympathy” (112). In contrast, Alice and Cora’s embrace elicits the following reaction: “The manhood of Heyward felt no shame, in dropping tears over this spectacle of affectionate rapture; and Uncas stood … with eyes that had already lost their fierceness, and were beaming with a sympathy, that elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before, the practices of his nation” (115). Cooper initially appears to suggest that sympathy provides a way of assessing value independent of race. However, the text reinscribes race in the final sentence when he suggests that Uncas has “advanced … centuries before the practices of his nation.” This strange sentence seems to locate Uncas and the white colonists in a different historical moment from their Native American contemporaries, describing native culture as a sort of present past that has accidentally survived into the present day of the novel. At the same time, however, Cora’s affection for her sister teaches readers her value at the expense of Alice and the other white characters. Alice’s tendency to faint at moments of peril until Cora has restored them to safety becomes a motif in the novel, and, as I suggested earlier, is connected to Alice’s refusal to confront race. By fainting, Alice relies on sensibility to escape her knowledge of Cora’s difference while simultaneously returning attention to herself. At several moments, Cora offers her life in exchange for Alice’s. When Magua first captures them, Cora asks, “At least, release my gentle sister, and pour out all your malice on me. Purchase wealth by her safety, and satisfy your revenge with a single victim” (104), offering herself and wealth in exchange for Alice’s life.29 Yet, when Cora places her life in Alice’s hands and asks her to decide whether they should die together or if Cora should consent to be Magua’s wife, Alice is entirely passive, “like some beautiful emblem of the wounded delicacy of her sex, devoid of animation, and yet keenly conscious” (110). Natty and Alice each fail to make the sacrifice that Cora would make for them; once more, Cora’s death wish is also a measure of her worth. Alice’s devotion to Cora and Cora’s maternal fondness and solicitude for Alice further complicates the web or kinship and race that structures the novel: with dead mothers of different races, Cora and Alice seem to have found a kind of interracial bond mimicking that of mother and child, but this bond repeatedly places Cora’s life in peril. Alice’s frailty jeopardizes Cora, who repeatedly offers herself as a substitute for Alice, even though that choice, at least in Cora’s mind, inevitably leads to her own death. With Cora’s death, the narrative offers Duncan as a substitute guardian: he will be Alice’s lover/father and care for her and the shattered Munro. But if we look closely at Duncan’s role in the text, one can see where Duncan’s ability to protect Alice breaks down. It begins, as I noted above, with Cora’s realization that Duncan has been tricked by Magua, but continues throughout the novel. As Ian Dennis has noted, Duncan twice falls asleep when he is supposed to be on watch and bungles his own rescue of Alice (“The Worthlessness of Duncan Heyward”). In his enthusiasm to confess his love for her, he forgets to watch the cave door. They are 29

  This is a kind of dark echo of Cora’s mother’s marriage to Munro.

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surprised by Magua, and their capture draws attention away from the attempt to rescue Cora. Worse still, in the midst of Magua’s taunting words Heyward imperils Alice: “‘Huron, do your worst!’ exclaimed the excited Heyward, forgetful that a double stake was involved in his life” (261). Heyward’s carelessness does not bode well for his future or for Alice’s safety, and, in their symbolic role as the progenitors of British America, foreshadows Britain’s loss of the colonies.30 Indeed, once Heyward is secure in Alice’s affection, he immediately appears to lose interest. Captive with Alice and Cora, the narrator comments that he felt such “an interest in both, that, at such a moment of intense uncertainty, scarcely knew a preponderance in favor of her whom he most loved” (295). Once Tamenund has passed judgment and restored Alice to Duncan, he quickly abandons her to join the others in the attempt to rescue Cora. The narrative shift to Cora in the conclusion seems to me to complicate Baym’s claim that “it is precisely in preserving [Alice] that a civilization signifies itself” (“How Men and Women” 73). However, each hero fails Cora in important ways: Heyward’s affection for Alice leads to his capture and prevents the others from rescuing Cora; Natty does not take Magua up on the offer of exchange quickly enough and thus misses the opportunity to trade his life for hers by offering his rifle instead, forgetting that Magua has rejected bribes; finally, and most tragically, Uncas fails Cora by submitting to the laws that govern the Delawares in his appeal to Tamenund.31 Uncas has adopted some white customs – he wears white clothes and serves Cora and Alice in opposition (according to Cooper) to tribal custom. He is also the heir apparent, and thus in a position to change the rules, so to speak. By complying with tribal custom, Uncas rejects the kind of intercultural compromise necessary to spare Cora and unite whites and Native Americans. Although Uncas’s affection for Cora is unrequited, he still fails to make the kind of political compromises necessary for a parallel romantic union. In the conference with the aged Tamenund, however, Cora has failed, too. When she asks Tamenund if he is a father, his reply, “Of a nation” (305), elicits this response from Cora: “For myself I ask nothing. Like thee and thine, venerable chief,” she continued, her hands convulsively on her heart, and suffering her head to droop, until her burning cheeks were nearly concealed in the maze of dark, glossy tresses, that fell in disorder upon her shoulders, “the curse of my ancestors has fallen heavily on their child. But yonder is one, who has never known the weight of Heaven’s displeasure until now. She is the daughter of an old and failing man, whose days 30

 I describe Alice and Duncan as symbols of British America for two reasons: first, their “untainted blood,” paired with their wealth and social positions; second, Cooper returns to narrate the fates of their descendants in The Prairie. 31   Here I build on Mann’s observation that Tamenund’s decision is in keeping with Iroquois law. I disagree slightly with Bradfield’s reading of Uncas as “the ultimate signified”; Bradfield glosses over Uncas’s obedience to Tamenund’s decree (62).

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Here, for the first time in the text, Cora aligns herself with the Native American community and, in her effort to conceal her face and her acknowledgment of “the curse of [her] ancestors,” accepts the prejudices of her own people, and thus exiles herself from both communities. To each offer of help, even Natty’s belated willingness to change places with her, Cora responds in similar fashion: “Your offer is vain, neither could it be accepted; but still you may serve me, even more than in your own noble intention. Look at that drooping, humbled child!” (315– 16). As always, Cora attempts to care for Alice, even in her own distress. But in this scene Cora’s solicitude has the opposite effect: once she has acknowledged her “curse,” and now that Alice has been promised to Heyward, the attention of the community turns to her, instead of to Alice, as Magua carries her away from the reunited Delawares. In The Pioneers, the revelation of Oliver’s true race identity enabled him to marry the heroine; in The Last of the Mohicans, the acknowledgement of Cora’s “curse” enables the marriage of Duncan and Alice. Yet the potential marriage of hero and heroine is overshadowed by the plight of the secondary heroine in the concluding chapters of the novel. Their pursuit of Cora is a strange and compelling scene, with Uncas (who throughout the novel has demonstrated uncanny tracking skills, particularly where Cora is concerned) leading the way. As the night darkens, their pursuit continues, with Uncas keeping sight of Magua “as if life to him possessed but a single object” (335). This is a slight misstatement, though, because Uncas is using Magua as an indicator of Cora – once more, the complex politics of internecine war is connected with Cora. If Uncas kills Magua, he releases Cora and consolidates his own power within the tribe. The narrator continues, “Heyward and the scout still pressed on his rear, actuated, though, possibly, in a less degree, by a common feeling” (335). Thus Cora, who possessed the admiration of all three men, but only the love of Uncas, has suddenly shifted into the primary heroine, with Alice locked up with the old men, women, and children. Cora’s ascendancy cannot last long, however, and Cooper writes her death as a complex scene, simultaneously balletic and operatic, in which the internecine tribal conflicts meld with the contest for Cora, leaving a ledge full of dead Native Americans surrounding Cora’s dead body. In death, Cora’s statement to Tamenund affirming the separateness of whites and Indians – “‘It is so,’ said Cora, drawing a long breath, as if reviving from a trance, raising her face, and shaking back her shining veil, with a kindling eye, that contradicted the death-like paleness of her countenance; ‘but why – it is not permitted us to inquire’” (305) – is contradicted by the profusion of bodies, and by the joint funeral rites that link her and Uncas in death, if not in life. Magua’s final injunction to her, “choose,” seems a strange sort of metonymy for Cora’s double consciousness: torn between white and other, she is left without a place in the struggle between nations that serves as the backdrop for this novel. Cora’s death is the bleak answer of providence to her plea: “I am

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thine! do with me as thou seest best!” (337). But with her death, the possibility of peaceful coexistence between white and Native American appears to be lost, and the fragile forms of Alice and Heyward retreating from the landscape promise that England’s hold on the inhabitants of this new land will not last long.32 Conclusion: Who Can Afford Sensibility? The conclusion of The Last of the Mohicans is saturated with loss. Munro, Alice, and Heyward mourn Cora’s death, but also the loss of Fort Henry. The victory of the French over the English is overshadowed by the Huron attack that restages the war: the conflict between colonial powers is recast as a conflict between colonizer and colonized. The wedding of Cora and Uncas would have resolved these conflicts. Uncas’s tattoo has a sort of totemic power, garnering the allegiance of the Delaware and sapping Magua’s power; his marriage to Cora would have created at least a symbolic peace between the British and the Native Americans, as Cooper imagines them. Yet this particular romantic resolution, and its attendant national resolution, cannot be. In part, as was the case in Ivanhoe, the sheer and opposing weight of historical fact renders it impossible; in part, however, Cooper seems uncomfortable with the race dynamics he has created. Unable to fully imagine a romance between two “non-white” characters of different races, Cooper instead narrates the bleached-out romance of Duncan and Alice. Duncan’s carelessness and Alice’s excessive sensibility are foreboding qualities, perhaps best understood as the result of privilege. Alice’s and Duncan’s respective social positions within the British aristocracy create a buffer: the young major has, as Natty points out, few responsibilities; Alice has been doubly sheltered by her father’s excessive affection for her and the deference that his military rank procures for all of his family members. Cooper reveals that Alice and Duncan’s wealth and therefore rank is created out of slavery: Duncan’s home in the South and Munro’s marriage in the West Indies provide the finances that enable Munro’s second marriage and the military commissions each man holds. In Cora, therefore, Cooper registers the cost of their success: the suffering of the racially marked bodies that finance their lifestyle.33 Cora’s lineage prevents her from assuming her proper station in society even as it enables her sister’s marriage to the man she loves. In the wilderness, Cora’s merit is demonstrated; in the wilderness, Cora and Uncas each are properly valued, but the wilderness is an already-vanishing place. As Cooper demonstrates in The Pioneers, published a few years earlier, the frontier recedes ever westward.

32  I should note, however, that Alice and Heyward’s progeny survive; as Rans has noted, the hero of The Prairie is their descendant. 33   Cora’s mother’s wealth enables Alice’s marriage; Cora’s mother’s race prevents Cora from marrying Duncan.

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In The Pioneers Cooper selects an outspoken and wealthy heroine to create a new and uniquely American aristocracy that resolves, however superficially, America’s tenuous position as former colonial subject and nascent colonial power. However, Louisa’s experiences of poverty and hardship, when contrasted with the luxuriant excess of Judge Temple’s house, suggests a correlation between financial security and sensibility. Bess’s bravery is, quite literally, a luxury she can afford. In contrast, as the sole surviving child of Reverend Grant, Louisa has witnessed the price of temerity and her father cannot afford to lose her assistance. Bess’s plans for Louisa, in tandem with the exile of Natty and the death of Indian John, attempt to remove the threat that suffering poses to the national romance by literally exiling the suffering body from the nation. The spectacle of the suffering body is a key trigger of sensibility: demonstrating sympathy for the suffering other confirms the sensibility of the observer. Cooper’s novels problematize the deployment of sensibility by noting that sensibility erases the very body that calls it into being. The Last of the Mohicans utilizes Alice’s sensibility as an expression of a stereotypically feminine weakness that also turns away from the problem of race, even as Cora’s funeral memorializes the lost alternatives of race, nationhood, and sense she embodied. By introducing the heroine of sensibility as the emblematic American girl in The Pioneers, Cooper exploits her ideological power to exile competing national identities, including that of the secondary heroine. In these texts, the sensibility of the primary heroines masks the structures of wealth that enable sensibility at the expense of the suffering body of the secondary heroine.

Chapter 4

Magawisca’s Missing Arm: Absence and Replacement in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie The secondary heroines of Ivanhoe and The Last of the Mohicans, as discussed in the previous chapters, are so central to the questions of national identity raised in each novel that they often overshadow the more conventional primary heroines. Early reviewers and critics alike ignored Rowena and Alice, but extolled the virtues of Rebecca and Cora. These racially marked heroines are central to each novel’s inquiry into nationalism. Like Ivanhoe and The Last of the Mohicans, Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) features a secondary heroine who is racially marked, and whose race is a source of concern in the novel. Working within the tradition of historical romance established by Scott and Cooper, Sedgwick depicts the effect of nation-building on racialized identities written into history and simultaneously excluded from the genealogy of the new nation. Like Rebecca and Cora, Magawisca is removed from the romance plot near the conclusion of    For an example of the praise lavished on Rebecca, see Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s “Female Portrait Gallery” of heroines from Scott’s novels, collected in Blanchard’s Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L.: “The character of Rebecca stands pre-eminent among Scott’s finest conceptions.” Also, the Eclectic Review: “[Ivanhoe’s] attendant is a lovely Jewess, the magnanimous heroine of the tale, upon the delineation of whose character, the Author has bestowed his very best efforts” (qtd in Scott: The Critical Heritage 194).    Cagidemetrio suggests: “Race [in Scott] is a concept of descent” (16). Cagidemetrio is invested in opposing this concept of race (allied to the Saxon Norman conflict) with the conflict between “Jews and Gentiles” (18). Instead, I will follow Scott’s and Sedgwick’s slippery use of “race” in this chapter. Ezra Tawil’s discussion of “race” as a term in the nineteenth century is helpful: “During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, a period wedged, so to speak, between the waning authority of eighteenth-century natural science and the racial biology yet to emerge into dominance, ‘race’ had various meanings. It could refer simply to groups of kin such as families or extended kinship networks, or, by extension, to larger social units such as tribes or nations. But rarely during this period was race used to refer to types of men as defined by essential or permanent attributes – a sense, of course, which the word would acquire by mid-century” (115).    See, for example, an anonymous review of Hope Leslie in the April 1828 edition of The North American Review: “Possible or impossible, she is a glorious creature, and even if we had no right to her creation, we welcome her to our heart of hearts” (“Hope Leslie” 418).

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the novel to enable the marriage of the heroine and hero and the consolidation of Anglo-American identity. However, while Scott and Cooper present the primary heroines, Rowena and Alice, as poor substitutes for Rebecca and Cora, Sedgwick replaces the Native American Magawisca with an appealing primary heroine, the Anglo-American Hope. Hope literally takes Magawisca’s place: in the Fletcher household, in Everell’s heart, and as the rebel/critic of British–American Puritan society. Sedgwick removes the problem of race by transposing the virtues of the “Vanishing American” to the white heroine. The project of the historical romance in America is not a return to order and Englishness, as we saw in Scott, but rather the construction of a new order and an American identity. Cooper’s The Pioneers interrogates various modes of government in post-Revolution America, while The Last of the Mohicans anticipates the American Revolution by concluding with the marriage of a weak heroine and incompetent hero as the representatives of British–American identity. Like The Last of the Mohicans, Hope Leslie is also set prior to the American Revolution. Sedgwick narrates the usurpation of America by the settlers, who are both no longer English and not yet American. Although the colonists still refer to themselves as “English,” the conflict between King and Parliament, in which the colonies side with Parliament, foreshadows the American Revolution. The larger political question of rebellion against authority is mirrored by the rebellious independence of Hope Leslie. Hope anticipates American identity, but Sedgwick’s novel confronts the historical alternatives: fidelity to the English crown or assimilation with indigenous communities. Thus Sedgwick understands that the problem faced by American historical romance is twofold: how to construct an American history or usable past, and how to cope with the displacement of the original Americans. Sedgwick’s romance of national origins must reconcile what her nineteenth-century readers would recognize as two very disparate national identities (Native American and English) into a new American identity. Because Sedgwick’s novel is set prior to the American Revolution, her heroine must – and Hope does – anticipate the American Revolution through acts of virtuous rebellion. Located historically just as the colonies are beginning to thrive, but before the Revolutionary War, Hope and Everell embody a rebellious virtue that will make revolution possible and right. Hope’s arrival in America redeems her mother Alice’s failed attempt to escape England and foreshadows her marriage to Everell, which will in turn replace or complete the courtship of Alice and William, Everell’s father, and establish a new American aristocracy. The Gothic narrative of Alice’s escape from her family, and her recapture, is replaced by the romance of Hope and Everell’s long attachment, which is not impeded by tyrannous parents, but rather by their own desires to do good works. Sedgwick suggests a genealogical model here: Alice’s daughter and William’s son are more perfect rebels than their parents,    Also, Sir Phillip Gardiner, Alice Leslie’s father, and Uncle Stretton are all figured as dangerous characters. The good English, it is implied, exiled themselves to America.

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and their descendants will participate in an even larger and more radical rebellion, the American Revolution. Hope and Everell’s union both emblematizes a conclusion of the long-deferred romance plot of Alice and William, and consolidates the nation under the auspices of a couple who are always ready to rebel against order in favor of right: a protorevolutionary family. As Baym has argued, Sedgwick’s project feminizes Scott by creating a central female character who “had to be imagined as participating more directly in historical events than as somebody’s girlfriend,” which Sedgwick does by “making her act to preserve or forward some historical trend that was only embryonic in her own time … the cultural refinement of America, which preserved the good aspects of aristocracy” (American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 155). Baym’s reading is an appealing account of Hope Leslie’s transatlantic experiences. However, by focusing solely on Hope, Baym ignores the alternative potential solutions to the problem posed by the secondary heroines of the text. She dismisses Magawisca by limiting her role to the political arena of the novel; Magawisca’s “intransigent resistance to conciliatory white overtures” (American 158) are read as Magawisca accounts for them in her trial, and later in her conversation with Hope and Everell: “… the Indian and the white man can no more mingle, and become one, than day and night” (349). When placed next to Rebecca’s struggle between personal desire and social duty (and the parallel struggle she occasions in Ivanhoe), Magawisca’s mirror answers at the trial and to Hope and Everell seem suspect because Magawisca and Everell have a deeper connection than critics have allowed. Despite our narrator’s insistence that Magawisca does not hesitate in her reply, her parting request for the miniature portrait of Everell reminds us of Magawisca’s private affection, which she has sublimated in favor of her obligations to her tribe. Magawisca’s return to her tribe and Hope’s return to the Fletchers are each described in terms of genealogy: Hope’s return resolves the separation of William and Alice; Magawisca returns to take her father’s place as chief. However, Sedgwick also posits an alternative to genealogical constructs of nationhood in the contented spinsterhood of Esther Downing, who spends her days performing acts of disinterested kindness reminiscent of Rebecca’s. Thus, Sedgwick splits the secondary heroine into two figures: the native Magawisca who at the beginning of 

  Judith Fetterley has argued that the novel imagines “Republican sisterhood” in place of Republican motherhood; Everell and Hope’s brother–sister relationship ensures that Hope has a voice in the new republic. Fetterley focuses on the possibility of sisterhood between Hope and Magawisca and Hope’s real sister, Faith, dismissing Rosa and Esther as “the ‘English’ twins” (“My Sister! My Sister!” 78). See also Ivy Schweitzer’s Perfecting Friendshp for a reading of sisterhood in the novel.    However improbable this may seem, Sedgwick repeatedly underscores Mononotto’s dependence on Magawisca. See, for example, “Magawisca had obtained an ascendency over her father’s mind by her extraordinary gifts and superior knowledge. He loved her as his child – he venerated her as an inspired being” (344).

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the novel is already part of a “vanishing” people – the Pequot War is Sedgwick’s 1066 – and the settler Esther, whose adherence to the letter of the law makes her unsuitable for Everell, who must marry a proto-revolutionary and thus protoAmerican wife. Hope and Everell’s marriage unites two rebellious youths in opposition to the rigid father figures that govern their community, and foreshadows the rebellion of the American colonies against British parental authority in the American Revolution. By splitting the secondary heroine in two, a racially marked heroine exiled by the national resolution and a white secondary heroine who returns to the nation, Sedgwick revises Scott and Cooper to incorporate the unmarried woman in the American body politic. Although Sedgwick’s novel concludes with marriage and stability, the text itself is a mess of competing narratives, heroines, epistemologies. As a way of preserving a distinction between the history represented in the novel and the “real history” of the nation, Sedgwick presents several competing narratives within her text: Magawisca’s history of the Pequot War is set against Digby’s; Rosa’s confession of her relationship with Sir Phillip Gardiner is contrasted with his attempts to disguise their connection; Faith’s silence becomes a stage for competing narrations by Oneco and Hope; Esther’s decision to remain unmarried is placed against Hope and Everell’s married life. These competing stories are not subsumed within Hope’s narrative, but rather remain external to her history as alternatives. Sedgwick’s narrative thus pulls against the resolution proffered in the conclusion. More than the male characters, the women of Hope Leslie embody alternative possibilities and dangers for the new nation. Faith, Rosa, Magawisca, Esther, and Hope each represent a possible model of femininity for the new nation (as well as for the new genre of historical romance and, more broadly, the novel). A sentimental parallel to the text’s competing national histories, the multiple romantic subplots perform cultural work in the novel. Sedgwick illustrates the potential dangers of romantic attachment in the narratives of Rosa and Faith in order to confirm a vision of America as an arena in which women may circulate in public unfettered by marriage. The subplot featuring Mary/Faith Leslie/“white bird” is emblematic of the dangerous possibility of “going native” – one of the legacies of the captivity narrative. Faith Leslie’s multiple names gesture to the confusion surrounding    A note on spelling: Pequot is currently considered correct, but Sedgwick spells the name “Pequod.” I will use Pequot for my comments, but preserve Sedgwick’s spelling in quotations from the novel.    The subplots of Rosa and Faith suggest that women’s identities are dangerously susceptible to construction by men: once seduced, Rosa disguises herself as a boy and Faith adopts Native American customs to such an extent that she cannot communicate with her sister.    The Faith Leslie plot has received a lot of critical attention for its revision of the captivity narrative. See, for example, Tawil’s “Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the

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her proper home: in England, she is Mary Leslie, daughter of Alice Leslie; in America, she joins the Fletcher household, is baptized within the Puritan church, and christened “Faith Leslie.” Sedgwick notes the proximity of Native and white communities by pairing Magawisca with Everell and Faith with Magawisca’s brother, Oneco. Just as Magawisca and Everell develop a bond, so too do Faith and Oneco. However, Magawisca and her brother have very different relationships with white culture: while Magawisca speaks fluent English, Oneco speaks little and amuses Faith, the “petted child,” with his “activity in ministering to her amusement” (20). Oneco in effect becomes Faith’s companion and protector; when the Fletcher home is attacked, she does not run to Everell’s side, but “sprang towards the Indian boy, and clung fast to him – and the children clustered about their mother” (65). Faith’s lack of home is made explicit here: she is not one of Mrs Fletcher’s children and so seeks protection from Oneco, her adopted family. Faith’s easy slip between white and Native families appears to limit the power of race to demarcate the nation: despite her race difference, Faith is welcomed as a Pequot. Faith’s return to her sister, and thus to her white blood relatives, underscores the profound power of nurture over “nature.” Removed from white communities at a young age, Faith has fully adopted Native American customs and language, as Magawisca warns Hope: “She and my brother are as if one life-chord bound them together; and besides, your sister cannot speak to you and understand you as I do. She was very young when she was taken where she has only heard the Indian tongue; some, you know, are like water, that retains no mark; and others, like the flinty rock, that never loses a mark” (200). Faith is like the “water” of Magawisca’s description and has adapted to her new home culture while apparently bearing “no mark” of the old. However, Magawisca proffers the possibility of transcultural connection by describing two elements of white culture that Faith retains as “white bird” (her Pequot name): the solemnity of marriage and Christianity. Sedgwick initially appears to forward Christianity as a potential transcultural and transatlantic bridge: Faith has retained her Christian faith through her remove from England to America, and from the white settlement to the tribe. Magawisca pushes this sentiment further by suggesting that any religion unites humanity: “… think ye not that the Great Spirit looks down on these sacred spots, where the good and the peaceful rest, with an equal eye; think ye not their children are His children, whether they are gathered in yonder temple where your people worship, or bow to Him beneath the green boughs of the forest?” (197). In this respect, Sedgwick echoes Cooper’s introduction of Christianity as a potential transatlantic bridge in The Pioneers. By the end of her meeting with Magawisca, Hope is persuaded at least of the connection linking white and Native through the side-by-side graves of Sentimental Heroine Became White.” Although Tawil’s reading is compelling, he does not address the other potential blurring of racial boundaries: the potential marriage between Everell and Magawisca. That the narrative is comfortable with a white woman, but not a white man, “going native” seems incredibly significant.

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her mother10 and Magawisca. Through her encounters with Faith, Hope becomes persuaded of the bond between Oneco and Faith and willingly resigns her blood claims to her sister in favor of Oneco’s claim as her legitimate husband, a marriage solemnized by both Pequot and Catholic rites. Thus, through Hope, Sedgwick offers an alternative narrative to white–Native relationships that bridges cultural differences through shared faith and kinship structures. While Sedgwick appears to be sympathetic to the relationship between Faith and Oneco, and even rewrites the “vacancy” in Faith’s eyes from a result of her captivity by the tribe to a result of her captivity by her family, her escape at the end of the novel closes the possibility of her functioning as a bridge between white and Native American communities. When Hope attempts to speak to her sister, Mary/ Faith/“white bird”’s reply, “No speak Yengees” (238), suggests the impossibility of her return to the settlement. Hope’s various attempts to persuade her sister are each fruitless, and at length Hope is reduced to mere bribery, which she defends by claiming: “I cannot help it, Magawisca; I am driven to try every way to win back my sister” (240). Ultimately, Hope is unsuccessful and Faith only returns through a concatenation of circumstances, namely Mononotto’s injury and the arrival of the Governor’s guards. Once returned to her family, Faith is listless, and Dame Grafton (far from a sympathetic character) attempts to win her over by the same means Hope attempted: jewels and dress. Hope’s response, “Well, my dear aunt, why not indulge her for the present? I suppose she has the feeling of the natives, who seem to have an almost superstitious attachment to that oriental costume” (280), shows how much Hope has acknowledged Faith’s attachment to Pequot customs. Once Faith escapes with Oneco, the narrator informs the reader: There had been nothing in the intercourse of the sisters to excite Hope’s affections. Faith had been spiritless, woe-begone – a soulless body – and had repelled, with sullen indifference, all Hope’s efforts to win her love. Indeed, she looked upon the attentions of her English friends but as a continuation of the unjust force by which they had severed her from all she held dear. Her marriage, solemnized as it had been by prescribed Christian rites, would probably have been considered by her guardian, and his friends, as invalidated by her extreme youth, and the circumstances which had led to the union. But Hope took a more youthful, romantic, and, perhaps, natural view of the affair; and the suggestions of Magawisca, combining with the dictates of her own heart, produced the conclusion that this was a case where “God had joined together, and man might not put asunder.” (359)

The narrator’s emphasis on the “natural” character of Hope’s perspective devalues the authority of guardians and friends in favor of hers and Faith’s idea of justice and religion. While the white community considers Faith’s marriage illegal and her religion blasphemous, Hope and Faith consider the marriage legitimate (perhaps 10

  Presumably she uses this term to refer to Mrs Fletcher.

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doubly so, as it is solemnized by both Christian and Pequot rites), and Faith’s Catholic faith as a vestige of her mother’s Christian teachings that links her to her sister and to white communities. However, the circumstances of Faith’s marriage and the continuing enmity between white and Native communities (at least in part occasioned by Faith’s “captivity”) prevent readers from imagining marriage as a solution to the conflicts between white and Native communities. In contrast, Rosalin/Rosa’s narrative undoes certain romantic expectations embodied in Sir Phillip Gardiner, himself a stand-in for dangerous Englishness and chivalric romance. Sir Phillip is repeatedly linked with England, and with the English court: he reminds readers that Hope, too, is originally named Alice Leslie, “daughter and sole heir of Sir Walter Leslie, who you may remember was noted for his gallantry in that mad expedition of Buckingham to the Isle of Rhée” (208). Hope’s father’s position in the royal court is never fully divulged, but Sir Phillip imagines it “a worthy act to tear this scion of a loyal stock from these crabs of the wilderness, and set her in our garden of England?” (208). However, Rosa’s plight warns readers, as Rosa herself warns Hope, of the dangers of chivalric romance: “Promise me you will not love my master. Do not believe him, though he pledge the word of a true knight always to love you; – though he swear it on the holy crucifix, do not believe it!” (176). The word of a “true knight” and an oath taken on a crucifix are equally suspect to the Puritan community of Sedgwick’s novel; these are the blasphemous excesses of an earlier age. Catholicism and chivalry are each associated with dangerous Englishness that the Puritans hoped to leave behind in their voyage to the New World. They are each also common features of Gothic fiction, which displaces its indictment of English aristocracy into a foreign past. Rosa’s plight has eerie resonances with Gothic fiction and, like Gothic fiction, offers a critique of the English aristocracy. The illegitimate daughter of an English nobleman and a French actress, Rosa’s mother dies and leaves Rosa at a convent. On his deathbed, her father asks his sister to take care of her. Lady Lunsford treats Rosa cruelly, and never acknowledges their relationship; she also allows Sir Phillip to seduce her charge. The father who seduces a French actress, but does not marry her, and the cruel sister who is more concerned with “the world” than with protecting an innocent girl – each points to the moral excesses of England that Puritan British America seeks to correct. Although Rosa’s story is tragic, she herself is complicit in her continuing bondage: despite numerous opportunities to do so, she will not accept help or leave Sir Phillip. When Hope points out the folly of her continuing devotion to Sir Phillip, Rosa retorts: “I never knew a mother’s smile, lady, nor felt her tears. I never heard a father’s voice; and do you think it so very strange that I should cling to him who was the first, the only one that ever loved me?” (256). Like Faith, Rosa’s lack of family and home renders her vulnerable. In desperate need of affection, she follows Sir Phillip to America, dresses as a boy, and serves as his page. Unlike Faith, however, Rosa has not found an adopted family in Sir Phillip: his chivalry, like so much else he professes, is false. Despite Sir Phillip’s falseness, Rosa remains profoundly attached to him, and plans to exact revenge

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on any who supplant her, including Hope: “… when I saw Sir Phillip hand you into that boat, and saw you sail away with him over the bright water so gay and laughing, I could have plunged this dagger into your bosom; and I made a solemn vow that you should not live to take the place of honour beside my master, while I was cast away a worthless thing” (257). Rosa’s language reveals her belief in the chivalric code: her “vow” and Rosa’s conception of “the place of honour” as opposed to the “worthless” are all informed by chivalry. In one of the most striking passages in the novel, Rosa, Sir Phillip, and Hope all fall victim to Rosa (or so the reader initially believes). Confronted by Sir Phillip’s plans to supplant her with Hope, and to position her as Hope’s servant, Rosa refuses: “Rosa made one desperate leap forward, and shrieking, ‘it cannot be worse for any of us!’ threw the lamp into the barrel. The explosion was instantaneous – the hapless, pitiable girl – her guilty destroyer – his victim – the crew – the vessel, rent to fragments, were hurled into the air, and soon engulfed in the waves” (342). Although the narrator’s description encourages sympathy for Rosa, as the “hapless, pitiable girl,” the narrator also recounts the cost of her actions in the manifest of dead bodies and destroyed property. While Sir Phillip may manipulate the chivalric code and his religious faith to achieve his political ends, women who believe in the chivalric code – allied in the novel with the English aristocracy – find only unhappiness, and in this case, death. Esther and Magawisca certainly play a larger role in the novel than either Faith or Rosa, but they are also secondary heroines because they rightly identify the merit of the hero, Everell Fletcher. They are each a potential mate for him, and each embody very different directions for the historical romance.11 For both Esther and Magawisca, the conflict between personal desire and public duty informs their relationship to Everell. Magawisca’s departure conforms to the historical exile of Native Americans from the colonies; by writing this exile as a choice, Sedgwick emphasizes the choice of duty over desire. Esther’s temporary exile to England is significantly more complicated: as a white woman, there is certainly no obvious reason why she couldn’t have married Everell; in fact, her guardian forwards the match. Esther chooses obedience to the higher authorities of God and the law over her attraction to Everell. Both secondary heroines value an organizing public authority over private desire, but Magawisca’s race identity, in keeping with the literary tradition of the Vanishing American and the separatist politics on both sides of the Pequot War, cannot be incorporated into the newly consolidated American identity represented in the novel’s conclusion. In contrast, Esther’s obedience to authority is recast as a devotion to the public good that requires she remain single so as not to “[g]ive to a party what was meant for mankind” (371). Esther’s return to the United States and her decision to remain single despite multiple offers of  Despite readings that locate Hope Leslie at the crossroads between domestic and frontier fiction (Tawil, etc.), I use the term historical romance to situate Sedgwick within both British and American traditions, particularly Scott. One similarity worth noting here is that Rebecca and Rowena both recognize the virtue of the hero, Ivanhoe. 11

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marriage echo Cooper’s portrait of Louisa Grant in The Pioneers. Unlike Louisa, however, Esther returns to her home community. In Esther, therefore, Sedgwick rewrites Scott and Cooper to ensure that disinterested kindness is not solely located in the vanishing indigenous or in exile, but remains in the American colonies. However, Hope and Esther do not appear until the middle of the novel; readers are first introduced to Magawisca: the arrival of the white heroines works to literally displace their indigenous precursor. In the opening pages of the first chapter, Magawisca’s introduction to the Fletcher family establishes her merit and encourages the reader to concur with Mr Fletcher and Everell’s acceptance of her, rather than with Jennet or Mrs Fletcher’s slurs. Fletcher chastens his wife for her prejudice and praises Magawisca’s intellect: “You surely do not doubt, Martha, that these Indians possess the same faculties that we do. The girl, just arrived, our friend writes me, hath rare gifts of mind – such as few of God’s creatures are endowed with” (20). Magawisca’s intellect, as well as her command of English, enables her to circulate in the public sphere as an interpreter, but despite her ability to navigate both Native and English cultures, Magawisca’s identity is firmly located by her status as the daughter of the chief. Within the narrative, Magawisca’s lineage, intellect, beauty, and the “low thrilling tone” of her voice enable characters to overcome their initial race-based prejudices (77). However, despite Magawisca’s exceptional qualities, Sedgwick insists on making her and Everell representative of Native American and white settler communities: “She and her conductor were no unfit representatives of the people from whom they sprung” (22). Sedgwick’s emphasis on Magawisca’s and Everell’s representativeness confirms their role as allegories for their communities: if their relationship thrives, so too will the relationship between white and Native communities. In similar fashion, Magawisca’s beauty is transformed from an exceptional quality to an indicator that marks her as representative of her race: “… it was an expression of dignity, thoughtfulness, and deep dejection that made the eye linger on Magawisca’s face, as if it were perusing there a legible record of her birth and wrongs” (23). Her birth, in other words, that she is born a Native American, is the source of the wrongs done to her. Her legible face, especially in one so young, suggests a collective, rather than a personal history. Her face is legible because it is Native American, not because it is hers.12 When considered on the more abstract levels of race and nation, Magawisca and Everell’s attachment threatens the stability of both categories. Magawisca is torn between her affection for Everell and her responsibility to her family. Magawisca’s relationship with her family is obviously personal, but it also fits into the larger categories of tribe and race. We later learn that her father expects her to become involved in the tribe’s politics, while resigning her brother to the 12

  One might contrast Magawisca’s “legible” face with the gaze Rebecca’s body is subject to in Ivanhoe. While Sedgwick wants to be able to read a Native American history in Magawisca, Rebecca is read as a woman, despite her Jewish race. However, like Rebecca, Magawisca is torn between personal attachment and national duty.

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domestic: “Oneco’s volatile unimpressive character was unfit for his purpose, and he permitted him … to hunt and fish for his ‘white bird,’ as he called the little Leslie. But Magawisca was the constant companion of her father; … Her tenderness for Everell, and her grateful recollections of his lovely mother, she determined to sacrifice on the altar of national duty” (203). Magawisca’s relationship with Everell is a purely personal tie: they are not kin, nor are they truly members of the same community. Although Magawisca eventually determines to choose public duty over private affection, her divided loyalties are illustrated in two early scenes: Mrs Fletcher’s letter to her husband, which uncovers Magawisca’s attachment to Everell, and Magawisca’s account of the Pequot War, which rewrites the history that Everell and presumably Sedgwick’s readers are familiar with. The first, Mrs Fletcher’s letter to her husband, reveals that she suspects an attachment: No – my heart yearneth towards this poor heathen orphan-girl; and when I see her, in his absence, starting at every sound, and her restless eye turning an asking glance at every opening of the door; every movement betokening a disquieted spirit, and then the sweet contentment that stealeth over her face when he appeareth; – oh, my honored husband! all my woman’s nature feeleth for her – not for any present evil, but for what may betitde. (33)

Mrs Fletcher’s empathy with Magawisca as a woman overshadows her anxiety about the attachment – an attachment that would not be sanctioned by their colonial community. Mrs Fletcher thus stresses private friendships over public prejudices. That this account is conveyed in a private letter to her husband is also significant, especially when contrasted with Magawisca’s alternative history of the Pequot War, recited out loud as a corrective to the colonial version recited by Digby. Phillip Gould has admirably contextualized Magawisca’s account of the Pequot War within competing nineteenth-century accounts. He argues: Despite Sedgwick’s apparent efforts to bestow full authority on Magawisca, the text of Hope Leslie resists this impulse and argues instead for historical relativism. Sedgwick’s rendition of the war is, indeed, just what she dubs Magawisca’s narrative, a “recital,” or performance, of history, and one which was in competition with other such performances during the time of the early republic. (644)

This very competition is, of course, rehearsed within Sedgwick’s text: while Magawisca’s history focuses on the personal suffering of the Pequot, it is also a narration of a historical event (told by the conquered) that she contrasts with Everell’s history (told by conquerors). Thus Magawisca’s narrative is both a private account of her family’s experiences and an attempt to enter the public record by challenging the white account of the Pequot War. Magawisca hopes that her retelling of the Pequot War will, quite literally, change history. Or, rather, she hopes that sharing her experiences with Everell will restore an untold history to the chronicle, which it

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does, through the medium of Sedgwick’s text: “… he had heard [stories about the Pequot War] in the language of the enemies and conquerors of the Pequods; and from Magawisca’s lips they took a new form and hue; she seemed, to him, to embody nature’s best gifts, and her feelings to be the inspiration of heaven” (55). This history is also intended to justify her allegiance to her family, but Magawisca’s account of national history, to Everell, only increases her value as an individual. Unable to reconcile public opinion and personal belief, Everell misses the connection between Magawisca’s personal experience and the larger politics of her narrative, and thus fails to comprehend the warning implicit in her tale. Magawisca’s nationalist and familial obligations prevent her from directly warning the Fletchers, but she does intercede for them and thus challenges the race prejudices of both Native and white communities.13 In the scene that foreshadows her later dismemberment, Magawisca steps between an attacking warrior and Everell: “The warrior’s obdurate heart untouched by the sight of the helpless mother and her little ones, was thrilled by the courage of the heroic girl – he paused and grimly smiled on her” (66). This heroic deed gains esteem from both Native Americans and whites, underscoring that it is only Magawisca’s race that prevents an attachment with Everell. In a later conversation with Digby, Everell argues that even that obstacle would not have been important: “… you do me honor, by implying that I rightly estimated that noble creature; and before she had done the heroic deed, to which I owe my life – Yes, Digby, I might have loved her – might have forgotten that nature had put barriers between us” (224). That Everell could only love “that noble creature” by “forgetting” the barriers of “nature” is problematic because it renders a natural human attraction unnatural. But Everell’s words negatively imply that it is Magawisca’s “heroic deed” that both makes her worthy of his notice and renders their relationship impossible. Magawisca’s “heroic deed” saves Everell’s life, but enables his escape. Although Magawisca and Everell are later reunited, Magawisca’s dismemberment creates another barrier, placed by “nature” between her and Everell, which I will discuss later in this chapter. At present, however, Digby’s response to Everell’s statement reminds readers of the constraints of this historical romance: I don’t know but you might [have loved Magawisca], Mr. Everell, but I don’t believe that you would; things would naturally have taken another course after Miss Hope came among us; and many a time, I thought it was well it was as it 13

  Although the term “nation” is difficult to apply to Native American tribes of 1640, I describe Magawisca’s obligations as “nationalist” because of her tribe’s role in the Pequot War. Magawisca and the tribe resist the establishment of the Anglo-American nation in racialized terms – the Indian and the white man – but the separation of Indian from white man is important to the construction of American national identity. The story of Mary raises the possibility that Indian and white man could, in fact, “mingle,” but Sedgwick is careful to reveal to Hope, and to the reader, that Mary has fully embraced her Native American identity, to the point that she and Hope cannot communicate.

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“All is as it should be” in the narrative’s predictable march to the union of Hope and Everell, the union that, as I have argued above, is necessary to the novel’s historical project. However, Digby’s sympathy for Magawisca undermines his claim that Everell’s affection for Hope is inevitable and natural, and gestures towards Sedgwick’s maneuvering. Magawisca leaves Springfield before Hope arrives; she never does suffer the “eclipse” Digby narrates, but her physical suffering is excessive and points to the work the novel does to render a romantic attachment between Magawisca and Everell unnatural. In the dismemberment scene, Magawisca privileges her personal connection to Everell over her political affiliation to her tribe, and is repeatedly physically punished for doing so. Magawisca’s dismemberment works both to confirm her heroism and remove her from the plot of the novel. After several attempts to help Everell escape, Magawisca is imprisoned in a separate tent. She does not leave Everell without a struggle, and it is one that affects him deeply: “… when the mat dropped over the entrance and separated him from the generous creature, whose heart had kept true time with his through all his griefs, who he knew would have redeemed his life with her own, he yielded to a burst of natural and not unmanly tears” (91). Sedgwick’s anxious presentation of Everell’s tears underscores the depth of his attachment to Magawisca, and such an attachment is a necessary recompense for what she is about to go through for him. Magawisca’s first injury is the scalding of her hand as she drugs the guards. This prefigures the dismemberment and establishes Magawisca’s ability to transcend human pain in service of those she loves. The dismemberment is, indeed, accidental, but Magawisca’s ability to quickly transform it from a tragic accident into an occasion to save Everell marks her power within the tribe: “Stand back!” cried Magawisca. “I have bought his life with my own. Fly, Everell – nay, speak not, but fly – thither – to the east!” she cried, more vehemently. Everell’s faculties were paralyzed by a rapid succession of violent emotions. He was conscious only of a feeling of mingled gratitude and admiration for his preserver. He stood motionless, gazing on her. “I die in vain then,” she cried, in an accent of such despair, that he was roused. He threw his arms around her, and pressed her to his heart, as he would a sister that had redeemed his life with her own, and then tearing himself from her, he disappeared. No one offered to follow him. The voice of nature rose from every heart, and responding to the justice of Magawisca’s claim, bade him “God speed!” To all it seemed that his deliverance had been achieved by miraculous aid. All – the dullest and coldest, paid involuntary homage to the heroic girl, as if she were a superior being, guided and upheld by supernatural power. (97)

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Magawisca’s management of this scene is striking: she is able simultaneously to persuade the tribe to accept her claim and honor her sacrifice, while rousing Everell to action and giving him directions. But I also want to call attention to Sedgwick’s anxiety here: Everell thanks Magawisca, “as he would a sister.” Gustavus Stadler accepts Sedgwick’s assertion that Magawisca is a “surrogate sister” to Everell, and so must read her amputation as “the mark of her loyalty to the sympathetic bonds offered in the proto-antebellum-domestic-space of the Fletcher household” (46). However, as I will demonstrate later in this chapter, Magawisca consistently describes her amputation as a sacrifice she makes for Everell, not out of loyalty to the Fletchers and thus to the white community. While Sedgwick is willing to attribute Magawisca’s action to a “generous love,” she deflates the erotic possibilities of this scene until Hope is introduced and they are no longer threatening. The erotic possibilities are nonetheless present and threatening to both white and Native communities: before Magawisca’s dismemberment, she attempts to persuade her father to release Everell. Her father’s response is telling: “Why hast thou linked thy heart, foolish girl, to this English boy?” (87–8). Magawisca confirms her father’s assessment of her heart by describing the “scorching fire” (91) in her head, an image Sedgwick will later revisit to describe Rosa: “then she groaned aloud, and pressed her hand upon her head as if it were bursting” (342). For both Magawisca and Rosa, these headaches signify the strain of reconciling competing desires: Rosa cannot reconcile her competing allegiances to Sir Phillip and Hope; Magawisca cannot resolve her love for Everell with her loyalty to her father. In each case, catastrophe ensues, as Rosa kills herself and her shipmates, while Magawisca sacrifices her arm for Everell’s life. By substituting the “true time” of their hearts that Everell describes prior to Magawisca’s dismemberment with his embrace of her “as he would a sister,” Sedgwick is able to replace Magawisca with Hope. By rending Everell from Magawisca at the moment of Hope’s expected arrival, the novel prevents Everell from having to choose between Magawisca and Hope. Sedgwick jumps from Magawisca’s heroic sacrifice to Hope’s chatty letter to an absent Everell. The disjunction between Magawisca’s “lopped quivering member” (97) and the happy prattle of Hope’s letter is startling. Indeed, the reader should be startled by Magawisca’s dramatic absence and Hope’s sudden presence. Sedgwick’s tactic is a photonegative of Scott’s narrative strategy in Ivanhoe, later picked up by Cooper in The Last of the Mohicans.14 Scott reveals Rebecca’s agency repeatedly in Ivanhoe by juxtaposing her agency with Rowena’s passivity; Cooper also contrasts Cora with her ever-swooning sister, Alice. Like Scott and Cooper, Sedgwick presents the racially othered Magawisca’s agency first, but disrupts it by supplanting her with the equally capable Hope. This substitution is puzzling until Sedgwick reveals, through Hope’s letter, that she has created a second, but white, 14   Sedgwick’s novel, published one year after The Last of the Mohicans, has often been read as a response to and critique of that novel.

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Magawisca in Hope. Any further anxiety over the reader’s possible preference for Magawisca is allayed in Hope’s letter: “I repeated what I had often heard you, Everell, say, that Magawisca believed the mountain, and the valley, the air, the trees, every little rivulet, had their present invisible spirit and that the good might hold discourse with them. ‘Why not believe the one,’ I asked, ‘as well as the other?’” (111). Hope possesses the virtues of a Magawisca without the baggage of a racially othered identity. In the years that have passed since the opening pages of the novel, the relationship between white man and Native American, conqueror and conquered, has become more stable; the novel now turns to the internal problems of nationhood. What will an American girl look like? Esther and Hope are placed side by side at the moment of Everell’s homecoming. In order to build suspense for the reunion scene, Sedgwick initially refrains from naming her characters: “You say it’s edifying, and all that,” said the shortest of the two young ladies, in reply to what seemed, from the tone in which it was concluded, to have been an expostulation; “and I dare say, dear Esther, you are quite right, for you are as wise as Solomon, and always in the right; but for my part, I confess, I had infinitely rather be at home drying marigolds, and matching embroidery silks for aunt Grafton.” “Hope Leslie! by Heaven!” exclaimed the young man, springing forward. The young lady turned at the sound of her name, uttered a scream of joy, and under the impulse of strong affection and sudden delight, threw her arms around the stranger’s neck, and was folded in the embrace of Everell Fletcher. (135)

Until Everell names “Hope Leslie,” the reader is presented with the contrast between a “wise” young woman, interested in education, and a short, impetuous girl who prefers the considerably more superficial and domestic tasks of drying flowers and matching silks. This description is hardly fair to Hope, whose predilection for outdoor adventures and disobedience is very different from the domestic ennui here presented, nor is it an entirely accurate image of Esther, whose consistent adherence to the letter of the law is more rigid than Hope suggests. The effect of this introduction is to set up, in the scenes that follow, the possibility of a romantic attachment between Everell and Esther, and to confirm Esther as a potential model for American femininity. What we know of Esther appears to favor such a reading: her family is the prominent friend of the Governor, and she is considered a model woman in the neighborhood. While Magawisca and Hope are each permitted to narrate their own histories (Hope, in her letter to Everell; Magawisca, in her oral account of the Pequot wars), Esther’s inability to speak for herself and the dismissive language of the narrator create distance between the reader and character: we learn not to trust her narrative, or narratives like it – the conventional romance plots of popular fiction: “Miss Downing then proceeded to relate some of the following particulars; but as her narrative was confused by her emotions, and as it is necessary our readers

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should, for the sake of its illustration, be possessed of some circumstances which were omitted by her, we here give it, more distinctly, in our own language” (140). Esther does not die from unrequited affection, but only nears death because of the burden of fantasy, a fantasy that is private and not in service of the national good. The reader discovers that Everell stayed with Esther’s family while they were both in England, and that she falls in love with him. Esther’s affection for Everell appears to her as a “sinful dream” that she cannot successfully restrain “in manifest subservience to religious devotion” (143) in accordance with the strictures of her Puritan faith. The tension between religious devotion and her unrequited affection for Everell results in a severe illness. Delirious with fever, she confesses her feelings to Everell and expects to be “translated to a more congenial sphere” (144). However, once Esther has divulged her feelings, she lives to suffer under them. By allowing readers to witness Esther’s suffering, Sedgwick encourages a reconsideration of the value placed on romantic attachments. Esther imagines (and extensively fantasizes about) an attachment between herself and Everell, and as a result neglects her religious and social duties – almost to the point of death. In contrast, Hope is entirely ignorant of her own feelings for Everell, but acts in what she perceives to be the interests of her friends and thus of the public good. Indeed, Hope’s initial attempt to mediate an attachment between Everell and Esther is entirely in keeping with the desires of the Puritan elders. However, Hope’s effort requires her to use the language of courtly love, language she borrows from Scott and chivalric romance: “‘Esther,’ she said, ‘Everell shall not be our knight at tilt or tournament, if he cannot use the lance your uncle has dropped at his feet. Are there not always, Everell, in your heart, arguments of love unfeigned, when you drink to the health of a fair lady?’” (156). The only other character to speak in such terms is Sir Phillip Gardiner, whose meditations on Hope and Esther are also of a decidedly chivalric character: “[W]ould it not be a knightly feat to win the prize against a young gallant, a pink of courtesy, while the unfledged boy is dreaming of love’s elysium? … Besides, the helpmate selected by these Judges of Israel, for the good youth might be, if she were a little less saint and more woman, a queen of love and beauty” (208–11). Sedgwick often refers to Sir Phillip as “the knight,” and these knightly sentiments owe a particular debt to Ivanhoe, where the competition for the Queen of Love and Beauty juxtaposed Rebecca and Rowena.15 But in borrowing these terms, Sedgwick is differentiating her historical romance from its predecessor. By displacing the rhetoric of chivalry onto Sir Phillip, already suspect as an English Catholic, Sedgwick educates the reader into a suspicion of historical romance that is not connected explicitly to a historical reality: Sir Phillip’s chivalry does not belong in America in 1640. He is, of course, a false knave in many other ways as well, as his treatment of Rosa demonstrates; Hope’s appropriation of these courtly terms underscores the falseness of her desire to unite Everell and Esther. On the opposite extreme, 15   For another reading of Sedgwick’s use of Scott that focuses on Sir Phillip Gardiner, see Clare Simmons’s article, “Hope Leslie, Marmion, and the Displacement of Romance.”

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Mr Downing’s plan to marry Hope and Everell off to parties who he imagines will tame their rebellious natures (namely, Sir Phillip and Esther) is equally false. Downing and Winthrop’s misjudgment of Sir Phillip echoes their misjudgment of Everell. The specious presentation of Downing’s argument in a letter to Governor Winthrop belies the covert logic of his argument: wealth and power. In marrying Hope, Everell would have access to her fortune, which would give Everell power. Wealthy and rebellious, a united Hope and Everell might work in opposition to the Downings. The Downings’ power in the community rests in the valuation of Esther’s spiritual graces: Esther’s gentle piety will subdue Everell’s critique of Puritanism and he will not have the resources to contest his father-in-law’s authority. By marrying Hope’s money to a (purportedly) pious Sir Phillip, Hope’s finances are at the service of the church. Where Downing’s and Winthrop’s efforts might have failed, Hope does succeed in arranging Esther and Everell’s engagement. Sedgwick attempts to assign the blame to Hope’s nature: “Thus had Hope Leslie, by rashly following her first generous impulses, by giving to ‘an unproportioned thought its act’ effected that, which the avowed tenderness of Miss Downing, the united instances of Mr Fletcher and Governor Winthrop, and the whole colony and world beside, could never have achieved” (225). This may seem to be another proof of Hope’s uncanny personal powers of persuasion, or a critique of Hope’s lawless impetuosity, but Everell only considers marrying Esther because of Hope’s coolness to him. Hope’s behavior is a result of the reappearance of Magawisca, who requires Hope to keep a secret: Utterly engrossed in one object, [Hope] never reflected that there had been any thing in her conduct to excite Everell’s distrust; and feeling more than ever, the want of that sympathy and undisguised affection which she had always received from him, she was hurt at his altered conduct; and her manner insensibly conforming to the coldness and constraint of his, he naturally concluded that she designed to repel him, and he would turn from her, to repose in the calm and twilight quiet that was shed about the gentle Esther, whom he knew to be pure, disinterested, humble and devoted. (216)

It is Hope’s secret, not her rash action, which drives a wedge between Hope and Everell and encourages his attention to Esther. Everell’s decision to “repose” in Esther will not do for the national romance, and is related to why Esther will not do for a national heroine: she is too obedient to function as a proto-revolutionary, as Everell will discover. Like Magawisca, Esther chastens her affection in order to devote herself to the larger public good: She illustrated a truth, which, if more generally received by her sex, might save a vast deal of misery: the marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of a woman. Indeed, those who saw on how wide a sphere her kindness shone, how many were made better and happier by her disinterested

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devotion, might have rejoiced that she did not “Give to a party what was meant for mankind.” (370–71)

Esther’s useful gifts are contrasted with Magawisca’s inaccessible and vanishing happiness; Esther’s continued circulation in the colonies ensures that she will be a part of the new nation as an unmarried woman. By splitting the role of the secondary heroine in two, Sedgwick is able to recast spinsterhood as a positive choice, unattached to the racial logic that informs both Rebecca’s and Magawisca’s exile. Like Hope, Esther is beautiful, wealthy, and related to the Governor (as close to lineage as one gets in America). But Esther is also timid, meek, and obedient. Maria Karafilis has suggested: “Sedgwick deliberately contrasts Hope with Esther, the niece of Governor Winthrop, a ‘perpendicular’ young woman who embodies the precision, constraint, and lack of originality associated with Britain (and who, significantly, goes off to Britain for a period near the close of the novel), traits which often were presented as singularly unfitting for life in the new nation” (339). Whether this obedience is attributed to a British identity, as Karafilis claims, or to Esther’s devout Puritan faith, Esther’s unwillingness to disobey ultimately costs her Everell’s esteem.16 Esther’s language often conflates all forms of authority into heavenly authority; Hope, on the other hand, distinguishes between doing what is right and doing what you are told. Like Magawisca, Hope keeps numerous secrets so that she may act outside of the laws imposed by her community: Hope breaks curfew, frees prisoners, and keeps secret appointments in service of her own notion of justice. In this respect, Hope’s behavior reflects Magawisca’s, whose role in Everell’s escape requires that she disobey her father, the chief of her tribe, to conform to her own ideas of justice. As Judith Fetterley has suggested, Hope’s marriage to Everell appears to confirm that private desires are in service of, and perhaps equivalent to, the public good (“My Sister! My Sister!”). However, the secondary heroines privilege a community identity at the expense of personal desire and are valued for doing so: Magawisca’s return to her tribe is rewarded when she governs her tribe during Mononotto’s lunacy, and Esther’s decision to remain unmarried and in the service of mankind is valorized by the narrator. The deflated narration of Hope and Everell’s wedding and the narrator’s concluding paean to Esther’s disinterested

16

  Here I disagree with Fetterley’s reading of Esther as twinned with Rosa. Fetterley claims: “Both are women who accept male authority and see their own position as subordinate, who regard romance and religion as the main concerns of women, and who accept the separation of public and private, which entails their own confinement to the latter” (“My Sister! My Sister!” 78). Fetterley fails to account for the different forms of authority Rosa and Esther affirm and their different fates: Rosa is seduced by Sir Phillip and ultimately dies; Esther survives her romantic attachment to Everell and becomes a useful public citizen.

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kindness suggests that Sedgwick imagines the new citizens of the republic as those who privilege public good over private desire. Magawisca and Esther both value the ordering structures of government (whether that government is tribal or colonial) over disordering desire.17 Sedgwick must educate her characters, and also her readers, out of personal attachment and into national responsibility. For Magawisca, this education is in terms of external conflicting duties inherent in the state of the nation: which family should she choose – the Fletchers, or her tribe? For Esther, this education takes the form of an internal conflict between selfish desire and public good, framed by her strict adherence to Puritan doctrine and her affection for Everell. It is only after Everell is safely engaged to Esther that Sedgwick feels comfortable reintroducing Magawisca, and indeed, she must introduce her in captivity. In the narrator’s description of Everell’s reaction to her appearance, we see her dangerousness: “‘Now God be praised!’ he exclaimed, as he caught the first glance of a form never to be forgotten – ‘it is – it is Magawisca!’” (244). The ambiguity of the “form never to be forgotten” is telling; the narrator is not clear whether Magawisca’s form is memorable because of her beauty or because of her dismemberment. We know from Hope’s first meeting with Magawisca that her deformity is not visible under the mantle of her blanket: “Magawisca might have at once identified herself, by opening her blanket, and disclosing her person; but that she did not, no one will wonder who knows that a savage feels more even than ordinary sensibility at personal deformity” (191). But Magawisca’s sensitivity over her deformity is not typical of “a savage”; it is synonymous with her attachment to Everell, as we see when she first sees him: “… through the aperture Magawisca had a perfect view of Everell, who was sitting musing in the window seat. An involuntary exclamation burst from her lips; and then shuddering at this exposure of her feelings, she hastily gathered together the moccasins that were strewn over the floor, dropped a pair at Hope’s feet, and darted away” (193). To expose her arm is to expose her weakness, and her tie to Everell. When Sir Phillip visits Magawisca at the jail and undermines her confidence in Everell, as she later tells him: 17

 I am not the first scholar to suggest a connection between Magawisca and Esther. Gustavus Stadler has suggested that Esther takes on Magawisca’s role within the novel. In locating Magawisca’s performativity in her liminal status within Native American and white communities, and dismissing her “vanishing” as convenient to the narrative, Sadler undervalues Magawisca’s decision to embrace her public identity as Native American, instead of her place within the private community of Everell and his family. In contrast, Karafilis claims that, after Magawisca vanishes, “Esther Downing is also ‘removed’ from the space of the text for a time, returning to England; and Hope remains the lone heroine in the New World. Thus, it is only through Hope (and her union with Everell) that the text holds out the potential for radical democratic individualism beyond the scope of the novel” (341). But such a reading dismisses the progress that Esther has made over the course of the novel from lovesick girl to public woman.

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“That bad man”, she said, “made me, for the first time, lament for my lost limb. He [Sir Phillip] darkened the clouds that were gathering over my soul; and, for a little while, Everell, I did deem thee like most of thy race … but when I found thou wert true,” she continued in a swelling, exulting voice – “when I heard thee in my prison, and saw thee on my trial, I again rejoiced that I had sacrificed my precious limb for thee; that I had worn away the days and nights in the solitudes of the forest musing on the memory of thee, and counting the moons till the Great Spirit shall bid us to those regions where there will be no more gulfs between us, and I may hail thee as my brother.” (348–9)

As this passage occurs near the conclusion of the novel, Sedgwick must complete at least the surface deflation of Magawisca and Everell’s relationship; if Everell embraced Magawisca as a “sister” when she rescued him, now Magawisca must imagine a time she can “hail” him as a “brother.” By locating this moment in the future, Magawisca leaves space for a current uncertainty. Indeed, just after she sees Everell for the first time, Magawisca troubles their “fraternal” relationship: “I have learned to deny even the cravings of my own heart; to pursue my purpose like the bird that keeps her wing stretched to the toilsome flight, though the sweetest note of her mate recalls her to the nest. But ah! I do but boast … I may not trust myself; that was a childish scream that escaped me when I saw Everell” (199). Magawisca links “the sweetest note of her mate” to Everell’s voice, and undercuts her own claim that she remains true to her purpose by describing her “childish scream” at his jeopardy. Her “toilsome flight” is clearly her nationalist responsibilities, which lure her away from Everell and to the management of her tribe in her father’s stead. In the trial, Magawisca most clearly values her racial identity at the expense of personal desire. She turns aside the well-meaning counsels of Everell and exiles herself from the Puritan community. The climax of the trial occurs when Magawisca prophesies the Vanishing Indian, and overturns the public authority of the court through the exposure of her limb: “Take my own word, I am your enemy; the sun-beam and the shadow cannot mingle. The white man cometh – the Indian vanisheth.” … She paused – passed unresisted without the little railing that encompassed her, mounted the steps of the platform, and advancing to the feet of the Governor, threw back her mantle, and knelt before him. Her mutilated person, unveiled by this action, appealed to the senses of the spectators. Everell involuntarily closed his eyes, and uttered a cry of agony, lost indeed in the murmurs of the crowd. She spoke, and all again were as hushed as death. “Thou didst promise,” she said, addressing herself to Governor Winthrop, “to my dying mother, thou didst promise, kindness to her children. In her name, I demand of thee death or liberty.” (309)

Everell’s reaction to her limb and his knowledge of the personal sacrifice it represents is lost in the public murmur. The public later joins Everell in crying for

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her liberty, and so the absent limb, a previously hidden marker of Magawisca’s attachment to Everell, is re-read as a public appeal to the senses of her spectators to ensure her liberty. The rescue of Magawisca proves to be the deciding point in the contest between Hope and our secondary heroines. Magawisca learns that Hope did not betray her when Hope arrives to rescue her: “‘Then, Hope Leslie,’ she exclaimed, rising from her abject seat, and throwing off her blanket, ‘thy soul is unstained, and Everell Fletcher’s truth will not be linked to falsehood’” (327).18 Once Magawisca has ascertained Hope’s virtue and worth, she can resign her to Everell. The reader, of course, has known of Hope’s innocence almost the entire time, so Magawisca’s concession is significant only because it reconciles her to the union of Hope and Everell, and thus reconciles the reader to the impossibility of a romance between Magawisca and Everell. The rescue also tests Everell’s regard for Esther. Everell asks Esther to help him rescue Magawisca, but their discussion of her rescue is overshadowed by the markedly political tones of the debate. In response to Esther’s initial refusal, Everell argues: “‘But surely, Esther, there must be warrant, as you call it, for sometimes resisting legitimate authority, or all our friends in England would not be at open war with their king. With such a precedent, I should think the sternest conscience would permit you to obey the generous impulses of nature, rather than to render this slavish obedience to the letter of the law’” (292). Although Everell politicizes this claim in terms of the war between King and Parliament occurring contemporaneously in England, it clearly has revolutionary resonances. Esther’s insistence on submission to authority answers Everell’s political and personal question in terms that conflate the authority of the law and the church: “‘[F]or me, Everell, it would be to sin presumptuously, to do aught, in any way, to countervail the authority of those chosen servants of the Lord, whose magistracy we are privileged to live under’” (292). Esther’s inability to imagine a situation in which rebellion is warranted makes her unfit for the national romance, as we see when Everell compares her to Hope by crying: “‘Oh, Hope Leslie! how thy unfettered soul would have answered such an appeal!’” (294). Hope’s ability to discern between obedience and justice makes her sympathetic both to Magawisca and to the “friends in England” who oppose the King. In turn, these instances of right rebellion anticipate the American Revolutionary War. Throughout Hope Leslie, Sedgwick carefully juxtaposes the personal and the political. Once Everell and Hope have freed Magawisca, the three heroines (Hope, Esther, and Magawisca) are again compared in the discussion surrounding the miniature of Everell. The discussion, aptly enough, rehearses the conflict over Everell through the anxiety over the miniature:

18

 It’s interesting to note that Magawisca’s English often echoes Sir Phillip’s language in its rhetorical excesses. Sir Phillip’s language is linked explicitly to English chivalry and Catholicism, Magawisca’s to her “savage” identity – in both cases, language serves as a marker of difference from the nascent American identity epitomized by Hope and Everell.

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Immediately after Everell’s arrival in England, he had, at his father’s desire, had a small miniature of himself painted, and sent it to Hope. She attached it to a ribbon, and had always worn it. Soon after Everell’s engagement to Miss Downing, she took it off to put it aside, but feeling, at the moment, that this action implied a consciousness of weakness, she, with a mixed feeling of pride, and reluctance to part with it, restored it to her bosom. While she was adjusting Magawisca’s disguise in the prison, the miniature slid from beneath her dress, and she, at the time, observed that Magawisca’s eye rested intently on it. She must not now hesitate – Everell must not see her reluctance, and yet, such are the strange contrarieties of human feeling, the severest pang she felt in parting with it, was that Everell would think it was a willing gift. (353)

While the earlier conflicts between our three heroines had been staged in terms of plot (that is, Sedgwick manipulating the events of the novel to juxtapose our heroines), the miniature is significant because it stages the conflict within Hope. For most of the novel, Hope has been ignorant of her feelings for Everell, but the history of the miniature substantiates the narrative’s claim that those feelings have always been present. Hope’s decision to wear the miniature when Everell is engaged to Esther is an attempt to navigate the situation she finds herself in: to wear the miniature is to acknowledge her regard for Everell, but she can recast that regard as friendship, which she should not be afraid to own by wearing the miniature. To give Magawisca the miniature, however, is only possible if, as Magawisca claims, she has possession of the “living form” (353). In turn, the education of our secondary heroines is only complete if they resign their hold over the “living form.” Once Magawisca possesses the image of Everell in miniature, she leaves, and with her, the Indian vanishes. The possibility of an alternative history of intermarriage between colonized and colonizer is forever lost to history yet remains intrinsic to the historical romance. Her departure, and the sympathy it engenders in Hope and Everell, unites them spiritually before they are literally united: “… there was a consciousness of a perfect unity of feeling, a joy in the sympathy that was consecrated by its object, and might be innocently indulged, that was a delicious spell to their troubled hearts” (354). Through sympathetic identification with Magawisca, Hope and Everell can share feelings with each other without revealing their feelings for each other. This scene of sympathy is contrasted with Hope’s guilt when they return to Esther: Their eyes met. A deep, scorching blush suffused Hope’s cheeks, brow, and neck. Esther’s face beamed with ineffable sweetness and serenity. She looked as a mortal can look only when the world and its temptations are trampled beneath the feet, and the eye is calmly, steadily, immovably fixed on heaven. … Hope turned away from Esther, and crept into her bed; feeling, like a condemned culprit, self-condemned. (360)

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Esther’s peace, like Hope and Everell’s sympathy, comes from having resigned personal desire for the greater good. However, Hope and Everell’s sympathy for Magawisca is simultaneously an acknowledgement of their feelings for one another. Hope’s guilt at meeting Esther confirms that her sympathy for Magawisca is contingent on feeling that she possesses some claim on “the living form” of Everell; however, this claim undermines Esther’s engagement to Everell. As I have noted earlier, Esther’s earlier account of her relationship with Everell is usurped by our narrator; desire and dismay render her unintelligible. Once Esther has renounced personal desire, she regains her serenity and disappears from the narrative as a personality, but she is also allowed to speak for herself. Having renounced personal desire, Esther is able to speak not only for herself, but speaks as an authority and literally authors the plot of the remainder of the novel. In her farewell letter to Hope and Everell, Esther chastises them for their errors, and writes their marriage into the text, thus making their attachment public. Mr Fletcher echoes her letter by uniting their hands. Hope and Everell’s confessions of mutual love, however, occur behind the curtain. While their engagement is, in this manner, left private – beyond the ken of both writer and reader – Hope’s wedding is left to the “fancy” of “that large, and most indulgent class of our readers, the misses in their teens” (369). The public ceremony belongs to the public imagination, without any authorial shaping. The marriage achieved, the details of dress are insignificant. Sedgwick is more anxious that her readers rightly read Esther’s fate. Though Esther is initially exiled to London, Sedgwick needs to make room for the femininity she represents in America as well, and so Esther returns, after two or three years, to exactly the same station she held before. To redeem her potentially condemnable status as old maid, Sedgwick must make it Esther’s choice, and so she instructs the reader: “Her hand was often and eagerly sought, but she appears never to have felt a second engrossing attachment” (370). Esther’s unmarried state does not result from an inability to feel; rather, in the concluding sentence Sedgwick describes Esther’s private feeling self as most fulfilled when most erased in service of the public: She illustrated a truth, which, if more generally received by her sex, might save a vast deal of misery: that marriage is not essential to the contentment, the dignity, or the happiness of woman. Indeed, those who saw on how wide a sphere her kindness shone, how many were made better and happier by her disinterested devotion, might have rejoiced that she did not “Give to a party what was meant for mankind.” (370–71)

Contrasted with the spectacle of Esther’s earlier suffering, which nearly killed her in England by opposing her private desire for Everell with her responsibilities to church and community, Esther’s newfound serenity is remarkably anonymous. The narrator emphasizes the scope of Esther’s power: “how many,” “how wide a sphere,” in short, how enmeshed in the public community is Esther’s life outside of matrimony. By effacing all interest, and indeed, all personhood, but therefore

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all private “misery,” Sedgwick is able to recast Esther as a “disinterested” public agent and model for her readers. Ironically, contemporary reviewers were frankly bored with Esther’s angelic qualities and questioned Magawisca’s legitimacy as an “angel Indian.”19 Sedgwick’s contemporaries embraced the version of American identity embodied in Hope Leslie, but were not convinced by the alternatives posed by the secondary heroines. However unsuccessful her attempt to sway her readership, Sedgwick’s novel illustrates the work performed by secondary heroines in service of national identity: Magawisca’s decision to value her race identity as Native American over her affection for Everell is revealed to be a choice between two transient things. While the possibility for Magawisca (and thus other Native Americans) to share in the new American identity “vanishes,” Esther’s vaunted kindness to mankind, like Rebecca’s before her, literally exceeds national boundaries in her voyage to England, but her return to the colonies ensures that it is also an American virtue. Magawisca’s decision to take the miniature instead of Everell is a decision to separate the domestic from the nation, and the Native American from the nascent American nation. As I have argued earlier, Magawisca’s dismemberment results from racial conflict between Native American and white man, but also from Mononotto’s conflation of the nation (the Pequot War) with the domestic (the Fletchers). Her dismemberment occasions Mononotto’s lunacy and thus Magawisca’s rise to power within her tribe, but also separates Magawisca from Everell. Although Magawisca returns to the novel, she has accepted the logic of the “Vanishing Indian.” She does not choose reconciliation and universal good, as do Rebecca and Cora; instead, she chooses exile as the white man’s enemy. For Sedgwick, Magawisca’s choice is unsatisfactory because it is an intensely separatist choice. Although in keeping with history, Magawisca’s exit at the conclusion of the narrative leaves no room for an alternative to the marriage plot in the newly formed American nation. In contrast, Esther’s lack of nationalist zeal and her complicity with the rules make her an unsatisfactory heroine for the marriage plot, but once she has rejected the romance plot, she can operate without the confines of the domestic. Hope and Magawisca, it is important to remember, are always acting in secret, and that secrecy is imposed by the conflict between the domestic and the nation. While Hope’s rebellious nature is necessary for revolution, it is a revolution that, for Sedgwick’s readers, is already in the past. In Esther’s disinterested kindness, Sedgwick inscribes a model of civic duty, and one that she hopes will educate her readers away from the romance plot and into civic virtue.

19

  Preoccupation with the question of whether Magawisca was a probable character or not persists from the moment of publication to the end of the century. See, for example, a late mention in the February 1891 issue of The Living Age: “Hope Leslie … contains, in Magawisca, the Red Indian heroine, an impossibly idealized character” (“American Fiction” 520).

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The secondary heroines of historical romance embody romantic possibilities that the knowable facts of history render impossible. Sedgwick’s multiple heroines operate similarly, each seemingly representative of the possibilities available to American identity in the seventeenth century, but her focus on Magawisca, Esther, and Hope reveals her revision of Scott and Cooper. By splitting the secondary heroine, Sedgwick removes the problems of race and conquest while still retaining a viable alternative to the marriage plot. Esther’s serenity is solely a result of her rejection of romance, not, as is the case for Rebecca, Cora, and Magawisca, a submission to the realities of racial prejudice. Although the contemporary reviews of Hope Leslie suggest that Sedgwick failed to make this possibility appealing to young readers, it still exists. Concluding the novel with return, rather than with exile, Sedgwick incorporates disinterested kindness into American identity. The works of Sedgwick, Cooper, and Scott occupy a turning point in the history of the novel: the historical romance, situated at the cusp of Romanticism and Realism, strains against both terms.

Conclusion: Why Does the Historical Romance Make Us Want What We Can’t Have?

Assuredly it has often occurred to every one of you, that the books we delight in have very unsatisfactory conclusions, and end quite prematurely with page 320 of the third volume. Thackeray, Rebecca and Rowena (1850)

Like Thackeray, I find conclusions profoundly unsatisfying. The neat summingup and pulling-together of disparate threads, the meting-out of appropriate fates, the weddings or funerals that signify “the end” – all seem distressingly false. Perhaps it’s merely the frustration of putting the book down, of giving up the “delight” Thackeray describes, but I argue in this book that our frustration with the conclusions of historical romance is instead motivated by the tension between readerly desire and authorial prerogative – between what we want, and what we can have. The authors of historical romance stage the tension between historical fact and romantic possibility, literally embodied in the pairs of heroines I examine in this book. The marriage of the heroine and hero solemnizes the resolution of internecine conflict and the consolidation of national identity; the possibilities inherent in the secondary heroine are foreclosed in service of the genre’s nation-building project. The secondary heroine’s return, however, disrupts the narrative drive towards resolution. She returns to loosen the knot of the conclusion; a persistent loose end, her reappearance keeps the reader from being overly complicit in the construction of nationhood via the femininity of the primary heroine. She leaves us dissatisfied with the conclusion that we should desire, that we are conditioned to desire by the predictability of the marriage plot and by history itself. Like the definitions of the terms nationhood and femininity themselves, the secondary heroine’s role is tailored by two transatlantic histories: the history of the novel, and the history of Britain and America. In the early British and American seduction novels I examine in the first chapter, the secondary heroine survives to write the story of her fallen friend: she gains control of the representation of the heroine’s narrative while successfully navigating the social matrix responsible for the primary heroine’s death. Whereas the conclusions of Clarissa and The Coquette re-establish order by memorializing the death of the titular heroine, Desmond displaces the fall of the heroine onto her French double, and defines Englishness against a dangerous other woman, the French mistress.

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Following the American and French revolutions, British and American novels shift from narrating an imperiled present, represented by the vulnerable body of the heroines I discuss in Chapter 1, to imagining the nation’s past. In these novels, the subject of Chapters 2 to 4, the divided nation is unified by the concluding marriage of the heroine and the hero. As we have seen, Scott, Cooper, and Sedgwick deploy this romantic resolution to consolidate national identity: the marriage of the hero and the heroine, and the concomitant exile or death of the secondary heroine, determines the character of the nation at the expense of alternative visions of national identity. The secondary heroines of each text pull against such hegemonic readings, pointing to the tendency of nation-building projects to reduce national identity to a binary of same and different, nation and other. By foregrounding the other, even as it is foreclosed by both the facts of history and the project of romance, the return of the secondary heroine gestures to the politics and the price of both nation-formation and narrative closure. But what if that wasn’t the end of the story? In the first chapter of Rebecca and Rowena, Thackeray voices the opinion of many readers of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe when he expresses dissatisfaction with Scott’s conclusion: [N]or can I ever believe that such a woman [as Rebecca], so admirable, so tender, so heroic, so beautiful, could disappear altogether before such another woman as Rowena, that vapid, flaxen-headed creature, who is, in my humble opinion, unworthy of Ivanhoe, and unworthy of her place as heroine.

In the pages that follow, Thackeray inverts the roles of primary and secondary heroine, and gleefully imagines Rowena’s struggle to maintain her significance within the fictional England of the novella. “Rowena the wife” may be “a pattern of correctness for all the matrons of England,” but Thackeray’s Rowena clearly realizes the threat Rebecca still poses to her marriage, and thus to her position in home and nation. Rowena’s marital acrobatics comically highlight the very serious ramifications of marriage in the historical romance: widowed by Athelstane after annulling her marriage to Ivanhoe, Rowena is left without a protector. She is, quite literally, left to rot in prison. Thackeray’s novella revises Scott’s historical romance, and the genre more generally, in two directions. On the one hand, Thackeray offers a comedic, but arguably realistic, account of the day-to-day married life of Ivanhoe and Rowena; the comedy lies, of course, in Thackeray’s juxtaposition of quotidian married life (Ivanhoe adopting a “degagé” air over tea to broach an issue), with all of the clinking armor of historical romance. On the other, the conclusion of Thackeray’s novella articulates the difference between desire and reality, between what we want and what we get. In order to achieve the desired marriage of Rebecca and Ivanhoe (and to preserve the schoolboy fantasy of an entirely happy ending), Thackeray’s narrator employs a good deal of authorial privilege (namely in the narration of Rebecca’s secret and previously unknown conversion to Christianity),

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and he finally refuses to narrate the scene of their romantic reunion and subsequent marriage. Ivanhoe and Rebecca’s marriage, once made “real,” is dismissed by the narrator, who assures us that they were not “boisterously happy” and died “rather early.” The deflation of our romantic expectations in the final paragraphs ultimately mimics Scott’s conclusion, which unravels the very order that the novel has struggled to create through the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena. Thackeray’s revision of Ivanhoe is one of numerous nineteenth-century reworkings of Scott’s text. Attention to these adaptations reveals the transnational impact of Scott’s text as a cultural phenomenon, but also suggests that historical romance, and especially Ivanhoe, provided an imminently useful and adaptable means of rethinking national identity. Adaptations of Ivanhoe fall fairly neatly into two categories: those that emphasize the Rebecca plot and thus chart the cost of national resolution, and those that focus on the spectacle of nationalism, the tournaments and battles that stage the struggle for national identity resolved in the restoration of order and the marriage of heroine and hero. This latter type of adaptation links the spectacle of chivalry with an imperialist nationalism of the kind described by Benedict Anderson. Readers or viewers identify with the imagined community represented by the English knights and monarch whose martial prowess conquers threats to the nation and home. In turn, adaptations that highlight the Rebecca plot shift focus to the kind of fringe nationalism interrogated by Katie Trumpener, here embodied in Rebecca. Rebecca’s critique of the imperialist nationalism of Richard’s court and the imperialist ambitions of the nationless Templars is rendered heroic, while the Rowena plot all but disappears. These adaptations dismantle the complexity of Scott’s text, which presents both an imperialist nationalism and its critique in service of a simpler narrative with popular appeal: in essence, these adaptations give readers and viewers what they want. Thackeray reworks Scott’s novel to critique the consolidation of English national identity through chivalry and marriage at the expense of Rebecca. In contrast, the Ivanhoe of another Victorian, Arthur Sullivan, downplays the Rebecca plot in service of a united kingdom. Sullivan’s opera is the most successful of a bevy of now-forgotten stage adaptations of Ivanhoe, some of which must surely have influenced the composition of Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena. However, the very titles of these plays suggests that, like Thackeray, these dramatists found Rebecca’s narrative more compelling than Rowena’s (hence, Ivanhoe, or the Jew’s Daughter, Ivanhoe! or the Jewess, The Hebrew, etc).

   One reason for the proliferation of Ivanhoe adaptations is that such projects were almost uniformly commercially successful.    See Jeff Dailey’s Sir Arthur Sullivan’s Grand Opera Ivanhoe and Its Theatrical and Musical Precursors.

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In contrast, Sullivan’s romantic opera uncritically presents the romance of Ivanhoe and Rowena, and parallels the expulsion of Rebecca with that of her Templar persecutors. Although Rebecca’s temple is clearly not the same as that of the Christian Templars, the lyrics are parallel. Rebecca sings, “our temple was not made with hands/but high as heaven it springs,” in response to the Templars’, “wide as the world our temple stands/to mock the pride of kings” (Sullivan 256–7). Despite the clear differences in these temples, each is described in terms of its reach (“high as heaven” or “wide as the world”) and in opposition to the narrow notions of nationhood epitomized by King Richard and England. Unlike the geographical borders of the England from which she is exiled, Rebecca’s temple cannot be delimited because it is not “made with hands”; instead, it is defined by faith. In a similar vein, the Templars’ power is not limited by nations or subject to kings. Linking Rebecca with the Templars devalues her difference: her temple, like theirs, is just another form of community that must be exiled in service of the consolidation of English identity. The rest of the cast, led by Ivanhoe, Rowena, and the King, sing in praise of love, and particularly of the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena: “O love, that holdst the world in fee,/ and strongest knights in thrall/Our hymn we raise to thee,/ and hail thee lord of all” (Sullivan 257–9). By hailing love as lord, the chorus validates the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena as a national resolution stronger than knights or kings. The love of heroine and hero patches up and covers over the ravages of war. While the text of the libretto may smooth over the ravages of war, Sullivan’s spectacular battle scenes proved problematic: he had to rearrange the early scenes of Act II to avoid a challenging (and time-consuming) scene change from forest to castle and back again, and the most exciting action sequence, the burning of Torquilstone, occurs off stage, narrated by Rebecca. Sir Thomas Beecham’s 1910 Covent Garden revival was the only production to stage the burning of Torquilstone; the attempt proved disastrous: “The burning of the castle was certainly an astonishing triumph as viewed from the auditorium, but it was appreciated less by the occupants of the crowded stage. For regardless of the value of human life, huge chunks of masonry flew in every direction, spreading terror among the attackers and defenders alike” (Beecham). Within Scott’s text, the burning of Torquilstone unites a disguised King Richard with the Saxon “Merry Men” in opposition to the corrupt Norman occupants of the castle, but the ensuing battle is the occasion for Rebecca’s critique of chivalry. In Beecham’s production, the dangers of chivalry were quite literally presented to the audience as Saxon and Norman, “attackers and defenders alike,” fled the stage. Most contemporary readers, however, are familiar with a different critique of the spectacle of chivalry: Twain’s scathing indictment of Scott in Life on the

   Sullivan’s opera is the only “grand opera” he composed, and the first work written without Gilbert. Its record-breaking run – 155 consecutive performances – attests to its popularity. For more information, see Dailey.

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Mississippi. Twain claims that Scott is singularly responsible for the condition of the American South in the nineteenth century: Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless longvanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. (Vol. II, 422)

Twain’s emphasis on “sham” evokes Thackeray’s theatre metaphors and the numerous theatrical renditions of Ivanhoe, but for Twain, the real harm of Scott’s text is its ability to impede progress in favor of nostalgia for a decayed past. Scott’s narrative of English origins jeopardizes the future of the American South. Twain specifically links Scott’s chivalry with the continuance of slavery, and thus imports Scott’s treatment of race into the American South. The antiSemitism directed at Isaac and Rebecca in service of chivalry and Christianity has its American counterpart in the race prejudice leveled at African–Americans in the lead-up to the Civil War. However, in blaming Scott for the Civil War, Twain ignores the critique of racism and chivalry encoded in Scott’s Rebecca. Or rather, if Twain himself does not ignore Rebecca, he at least suggests that the transnational rage for all things medieval in the wake of Ivanhoe over-simplified the text’s critique of race-prejudice in favor of spectacle: the jousts, burning castles, and courtly language of chivalry commonly seen in the operas, stage adaptations, and medieval-themed parties Ivanhoe inspired. The transnational impact of Scott’s text is evidenced by several very successful non-Anglophone operatic treatments, including Rossini’s Ivanhoé, Otto Nicolai’s Il Templario, and Heinrich Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin. For Rossini, Ivanhoé was easy cash. He strung together bits and pieces of old scores and presented a simplified plot that consolidated Rebecca and Rowena into one character, and thus eliminated the challenge posed by Rebecca’s racial difference. In contrast, Nicolai’s Il Templario launched his career, ultimately garnering him the position of Hofkapellmeister. It proved so successful that he reworked it as Del Tempelritter five years later. Similarly, Marschner’s Der Templer und die Jüdin was performed over two hundred times in Germany, and simplified versions of his score continued to receive regular performances into the early twentieth century. As the title suggests, the libretto almost entirely eliminates the Rowena plot to focus on the relationship between Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca. While all operas were commercially successful, they present very different versions of Ivanhoe, choosing either the spectacle of English chivalry or the exotic otherness of the Rebecca/Bois-Guilbert plot. 

  See Dailey.

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The cultural afterlife of Ivanhoe attests to the ideological power of both Scott’s text specifically and the genre of historical romance more generally. This book charts the deployment of the secondary heroine in British and American historical romance and claims that American novelists writing after Scott grapple with his articulation of the genre: Cooper doesn’t directly acknowledge Scott, but his description of the loss of an indigenous culture in America echoes Scott’s Highlanders; in contrast, Sedgwick directly invokes her British and American predecessors in Hope Leslie to differentiate her project from theirs. Unlike Cooper, she refuses to narrate feats of woodcraft. Unlike Scott, her narrative rejects chivalric romance: “This is no romantic fiction … This cause [Puritanism] was not to their eyes invested with any romantic attractions. It was not assisted by the illusions of chivalry, nor magnified by the spiritual power and renown of crusades” (10). Perhaps, as a woman author, Sedgwick is simply less interested in these trappings of historical romance, investing instead in the didactic project of introducing her readers to American history. Cooper and Sedgwick transpose the genre to America, and deploy the other woman, the racially othered secondary heroine, to delimit American identity. My intention has been to recover the role of the secondary heroine in the early history of the novel and to make visible the cultural work she performs. As adept as we have become at unpacking the ideological thrust of texts – how novels build nations, oppress or exalt women, and construct or critique social identities, to name some of the threads I have engaged in this study – we undervalue the ideology of character. By remaining complicit with the early novel’s ideology of character we become complicit with its attendant ideology of nation-building, which is in turn replicated in our critical treatment of texts. By resisting the narrative drive towards resolution and turning our attention to such sites of resistance as are proffered by figures like the secondary heroine, therefore, we also resist the more familiar but no less insidious ideologies of monolithic nationalism that our critical practice has uncovered, but not sufficiently questioned. Returning attention to the ideologies of character requires that we interrogate not only the politics of a given character but also that character’s role within the politics of the narrative as a whole. This kind of work, evident in studies like Alex Woloch’s The One vs. The Many and Gilbert and Gubar’s Madwoman in the Attic, singles out particular types of minor characters and investigates the cultural work they perform. As Woloch suggests, “all characters are potentially overdelimited within the fictional world – and might disrupt the narrative if we pay them the attention they deserve” (13). The secondary heroes, comic sidekicks, maids, beggars, and madmen that pepper literature deserve the attention accorded to heroes and villains for what they can teach us about gender, nation, and narrative. Madwoman in the Attic remains groundbreaking in its attention to a particular type of oppressed heroine, and my own study relies heavily on a similar feminist critique of the role of women in the novel. But might we also productively turn our attention to alternative masculinities as a novelistic trope? Such a study might devote the same attention to Mr Hickman that I have granted to Anna Howe, or

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consider the exile of Boyer in The Coquette or Bethel at the end of Desmond. Bethel seems far too staid, far too boring to be considered a serious suitor, but my reading of Desmond to some degree resuscitates Bethel’s potential as romantic hero. Alternatively, one might turn to the strange career of Natty Bumppo, who manages to upstage the conventional hero in The Pioneers and so becomes the hero of his own saga, The Leatherstocking Tales. Most obviously, one might consider the dangerous masculinities of Sir Phillip Gardiner, Bois-Guilbert, and other “foreign” men. My use of the term “hero” emphasizes the heroic potential of these characters: these alternative narratives or lost possibilities are explicitly connected to their narrative significance – their crucial role in the plot of the novel. Equally compelling, however, are the truly minor characters of literature: the jester characters of historical romance have little narrative function, but nonetheless offer a critique of the novel’s politics. One might examine the profligacy of Richard Jones in The Pioneers as a critique of the American dream: Richard’s claim that he can do anything – from surgery to mining – is an eerie recasting of American optimism and the promise of equal access to opportunity. In Ivanhoe, the faithful Gurth and Wamba remain always in the periphery, but in a sense, they have to be there: they are each feudal servants, bound to their master. Their presence, then, reveals the impact of the hero’s adventures on those who serve him. Decentering the authority of the protagonists to attend to these minor characters unravels the ideology of narrative and replaces it with a multi-faceted ideology of character, in which characters compete for narrative and thus ideological dominance. This book explicitly connects character and nation, and thus links the ideologies of character to the nation-building project of historical romance. By extension, this book undertakes a transatlantic study of historical romance to understand the deployment of a common character type, the secondary heroine, to serve different national ends. However, as the transnational impact of Ivanhoe attests, the cultural work of these novels, and of the genre, is not limited to Britain and America. This study is particularly interested in the ways in which Britain and America defined themselves in opposition to one another and through their treatment of internal “others” – the Highlanders, Saxons, Native Americans, and Catholics that contest the construction of national identity and are ultimately subsumed or exiled from the nation. However, the British and, occasionally, the Americans have also defined themselves in opposition to the French – an opposition suggested in my reading of Desmond, and briefly touched on in my discussion of Monsieur LeQuoi in The Pioneers and the French and Indian War in The Last of the Mohicans. Attention to the larger transnational literary sphere is vital, whether one examines “foreign” characters or global literary culture. My description of transatlantic literary culture relies on global trade networks, and, as I have argued, the construction of nationhood and femininity central to these texts is explicitly connected to structures of wealth and power. I began this book 

  Who can forget “freedom fries”?

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with a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” that suggests Poe’s short story offers a critique of this kind of traffic in women. Thackeray’s Rebecca and Rowena also reveals the economic underpinnings of Scott’s text and the transnational imperialism practiced by King Richard in the Crusades. In Thackeray’s text, Ivanhoe’s callous comments about Jews are remedied: to cope with his disappointment in married life with Rowena, Ivanhoe rejoins Richard and ransoms countless Jewish lives in tribute to his memory of Rebecca and what might have been. While Ivanhoe retains his martial prowess into middle age, the narrator’s accounts of his chivalric exploits confirm Rebecca’s critique of chivalry: despite the narrator’s comic flourishes (the well-seasoned cauldron into which Lady Chalus dives, for example), it’s difficult to ignore the narrative’s brutal violence. Women dive into boiling cauldrons to feed their families; children are murdered in cold blood; beautiful girls are quickly turned into “beauteous corpses” – all apparently in the name of religion, but more often than not, religion serves merely as a cover for greed. Richard’s military exploits against the heathen are not proof of chivalry or piety, but rather proof of empty coffers: he “always quitted the country when he had squeezed from his loyal nobles, commons, clergy, and Jews, all the money which he could get.” When Ivanhoe seeks for fellow adventurers among his old acquaintance, he finds instead a group of grasping knaves: Robin Hood is now the Earl of Huntingdon, whose zeal in protecting his own hunting rights “sent scores of poachers to Botany Bay.” The former outlaw, once granted a place within the law by virtue of his property, becomes its strictest enforcer. Rowena, too, uses piety as a cover for greed: despite her ostentatious Christianity (and virulent antiSemitism), she doesn’t hesitate to sport the jewels Rebecca gave her at Court, considering it “her duty … as one of the chief ladies of the county.” The English are, as Scott’s Rebecca notes, “a fierce race, quarrelling ever with their neighbors and among themselves, and ready to plunge the sword into the bowels of each other. Such is no safe abode for the children of my people” (499). The England of Thackeray’s novella is as Rebecca describes: violent and politically unstable. Out of favor with the newly crowned King John, Rowena pays the price of her political allegiances and dies in prison. In contrast, Rebecca’s secret conversion to Christianity puts her on the “right side” of the ongoing war. As the Christians invade Rebecca’s corner of Moorish Spain, she and Ivanhoe are reunited in the rushed conclusion, for, as the narrator notes: “Who wants a long scene at the last?” Rebecca and Rowena may narrate the outcome of Ivanhoe and Rowena’s marriage, but it refuses to give readers what Thackeray claims they most desire: the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rebecca. Instead, Thackeray abandons his narrative in the middle of battle. Rebecca is exiled from her family, living on moldy bread and brackish water in a back kitchen of her father’s house. The Christians have invaded and senselessly brutalized the nation, and Ivanhoe is perhaps the worst transgressor of all: “Day after day he issued out against these infidels, and did nought but slay and slay. He took no plunder as other knights did, but left that to his followers; he uttered no war-cry, as was the manner of chivalry, and he gave no quarter.” Ivanhoe abandons the

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politesse imposed by the English code of chivalry that masks the brutality of war: he gives up the comforting fictions of nation and honor, the very fictions that make him heroic, in mindless murder. How will Thackeray restore our hero to home and nation, the comforting resolution of historical romance? In short, he doesn’t. The redemptive resolution promised by marriage to the heroine is barely narrated by Thackeray, who reminds us instead that this story is the fulfillment of his readerly desire: As for Rebecca, now her head is laid upon Ivanhoe’s heart, I shall not ask to hear what she is whispering, or describe further that scene of meeting; though I declare I am quite affected when I think of it. Indeed I have thought of it any time these five-and-twenty years – ever since, as a boy at school, I commenced the noble study of novels – ever since the day when, lying on sunny slopes of halfholidays, the fair chivalrous figures and beautiful shapes of knights and ladies were visible to me ever since I grew to love Rebecca, that sweetest creature of the poet’s fancy, and longed to see her righted.

Thackeray leaves the reader with the responsibility of imagining a different conclusion: the fantasy of perfect resolution is far more satisfying than “a long scene at the last.”

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Index

alliance between characters 25–7, 29, 32, 47, 67, 72, 79–80, 110 between nations 24, 32, 44, 57, 66–8, 74, 110 American see national identity American landscape 97, 99, 101, 103, 107, 110 American literature 5–7 American Revolution 54–5, 97, 99, 101, 107–8, 122–4, 140 Anderson, Benedict see nationalism, theories of Armstrong, Nancy see novel, theories of and transatlantic studies Austen, Jane 6, 97–8 Baym, Nina 117, 123 Beecham, Sir Thomas see Ivanhoe adaptations British see national identity Brown, Sarah Annes see transatlantic studies Buell, Lawrence see transatlantic studies captivity, representation of 8, 79, 81–3, 124, 126–7, 138 Catholics, representation of 62, 69, 83–4, 138 Clarissa see Richardson, Samuel, novels of characters in see Richardson, Samuel, characters in Clarissa Cooper, James Fenimore 11–12, 14–15, 59, 95, 97–103, 105–14, 116–22, 124–5, 129, 133, 144, 146, 150 characters in The Last of the Mohicans 97–8 Bumppo, Natty 97, 108–9, 113, 116–19, 151; see also Cooper,

James Fenimore, characters in The Pioneers, Bumppo, Natty Chingachgook 113 Heyward, Duncan, Major 97, 108–19 lineage of 113 Magua 108, 110–13, 115–18 Munro, Alice 15, 97, 107–20, 121–2 lineage of 15, 97, 113 marriage of 108, 114, 116–18 Munro, Colonel 97–8, 108–109, 111–14, 116, 119 Munro, Cora 15, 97–8, 107–20, 121–2, 133, 143–4 death of 107–109, 113–19 lineage of 97–8, 112–13, 119 race of 97–8, 108–18 Tamenund 108, 117–18 Uncas 108–13, 115–19 lineage of 112–13 characters in The Pioneers Bumppo, Natty 98–9, 104, 106, 120, 151; see also Cooper, James Fenimore, characters in The Last of the Mohicans, Bumppo, Natty Chingachgook 99–102, 104, 106 Edwards Effingham, Oliver 97–107 attentions of 102–3 identity of 98–105, 118 Grant, Louisa 15, 97–107, 114, 120, 128–9 lineage of 15 meritocracy 97, 100, 103 racism of 100, 102–4 Grant, Reverend 98, 100–102, 104 LeQuoi, Monsieur 105–106, 151 Temple, Bess 15, 97–107, 109, 114, 120

176

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sensibility of 97, 101, 105 Temple, Judge 97, 100–101, 120 novels of 95, 98, 100, 120 The Last of the Mohicans 15, 95, 97, 107, 109, 114, 119–22, 133, 151 The Pioneers 15, 95, 97–100, 106–7, 109–10, 114, 118–20, 122, 125, 129, 151 Coquette, The see Foster, Hannah Webster, novels of characters in see Foster, Hannah Webster, characters coverture 22–3, 25–6, 28–9, 32, 35, 44, 55 law 25, 44, 52–3, 63, 124, 128, 136–37, 140 Davidson, Cathy see novel, theories of Delaware see national identity, Indigenous Americans Desmond see Smith, Charlotte, novels of characters in see Smith, Charlotte, characters in Desmond Doody, Margaret Anne see novel, theories of Duncan, Ian see novel, theories of epistolary novel 13, 18, 20–21 correspondence 13, 20–21, 23–4, 35–7, 39, 45, 47–8, 57 correspondents 18, 21–22, 24, 37, 44–6, 48–50, 57 genre 13, 17–18, 20–22, 39 letters 18, 20–24, 26–8, 32–45, 47–50, 52–7, 66, 71, 130, 133–4, 136, 142 private 20–21, 26–7, 34–6, 38, 41–3, 45, 50, 130 letters of Clarissa 23, 7, 30, 32 exile 3–4, 15, 22, 44, 46, 52, 56–7, 60–64, 69–70, 73–6, 89, 92–3, 99, 102–3, 105–6, 118, 120, 124, 128–9, 137, 139, 142–4, 146, 148, 151–2 femininity, construction of 2, 4–8, 14–16, 18, 30, 44, 54, 57, 75, 96–7, 124, 134, 142, 145, 151 fallen woman 14, 18, 34, 59 gender 63, 65, 98, 150

femme covert see coverture Foster, Hannah Webster 13, 17, 33–6, 41–3, 57–8 characters Boyer, J., Reverend 34–8, 43, 58, 151 Deighton, Charles 37, 57 Granby, Julia 13, 20–2, 33, 36, 38–44, 49, 57–9 language of 39–42 letters of 38–42, 59 Hale, Mr 19–20, 39 Richman, Mrs 33, 38–9 Sanford, Peter 19, 34, 36–8, 42–3, 57–8 Sumner, Lucy Freeman 21, 33–42, 57–8 Wharton, Eliza 7, 13, 18–21, 33–43, 47–8, 56–9 novels of The Coquette 13–14, 17–19, 21–22, 33, 35, 43–4, 56–9, 145, 151 coquetry 22, 27, 33, 35, 38–9, 42, 58 French see national identity French and Indian War 55, 107, 151 Freud, Sigmund 1–2 the return of the repressed 1–3, 7–8, 15–16, 45 the Uncanny 1–3, 15, 52, 136 Gilbert, Sandra M. see novel, theories of Giles, Paul see transatlantic studies Gilroy, Paul see transatlantic studies gothic 1, 8, 11, 15–16, 47, 69, 75–6, 79, 122, 127 Gubar, Susan see novel, theories of, Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar Hawthorne, Nathaniel 6, 10 historical romance 4, 9–17, 19, 59–60, 62–3, 75–6, 91–2, 121–22, 124, 128, 131, 135, 141, 144–47, 150–51, 153 chivalry 76, 80–81, 84–6, 89, 93, 127–8, 135, 147–50, 152–3

Index chivalric code 78, 85, 128, 152 chivalric romance 127, 135, 150 genre 4, 10–13, 15, 17, 22, 59, 76, 83, 91–2, 124, 146, 150–51 national resolution 14–15, 60, 66, 92, 97, 119, 124, 147–8 origins of 10, 12–13, 15, 59–60, 76, 124 romance plot 22, 63, 75, 102–103, 121, 123, 134, 143 romantic resolution 14–15, 60, 66–7, 95, 119, 146 Hope Leslie see Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, novels of characters in see Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, characters in Hope Leslie Huron see national identity, Indigenous Americans imperialism American colonists 15, 97, 108–9, 116, 122, 129, 143 British colonies 9, 44, 97, 107–9, 117, 122, 124, 128 empire 22, 43–4, 55–6, 169, 172 French colonies 44, 55, 97, 108 nationalism 3, 147 Ivanhoe see Scott, Sir Walter, novels of; Ivanhoe adaptations, Sullivan, Arthur characters in see Scott, Sir Walter, characters in Ivanhoe; Ivanhoe adaptations, Sullivan, Arthur Ivanhoe adaptations Beecham, Sir Thomas 148 other adaptations Ivanhoe 149 marriage of 147–8 Rebecca 147, 149 Sullivan, Arthur 147–8 characters in Ivanhoe Ivanhoe 148 Rebecca 147–8 Rowena 148 opera: Ivanhoe 147 Thackeray, William Makepeace 15–16, 62, 92, 145–7, 149, 152–3 characters in Rebecca and Rowena

177 Ivanhoe 146–7, 152–3 marriage of 152 Rebecca 16, 62, 146–7, 152–3 Rowena 16, 92, 146–7, 152 novella: Rebecca and Rowena 15, 62, 92, 145–7, 152

Jameson, Frederic see transatlantic studies Jewish identity see national identity Kaplan, Amy see novel, theories of Last of the Mohicans, The see Cooper, James Fenimore, novels of characters in see Cooper, James Fenimore, characters in The Last of the Mohicans “Ligeia” see Poe, Edgar Allan, short story: “Ligeia” characters in see Poe, Edgar Allan, characters Manning, Susan see transatlantic studies marriage function of 2–6, 8, 14–15, 22, 60, 145–7, 153 mercenary 18–19, 48, 52, 54 nationally defined 13–15, 19, 22, 44–6, 48, 50, 54–6, 58, 60–62, 64, 72, 74–6, 89, 92–3, 95, 97, 99, 106, 108–109, 114, 118–19, 124–27, 141, 146–8 socially defined 14, 18–20, 22–3, 28, 31–4, 36–8, 43–5, 48–9, 52–4, 58, 72, 91, 97–9, 102, 106, 118, 122, 124, 137 marriage market 18–19, 22, 43, 49, 52, 54–5, 69, 113 estate of Clarissa 25–6 exchange 8, 16, 116–17, 152 wealth 19, 22–6, 32, 35, 37, 51–2, 58, 64, 66–8, 70, 73–4, 79, 82–3, 90, 93, 95–8, 109, 113–14, 116, 119–20, 136–7, 151–2 marriage plot 2, 4, 12, 35, 96–99, 106, 143–5 romance plot 22, 63, 75, 102–103, 121, 123, 134, 143

178

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

national identity 2–6, 8–9, 11, 13–15, 19, 22, 45–6, 48, 60–61, 76, 84, 91–92, 95–6, 98, 104, 106, 121, 131, 143, 145–7, 151 American 11, 95–8, 106, 121–2, 128, 140, 143–4, 150 imperial identity 11–12; see also imperialism British 3–8, 11, 13–14, 17, 19, 22–3, 43–5, 47, 51, 54, 56, 60–61, 73, 95–7, 106, 108–9, 113, 117, 119, 122, 124, 127, 137, 145–6, 150–51 empire 14, 22, 44, 55–6, 109 England 4–5, 9, 14, 17–18, 30, 44–5, 54, 56, 60–62, 65–6, 69, 72, 75, 80, 83–8, 90–93, 101, 108–9, 119, 122, 124–5, 127–8, 135, 140–43, 146, 148, 152 Englishness 30, 84, 89, 91, 93, 122, 127, 145 ideas of 3, 19, 45–6, 61, 63, 65–6, 74, 76, 84, 86–7, 90–2, 95, 101, 119, 122, 129 imperialism 3, 11–12, 14, 55–6, 87, 108,147, 152; see also imperialism France French identity 19, 22, 43, 48, 50–51, 53–4, 59, 97, 99, 106, 108, 127, 145, 151; see also imperialism French revolution 14, 17, 19, 22, 43, 52, 54, 59, 146 representation of 11, 14, 22, 44–7, 52–6, 62, 69, 71, 92, 108, 119, 151 indigenous Americans representation of 9, 11, 15, 55, 95–7, 100–102, 104, 106–10, 113, 116–19, 122–29, 131, 134, 143, 151 exile of 15, 106, 128–9, 151 in Hope Leslie Pequot 124–8, 130–31, 143 in The Last of the Mohicans: Delaware 98, 108–9, 111, 117–19

Huron 97, 108, 111–12, 116–17, 119 vanishing 107, 122, 124, 128–9, 139, 141, 143 in Ivanhoe Jews 61, 75, 79, 82–3, 87–8, 92, 95, 152 Normans 8, 15, 60–61, 75–6, 80, 84–9, 91–92, 148 Norman Conquest 15, 60–61, 75, 81, 87–9 Saxons 15, 60–61, 75–8, 80, 82, 84, 86, 88–9, 91–2, 148, 151 Templars 82–3, 86–9, 147–8 national conflict 59–61, 67, 75, 85, 92, 95, 119 politics 9, 14, 19, 62–3, 67–70, 109, 114–15, 118, 128–29, 131, 146, 150–51 national 9, 14, 19, 62, 67–8, 70, 114, 128, 146 Scottish nationalism 63–4, 74 in Waverley, Highlands 11, 60–64, 66, 69, 71, 73–4, 92, 95, 150–51 bardic traditions 64, 70, 92 clan 59–60, 62–4, 66–7, 70–71, 73, 92 Highland bard 60, 64–5, 69–71, 92 Jacobite cause 11, 15, 59–60, 64–8, 70–71, 73, 92 Scottish 3, 12, 60–66, 72–4, 92 nationalism, theories of Anderson, Benedict 3–4, 11, 17, 19, 147 Imagined Communities 3, 17 Trumpener, Katie 3, 11–12, 14, 147 Bardic Nationalism 3, 11 Native Americans see Indigenous Americans Normans see national identity novel, theories of Armstrong, Nancy 4–5, 7–8, 18–19, 28, 57 Desire and Domestic Fiction 4–5 cultural work 10, 16, 124, 150–1 Davidson, Cathy 4–5, 57 Doody, Margaret Anne 12–13, 96 Duncan, Ian 10, 73–6, 81, 89

Index Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar 6, 150 Kaplan, Amy 7 primary heroine 3–5, 13–14, 18, 20–22, 57, 59, 96, 98, 118, 120–22, 145 the rise of the novel (theory) 3, 60 Watt, Ian 4–6, 19, 24 The Rise of the Novel 4–5, 24 Woloch, Alex 10, 150 Pace, Joel see transatlantic studies Pamela see Richardson, Samuel Pequot see national identity, indigenous Americans Pioneers, The see Cooper, James Fenimore, novels of characters in see Cooper, James Fenimore, characters in The Pioneers Poe, Edgar Allan 1–3, 7–8, 15–16, 152 characters Lady Ligeia 1–3, 8, 16 Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine 1–3, 7–8, 16 narrator 1–3 short story: “Ligeia” 1–2, 7–8, 15–16, 152 primary heroine see novel, theories of primogeniture 19, 25, 50, 63–4, 69, 80–81, 100, 102, 105 estate of Clarissa 25–6 estate 19, 25–6, 45, 50, 54, 63, 66–7, 95 land 55, 63–4, 80, 82, 95–100, 104–105, 107–109 laws 25, 29, 45, 63, 137 money 19, 22, 52, 98, 136 race 4, 7, 12, 15, 60–62, 75–7, 79–80, 82– 5, 87, 89, 91, 96–8, 100, 109–16, 118–22, 125, 128–9, 131, 143–4, 149; see also secondary heroines blood 77, 97, 111–13, 115, 125–6 Rebecca and Rowena see Ivanhoe adaptations, Thackeray, William Makepeace characters in see Ivanhoe adaptations, Thackeray, William Makepeace

179

Richardson, Samuel 4–5, 8, 13, 17–18, 23–4, 30–6, 57–8 characters in Clarissa Belford 21, 24, 28–31, 59 Harlowe, Clarissa 9, 13, 17–33, 35–9, 42–3, 47–8, 56–9 individualism of 19, 32 virtue of 25–6, 28–9, 32 Harlowes 25–6, 35 Hickman 21, 27–8, 31–2, 49, 58, 150 Howe, Anna 13, 17–18, 20–34, 43–4, 49, 56–9, 150 Howe, Mrs 28 Lovelace 18, 20, 23–33, 37, 56–7 Solmes 23, 25 novels of: Clarissa 13–14, 17–19, 21–4, 33, 35, 43–4, 52, 56, 59, 145 Pamela 4, 8, 17, 20, 23–4, 57, 81 romance, definitions of 10–14, 64–5, 75, 79, 83, 134, 144 Romantic novel 3, 5, 8, 13–14 romanticism 12–14, 144 Rowe, John Carlos see transatlantic studies Saxons see national identity Scott, Sir Walter 7–8, 10–14, 16, 59–71, 736, 78–80. 82–55, 87, 89–90, 92, 95, 110, 121–4, 129, 133, 135, 144, 146–50, 152 characters in Ivanhoe Bois-Guilbert 61, 77, 79, 82–3, 86–8, 149, 151 De Bracy, Maurice 79–82, 84, 91 Gurth 89, 151 Isaac of York 78, 83, 87, 149 Ivanhoe 13, 60–2, 75–6, 79, 81–95, 123, 146 lineage of 93, 95 marriage of 60, 75–6, 89, 91, 147 Rebecca 13, 60–2, 74–8, 82–93, 121–3, 135, 144, 149, 152 agency of 76, 80, 86 appeal of 79, 84 beauty of 61, 78–9, 83, 90–91 exile of 62, 75–6, 89, 91–2

180

Secondary Heroines in Nineteenth-Century British and American Novels

Jewess 61, 76, 78, 82–3, 87–8 lineage of 62, 78, 83–5 misreading of 90 race of 60–62, 75–6, 78–80, 82–5, 87, 91, 144, 149 Richard Plantagenet, King 61, 76, 85, 88–91, 147–8, 152 Rowena 7, 60–62, 74–93, 121–2, 135 bland passivity of 80, 133 lineage of 61, 74, 77, 79–82, 84, 91 marriage of 60–62, 74–6, 85, 88–9, 91, 93 Saxon heiress 61, 76–7, 79–82, 91 Saxon heritage 61, 76–7, 79 Wamba 89, 151 characters in Waverley Bean, Alice 66 Bradwardine, Baron of 60, 63–4, 67–8, 71–4 Bradwardine, Rose 12, 60–73, 92–3 Dhu, Evan 60, 73–4, 92 Gellatly, Janet 66, 72, 74 MacIvor, Fergus 11–12, 60, 63–4, 66–74, 92 MacIvor, Flora 11–12, 60–71, 73–4, 92–3; exile of 61–2, 64, 69–71, 73–4, 92 Talbot, Colonel 69, 72 Waverley, Edward 12, 60–74, 92 lineage of 67, 95 Waverley, Sir Everard 69, 72 novels of 63, 66, 73 Ivanhoe 7–8, 10–11, 14–16, 60–2, 68, 74–5, 85, 90, 92, 95, 119, 121, 133, 135, 146–7, 149 Waverley 10–11, 14–15, 59–64, 66, 69–70, 87, 92, 95 Scottish see national identity secondary heroines 1–7, 10–22, 43–4, 57, 59–62, 79, 91–2, 96–8, 109, 120–21, 123–4, 128, 137, 141, 143–6, 150–51 other, figure of 2–5, 11, 17, 19, 60, 78, 90, 95, 118, 145–6, 150–51

race, and 4, 14–15, 59–62, 75, 78–80, 82–5, 87–8, 90–91, 97–8, 109–19, 121, 124–6, 129–34, 137, 139, 143–4, 150 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria 11–12, 14–15, 106–7, 121–6, 128–44, 150, 155, 161–4, 167, 170 characters in Hope Leslie Alice 122–23, 125 Downing, Esther 15, 123–4, 128–9, 134–8, 140–4 lineage of 137 Fletcher, Everell 106, 122–5, 128–43 Fletcher, Mr 129–30, 136, 142 Fletcher, Mrs 125, 129–30 Fletcher, William 87, 122–3, 158, 164 Gardiner, Sir Phillip 124, 127–8, 135–9, 151 Leslie, Faith 123–8, 130 marriage of 124–7 as Mary 124–6 as white bird 124–6, 130 Leslie, Hope 12, 15, 122–29, 131–7, 140–44 Magawisca 11–12, 15, 121–6, 128–34, 136–44 account of Pequot war 124, 130–31, 134, 139 dismemberment of 131–3, 138, 140, 143 exile of 15, 123, 128, 130, 132, 137, 139, 143 intellect of 129, 133 lineage of 123, 128–30, 137, 143 relationship with Everell Fletcher 123, 125, 129–33, 136–41, 143 return of 136, 138, 143 Mononotto 11–12, 126, 137, 143 Oneco 124–6, 130 Rosa 124, 127–8, 133, 135 Winthrop, Governor 136 novels of Hope Leslie 11, 15, 121–2, 124, 130, 140, 144, 150

Index sensibility, 95–6, 98, 103–5, 109–10, 112, 115, 120 Smith, Charlotte 13–14, 17, 19, 22, 43–5, 47, 51–2, 54–6, 58–9 characters in Desmond Bethel, E. 22, 44–6, 48–51, 56, 151 Boisbelle, Josephine de 18–19, 22, 44–9, 52–9 Josephine’s daughter 54 Danby, Major 49, 52 Desmond, Lionel 18–19, 22, 44–56 d’Hauteville, Comte 44, 50, 55–6 Montfleuri, Marquis de 19, 22, 44–8, 50–1, 53–6 Rivemont 44, 53–5 Verney 48–9, 52–3, 56 Verney, Geraldine 13–14, 18–20, 22, 43–57 reputation of 47, 53 Waverly, Mrs 47, 50, 53 Waverly, Fanny 13, 19–20, 22, 43–58 marriage of 19–20, 22, 43–6, 48–58 novels of Desmond 13–14, 17–19, 21–2, 434, 56–9, 145, 151 Sullivan, Arthur see Ivanhoe adaptations

181

Templars see national identity Tennenhouse, Leonard see transatlantic studies Thackeray, William Makepeace see Ivanhoe adaptations transatlantic histories 8, 13, 17, 56, 101, 125, 145, 151–2 transatlantic studies 5–9, 13, 18, 123, 145 Armstrong, Nancy 4–5, 7–8, 18–19, 28, 57 Brown, Sarah Annes 4, 7 Buell, Lawrence 8 Giles, Paul 8–9 Gilroy, Paul 7–8 Jameson, Frederic 6 Manning, Susan 8–9 Pace, Joel 13 Rowe, John Carlos 8–9 Tennenhouse, Leonard 8, 18, 30 Weisbuch, Robert 8–9 Trumpener, Katie see nationalism, theories of Twain, Mark 11, 85, 148–9 Watt, Ian see novel, theories of Waverley see Scott, Sir Walter characters in see Scott, Sir Walter Weisbuch, Robert see transatlantic studies Woloch, Alex see novel, theories of