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Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

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Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

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Content Roguish Femininity: Gender and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by April Davidauskis –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2015 Copyright 2015 April Davidauskis ii Acknowledgements A project develops with relationships and those relationships keep a project and a person moving. At the end of this long project, I will stop and offer a few words of gratitude. This dissertation owes so much to my chair, John Carlos Rowe, a mentor whose intelligence and generosity have been so crucial to my work and my sanity. My other committee members, Jack Halberstam and Karen Halttunen, have each shaped this project and my scholarly pursuits, and I am grateful for their mentoring and intelligent engagement. My work also has developed thanks to Tania Modeleski, Michelle Gordon, and other faculty members at USC. To others who have guided me at USC, including Flora Ruiz, Jack Blum, John Holland, Lilyan Lam, and Barbara Leaks, I give my thanks. To my writing group and, more importantly, my friends—Arunima Paul, Penelope Geng, Gino Conti, Meghan Boyle Olivas, Matt Carrillo-Vincent, and Genevieve Kaplan—I cannot express how each one has served as inspiration, motivation, and hope in the darkness. It was an honor to write for you all and to read your work. To single one person out, I am grateful to have found a friend like Arunima, who has been the Lorelai Gilmore to my Sookie St. James and vice versa. To Brennan—you have been with me each step of the project, and I am grateful that we will long outlast this dissertation. I am thankful for my parents Tony and Mary Angel and my sister Gabrielle for the love they have shared. To Georgina, Larry, and Victoria, I am so grateful for the feeling of home and respite they have offered since I moved to Los Angeles. iii I have been inspired and helped by all of my family, including those gone, in particular my grandmother, Mary Gamez Villa, who passed away the day after I finished this dissertation. A woman of voice and intelligence, strength and frailty, I write for you and for us all. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii List of Figures v Introduction Why Go Rogue? 1 Chapter One The Female American and Hope Leslie’s Native Femininities 24 Chapter Two Friendship’s Roguishness in Leonora Sansay’s Haiti 68 Chapter Three The Roguish Cross-Dressing Soldier 103 Chapter Four The Hidden Hand and its Charming Empire 136 Postscript Anti-Charm, Affect, and Harriet Wilson 171 Bibliography 178 v List of Figures Figure 1: Eliza Allen as a Young Lady of Eastport, Maine 111 Figure 2: Eliza Allen as a Soldier 111 Figure 3: 1725 depiction of Anne Bonny 112 Figure 4: Capitola at the Hidden House from New York Ledger, 1859 145 1 Introduction Why Go Rogue? This project examines how rebellious femininities are constituted by and contest the imperial practices of the nineteenth-century United States. It presents the concept of “roguish femininity” in order to explore how spunky and unruly female characters in nineteenth-century fiction are formed in relationship to hemispheric politics and expansion. Roguish femininities resist conventions, particularly gender conventions and also sometimes the politics of imperialism. Yet in the texts I examine, resistance is shaped by charm and feminine beauty, which privilege the white or light-skinned heroine and her struggles. Therefore, these texts often manifest imperial formations even as the characters might critique them. The pages to come will examine female characters in fiction written primary by women and published in the early- and mid-nineteenth century. I situate the texts in their specific political, cultural, and historical moment, but my own cultural moment has influenced the way that I think about these characters. Indeed, not long after drafting the chapters, as I started 2 thinking about this introduction, I learned about a line of toys aimed for girls called the Nerf Rebelle. These toys—pink bows, arrows, guns, and crossbows—are marketed with taglines like, “Who says you can’t be a heartbreaker with fiercely accurate aim?” The name of the product, a combination of “rebel” and “belle,” seemed to resonate with my work, as I have contemplated the connections between femininity, appeal, and rebellion, particularly a rebellion that often manifests through the perceived subversion of gender conventions. The Nerf Rebelle toys reminded me how I started this project and, more specifically, reminded me of Sarah Palin. This contemporary context has informed my own perspective, steeped in discourses about postfeminism, American exceptionalism, and neoliberalism. A conceptual understanding of these nineteenth-century characters and texts coalesced when I started thinking about Palin’s 2009 book title Going Rogue and her self-fashioning as a maverick—a politician who was a former sports reporter, former beauty queen, a woman who knew how to hunt in order to feed her family. As I considered Palin’s representation and self-presentation as conservative gun- toting attractive mother, I researched nineteenth-century mavericks, trying to understand how and why, for example, in stories of gun-toting cross-dressing soldiers, women disguised as men who fought in the contested spaces of the Americas, the heroine revealed herself to be a beautiful feminine woman and often married. Helping me conceive of the relationship between gender and empire was Amy Kaplan’s concept of “manifest domesticity.” Her work elucidates how “the discourse of domesticity was intimately intertwined with the discourse of Manifest Destiny in antebellum U.S. culture” (Kaplan, Anarchy, 24). Though the discourse of domesticity often insisted on separate spheres between men and women, which would situate women as outside of the business of the nation and of empire, Kaplan shows how domestic discourse “developed as a central tenet of middle-class culture between the 1830s and 1850s, at a time when the United 3 States was violently and massively expanding its national domain across the continent” (Kaplan, Anarchy, 24-5). With this context, the culture of domesticity, especially domestic manuals and sentimental novels written by women, worked to “expand female influence beyond the home and the nation, and simultaneously to contract woman’s sphere to that of policing domestic boundaries against the threat of foreignness” (Kaplan, Anarchy, 28). 1 One does not have to think too much about Palin to see how she inherits a similar relationship to the domestic and the imperial. Indeed, her infamous (and misquoted) statement “I can see Russia from my house” stakes a claim at international might from the place of the domestic. During the interview with ABC News during her 2008 vice presidential campaign, when asked about the insight she had about Russia as an Alaskan, what Palin actually said was “They're our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” The mistranslation of her statement—the “I can see Russia from my house” line comes via Tina Fey on Saturday Night Line—emphasizes Palin’s own invocation of the domestic as a space of power. Because she is a “hockey mom” who is like a pit bull and a “mama grizzly,” Palin’s tie to domesticity is filtered through her identity as a maverick and a rogue. 2 She is figured as going rogue from John McCain’s presidential campaign and from Washington politics, but her roguery is embedded within the domestic, retranslating maternal motherhood as something potentially aggressive, a pitbull with lipstick. Cultural figures like Palin have helped to articulate what I am trying to get at in this project—a type of femininity that fashions itself as defiant, a maverick, a rebel from gender 1 Anne McClintock too has explored Victorian domesticity in relation to empire: “the cult of domesticity was a crucial, if concealed, dimension of male as well as female identities—shifting and unstable as these were—and an indispensable element both of the industrial market and the imperial enterprise” (McClintock, 5). 4 conventions especially. ⁠3 I am not claiming that Palin or the Nerf Rebelle are the exact same as nineteenth-century cross-dressing soldiers or plucky heroines, to mention just a few of my subjects of inquiry. However, I mention Palin here to demonstrate the importance of the interrogating gender and imperial formations, even in this contemporary moment, and how Palin belongs to a long history of women legitimating U.S. imperialism. My work continues the claims that women’s culture and imperialism are intertwined, that representations of women in the nineteenth-century affect and are affected by the discourse of empire and colonialism. But it thinks about femininities that may be in tension to domesticity. Indeed for many of these characters the sentimentalized domestic is not available to them because of their racial formation or because they exist in a site of potential violence due to intersections of imperialism and misogyny. For many of the characters, acting out is necessary for survival and offers potential for critiques of settler colonialism, racism, heternormativity, and sexism. But even if not perfectly embodying gender conventions, roguish femininity is a gender rebellion that is friendly to normativity— not necessarily through domesticity, but through an idealized feminine beauty and charm that functions in a heteronormative economy. The character’s appeal makes resistance to the novel’s power dynamics appealing, but it also marks the limits of resistance. Their beauty and charm—and the will that is often acted out in the text—are embedded in racist imperialist logics. 2 During the Republican National Convention in 2008, Palin quipped, “You know, they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.” In 2010, Palin used the term “mama grizzly” to refer to herself and her female constituents, notably in a fundraising video. 3 Marjorie Jolles examines Palln along with contemporary fashion industry discourse—“fashion rule- breakers”—to unpack how defiance of norms is a marker of postfeminism. She uses the term “rogue affect” to get at a “simultaneous investment in and detachment from social norms and those who follow them” (Jolles, 45). Palin then becomes an important cultural figure that helps scholars of different periods articulate types of femininity that are resistant to norms. 5 The texts I consider, mostly fiction written by women, make into heroines, if not celebrate, a woman is who self-willed and charming. A woman who is often mischievous and who may have a roguish glint in her eye. She fashions herself one who resists, talks back, fights back, and goes rogue, deviating from cultural norms, while being imagined and described through conventions of feminine beauty, qualities which I would say makes her roguish. ⁠ She may disguise herself as a man, or act out in ways considered unwomanly, but this type of woman is not really masculine; instead, she is often imagined to be beautiful and attractive—to be essentially feminine. These roguish femininities are many times characterized as unconventional, exceptional, and new. This sense of newness around the roguish woman is crucial to her characterization, inspiring a feeling of excitement that accompanies her during her adventures and relationships. She seems exceptional to the sentimental model, either imaginatively or literally moving in a world that exceeds the domestic United States, so that her adventures not only signify her gender rebellion but also offer a way of relating to the historical moment in which she exists. These characters, often characterized by charm, beauty, and mischief, infuse excitement into ideological justifications, including those for the hemispheric conflicts of the nineteenth century. Yet the figures do not have a stable relationship to these ideologies, often actively critiquing them, but also usually benefiting from them. As Anne McClintock writes about Victorian England: “white women were not the hapless onlookers of empire but were ambiguously complicit both as colonizers and colonized, privileged and restricted, acted upon and acting” (McClintock, 6). I use the term “roguish” as an organizing principle for my larger aim—to expand the understanding of nineteenth-century U.S. normative femininity, considering how this subversive femininity makes itself legible through the manifestation of imperialism and white supremacy, 6 both openly benefiting from and critiquing these power formations. Yet the word “rogue” has had many different implications, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The initial ones originate in the fifteenth century when rogue referred to “an idle vagrant, a vagabond” and more generally a “dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal, a scoundrel.” While the use of the word in this way has pejorative implications, the term rogue was also often used as a term of endearment that described “a mischievous person, esp. a child; a person whose behavior one disapproves of but who is nonetheless likeable or attractive.” The use of this reproachful, but teasing, endearment—the OED uses examples of male authors speaking of a “sweet little rogue,” “smart little rogue,” “pretty rogues” and “negroes, those holiday loving rogues”—reveals the power dynamics embedded in when and how the word is employed, one shaped by race, class, and gender hierarchies. The adjective roguish, which I am using to modify my study of femininities, too holds this association. Indeed, one of the OED’s examples of roguish is from Washington Irving: “A trim, well made, tempting girl, with a roguish dimpling face.” 4 The idea of roguishness being “tempting” or associated with “well made” girls speaks to the construction of normative femininity as attractive to male desire. Indeed, many of the protagonists that this project explores have multiple men (if not women) in love with them or vying for their attention. Sexual possibility is often emptied out in these novels that circulate in sentimentalized culture, but these novels construct these women as desirable in a heteronormative economy, and my study considers what is being constructed as likeable and charming. 5 4 From Irving’s 1824 Tales of the Traveller, 295. 5 The term “rogue” also relates to the tradition of the picaresque, which has been known as the rogue’s tale. The basic picaresque story is “that of an unheroic protagonist, worse than we, caught up in a chaotic world, worse than ours, in which he is on an eternal journey of encounters that allow him to be alternately both victim of the world and its exploiter” (Wick, 54). Generally, the picaresque genre tells the tale of a wanderer or traveler recounted in loosely connected episodes, often related with humorous or satire. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders an example. These characters are not necessarily rogues in this sense, though some of the novels may be influenced by this genre of literature. According to Ulrich Wick’s 7 Nineteenth-Century Femininities In order to understand gender in the nineteenth century, scholars have done important work examining domestic and sentimental cultures as a primary defining medium of women, particular white bourgeois women. 6 In early American discourse, the trope of Republican Womanhood heralded women as having a role in creating good citizens for the young nation with an emphasis on mothers whose “superior moral nature would shape and uplift her family, and […] would serve as a shining example to her children” (McMillen, 15). This idea developed as the century went on with domesticity being tied to Christian sympathy and commodified through the industry surrounding sentimental culture. 7 These industries included a huge literary economy publishing sentimental fiction and non-fiction. Sentimental culture was also tied to politics in the nineteenth century in what Lauren Berlant calls a “politico-sentimental aesthetic” that we can see clearest in Harriet Beecher Stowe call to “feel right” about slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Berlant, 36). Picaresque Narrative, Picaresque Fictions: A Theory and Research Guide, one of the first and most comprehensive books about the picaresque genre is Frank Wadleigh Chandler’s 1899 Romances of Roguery. 6 From all the various incarnations of the Tompkins-Douglas debate about whether sentimental culture has a conservative function or whether it offers a powerful feminist reinterpretation of power, to Lauren Berlant’s recent work on twentieth-century women’s culture, scholars have emphasized sentimental culture in order to understand not only what “women’s culture” is, but also to limn out the terms of normative feminine identity. For instance, Douglas, Ann. Feminization of American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977; Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. 7 Lori Merish writes about how what she calls sentimental ownership is a way through which femininity was articulated in nineteenth-century United States in relation to commodity culture.. Ann Douglas shows the interconnectedness between women’s literary culture and Protestantism: both groups “believed they had a genuine redemptive mission in their society: to propagate the potentially matriarchal virtues of nurture, generosity, and acceptance, to create the ‘culture of feelings’” (Douglas, 10-1) 8 As these different cultural locations suggest, scholars have had much to say about sentimental culture. Publishing The Feminization of American Culture in 1977, Ann Douglas argues that popular women’s culture and Christian clerical culture became aligned in the nineteenth century to put forth a “redemptive mission” in which sentimental values—“to propagate the potentially matriarchal virtues of nurture, generosity, and acceptance, to create the ‘culture of feelings’” (10-1)—were made crucial to American culture. Douglas is critical of this shift: “The sentimentalization of theological and secular culture was an inevitable part of the self-evasion of a society both committed to laissez-faire industrial expansion and disturbed by its consequences. [. . .] Sentimentalism provided the inevitable rationalization of the economic order” (12). Responding to this argument in 1985, Jane Tompkins sees Douglas as participating in the same critique of sentimental culture as those in the nineteenth century who dismissed the “mob of scribbling women,” and Tompkins instead argues that “the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represents a monumental effort to reorganize culture from the women’s point of view” (124). In other words, these sentimental novels imaginatively invert structures of the world, so that women are the ones with the power, which is manifested in the terms of the gendered hegemony—through their submission, through domestic space. More recent scholarship still invokes these two scholars, even if only noting the shift in critical focus: “Moving beyond the Tompkins-Douglas debate, critics are now invested in the unsteadiness of sentimental literature as it attempts to make sense of the agencies and desires of its domestic subjects” (Dill, 711). Though sentimental culture primarily constructs white femininity, scholars have shown how women of color often had a complex relationship to sentimental culture, a system that often upheld whiteness and the privileges of white femininity against ways of being that are racialized 9 as non-white. 8 Many of the literary representations of women of color circulated a sentimentalized image, like Stowe’s Eliza, a runaway slave motivated by her role as a mother. 9 Though not living within middle-class white women’s culture of the mid-nineteenth century, the characters I will explore in the early chapters, Magawisca from Hope Leslie (1827) and Zelica from Zelica, the Creole (1820) invoke the discourse of sentimentality, tying their own defiance against colonial, patriarchal powers to sentimentalized, noble beauty. These women do resist the conventions of sentimental femininity, but they are understood within those very conventions. Even though most scholarship claims a need to “move on from arguments for and against sentimentality” (Howard, 63), sentimental culture still is synonymous with femininity in the nineteenth century. In addition to the sentimental, my study focuses on fiction that often fits into other genres like sensationalism and travel narrative. The characters defy conventions of nineteenth-century femininity, which include domesticity, sentimentality, sympathy and motherhood, but these characters still circulate and are subsumed in these regimes of womanhood. However, my project emphasizes that sentimentality is not the only category through which to understand the constructed category of “women” in the nineteenth century. That is not to say that sentimental culture is not a crucial vector by which to understand femininity, but gender representations are not created by only one vector. Even if considering 8 P. Gabrielle Foreman examines the intersections between sentimental and political discourse for black women in the nineteenth century. Lauren Berlant summarizes James Baldwin’s argument that sentimentality reproduces “a person as a thing” and elaborates by saying “sentimentality from the top down softs risks to the conditions of privilege by making obligations to action mainly ameliorative, a matter not of changing the fundamental terms that organize power, but of following the elevated claims of vigilant sensitivity, virtue, and conscious” (Berlant, 35). 9 Berlant writes about how the characterization of “Poor Eliza” escaping over the Ohio River with babe in arms circulates across multiple centuries. Yu-Fang Cho notes moment of sentimental affect— benevolence as she calls it—working in sensational short stories about Chinese in California magazines of the late nineteenth-century. Sentimentalized women of color, through different genres and historical locations, include Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs framed by her editor, white abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and later in the century with Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, about a mixed-raced native girl, sentimental heroine 10 only the narrow category of white bourgeois women, sentimental culture was not the only culture at work fashioning representations of women. Simply put, women did not only consume sentimental culture, and normative femininity is constituted not only through that dominant women’s culture. During these time period circulated challenges to norms and institutionalized oppression, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 to The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. This politics seeps through into fiction, informing the way several roguish characters express their complaints and insists upon their choices and their rights. This time period also circulated stories of femininities that had an overtly conflicted, skeptical relationship to sentimentality and other regimes of gender. 10 ⁠ These stories emphasized how these characters are exceptional from others, listing personality traits that made them notable. Catharine Sedgwick describes her title character Hope Leslie as having an “open, fearless, and gay character.” Leonora Sansay describes her character Clara in Secret History as being “proud and high spirited.” And in the genre that first sparked my interest in femininity with spunk is cross-dressing solider Eliza Allen, a “tender and delicate female” who assumes “a rugged and turbulent character” in the narrative The Female Volunteer. E.D.E.N. Southworth seems to offer a whole collection of such women, including Britomarte who expresses her belief in women’s equality “fervently, earnestly, passionately, with blazing eyes, flushed cheeks and crimsoned lips” in Britomarte, the Man-Hater and her most famous character Capitola Black who is known for her “humor, mischief, and roguery” in The Hidden Hand. 10 While describing the role of the republican mother—“virtuous patriots, they sought always to serve the Republic—but never seeking a public role for themselves”—Caroll Smith-Rosenberg also points out that alternative narratives existed like the “spicier narrative” of seduction (Smith-Rosenbery, 168-9). Baym too insists on the complexity in women’s culture and literature that is not fully limited to domesticity, maternity, and sentimentality, instead noting how literary production and representation “supported a wide range of female endeavor” (Baym, 3). 11 Characters such as these may challenge to patriarchy, heteronormativity, and gender hierarchy, and challenges to sentimentality as scholars have examined in the past several decades. These women have been identified as subversive, and in doing so, a certain type of feminist scholarship sometimes celebrates them as feminist rebels or identifies them as persons of gender fluidity. 11 But many scholars demonstrate the complexity of these gender formations, acknowledging how defying some norms also means staying true to other norms, whether strategically or by virtue of one’s own privilege. For instance in her study of nineteenth-century autobiographical writing by women, Laura Laffrado notes that the women writing their own lives “behave against conventional expectations and narrate their deviations from normative assumptions, while simultaneously proclaiming their propriety” (5). Laffrado acknowledges this complexity as a tactic for women to be culturally legible. Representations of women, whether self-authored or not, were and are complex and vexed, especially when working through hierarchies of power and legibility. However, my study of roguish femininity does not simply reveal that women were agents of resistance or point out how they were oppressed. Gender is manifested in complex ways by roguish women, but my analysis of these texts does not rely on roguish femininity to signify gender fluidity or a transcendence over norms, and neither does it signal blanket suppression of gender and sexual freedom. Roguish femininity signifies gendered traits that resist convention and oppressive narratives for women, usually by attaching those traits to 11 I have presented on conference panels that have included papers naming the times when a character enacts agency, agency signifying freedom, feminism, or empowerment in the face of an oppression that allowed women no free will. My study is not trying to find “agency” in a supposed time of blanket oppression for women, nor to point out agency for agency’s sake. If anything, my point is that “agency” is not necessarily some great feminist victory. For some examples of the range of discussions on “uncommon” women see: Michelle Ann Abate, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History; Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America; Laura Laffrado, Uncommon Women: Gender and 12 beautiful charming femininities; moreover, it shows how the resistance to norms becomes a character type. Roguish Femininity and Feminism Roguish femininity suggests that resistance is not only what these women do, but who these women are, and resistance to gender conventions is part of their makeup as appealing, beautiful, charming characters. So if resistance is a part of a gender formation in these characters, then we can consider how and why resistance works in specific contexts and its effects. As Shelley Streeby writes in her study of sensational fiction and empire: “Stories of female power and passion were also attempts to represent bodies along racial lines that were strongly shaped by the long nineteenth-century history of imperialism of the Americas” (Streeby, 34). We can see these connections between this particular manifestation of power, race, and gender by asking questions like: Who is charming? What kinds of relationships, adventures, and rebellions are celebrated in this literature as appealing, even if the characters are scolded and looked at with humor and resignation? My answers to these questions and my work more generally emerges out of a feminism that is critical of an alliance with imperial and racist formations. In mapping the development of feminisms in the second half of the twentieth century, Chela Sandoval identifies overlapping feminist movements that were “influenced not only by struggles against gender domination, but by the struggles against race, sex, national, economic, cultural, and social hierarchies that marked the twentieth century” (Sandoval, 54). Strands of feminism, however, have often tended to focus solely on individualized progress or Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S Women’s Writing, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009; Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War 13 power—usually the progress of exceptional white (or whitened) women. Studies too of nineteenth-century women often have the tendency to search for women’s agency, not questioning what enables agency and resistance for white women of the time. Feminists of color have criticized this persistent form of feminism for decades, calling it “hegemonic feminism” and “whitestream feminism” among other appellations. 12 The focus on individual equality or progress that sometimes occurs in studies on the agency of nineteenth-century white women ignores feminism that has been build upon a foundation of intersectionality and a rigorous critique of racism and imperialism. It does not account for ways in which women were both oppressed and oppressors, empowered and disempowered—in other words, does not account for the complexity of gender and power formations. Moreover, characteristics that some might identify as feminist—a powerful woman, a women in charge, a woman upending convention—have not necessarily served the goals of feminism. Nancy Fraser gets at this when she notes how in recent decades focus on the empowerment of an individual woman has been, with limitations, useful to neoliberalism rather than feminism’s critique of structural and institutional injustice, noting that “disorganized capitalism turns a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” that shuts out the complexity of feminist discourse and action (384). Fraser says that “second-wave feminism has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism” (384). 12 Sandoval, who uses the term “hegemonic feminism” after Spivak, writes, “From the beginning of what was known as the second wave of the women’s movement, U.S. feminists of color have claimed feminisms at odd with those developed by U.S. white women” (Sandoval, 45). Sandoval identifies U.S. third world feminisms as an alternative. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, Angie Morrill critique “whitestream feminism” in their article about native feminisms. Feminists of color often point to the ways in which oppression can be addressed; for instance, Cherrie Moraga identifying “a complex map of feminism, one that fights sexism and colonialism at once” (Moraga, xiii). 14 Earlier manifestations of a gender-based resistance or politics can also serve other ideological purposes, and I focus here on imperialism and white supremacy. My study addresses how individualized rebellions or critiques of gender oppression become more palatable when couched with charm, beauty, and other culturally-recognized appealing traits. By looking closely at what gets represented as charming and beautiful, my aim is to uncover the way that gender, race, and imperial formations coalesce together in a historical moment. These methods emerge from concerns that are specific to my own historical moment—the ways in which the “feminist” discourse of “empowerment” has often too easily served neoliberalism. I am not claiming that I am identifying nascent neoliberal manifestation in the nineteenth century, but rather that I am embedded in my own historical moment of feminist scholarship and seek to unpack the ways in which gender-based politics and feminism manifests. This project is based in a feminist methodology, one that continues the discussion of how gender, racial, imperial, and other forms of domination co-exist. It maintains that studies of nineteenth-century gender in literature need a critical gender studies that is informed by feminism that is committed to critiquing racism and imperialism as well as sexism and misogyny. I interrogate the gender formation of these characters as it intersects with their racial formation, the characters being white, whitened, biracial, and light-skinned women. My work then is influenced by recent scholars of the nineteenth-century who critically look at the ways that race, gender, and modes of power function. P. Gabrielle Foreman writes about the politics of black women’s writing: “Nineteenth-century women’s writing is rarely identified with the intersectional positionality associated with twentieth- and twenty-first-century subjectivity even as nineteenth-century writers’ reception communities are evidence of just such intersectionalities” (Foreman, 9). Kyla Wazana Tompkins in her study of food cultures and the 15 body in the nineteenth century describes her aim as one that attempts “to more closely bind food studies to feminist, queer, and gender studies, as well as to critical race theory” (Tompkins, 3). She then explains how all these ingredients of eating “had particular consequences for a nation in the process of cultural, political, and ideological formation” (Tompkins, 3). She gives insight into racial and gender formations that are produced through eating cultures and how that ties into the political culture of the nineteenth-century U.S. This type of theoretical complexity—that considers race, gender, nation, and political culture—influences how I have thought about the way roguish femininity manifests, the way the coupling of charm, beautiful, and resistance manifest. The Woman of Spunk The chapters will examine fiction(alized) stories that recount women who defy social convention whether for pleasure or for material necessity. Beyond the realm of fiction, actual historical figures were recounted in the popular discourse in ways that could be considered roguish. Helen Jewett was murdered in 1836 in her bed at the brothel where she worked and lived. Her death, life, and the trial that followed became a sensation in the popular press. The sensational nature of her crime—killed in bed by a client/lover wielding a hatchet—coupled with Jewett being a relatively well-known woman around New York with some influential and wealthy clients made the murder and the woman into objects of fascination. Fictionalized pamphlets and newspapers offered, as historian Patricia Cline Cohen’s describes it, “Acclaim for a Woman of Spunk,” the discourse “making her out to be a noble and spirited young woman who somehow miraculously transcended the inevitable degradation of her occupation,” while describing her as “charming, witty, spirited, authoritative, imperious even, 16 and certainly unafraid of and undeferential to men” (77, 78). Stories circulated of her talking back to men, knocking a pistol out of a hand of a threatening man, and freely walking around town in expensive clothing. Her spunk also manifested in the legal realm, as before her death she appeared in court several times, bringing charges against men who insulted or assaulted her. According to the (not-so-authentic) pamphlet Authentic Biography of the Late Helen Jewett, a Girl of the Town, by a Gentleman Fully Acquainted with Her History, in court Jewett scolded a British military officer who had destroyed her dresses: “You…pretend to be an officer of the British army! What a calumny upon his Majesty’s service. You, an officer! It is impossible. The men holding his Majesty’s commissions have generally some pretensions to the character of gentlemen” (Cohen, 83). Jewett’s nimble use of words, reflections of both her perceived haughtiness and her dignity, speak to the characters I will explore in pages to come—making declarations in spaces, official or not, where injustices are made manifest. Declarations similar to the fictionalized Jewett’s invoke the values of patriarchal authority at the same time they are pointing out hypocrisies in gender conventions. Many of the roguish woman I explore showily engage in condemnations both of individuals (especially men) or institutions, a manifestation of their impetuousness, but also of the righteousness of their critiques. The women are too described as having an unmistakeable and unshakable dignity like Jewett’s, but are represented as, unlike Jewett, sexually uncorrupted, having their virtue in the more conventional sense. Yet that these characteristics remain consistent through both fiction and non-fiction—the stories and the cultural figures—demonstrate a different manifestation than the standard virtuous sentimental heroine, and this femininity is, to a certain extent, celebrated. Jewett’s cultural reception is not the only reason that she fits into the concerns of this project. Her story, though perhaps obliquely, connects to the culture of imperialism that I mean 17 the term “roguish” to signify. After Jewett’s murder, a reporter visiting the brothel made note of an uncanny painting on the wall: “It represented a beautiful female, in disorder and on her knees, between two savages, one of them lifting up a tomahawk to give her a blow to the head” (Cohen, 105). Patricia Cline Cohen speculates that the painting is John Vanderlyn’s The Death of Jane McCrea or at least a copy of it. The famous painting represents a scene of violence during the U.S. Revolutionary War based on a widely circulated story about a group of Native Americans killing a white woman. As the legend goes, Jane McCrea fell in love with a man who was loyal to the British and who joined their army. McCrea left her family to join him and was guided to him by Mohawks aligned with the British, seemingly betraying the revolutionary cause to seek out treasonous love. According to legend, McCrea was murdered by the Mohawks before she reached her lover. Vanderlyn’s painting depicts the scene of violence, the white American McCrea knelt between two native men, one of whom holds an axe menacingly over his head. The painting, representing the semi-dressed McCrea and murderers, combines the sexual and violent, being a troubling, but, according to Cohen, logical choice to hang in the brothel’s parlor to tap into both the anxieties and fantasies of this sexual space (109-110). I would add that he painting also plays into politics outside the brothel as the 1830s are the decade of the Indian Removal Act and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. Whether the painting is literally of Jane McCrea or just invokes that famous story, the represented scene of violence wherein a brown male body both sexually and physically menaces the “beautiful female” white body is a deeply rooted in imperial imaginaries of rebellion and nation formation. During the war, American military officials invoked the Jane McCrea story “to inspire soldiers to defeat [British General] Burgoyne and his thuggish Indian allies in defense of American womanhood” (Cohen 109). The representation of white femininity as vulnerable, 18 but sexualized, and the native masculinity as violent and cruel leaves white American masculinity to be unimplicated in wrongdoing, especially relevant when we consider how Jewett’s well-connected, respectable, and white (alleged) murderer was acquitted of the crime. Though seemingly arbitrary and coincidental that such a painting existed in a place where a spunky, defiant woman lived, this racialized discourse is crucial to the type of femininity that Jewett is represented as having in the stories that were told after her murder. The unruly, charming, but ultimately pure-hearted woman is a racial formation that often requires the contrasting violent or menacing masculinities of color. For instance, in Hope Leslie, the menacing violent presence of Mononotto, a Pequot leader seeking revenge against the Puritans, informs the development of the roguish women in the novel. In Zelica, the Creole, the two main characters, one a white American, the other a light-skinned biracial Haitian woman are pursued by black Haitian revolutionaries, limiting the critique of institutionalized colonial racism that the text invokes. The white masculinities in that particular text are stripped of any threat of violence against women, unlike the earlier version of the story, Leonora Sansay’s Secret History, which represents the main violent actor as the American woman’s white French husband. Another white man with a French surname is the threat in Southworth’s Hidden Hand, while a comic villain, a white man named Black Donald, is redeemed by the end of the novel, disassociating any ties between white American masculinity and threats to the charming heroine. The descriptions of a charismatic Jewett refocus energy away from the gendered violence onto an appealing femininity, and it individualizes and exceptionalizes violence, as the nineteenth- century media offered the body of a dead white woman. Similarly, the texts I will explore, though often representing moments of despair, social ill, and scenes of violence, often want to avoid mournfulness. This avoidance is constitutive of their status as heroines—they disguise 19 themselves, make jokes when they should be serious, and change their identities. 13 The conflicted imperial and racial formations of the nascent and growing United States inform this femininity, her spunk often moving her transnationally or alongside and against colonial actors. Chapter Organization This study enters into conversations about gender, feminism, race, and the nineteenth- century United States, clarifying and naming a femininity in order to problematize the tie between gender rebellion and feminism. The chapters to come seek to examine the complexity of these femininities within transnational spaces to show how and when gender formations can support imperial ventures, even if they seek to critique them. The first set of texts are published in the first several decades of the nineteenth century with events like the Haitian Revolution, Indian Removal, and a historical legacy of genocidal colonialism, an influence both inside and outside the stories. The second set of texts have Manifest Destiny, the imperial war with Mexico, and the Civil War as their backdrops. Many of these characters if not the texts themselves have an urge that is anti-imperial and anti-racist, but these texts also reinforce white supremacy and give justification to American imperialism, even if it critiques these things. I have chosen these texts because within these settings, the main characters do not follow all the conventions of nineteenth-century femininity, and because of 13 Even “Helen Jewett” was an alias—one of many the woman originally named Dorcas Doyen donned. She also went by Helen Mar. Taken from a novel about William Wallace and other Scottish resisters fighting against the English, the character Helen Mar was, according to Cohen, “beautiful and strong- minded,” while also being “ladylike” and “brave, heroic” (169). That Jewett was attracted to the name Helen Mar, speaks to appeal of the roguishly feminine woman. Chapter three of this project explores the cultural phenomenon of women who participate in war, focusing on the narrative of Eliza Allen and Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater, texts about women who enlist in the military, disguised as men, 20 that, they are often celebrated by the text. All of the chapters place the text and its heroines in their historical context in order to consider how gender forms along with and against racialized imperialism. The texts in the first two chapters are published in the United States in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The Female American (1767, 1801, 1814) and Hope Leslie (1827) are set during initial colonization of the Americas, characterizing interactions between white British colonizers and indigenous native populations. This setting in the past speaks to the time in which the novels were circulating, as the United States government continued to threaten native sovereignty with shifting tactics, including the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Haitian Revolution is the setting of both The Secret History (1808) and Zelica, the Creole (1821), and transnational politics of the United States, France, and the Haitian rebels influence the movements and developments of the women in the novels. The texts in the final two chapters are published in the 1850s and 1860s, and are set during and around both the United States’s war with Mexico and the U.S. Civil War. The Hidden Hand (1859) published on the eve of the Civil War makes no mention of the building conflict and sets her novel ten years prior during the U.S.- Mexico War. The chapter entitled “Roguish Soldiers” examines cross-dressing with two texts that are respectively set in the U.S.-Mexico War and the Civil War. I examine how the hemispheric setting of these conflicts inform the way gender manifests through these characters. “The Female American and Hope Leslie’s Native Femininities” argues that gender deviating from nineteenth-century conventions of femininity both disrupts and supports imperial formations that include native displacement and genocide. The Female American and Hope Leslie recount stories of women living in the colonial Americas—the former tells a Pocahontas- in order to follow their beloveds into battle. Eliza Allen and Britomarte then criss-cross the country, if not the world, following the imperial trajectories of the United States. 21 to-Robinson Crusoe story that is set in Virginia and on an island in the Atlantic and the latter is set in Massachusetts during war between Puritan settlers and the Pequot natives in the seventeenth century. These texts represent native femininities as charming, heroic, and as important to a conception of an American woman as vital and full of life. In forming these femininities, the native women are represented as whitened, and in Hope Leslie, the native heroine is displaced for a more attractive and charismatic white “American” woman who takes over as the preferred femininity. “Friendship’s Roguishness in Leonora Sansay’s Haiti” continues to trace the racial formation of roguish femininity through the setting of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on the ways that American femininities are represented. This chapter examines two texts that are set in revolutionary Saint-Domingue—Sansay’s Secret History and the revision to that text Zelica, the Creole, which is attributed to “an American,” but may also have been written by Sansay. These novels show the interconnection of colonial and misogynistic violences, and the latter text offers a woman of color feminist discourse, by displacing a white American heroine with a biracial Haitian woman who is Zelica, the Creole’s title character. While the later novel offers female interracial friendship as an alternative to colonial, patriarchal powers, it also relies on racist, white supremacist notions of black masculinity in order to bring forth a woman of color gender politics. Chapter three “The Roguish Soldiers of The Female Volunteer and Britomarte, the Man- Hater” examines how roguish femininity manifests through cross-dressing. Though different in form—The Female Volunteer (1851) a fictional but purportedly true narrative of cross-dressing and Britomarte, the Man-Hater (1864-5), a serial novel about four women set during the Civil War written by E.D.E.N. Southworth—these texts represent women disguising themselves as 22 men and enlisting in the military to follow the men they love in battle. Between the two texts, the heroines travel to Mexico, California, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, negotiating what they see as their right to choose how they live their life and who they love. The chapter argues that the trope of the cross-dressing soldier empowers a femininity that is seeking heteronormative matrimony, shaped by a historically-specific nineteenth-century discourse about women’s matrimonial rights, all embedded in imperial formations. Chapter four “The Hidden Hand and its Charming Empire” examines the character of Capitola Black from E.D.E.N. Southworth’s novel. The Hidden Hand (1859) was a hugely successful novel that told the story of its roguish heroine who adventures, wears disguises, and plots to protect herself and the ones she cares about in her new Virginia plantation home. The novel is set during the U.S.-Mexico War and this chapter places this novel in its hemispheric context and demonstrates how the development of the character’s charisma is embedded in the discourse of Manifest Destiny. In her exploration of twentieth-century sentimentality, Lauren Berlant identifies a “female complaint” within women’s culture that identifies white women’s dissatisfaction with mainstream society and culture, especially the lack of recognition of problems of gender. Berlant recognizes how woman’s culture provides ways of expressing the complaint, and thus feeling validated by the social recognition. The female complainer feels that she “knows something about the world that, if it were listened to, could make things better” (Berlant, 2). Berlant argues that this complaint is often not in the political realm, but instead is “juxtapolitical” and “flourishing in proximity to the political” (3). And when women sentimentalists turn to politics overtly, says Berlant, they do not see politics as a needed resource, but instead as a “degraded space and a threat to happiness and justice that needs reforming so that better living 23 can take place” (3). Berlant acknowledges that, though not radical, these texts do have ruptures, noting “women’s culture always contains episodes of refusal and creative contravention to feminine normativity, even as it holds tightly to some version of the imaginable conventional good life in love” (4). However, she argues these texts are not subversive but instead about the “management of ambivalence” and “cultivate fantasies of vague belonging as an alleviation of what is hard to manage in the lived reality” (5). As I have thought about the texts and women in the chapters to come, I have considered their complaints, both juxtapolitical and overtly political, about limits to their lives, mobility, and communities. The literary works contain characters that refuse and offer alternatives to normativity, even as normativity is being reconstituted, even as imperialism is being resisted and justified. These characters I identify as representing roguish femininity are formed as a complaint and a refusal of conventions of gender and modes of power. Yet rather than working through sentimentality, or solely through sentimentality, roguish femininity adopts the less ambivalent, more spectacular types of resistance. Roguish femininity works through the exceptional rather than the ordinary, charm and beauty that seeks to dazzle as it launches its critique. Roguish femininity works large and big, capturing attention, if not forcing that her will be done. She operates with a spirit of dominance, and serves as the charm of imperialism. She winks as she conquers, from Massachusetts to San-Domingue, from Virginia to California. 24 Chapter One The Female American and Hope Leslie’s Native Femininities The Female American and Hope Leslie are set in the seventeenth-century Americas, while written much later: The Female American was first published in England in 1767 and then in the United States in 1800 and 1814, while Hope Leslie is published in 1827. These texts represent native, white, and mixed femininities that critique colonial practices, written—or, in the case of the earlier text, claiming to be written—by women. Hope Leslie is authored by prominent literary figure Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and, while the creator of The Female American is unknown, it claims to be a narrative authored by a woman born in colonial Virginia, daughter of a native woman and British man. In considering the lack of knowledge about the text, Michelle Burnham states, “Whether female or male, American or British, the author of The Female American articulated for readers on both sides of the Atlantic an often radical vision of 25 race and gender through an account of a biracial heroine who is able to indulge in a kind of ‘rambling’ mobility and ‘extraordinary’ adventure precisely because she is, as the title declares, an American female” (Burnham, 24). This project is invested in the kinds of stories that tell those “radical” and “extraordinary” adventures of “American” women, but interrogates how being extraordinary constructs femininity in relation to imperial projects of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the stories that represent “extraordinary” women are often unevenly and problematically invested in imperial practices. This chapter continues to trace that investment by exploring the ways that fictional native women are represented in nineteenth-century retellings of the colonial period. Importantly, these fictional imaginings have more to do with the construction of white femininity in the United States than the realities for Native American women in the nineteenth century. Within the cultural glorification of heroic (but tragic) native leaders and a political divide over U.S. policies toward natives, The Female American and, especially, Hope Leslie emerge with stories of heroic native women. These representations critique colonialism, the hypocrisy of imperial powers and actors, and the treatment of native populations, representing some of the vulnerabilities and violences that native woman faced, though within a sensational or sentimentalized milieu. Yet even with their critiques, these texts are often more invested in constructing a white alternative to conventional modes of womanhood than with a native femininity alternative to the cultural tropes. Instead, the way these texts represent women in the colonial period informs an understanding of how white women engage in nineteenth-century political discourse. The Republican Mother is one of the main ways that critics have accessed the role of white women in the early United States: “Republican motherhood brought women into the public and political sphere by focusing on a woman’s role as the mother of sons and 26 hence a producer of the nation’s future citizens” (Fetterley, 72). Putting that concept into play with the trope of the Vanishing American, Melissa Ryan explores how Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824), a novel about the marriage of a white woman and a native man which begets a child, “positions [the] heroine as the mediating force by which the conflicting desires to appropriate and to outgrow Indianness are simultaneously realized” (Ryan, 39). Therefore, Republican Mother is constructed out of the ideology that held the native as vanishing and as against progress. Whether it is women engaging as mothers, sisters, or other familial affiliations, the white supremacist imaginary reigns as the “Indian” is appropriated and then expunged. 14 Fictional representations aside, actual native women did engage with imperial actors and negotiated political power on behalf of themselves and their communities. In 1781 during the revolutionary period, an especially turbulent time for the Cherokees, a faction of whom unsuccessfully went to war against the colonists, a group of Cherokee women made a speech to a diplomatic commission led by Continental Army general Nathanael Greene. As their intercession, the women make a claim at connection with the colonists: “Why should there be any Difference amongst us, we live on the same Land with you, and our People are mixed with white Blood: one third of our people are mixed with white Blood” (“Speech of Cherokee Women,” 180). 15 This speech uses the realities of racial intermixing as a diplomacy tool, insisting on shared kinship of groups that have been at war. These women make an implicit 14 As an alternative to motherhood, Judith Fetterley uses the term “Republican sisterhood” to explore the women-centered relationships as a model for political engagement in Hope Leslie. 15 Some of the text is missing in Greene’s text, which Moore, et al, replace which brackets, which I removed in this quotation. Colin G. Calloway details the tension between older Cherokee accomodationist leadership with younger members who wanted to join the British in war against the Americans. After the Cherokees losses, many adopted “a path of accommodation and controlled change” (Calloway, 200-201). Cherokee women participated in the negotiations to end conflict, but saw limits in the American gender system: “To Cherokee people accustomed to matrilineal social structures and women’s political participation, the political voicelessness of women in the United States was symptomatic of the imbalance, disorder, and violence of white, colonial society” (Moore, 179). 27 critique of the treatment by the colonial and nascent United States by strategically leveling the racialized hierarchy by which natives are posed as savages, different from civilized Anglo- Americans. Both The Female American and Hope Leslie engage with the ambivalences of “mixing,” be it through a biracial character or through connections that motivate colonial critique. Moreover, the novels engage with the construction of femininity in violent colonial contexts. Though sanitized and individualized, these representations compel us to explore how the novels engage with gendered violence. As Andrea Smith traces “gender violence is not simply a tool of patriarchal control, but also serves as a tool of racism and colonialism” (Smith, 1). The political involvement of native women like the Cherokee delegation speaks to the intersections of violence, gender, race, and colonialism. 16 The novels I explore lay out some of these intersections, even if the texts, (likely) written by white authors, hold back from completely questioning the racialized violence underpinning imperial projects, the nation’s understanding of itself, and white femininity. Yet, these novels articulate how the threat and history of violence shapes the represented femininities and possibilities for rebellion. My focus on the roguish woman does not change the cultural narrative about “vanishing” natives, but it can reveal the gender formation that did fight against the “inevitable” history, a femininity that destabilized the coherent narrative of the United States and resisted and slowed down some of the imperial work of the nation. These novels represent women of color among those resisting, and this was often not the case in the nineteenth-century cultural discourse. The characters condemn dominating ideologies and power structures, while asserting femininities 16 Later in the century, recounting the Piute experience of white American westward expansion is Sarah Winnemucca who wrote an account of “their wrongs and claims” in Life Among the Piutes (1883). Winnemucca describes injustices facing the Piutes, especially women: “My people have been so unhappy for a long time they wish now to disincrease, instead of multiply. The mothers are afraid to have more children, for fear they shall have daughters, who are not safe even in their mother’s presence” 28 that have the “power” to condemn—the ones that remain legible and palatable, mostly the whitened ones. Therein lies the limits of the resistance offered by these representations—it tends to be about whitened femininity and femininities that articulate resistance through performances of whiteness. The native characters—Unca Eliza Winkfield and Magawisca—are often assigned Anglo-American qualities, their manner and communication mostly appreciated and admired by other white characters. 17 Scholars like Lucy Maddox unpack the “positive” literary representations of natives by white women in the nineteenth century saying, “the project of merging gender and race means only that they experiment with moving their Indian characters, for a short time, into the privileged domain of the white woman” (Maddox, 96-7). These native women are represented with characteristics of white femininity, yet it is not only a transference of white feminine values to native women, but also a production of white femininity. Part of my examination of whiteness through native characters is influenced by Wanda Pillow’s “Searching for Sacajawea” which shows “how depictions and remembrances of Sacajawea participate in reproductions of whiteness” (Pillow, 2). She goes on to say that “the whitening of Sacajawea’s physical features, thoughts, and deeds was performed partly by assigning her the tropes of white womanhood—Madonna, maiden, and mother—were integral to her creation as an emblem of manifest destiny and suffragist icon” (Pillow, 5). For instance, when early-twentieth-century suffragists appropriated Sacajawea as a feminist symbol they did so “by highlighting Sacajawea’s role as both guide and virtuous female subjects,” qualities which “reinforced and reproduced white gendered colonial narratives of manifest destiny” (Pillow, 6). (Winnemucca, 48). In detailing the fear of Piute women, Winnemucca suggests the genocidal and sexual violence used as a tool of imperial expansion. 17 These characters, more so Magawisca—definitely fit into the trope of “noble savage,” though the texts would not characterize them as “savage.” Schweitzer writes that “Sedgwick offers a specifically ‘feminine’ alternative—reciprocity—to masculine domination, but mobilizes a discourse of the noble 29 This examination of Sacajawea connects to this chapter’s exploration: how the representations of native women create and enhance a roguish whitened femininity that is critical of imperialism but participates in its benefits. Therefore, the representation of these figures as hybrid subjects or as white-like contributes to the whitening of certain “Indian” characteristics so that they could be appropriated in some form for the white woman, who in this chapter is Sedgwick’s title character Hope Leslie. In their call for gender studies to engage actively with Native feminist theories, Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill write: “Native feminist theories thus offer a number of useful starting points in problematizing the intersections among settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism, particularly through demonstrating how whitestream and other feminist movements often ignore and, at times, perpetuate this triad” (Arvin, et al 16). Keeping in mind these intersections, this chapter and this project more broadly seek to problematize resistant femininities written by mostly white authors, to show how roguish femininities—what some may see as “feminist” characteristics—are often made out of the same material as the discourses of imperialism and settler colonialism. My questioning of this “alternative” politics is akin to Mark Rifkin’s work on the limits of Hope Leslie’s implicit critique of conjugality and nuclearity: “Sedgwick’s queer intervention, then, reaches its limits in appropriating (or perhaps inventing) native subjectivity in ways that implicitly deny the possibilities of indigenous self-determination” (Rifkin, 103). As Rifkin says, the novel’s “way of reimagining, or queering, the U.S. national public depends on effacing the geopolitics of native kinship” (Rifkin, 137). Similarly, Hope Leslie and The Female American efface the specificities of native femininities, and that effacement creates the room for a more expansive white female savage in need of a Christian civility that thinly veils an imperialist expansion” (Schweitzer, “Imaginative Conjectures,” 143). 30 femininity. In other words, many of these resistant characters are (anti-)imperial fantasies that articulate white femininities that include these roguish (or racialized) traits. These characters are special, peculiar, and exceptional women, and those special qualities contribute to a gender formation that is self-consciously at odds with and that benefits from imperial formations. Because these women are coded as palatable to whiteness, they offer expression of a femininity that wants to be “respectable” (e.g. within sentimental culture) yet that desires to push back and critique dominant culture. The texts create a whitened native femininity that is appealing, adept, beautiful, adding important indigenous aspects to the idea of roguish femininity. The first section explores the representations of native femininity in The Female American though the trope of the “Indian Princess,” which its narrator Unca invokes, by focusing on how this biracial character critiques colonialism and exposes violence against native women through the uniqueness created by her status as a would-be princess. Hope Leslie invokes the princess trope as well through the character of Magawisca, a Pequot girl who in the novel’s first half lives with a white colonial family. With that novel, I start to unpack how the roguish qualities become more palatable when embodied by the protagonist of the novel’s second half, Hope, the mischievous English girl, another would-be female American, who embodies a joyful energy that is a tonic to the mournful colonial violence of the novel’s first half. Female American as Indian Princess The Female American, circulating in the United States in the early nineteenth century with publication in 1800 and 1814 in New England, invokes historical figures in rearranged history, influenced by the romanticized story of Pocahontas saving John Smith, which occurred 31 in 1607 as Smith tells it. The novel starts its own version of the Pocahontas tale by recounting the “Virginia massacre” in 1622 when four hundred English colonists were killed in an attack led by Powhatan’s brother Opechancanough. 18 Rewriting history is Unca Eliza Winkfield, who narrates: “At the time of the massacre…my grandfather was killed, and my father, with a few more, was taken prisoners by the Indians” (FA, 37). Unca Eliza’s grandfather is based on an early leader in Virginia, Edward Maria Wingfield, who died in what is now New Hampshire in 1631, and not Virginia as imagined in The Female American. This rewriting emphasizes the romantic story of Unca Eliza’s parents, the fictional William Winkfield and Unca, the “Indian princess” who saves William from death. From their marriage and out of this violence, a daughter Unca Eliza is born, the “female American” and presented author of the narrative. 19 The Female American’s use of the Indian Princess trope aligns with a dominant way that native women have been represented in the colonial Americas. Rayna Green traces the representation of native femininity and its cultural influence: “The powerfully symbolic Indian woman, as Queen and Princess, has been with us since 1575 when she appeared to stand for the New World” (Green, 701). Green traces how the conventional representations of native women are divided: “her nobility as a Princess and her savagery as a Squaw are defined in terms of her relationships with male figures. If she wishes to be called a Princess, she must save of give aid to white men” (Green, 703). The trope of the Indian princess created the cultural terms in which native women, both fictional and real, were discussed and conquest was imagined; as Wanda Pillow shows, “‘Indian Princess’ characterization are needed to support colonial racializing projects and specifically to reflect and affirm white female beauty and virtue” (Pillow, 9). 18 Colin Calloway details the struggles between the colonists and natives in colonial Virginia (Calloway, 100). 19 Unca has a name similar to Uncas in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo’s friend. Research should be done on connections. 32 Because many Indian Princess representations are whitened, the “positive” characteristics attributed to native women serve to reinforce normative white femininity. Along these lines, Unca Eliza, the offspring of an interracial colonial romance, represents the whitening of native women through the Indian Princess trope. Yet her relationship to that role destabilizes it, as does her relationship to whiteness and colonization. Unca Eliza remains a woman of color, though a “whitened” one, and reveals some of the privileges and vulnerabilities of that liminal position. Unca’s status as a princess is created in transnational exchange, as her title becomes relevant after the death of her mother, when she, a young woman, moves with her father to England: “I was accordingly invited by all the neighboring gentry, who treated me in a degree little inferior to that of a princess, as I was always called; and indeed I might have been a queen, if my father had pleased, for on the death of my aunt, the Indians made me a formal tender of the crown to me; but I declined it” (49). In England, Unca is treated by the aristocracy as a princess, and she affirms their belief because she could have become leader of the community she left. Yet the way she describes the treatment of her status as princess—“as I was always called”— exposes some of the fiction and the imposition of that title. By displacing the address onto the British, the passage reveals artificiality of the title, the way it comes from outside, specifically from an Anglo-European narrative about the Americas. This description wants to have it both ways—it exposes the status as misinterpretation, but insists on its potential accuracy as, indeed, she “might have been a queen.” This move leaves space to deny the association with royalty, both native and British, while also taking some of the social power that comes from the nobility. 20 Rayna Green discusses the ways that the representation of the Indian Princess fuses 20 Because the trope of the Indian Princess allowed access to some (limited) power and visibility, native women like Sarah Winnemucca sometimes strategically used the image of the Indian Princess to move through the world later in the nineteenth-century: “Winnemucca often identified herself as a princess and dressed the part, despite the fact that the term princess reflected accurately neither the Winnemucca 33 classical European values with the desired qualities of “America” as “colonies begin to move toward independence” (Green 702). The royal femininities—princess, queen, and others of monarchy—were transferred from Europe, but retranslated to come out of an American genealogy, a Native American genealogy in particular. The invented royalty of someone like Pocahontas, Unca’s imaginative foremother, thereby gives noble history to the story of the United States and colonization, keeping the taint of monarchy from white Americans who benefit from proximity. Unca’s status as Indian Princess in England manifests through her biracial identity, constructing her as worthy of notice. When describing the attention she receives, Unca explains why: “My uncommon complexion, singular dress, and the grand manner in which I appeared, always attended by two female and two male slaves, could not fail of making me much taken notice of” (49). She describes herself “uncommon” among the English—she does not look like them or dress like them, and importantly she appears in a “grand manner” as befitting power, attended by slaves. She continues in the literary tradition we will see throughout these chapters of identifying “strong” female characters with uncommon and special women. In this case, the aura of exceptionality is created through her status as an Indian princess with signifiers of New World wealth, attended by slaves who are themselves noticed only to draw attention to the woman herself. Moreover, Unca stands out because of her cultural liminality, daughter of a family status among the Northern Paiutes or Northern Paiute structures of leadership. Nonetheless, by declaring, in English, that she was a princess, she invested herself and her family among many non- Natives with much of the leadership she claimed” (Carolyn Sorisio, 10). In that way, the status of “Indian princess” signifies political power and perhaps allows access to political power, even if that performance often “stressed the assistance she and her family gave to US imperial efforts” (Sorisio, 10). Yet, as Soisio points out, “Winnemucca exposes the simulation” of supposedly real native identity in a way that “defies nineteenth- and twenty-first-century colonial tropes, including—but not limited to—the binary of an authentic (assumed traditional) versus performative (assumed commodified and fake) self” (Sorisio, 12). She also used the space that the trope allowed of her to critique the US government’s treatment of the Piutes. 34 British colonizer and a native woman, and the text represents her as a cultural hybrid: “My tawny complexion, and the oddity of my dress, attracted every one’s attention, for my mother used to dress me in a kind of mixed habit, neither perfectly Indian, nor yet in the European taste” (FA, 49). The text self-consciously describes Unca as a new kind of person, creating a pleasing uncommonness around this female American. It does reveal a process of assimilation; in her own words, she is not “yet” wearing European clothes. But along with the process of whitening and erasing of that which is non-white, the text is invested in the creation of uniqueness and newness through the racialized traits. Her biracial identity is in service to the articulation of an “American” one. Unca’s “mixed habit” reflects her mixed race, but her dress is not grounded in anything historically accurate; instead as Mary Helen McMurran notes Unca’s description of herself does not reflect realistic dress, but rather “mirrors the fanciful female allegorical figures of America found in murals, paintings, engravings, and objects d’art during this period” (McMurran, 326). Unca fits right into this description: “two consistent features in the iconography of America are jewels adorning the figure, and the bow and arrow slung over her shoulder” (McMurran, 326). At this point in the novel, Unca is often adorned with diamonds and she carries around a bow and arrow, as she describes: “I frequently diverted myself with wearing the bow and arrow the queen my aunt left me, and was do dexterous a shooter, that, when very young, I could shoot a bird on wing” (FA, 49). The description of her bow and arrow works to establish her lineage and to legitimize Unca as a native woman who is a dexterous shooter. That bow and arrow, importantly, shows the way the text both engages and shifts away from imperial violence. Unca’s bow and arrow is a gift from her aunt Alluca, who arranged the murder of Unca Eliza’s mother, jealous of her sister’s relationship with William Winkfield. The episode demonstrates 35 the violence that colonialism and even colonial cross-racial intimacies could beget, here deflecting the violence onto Alluca, who enacts the trope of the violent savage woman. Unca is a survivor and product of that violence, receiving the bow and arrow as an apology from her aunt. Being fashioned by her family trauma, wearing both the signifiers of her mother’s death and of colonial wealth, Unca exhibits the characteristics of the roguish woman—who then turns the marker of violence into a source of humor, repeatedly telling her proposing white cousin, “I would never marry any man who could not use a bow and arrow as well as I could” (51). Unca meets the multiple proposals she receives by white men with teasing, laughter, and “good humor” (54), but these moments that construct her as uncommon also expose her vulnerability as a women of color in these colonial locations. The threat of violence becomes even more apparent after her father dies when Unca, who had been living back in Virginia, travels to England to be with her uncle. On the boat there, the captain threatens her: “he told me, that if I would not immediately sign a bond to marry his son, on our arrival to England, or forfeit thirty thousand pounds, I should neither see England, nor return to my plantation” (54). The white English captain tries to strip Unca of her wealth by forcing a marriage to his son, a threat that places her within the sexual traffic of colonialism and the manifestation of violence that shapes native women’s interactions with colonizing forces. However, Unca, daughter of a British colonizer, is continuing the imperial trajectory of British colonialism, possessing the wealth of the Americas that she, it seems, intends to keep in England after she returns. Unca refuses the threat of the captain and the enslaved people who serve her suffer the captain’s violence as they try to defend her. The captain then deposits Unca on an “uninhabited island” for refusing his demands (55). The British captain himself lacks money, having recently been shipwrecked, himself coming from a more insecure social class than the 36 would-be princess, plantation-owning Unca. He, while trying to profit from imperial trajectories, is vulnerable to their whims, as he is of more contingent social class. These complex interactions demonstrate how colonialism displaces and causes scenes of power plays and colonial mimicry even for those not in the dominating class. Unca, now forcibly relocated onto an island, must remake her life, which she does by opting out of the imperial trajectories that made her vulnerable. The Female Savior The Female American circulated in the United States during a time when the War Department had jurisdiction over Indian affairs and “war and treaty-making came to dominate U.S.-Indian relations” (Calloway, 218). Intertribal resistance against further U.S. expansion westward grew and threatened the stability of the young nation. One of the most famous rebels is perhaps Tecumseh, leader of the Shawnee, who is marked by his “resistance to U.S. expansion, his alliance with the British in the War of 1812, and the nativist movement he led with his brother” (Sayre, 268). The young military suffered losses, particularly during an earlier violent opposition in 1791 when a group led by Little Turtle defeated General Arthur St. Clair’s army and caused a significant defeat for the US with over 900 causalities out of the 1400 American soldiers, 600 of whom died. 21 Nineteenth-century cultural texts engage with these struggles, whether they are described in great detail or not; for instance, Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) represents a starry-eyed, foolish protagonist who falls in love with a wounded solider who has fought in St. Clair’s army, suggesting a link between the self- conscious exploration of “female” Americans and the uncertainty beget by anti-imperial 37 struggles. Though The Female American is set in the early colonial period, the conflicts and uncertainty of this early national period shape the culture in which this novel and this femininity circulate. The second half of The Female American is prompted by Unca’s vulnerability to violence and plunder, and she is alone and abandoned, away from home on an unknown island. Her narrative in this section is influenced by Robinson Crusoe and is among other imitations of Defoe’s novel, specifically a female Robinsonade that Burnham argues is “an attempt to fashion a feminist revision of Defoe’s earlier tale” (Burnham, 16). 22 Moreover, some scholarship sees the gender-specific rewriting of Robinson Crusoe as an anti-imperial intervention because it retreats from England and violent colonial impulses: “it transforms Defoe’s castaway narrative into one of female self-fashioning and into a critique of colonialism at the same time” (Joseph, 318). Most critics do note the novel is not entirely successful at furthering an anti-colonial worldview: “The Female American revises the narratives of capitalist accumulation, colonial conquest, and political imperialism that have been associated with Defoe’s book. Winkfield’s story engages instead with fantasies of a feminist utopianism and cross-racial community, both of which are enabled, however, by a specifically religious form of imperialism” (Burnham, 11). 23 The novel does have it both ways—both critiquing and furthering imperial trajectories. Expanding upon these readings of Unca, this chapter shows how the gender formation created 21 Calloway identifies it as “the heaviest defeat Indians ever inflicted upon the United States” (Calloway, 223). Also on this topic: Edel, Wilbur. Kekiogna: The Worst Defeat in the History of the U.S. Army. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1997. 22 The abandonment of Europe differs from Robinson Crusoe, as Matthew Reilly argues: The Female American offers “a full-on philosophical, religious, and cultural critique of Enlightenment subjectivity exemplified by Defoe’s castaway” (Reilly, 262). This critique in embedded in several things, including Winkfield’s abandonment of Europe, the “emergence of self and self-understanding through a sensuous and situated experience,” and her relation to the environment and its inhabitants, not in a hierarchical way but rather in a “horizontal” way, similar to Quaker beliefs (Reilly, 262). 38 within these seeming competing ideologies mimic the location of settler colonialism. If in the first half of the novel, we have a not-quite Indian Princess, who is perceived as open to sexual and economic looting and who is then abandoned because of it, and then in the second half, she refashions her identity through an impulse to “save” the natives that visit the island on which she is stranded—saving them both by Christianizing and from protecting them from invading colonial forces. With this, she again performs her uniqueness, making connections with the indigenous community with whom she ends up living, while still upholding Anglo-European values. Her mixed identity informs her subjectivity as her kinship and life with the native community is what she seeks to preserve and is the expression her anti-imperial politics takes. After Unca Eliza is abandoned on the island, she learns to survive based on the journal of a hermit who had preceded her there. By reading the journal, she also discovers that the local natives visit the island every year for a religious visit to a temple with a large statue identified as The Oracle of the Sun (78). Unca decides that she will attempt to convert them to Christianity with her plan “to ascend into the hollow idol, speak to the Indians from thence, and endeavor to convert them from their idolatry” (83). As Unca has discovers, the statue amplifies voice so that it is heard throughout the island, so she believes she can use this statue to represent herself— specifically her voice—as an otherworldly religious force that can convert the natives to Christianity. 24 It may be a sacrilegious act, similar to how this chapter’s other focus, Hope Leslie, pretends to be a Catholic saint in order to escape potential threat, but Unca Eliza frames it as becoming “an instrument to promote the knowledge and glory of God, and the salvation and 23 As project is revised, connection between Robinson-heritage and picara traditions should be elaborated upon. 24 The Female American is not the only text from this time period to represent disembodied voice— Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) represents a bilioquist who throws his voice and provokes murder. 39 happiness of any of his creatures” (84). She uses this religious discourse to justify her interactions with the worshippers and to fashion her identity. The reason that Unca is able to communicate with this particular group of natives speaks to the construction of her “uncommon” femininity. Unca reveals that “the manner of my education had afforded me an opportunity of learning several of the Indian dialects, so as to speak them with the upmost ease” (83). Unca Eliza linguistic knowledge reinforces her adaptability, intelligence, breeding, and exceptionality; she is master of many, instead of limited by one. Yet, the probability of her knowing the exact dialect of the natives who travel to the island seems dubious and perpetuates the unspecific understanding of indigenous cultures, the dismissal in lumping together. 25 The novel is more interested in forming a “Female American” rather than representing natives with specificity, and her justification perpetuates her own privileged position: “if I should understand their language, I thought the extraordinariness of the event, my speaking to them, would appear miraculous, fill them with awe, and prejudice their minds greatly in favour of what I should say to them” (84). Unca here expects to fill them with awe, impressing them with her knowledge of their language—and therefore her intelligence and education—as it manifests through the amplification of the idol, a technology that is tool of religious imperialism. Unca’s preparation for converting the natives is a version of imperialism’s cultural superiority, yet Unca also identifies her cultural connection with native peoples. After speaking to them through the idol, she imagines appearing in corporeal form: “if I should hereafter judge it prudent to discover myself to them, and to go and live among them, that my tawny complexion would be some recommendation” (FA, 84). And then the next line offers us some space to 40 examine the emotional life of this woman of color, daughter of a white colonizer though she may be: “Supposing all this should take place, I thought that it might not open a way to my return to Europe, yet it might to my living a much happier life, and give me an opportunity of doing abundantly more good, than I had the least reason to think I should ever effect during the whole course of my life” (FA, 84). Unca is obviously embedded in a discourse of cultural superiority, informed by the rhetoric of Christian conversion and its morality. However, through her invocation of her “tawny complexion” and reminder of her unhappiness, Unca reveals that she is seeking connection—seeking connection to people who may look like her and whom she could live with, with whom she could find a community. The means to do this is through Christian missionizing, which absolutely does the work of colonialism; yet this women of color herself has been formed and displaced by imperial trajectories and seeks to find a community with the survival tools she has. That she does not seek to live among the natives on their terms, not adapting to their culture and religion, speaks to the formation of the roguish women of color like Unca—one who is within a discourse that insists on specialness, uniqueness, and superiority, and who expects to be embraced by all around her. Indeed, Unca’s roguishness is reinforced through what she tells the natives via the statue as she is laying the groundwork for appearing as herself to them: “You must be sure to show the greatest respect to her, do every thing she shall command you, never ask who she is, from whence she comes, or when, or whether she will leave you. Never hinder her from coming to this island when she pleases, nor follow her hither without her leave” (FA, 111). Unca is insisting on her individual freedom of movement, something that could be read as a feminist demand, but this gendered freedom is bounded up in colonizing discourses of 25 Michelle Burnham notes that “the Indians of The Female American resemble ancient Egyptians or even the Aztecs” (Burnham, 25). The description of the worshipping natives is a mash-up of many cultural and 41 superiority and force, which restricts the natives own movements and curiosity. And Unca succeeds in making herself an exceptional, celebrity-like figure: “How greatly was my situation changed! From a solitary being, obliged to seek my own food from day to day, I was attended by a whole nation, all ready to serve me” (FA, 118). Unca now remakes her living situation following her violent displacement to be similar to her previous life when she was attended by others. Indeed, she fashions herself with gold and other precious jewelry she discovers in the temple (which we later found out is where some English pirates have been storing their loot) in order to appear even more impressive when she appears. Her social power in this context is enhanced by her wealth and ability to manipulate the technology of the statue. She also uses her own cultural signifiers to impress: “I sometimes amused myself in shooting with my bow and arrow, in which I exceeded any of them. But even this circumstance, trifling as it was, raised their opinion of me” (FA, 119). Unca exceeds her new community at shooting and gains acceptance because of it. This social notability and power is similar to that she receives in England when wearing her bow there, the bow signifying her ability to impress and charm others, while pleasing herself. 26 Unca never uses the bow and arrow as a weapon; however, Unca does protect the natives from potential violence. Late in the book, Unca’s cousin, John Winkfield, arrives on board a ship in search of her, tracking down her general location. Unca meets the prospect of being rescued with ambivalence as she dreads what might happen: “My next fear was for the poor Indians, who would [. . .] be taken for slaves. Nor might the evil stop thus; their country might be discovered, and probably invaded, and numbers of the people be carried away into slavery, and other injuries committed” (121). Unca fears colonial conquest based on violence and religious signifiers. 42 economic exploitation. However, though she has this concern, she also has a mischievous streak and decides to play a prank on her cousin by using the oracle to speak to him and the ship’s crew when they first arrive. This joke does not go over well and the crew, who fear supernatural activity, abandon Cousin Winkfield on the island, even against the protests of the captain. Though unintentional and meant as a joke, Unca’s use of the oracle acts as resistance against the start of a process of economic colonization by those on the ship. Unca’s humor and trickery articulate how this roguish gender formation expresses resistance and creates alternatives. The fallout from the trickery avoids a more aggressive colonization of the island, but, with her cousin’s arrival, establishes this place as a settled colony where heteronormative conventions of white femininity start to be articulated. Unca and John Winkfield decide to stay on the island, and Unca feels compelled to marry her cousin if she wants to spend time alone with him: “for though the Indians, I believed, would not entertain any ill suspicions of my conduct, yet I could not satisfy myself with the reflection of being much alone with a man, as it hurt my modesty” (139). So the two marry—in both a Christian ceremony and “according to the custom of the Indians” (141)—and continue missionary work together. Part of their continued missionary work includes destroying the old religious buildings: “we determined to go upon my island, to collect all the gold treasures there, to blow up the subterraneous passage, and the statue, that the Indians might not be tempted to their former idolatry” (154). After the captain of the ship returns a year later to check in on the abandoned couple, John returns to England to “take final leave of his relationships, receive his parents blessing, and settle half of his and my fortune upon his sisters, and leave the rest for charitable uses” (154). Unca’s cousin brings the gold treasure to England which he uses to buy “a large 26 Important to continue to think about the connection between Unca and other colonial subaltern “translators” like La Malinche. 43 library of books, and many kinds of goods and linen” (154). When he returns to the island, they make sure to avoid the potential for further colonization: “We did not suffer the sailors to come any farther upon the island, than just to land the goods, that no discovery of our habitation might be made. As we never intended to have any more to do with Europe, captain Shore and my husband ordered a person who came for that purpose, to return to Europe with the ship, by whom, for my father and mother’s satisfaction, I sent over these adventures” (155). These final pages of the narrative offer both a critique of colonization, but also the process of it—an enactment of religious imperialism and looting of the temples to send the gold to England. Though the treasures themselves were not native to the island, instead booty hidden in the temple by British pirates, these riches come from the looting of the Americas. The resources obtained in England—books and linens—are returned to the island in seeming exchange. The ill-gotten imperial wealth of which Unca disapproves is replaced with markers of European civilization, which will likely aid Unca and her new husband in their process of converting the natives. This text offers a cultural space that represents a mixed-race native women negotiating the imperial world of which she is a product and often at the whims of. She condemns and opts out of European and colonized spaces, sending as her last word a text that condemns imperial work. The text represents a woman working for “good”—the good here being the religious work—by engaging in colonialism that does not seek other settlers but that is shut off from them. Yet this type of religious and philosophical and even feminist critique displaces native femininity, creating a fantasy of a biracial native and English femininity that condemns imperialism while also participating in its practices. This conflict between the desire to “save” and protect indigenous populations, while also propagating one’s own agenda, is seen in many cultural locations in the nineteenth century. Drawing upon Walter Mignolo, John Carlos Rowe 44 identifies how the words and work of creole nationalists are “full of passionate commitments to the liberation of indigenous peoples from the slavery and exploitation of their common imperial masters” (Rowe, “Areas of Concern”). But these commitments were often only rhetorical or self-serving, empowering the (whitened) creole. 27 Unca’s role is complex because she is native, yet she adopts many of the beliefs of the European colonizers. Joseph explains Unca’s identity within this imperial location: “Unca’s dispersal of her subjectivity—bisexual, non-unified, hybrid—may be a critique of the narcissistic imperial eye of mastery that surveys the natives and denies its own transformation by that encounter. Yet, as Unca herself exults, this subjective lack, contrary to creating a new native mode of existence, is intended only as a strategy for further penetration” (Joseph, 327). Unca displaces other “native mode[s] of existence,” yet she is not entirely “whitened”—her ethnic identity is not completely flattened out; instead, she acts out of a sense of solidarity with the native community to which she now belongs. The type of femininity that Unca represents is one that speaks against and shuts out Europe, that is representative of the transition from Indian Princess to Female American. This type of femininity that critiques the workings of colonialism continues in these types of roguish, mischievous, adaptable characters. The next section will consider a novel written decades later, but takes up similar issues of stories foundational to the United States and the femininities that critique, resist, and enable those discourses. Hope Leslie’s History Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie is published after the first decades of the formation of the United States, and is informed the shift in native strategies and national policies 27 The analysis of the roguish native women would benefit from developing the connections to Mignolo’s concepts. 45 that emerged in the 1820s. The resistances in the first three decades of the United States did not last; as historian Colin Calloway writes, “The age of Indian confederacies in the East and of Indian power that delayed American expansion was over by the end of the War of 1812, but the Indians did not disappear just because they stopped fighting” (Calloway, 228). At the time Sedgwick was writing Hope Leslie, Indian removal policies were a tool to expand the territory of the country, and one flashpoint of public debate about these policies was the Cherokee resistance to removal. 28 The Cherokees remodeled their political system after the United States, having already somewhat assimilated into Anglo-American ways of life, yet the state of Georgia “subjected the Cherokees to a systematic campaign of harassment, intimidation, and deception, culminating in a sustained assault on their government” (Calloway, 232). In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act that rejected tribal sovereignty and paved the way for the displacement of natives in Georgia and the east. Though Hope Leslie take place during the colonial period, scholars like Karen Woods Weierman show how “Sedgwick explored colonial history in the novel to make sense of the contemporary Indian removal crisis” (Weierman, 434). 29 Reflective of nineteenth-century divisive politics that would lead up to the U.S. Civil War, this was a regional conflict, as “there was significant opposition to the Removal Act, particularly in New England, where the congressional delegation voted 39-10 against the bill” (Weierman, 440). Yet most native population had been removed from New England by displacement or genocide before this time period. 28 Calloway gives some background to removal policies: “The policy of removing Indian peoples from their eastern homelands to the West was implemented in the late 1820s and 1830s, but it originated in earlier periods when Americans had considered various solutions to the problem of what to do with the Indians in the eastern United States” (Calloway, 229). 29 One of Sedgwick’s cousins married a Cherokee man and moved to Cherokee Nation in Georgia around the time Hope Leslie was published, and Sedgwick herself against Jackson’s removal policies. 46 The conflicted feelings of many white Americans, particularly those living in New England like Sedgwick, played out in the literature of the nineteenth century. But the institutionalized displacement of native tribes was enabled by literary tropes of the Vanishing American and noble savage, which helped to “justify what many white Americans believed to be an inevitable process of terminating the sovereignty of native peoples” (Sayre, 81). At the same time, literary and popular culture of the nineteenth century often celebrated native leaders who resisted imperial forces. For instance, Metacomet (or King Philip), who led an intertribal resistance to Puritan settlers in the 1670s, inspired dramas and stories in the nineteenth century, as Gordon Sayre examines. And in 1836 Pequot activist William Apess eulogized Metacomet and celebrated him in a way that criticized the United States, while other cultural figures like Lydia Maria Child called Metacomet a “heroic chief,” while objecting to US removal policies (Sayre, 82). Within the cultural glorification of heroic and tragic native leaders and a political divide over US policies toward natives, Hope Leslie emerge with story of a heroic native women. Hope Leslie has two heroines, both young women—Magawisca, a member of the Pequots who are at war with the colonists in the novel, and Hope Leslie, a resident of the Puritan community of the colonial Bay Colony. The first volume of the novel tracks the time that Magawisca lives as a servant with a prominent Puritan family, the Fletchers, after she and her brother are captured. The Fletcher son, Everell, becomes enamored with Magawisca, and the two become close friends. The first volume ends after a group of natives including Mononotto, Magawisca’s father, come to the Fletcher house, seeking revenge, killing Mrs. Fletcher and one of her children, and taking Everell and Hope’s sister, Faith, captive. Magawisca—in yet another retelling of the Pocahontas story—saves Everell from execution and loses her arm as she takes the blow that was aimed for the boy. 47 These acts of violence, both historical and fictional, are the bedrock of the novel. During a 1637 massacre, hundreds of Pequots were killed, as the colonists attacked them in the early morning, setting their houses on fire, and shooting and stabbing the ones who did not burn. After the attack, about three hundred Pequots were taken by the colonists. In his recounting of the history of this war, Michael Fickes seeks to reorient the historical record away from the emphasis on white colonists, especially white women, being held in captivity by natives, instead noting that a much more common occurrence was natives, especially native women, being held in captivity. And the capture of the native women had material benefit to the Puritans: “colonists likely believed that the acquisition of female Pequot captives would ease some of the problems arising from the scarcity of female laborers in early New England” (Fickes, 63). However, even though Pequot women did labor for the Puritans, “most of the Pequot captives, young and old, successfully escaped from their colonial captors” to flee to Mohegan and Narragansett communities (Fickes, 73, 81). Hope Leslie, written by a white American woman in the nineteenth century, spends nearly half of the book following a girl who has been taken in captivity after the war between the Pequot and the Puritans. Sedgwick is basing her story on real events, as Puritan leader John Winthrop felt obligated to the wife of Pequot leader Mononotto after she was captured. She requested that “the English would not abuse her body and that her children might not be taken from her” (Winthrop, quot’d in Fickes, 70). Sedgwick builds upon this historical precedent in Hope Leslie, Magawisca’s life spared because one of the soldiers recognizes Magawisca’s mother, who, because she had once performed “a kindness” for the colonists, was “treated with honour and gentleness” (HL, 53). Sedgwick merges historical accuracy and fiction, making up the character of Magawisca and imagining her lived experience. 48 The Female American and Hope Leslie are based in historical events that are then fictionalized through the inclusion of their female protagonists. Other cultural texts in the first few decades of the nineteenth century were turning back to an earlier era—for instance, the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, famously Last of the Mohicans (1826), are set in the eighteenth century during the French-Indian War, and create a “masculinist fantasy of national identity” that “has anchored U.S. identity in a nostalgic myth of male interracial friendship” (Schweitzer, “Imaginative Conjunctions,” 132, 133). 30 Though nostalgia and melancholy about the past informs this time period, it is not the monolithic view of history. Indeed, in a markedly less celebratory way, dissenting voices critiqued nostalgic representations of the past. As mentioned before, in 1836, William Apess articulates his own stark condemnation of United States policies by rearticulating the history of Metacomet, or King Philip, who in the 1670s led an intertribal resistance against the Puritan settlers. Apess, importantly, pressed against white Americans who were inclined to be supportive of Native Americans: “rather than curry favor with New Englanders by expressing gratitude for their antiremoval stance, he confronted them with their history and hypocrisy” (Calloway, 132). Apess’s confrontation includes rewriting the important historical figures of the Americas; as he demands, “I shall pronounce [Metacomet] the greatest man that was ever in America; and so it will stand, until he is proved to the contrary, to the everlasting disgrace of the Pilgrims’ fathers” (Apess, quot’d in Calloway, 135). This historical setting, in certain ways, allows the novel to undermine the legitimacy of the foundation of the United States through the story and specifically through the character of Magawisca, who articulates the hypocrisies of the Puritan settlers in the seventeenth century. The novel leans on 30 Schweitzer reads Hope Leslie’s “interracial sisterhood” between Magawisca and Hope as a rewriting of Cooper. Because the relationship between the two women does not last, she reads “the ‘failure’ of this friendship as Sedgwick’s determined refusal of Cooper’s romanticized conclusion” (Schweitzer, “Imaginative,” 133). 49 the tropes of the vanishing american and the inevitability of the demise of natives, including a setting that suggests that the Pequot are always already in the past, 31 but it also resonates with the discourse criticizing removal policies in the nineteenth century as many were “reevaluating their Puritan forebears from amid the young republic” (Sayre, 82). Peculiar Beauty Hope Leslie’s historical reevaluation includes imagining the experiences of a Pequot woman while she lives as a captive with the Fletchers, filling out Winthrop’s historical account which only gestures toward the experiences of the women. The character is imagined as beautiful and haunted, and this section examines how Magawisca is described and discussed early in the novel, to expand further this chapter’s claims about the Indian Princess/Female American character testifying to historical racist, gendered violence. In her preface, Sedgwick writes about how Magawisca has no real historical model like many other characters in the novel: “Without citing Pocohontas, or any other individual, as authority, it may be sufficient to remark, that in such delineations, we are confined not to the actual, but the possible” (HL, 6). 32 With Magawisca, Sedgwick does not represent the “actual,” instead creating a fantasy femininity influenced by the Indian Princess trope that is to be consumed by the “enlightened and accurate observer of human nature” (HL, 6). The femininity created out of the possibility of historical distance is aimed for the nineteenth-century “enlightened” eye, and the novel makes that eye explicit. 31 William Apess, a Pequot, disrupts the fantasy of the vanishing american since “most New Englanders supposed that the Pequots had been exterminated in 1637 and that Indians had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared from the region after King Philip’s War” (Calloway, 132). 32 The spelling of “Pocohontas” is Sedgwick’s own. 50 The novel trades in objectifying terms, as Magawisca is constantly looked at by characters when she is living with the Fletchers as a servant. For the observers, the way Magawisca looks expresses who she is: “Her form was slender, flexible, and graceful; and there was a freedom and loftiness in her movement which, though tempered with modesty, expressed a consciousness of high birth. Her face, although marked by the peculiarities of her race, was beautiful even to an European eye” (HL, 23). Not unlike how other female characters in Hope Leslie and in nineteenth-century novels are introduced, Magawisca’s physicality is described in detail, and that description racializes her beauty as peculiar, which is pleasing “even” to a “European eye.” 33 Her face is imagined to the legible, and the reader then is imagined to be the colonial English presence taking in this fifteen-year-old Pequot girl. The continuation of the description continues the racist, sexist viewing of Magawisca, but also complicates the scrutiny to which she is subjected: “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 the legible record of her birth and wrongs” (HL, 23). Magawisca is represented through the tropes of the noble savage, her dignity important to the construction of her femininity and her legibility to the audience. The text again points out that there is an “eye” looking at Magawisca, but then makes her face representative of her history, specifically her “wrongs,” which include being held as a servant at the Fletcher’s. Beauty, particularly native feminine beauty, which is being “seen” by the Puritan settlers and the American readers, is intertwined with the experiences of colonization and the “deep dejection” that this causes. The Fletchers’ and the novel’s attention to Magawisca construct a wounded native beauty legible to white Americans. Part of her beauty is made up of colonialism’s violent effects, with 33 This description resonate with how Wanda Pillow describes Sacajawea as being assigned “the tropes of white womanhood—Madonna, maiden, and mother” (Pillow, 5). Here Magawisca is “pleasing” in ways 51 which the novel forces the reader and the other characters to reckon. Yet it objectifies her, while revealing the ways the experience informs her moods and the way it informs the other characters reactions to her. When Mrs. Fletcher writes her husband, anxious about the affection growing between Magawisca and her son Everell, she says, “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 moment betokening a disquieted spirit…” (33). Mrs. Fletcher goes on to say that Everell’s presence calms the girl, but her description of Magawisca’s behavior recounts how the war between the Pequots and the Puritans creates disquieting effects in this domestic space—the kind, compassionate white household is an uneasy one. Indeed, the war will come to the Fletchers’s threshold as Magawisca’s father stalks the area, ready to rescue his children and seek justice for the deaths in his family. Upon seeing the snakeskin and rattle that was a warning to the Fletchers, Magawisca is described as fearful on behalf of the Fletchers: “The girl started and became very pale—to an observing eye, the changes of the olive skin are as apparent as those of a fairer complexion” (39). Due to her captivity, Magawisca is a liminal character, not biracial, but is forced into divided loyalties, devoted to her father, but wanting no harm to come to the generally kind Fletchers. Indeed, the Fletchers kindness is constructed through each one’s “observing eye,” which can differentiate changes in skin color—and changes in mood—of many skin tones. In certain ways, this language supports the argument of Ezra F. Tawil who shows how women’s frontier fiction, including Hope Leslie, prefigures accounts of biological racial differences, classifying race as “types of men…defined by essential of permanent attributes” (Tawil, 115). Hope Leslie’s discourse of “observing eye”—of not “common observers” but “those who most narrowly watched her” (45)—does seem to be a scrutinizing, analytical gaze. Yet, the text does not leave that white female sentimental heroines usually are by being modest, graceful, etc. 52 it at that—as it does fall into the modes of a sentimental text as hearts yearn for Magawisca even as they closely watch. This representation of native femininity articulates an implicit critique of white imperial formations that the Anglo-American observing eyes are reading in Magawisca’s face and body. As these passages that “look” at Magawisca reveal, she has the exoticized and objectified beauty of “her race.” Her “beauty” compels the white observers to look at her and reckon with her complaints, particularly when gazing is the catalyst for an articulation of the condemnation of colonial practices through Magawisca’s story of the Puritan massacre of the Pequots. Everell’s scrutiny of Magawisca when she is unsettled after receiving the bad omen enables a conversation in which she recounts the “tragedy of her people” (47). Wanting to comfort her, Everell observes the “beautiful moon and her train of stars,” but Magawisca disrupts his admiration of nature: “They do look peaceful…but ah! Everell, man is ever breaking the peace of nature. It was such a night as this—so bright and still, when your English came upon our quiet homes” (46). Hearing Magawisca tell her story of the colonists burning and brutally killing her community, Everell “dashe[s] the gathering tears from his eyes” (50). Everell’s tears fit into the sentimental model of affiliation that marks the possibilities and limits of their friendship. 34 Everell’s affection for this fictional girl comes because her appeal—her beauty, which makes the characters look so closely at her—is informed by her violent history. The attention paid to her “peculiar” racialized beauty forces attention paid to the violence of the Puritan settlers against the indigenous inhabitants. The sympathy of the characters is embedded within the complicated 34 Julie Ellison unpacks emotion and male tears in Cato’s Tears. There have been different reading of Everell’s tears. Maddox writes they represent “the weakening of the legalistic, masculine interpretation of both history and religion, feminizing them by tempering doctrine with human ‘feelings’” (Maddox, 105). About Everell’s tears, Schweitzer notes that they elicit “a kind of pleasing sentimental melancholy—which solicits their affective ratification of a nationalist agenda while at the same time disguising their agenda as apolitical sympathy” (Schweitzer, “Imaginative,” 134). 53 and limited discourse of sentimental politics of the nineteenth century, but rather than emphasizing sentimentality, I want to focus on how Magawisca’s emotion seems to resist pleasure in its resistance to imperial amnesia. Magawisca is performing emotion when she tells what happens to her family, but it is not easily fit into a sentimental model. When Everell asks about the death of her brother, she tells him how he was decapitated, and then she looks at him, showing a “bitter smile” and saying: “You English tell us, Everell, that the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts, for ye say it teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness—if ye had such a law and believed it, would ye thus have treated a captive boy?” (51). Gazing directly at one who spends a majority of his time looking at her, Magawisca condemns the hypocrisy of Christianity and the notion that it is superior to the belief system of the Pequot and other natives, her critique “bitter” rather than inspiring or motivating. The novel does immediately seek to contain Magawisca’s critique: “Magawisca’s reflecting mind suggested the most serious obstacle to the progress of the [C]hristian religion, in all ages, and under all circumstances; the contrariety between its divine principles and the conduct of its professors; which, instead of always being a medium for the light that emanates from our holy law, is too often the darkest cloud that obstructs the passage of its rays to the hearts of heathen men” (51). The narrator looking to defend imperial Christianity reorients Magawisca’s critique from an institutional one to an individual one, focused on bad “conduct of its professors.” However, the narrator’s interjection cannot repress the critique, as Everell is unable to articulate a response to Magawisca: “though he knew not what answer to make, he was sure there must be a good one, and mentally resolving to refer the case to his mother, he begged Magawisca to proceed with her narrative” (51). He has not yet learned how to respond to these hypocrisies and he instead asks her to precede. The text—and the pleasurable 54 melancholy of listening to Magawisca’s story of tragedy—is momentarily distracted by her bitterness and the direct questioning of Christian values, an emotion that neither the narrator nor Everell quite know how to contain. The novel prefers to focus on the defiant articulation of tragedy rather than the “ugly feeling” that “obstructs agency” (Ngai, 13). 35 Even though she is bitter, a character like Magawisca articulates many of the complaints of the nineteenth-century anti-removal activists. Moreover, Magawisca’s condemnation echos the discourse of native leaders like John Ridge, father of writer John Rollin Ridge, who showed how even assimilation left the Cherokee open to violence and removal. Sedgwick, daughter of a one-time Speaker of the House, was herself politically involved and well-connected; for instance, she met with John Ridge, whom she called “a most gentlemanly intelligent man…his soul worth Jackson’s and all his Cabinet” (quot’d in Weierman, 438-9). Ridge made a speech in Philadelphia in 1832: “You asked us to throw off the hunter and warrior state—we did so. You asked us to form a republican government: we did so—adopting your own as a model. You asked us to cultivate the earth, and learn the mechanic arts: We did so. You asked us to learn to read: We did so. You asked us to cast away our idols, and worship your God: We did so” (quot’d in Calloway, 231). Ridge eventually signed a treaty that committed the Cherokees to displacement westward, but here he identifies the hypocrisy of the United States in treating the Cherokee and native populations more generally. Existing during the time of unjust policies were dissenting voices, among whom is Magawisca pointing out the colonial hypocrisies. The novel is invested in a native female character who articulates the hypocrisies and then, in the second half of the novel, a white female character who was able to undo some of them. 35 Sianne Ngai upacks “ugly feelings,” including envy and paranoia, in her study of “the aesthetics of negative emotions” (Ngai, 1). 55 Though the roguish femininity offers an important critique of imperialism in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries by characters of color, Hope Leslie recounts a worldview that aligns with white femininity as it is manifested through the charming eponymous heroine. The novel shifts from Magawisca, too bitter and conflicted, to Hope Leslie who embodies the characteristics that resonate more favorably with other white characters, as she is a mischievous and temperamental, but playful and kind girl. The comparison of these two women reveals white roguish femininity—and likely native roguish femininity—to be an imperial formation even as it critiques imperial practices. In order to understand the shift, I am suggesting that certain emotions and actions come out of the racial and gender formations that these characters offer. Magawisca’s violent reality— and the pain she suffers because of it—inform her beauty and shapes the way the characters see and experience her, but also represents the limits of her appeal. Her represented sadness is not unlike other novels in the early literary history of the United States. In her study of early republican novels, Julia A. Stern shows how the heightened emotion that is their hallmark signals “a collective mourning over the violence of the Revolution and the preemption of liberty in the wake of the post-Revolutionary settlement” (Stern, 1-2). She identifies the deaths represented in Wieland, Charlotte Temple, and other novels of the 1790s as expressing grief and rage so that the founding of the United States is “not a celebration of the birth of a nation but…a funereal rite” (10). Though published in 1827, Hope Leslie manifests similar affect, the novel having two foundational scenes of violence—the Pequot slaughtered by the Puritans in Magawisca’s telling of her story and then the murder of members of the Fletcher family by Mononotto, Magawisca’s father. Years later, loss suffuses the relationship between the two women, as Magawisca and Hope Leslie have their first meeting on the graves of their mothers. Upset upon learning that her 56 kidnapped sister has married Magawisca’s brother, Hope Leslie exclaims “There lies my mother,” observing the different familial losses and objecting to the idea that her sister is no longer a party of “the christian family.” Magawisca replies “in a voice of deep pathos”: “And here…here is my mother’s grave; think ye not that the Great Spirit looks down on these sacred spots, where the good and 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” (189). These characters too engage with the affect of grief and historical violence, yet throughout the novel, Magawisca is the one who more overtly exhibits the “deep pathos” of mourning that suffuses her politics, her gestures toward equality. In contrast is Hope Leslie who, though expressing deep grief around her sister’s “conversion” to the Pequot culture, does not exhibit signs of constitutional mourning. Instead, her character is one of “a bright gay spirit” (139). The narrator even notes how Hope Leslie’s personality might seem anachronistic: “It might appear improbable that a girl of seventeen, educated among the strictest sect of puritans, should have the open, fearless, and gay character of Hope Leslie; but it must be remembered that she lived in an atmosphere of favour and indulgence, which permits the natural qualities to shoot forth in unrepressed luxuriance” (122). Hope Leslie then is represented an exception not only in the time at which the novel is set but also perhaps even an exception to novels based in histories of violence and trauma. Though Hope may be improbable for the Puritan era, Maria Karafilis outlines why she might be appealing to the nineteenth-century audience: “Marked by ingenuity, unscriptedness, and adaptability as opposed to adherence to traditional values, rigidity, and perfectionism associated with the Old World, Hope seems to be a truly New World child” (Karafilis, 339). The way she is represented and treated within the novel makes the gender formation, which includes her 57 charming affect, a foundational femininity to the United States. Hope Leslie does not carry loss in the ways that Magawisca, her metaphorical sister does. And the reason she does not is what I hope to trace in the last section of this chapter—what Hope Leslie’s bright, gay, spirit allows and what is covers up. Charming Justice Hope’s influence—and what she can get away with—are articulated around her interactions with the Puritan judicial system. One of the novel’s strongest critiques of injustices done to the Pequots, especially Pequot women, is through the representations of this institution. Hope several times defies the legal system, and scholars have identified the range of possibilities for Hope’s actions including working toward the common good and being selfishly individualistic. 36 Hope is both selfish and compassionate, when helping both Nelema, an old native woman whose tribe had been destroyed, and Magawisca when they are tried and jailed for supposed crimes. When Nelema is accused of witchcraft after healing a sick white man, Hope Leslie has her testimony “extorted” from her because, she says in a letter to Everell, “I could not disguise my reluctance to communicate any thing that could be made unfavourable to her” (109). In response to her reluctance, one of the magistrates says to her, “Thou art somewhat forward, maiden…in giving thy opinion; but thou must know, that we regard it but as the whistle of a bird” (109). Showing what has been observed as Catharine Sedgwick’s patriarchal critique, the novel unfavorably represents the magistrates when they disparage the novel’s lively heroine. Hope Leslie does offer a critique of patriarchal hierarchies of power, especially ones that 36 Karafilis summarizes the way that critics have understood Hope’s action as either individualistic—and aligned with Jacksonian democracy—or communtarian (328-9). Karafilis argues it is a combination of both—Hope embodying radical democratic individuaism. Ivy Schweitzer and Judith Fetterly explore the possibilities and limits of kinship in the novel. 58 disallow the alternative forms of kinship that this novel represents—for instance, we are meant to find cruel the words of “shame—shame!” uttered at Hope Leslie as she gives her hand to Nelema when leaving the room. The novel briefly allows the alternative forms of kinship that critique patriarchal and colonial power, but it more readily indulges the one enacting these critiques. 37 The scenes that condemn the Puritan criminal justice system and white patriarchal colonial power also express the consolidation of an opposing power—that of the rebellious white woman who defies the law. When Nelema is awaiting her sentence in jail, Hope Leslie sets the imprisoned woman free: “This was a bold, dangerous, and unlawful interposition; but Hope Leslie took counsel only from her own heart, and that told her that the rights of innocence were paramount to all other rights, and as to the danger to herself, she did not weigh it—she did not think of it” (120). This passage shows how Hope’s rebellious streak is intertwined with her beliefs in justice—or rather, in the “rights of innocence.” Her “unlawful interposition” manifests through her entitled boldness, as she takes “counsel only from her own heart.” Hope enacts her kinship with Nelema, her anger with the trial, and her own desire to see her kidnapped sister again since Nelema has been in contact with her. Hope is able to rescue Nelema because “no one [was] dreaming of any interference in behalf of the condemned” (120). Hope, especially, is not read as a viable threat to the Puritan semblance of law and order, and observes the place where one of the magistrates kept the key in his house. The narrator suggests a divine purpose for this opportunity: “fortune, accident, or more truly, Providence, favoured the benevolent wishes of our heroine” (119). Yet the fact that no one sees her as a threat and that she circulates in houses of magistrates suggests her racially-privileged social standing. Even if she must hear 37 Lucy Maddox claims that Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child believe in “the steady progress of American culture in the gradual demolition of patriarchal control through enlightened individuals” (Maddox, 95). Maddox claims that these writers “wish to revise the Puritan historians’ representations of Indians as 59 “a reproof and admonition” for speaking in support of Nelema, it is only “of moderate length,” while Mr Fletcher, her guardian, “was condemned to a long and private conference, on the urgency of reclaiming a spoiled child” (119). The realities of the seriousness of her actions and punishment escape her, so that even when one of the magistrates suspects that she has engineered the break out, his “heart recoiled from punishing her openly” (121). Even though he identifies the need of “taking instant and efficient measures to subdue to becoming deference and obedience, the rash and lawless girl,” she is instead sent to live for a time with the family of John Winthrop in Boston, a punishment that seems lenient for setting free a woman who was about to be condemned to death. Indeed, the novel claims that most characters succumb to Hope Leslie’s charm, she able to manipulate others to do her will, including Digby, who works for the Fletchers and who aids Hope is her rescue of Nelema. The narrator even claims to be under the spell of Hope Leslie in words that anticipate the way that the narrator will discuss Capitola Black in Hidden Hand: “she had faults; but we leave our readers to discover them. Who has the resolution to point out a favourite’s defects?” (123). This seems to be a deliberate act—a rejection of the melancholy and tears of a genre of heroine, and a refusal to malign the way she demonstrates that spirit. In a later chapter, I will explore how the representation of Capitola’s charm becomes part of an imperial spirit in a novel that is set during the US-Mexico War but written on the eve of the Civil War. Indeed, that novel’s lack of mournfulness or crisis that the Civil War offers mirrors how Hope Leslie is imagined to be hopeful and vigorous in a way other characters and her violent setting are not. The other characters and the novel itself turn to her as their favorite, the one we’re imagined to prefer hearing from. Moreover, when Magawisca brings word to Hope Leslie that devilish and brutes” (Maddox, 96). Rifkin notes how the novel offers nonconjugal kinship that critiques patriarchy, but gets at this by emptying out the realities of native kindship. 60 Nelema made it to the community of Mohawks and remaining Pequot before dying, Magawisca tells Hope that “she cursed your race, and she blessed you, Hope Leslie” (187). Hope then is blessed, the only one not cursed, thereby again becoming the special one, the exception whose worth is pointed out and heralded. In imagining her to be the “blessed” white person, the novel is offering a white racial formation that is sensitive to the injustices in colonial practices, but preferable to the sensitive observing eyes of the Fletchers. Instead of inactive Fletchers, Hope Leslie is vigorous, feeling entitled to take “counsel only from her own heart” to right wrongs in individualistic, rather than structural, ways. 38 The novel suggests the structural basis of the imprisonment of natives, specifically native women, when it recounts late in the novel the trial of Magawisca, who Hope eventually frees as well. In a courtroom scene that mirrors Hope’s, Magawisca challenges the Puritan judicial system, and her intervention is treated with a similar amount of respect, yet her experience differs from Hope’s. When Magawisca is arrested because of a plot enacted by the novel’s true villain Sir Philip Gardner, a man recently arrived from Europe and secretly a Catholic but pretending to be a Puritan, she is imprisoned and then tried in front of the magistrates and Governor John Winthrop. Testifying against her, Sir Philip lies that he witnessed Magawisca performing “devil-worship of the powwows” in order to distract from his own deceptions and crimes (286). Even though most in the courtroom favorably view Magawisca, including the Governor, she refuses to make any statement in her own defense, instead telling the magistrates, “I am your prisoner, and ye may slay me, but I deny your right to judge me. My people have never passed under your yoke—not one of my race has ever acknowledge your authority” (286). 38 Karafilis argues that Hope Leslie is Sedgwick’s intervention in models of political action: “When the state fails to serve the functions and provide the protections that it was created to secure, […] Hope must assert her radical democratic individualism to repair the damage caused by the failure of the state apparatus” (Karafilis, 334). 61 Magawisca undermines the authority of the judicial process, offering a critique of the Puritan version of institutional justice on behalf of not only herself but also the Pequot. She denies the the magistrates’ right to judge, speaking back to them, like Hope. However, instead of being described with earthly passion or boldness like Hope, Magawisca is seen differently after she offers a particularly dramatic reply to the magistrates: “all seemed, for an instant, to feel that no human power could touch the spirit of the captive” (287). Magawisca is describes as otherworldly, beyond the influence of the Puritans, obscuring how she is very much in their power. By describing her as almost supernatural, the text constructs her femininity as an exceptional one, but one not of this world or of this historical location. When the court decides to send Magawisca back to jail while it investigates Sir Philip’s villainy, Magawisca protests, invoking many of the nineteenth-century of natives as vanishing: “I pray you, send me to death now. Any thing is better than wearing through another moon in my prison-house. [. . .] Do you wait for him to prove that I am your enemy? Take my own word, I am your enemy; the sun-beam and the shadow cannot mingle. The white man cometh—the Indian vanisheth. Can we grasp in friendship the hand raised to strike us? Nay—and it matters not whether we fall by the tempest that lays the forest low, or are cut down alone, by the stroke of the axe” (292-3). Magawisca articulates the ultimate conclusion of the novel and of popular nineteenth century culture that “the Indian vanisheth,” while using those tropes to articulate the inhumanity of imprisonment and furthering her critique of the system of justice. 39 Magawisca articulates a resistant femininity in line with the feminine formations in this novel, refusing friendship as well as the attempts at conversion performed by John Eliot, a Puritan missionary who is another real 39 Gordon M Sayre identifies the comparison of white/native relations to the day/night as one of the “cliches of nineteenth-century vanishing Indian rhetoric” (Sayre, 32). 62 historical figure in this novel. Her articulation of “I am your enemy” is a rhetorically aggressive act of resistance. In this sensational scene, Magawisca knees dramatically in front of the Governor, revealing her “mutilated person”—her arm having been cut off when she saves Everell earlier in the novel. Though the weapon that cut off her arm was her father’s, this scene suggests that the violence—and her now marred beauty—has indeed been done by these Puritan officers, as the courtroom affectively sides with Magawisca, including the Governor whose “heart was touched with the general emotion” (293). Magawisca is fusing that sentimental influence with a refusing critical native femininity that uses the rhetoric of the American revolution by saying, a la Patrick Henry, “I demand of thee death or liberty” (293). She is among a genealogy of literary native characters who were represented as using “the most stirring oratory of the American Revolution” to articulate their own protest (Sayre, 81). Though Hope Leslie is written decades after the American Revolution, its colonial setting makes Magawisca the foremother who speaks the discourse foundational to the nation. Saving the Past Even though Magawisca is represented as heroic, she alone is not the novel’s heroine. She balances Hope’s lightness (as does the more traditionally sentimental, modest character of Esther, Hope’s closest friend), by carrying the markers of violence and wielding the rhetoric so important to the United States’ understanding of itself. Magawisca wants liberty, but not individual liberty, as she refuses Hope and Everell’s offer of sanctuary late in the novel, but freedom—sovereignty—for her community. 40 Hope, however, helps Magawisca achieve her 40 In unpacking the complexity of the novel’s ending, Schweitzer says that Magawisca refuses the friendship that Hope and Everell offer because it “would require Indian assimilation, conversion to Christianity (like the kidnapped Pocahontas), which she and her tribe steadfastly resist, and their complete loss of cultural identity” (Schweitzer, 203). 63 individual liberty, freeing her from the jail and allowing her to return to her father and her people. Unlike Hope’s rescue of Nelema, the novel details Hope’s rescue of Magawisca, how she is able talk her way into the prison cell and then fashion disguises to sneak Magawisca out. Therefore, we have the text’s preferred heroism—Hope Leslie’s roguish femininity articulated through her charm and ability to manipulate others to her will. In this particular circumstance, she manipulates men who are represented as mentally and socially inferior to her—her tutor Master Cradock and the prison guard Barnaby Tuttle. She convinces her tutor who, though an older man, is half in love with her, to accompany her: “Cradock was so absorbed in the extraordinary happiness of being selected as the confidential aid and companion of his favourite, that he would have followed her to the world’s end, without question” (305). The “favourite” of many, including her tutor, her guardian, the narrator, she exploits that basis and her perceived kindness by complimenting them, emphasizing her humor and lightness. Barnaby is more than eager to help her before knowing her desire, saying to her, “ask any thing, my pretty mistress, that’s in the power of Barnaby Tuttle to grant” (307). And it is this willingness to sustain the “pretty mistress” that gets Hope into the prison cell. Hope starts to cry when Barnaby at first disallows her admittance to Magawisca without a permit from Governor Winthrop, but Barnaby, unable to “endure” it, relents: “there’s no denying you” (308). Her charms, emotional manipulations, and history of being kind to most characters allows her to freedom to fulfill her will, and in this case it allows her rebellion from Puritan law. The freedom that others allow her makes possible the rescue. Hope switches the clothing of Magawisca and Cradock, so that Magawisca can leave the jail without Barnaby Tuttle realizing. Again, her will predominates, even as the others go along unwillingly: “she preceded, without any further ceremony, to divest the old man of his wig, which she very 64 carefully adjusted on Magawisca’s head. Both parties were passive in her hands, Magawisca not seeming to relish much better than Cradock, the false character she was assuming” (311). Hope is the actor, removing cloak and boots from one and placing them on the other, both passive to her will, and she possesses “an almost supernatural celerity of movement” as she quickly arranges the room (312). Though the text describing Hope as “almost supernatural” resonates with the description of Magawisca as otherworldly in the courtroom scene, Hope’s actions differ from Magawisca’s—here, Hope is able to have her way because of her charming ingenuity, which might seem supernatural, but which signifies her white privilege as opposed to Magawisca’s otherworldly racialized condemnation of the white Puritan men. Hope’s whiteness is constructed through her ability to get away with breaking the rules, to be celebrated for breaking the rules. When Hope and Magawisca in disguise are exiting the cell, leaving Cradock behind in the guise of Magawisca, Hope again shows again how “quick…she was in invention and action” by extinguishing the light that Barnaby carried so he would not be able to look closely at the prisoner (309). She then succeeds in “beguiling the way to the top of the staircase” by flattering Barnaby and discussing his grandson (314). Her charm carries her through, so that even Magawisca who was reluctant to leave Cradock in her place tells Hope that she is “a spirit of light, and love, and beauty” (312). Hope Leslie, as Barnaby Tuttle thinks after she has left the jail, “keeps the key to all hearts” (314). She is beloved and she is willing to exploit the affection she receives, especially when she deems it a moral imperative, like she does the rescue of Magawisca. The character enacts conventional tropes of feminine deception and manipulation but by making those actions done for heroic and noble ends. The novel articulates Hope Leslie’s femininity through her heroism—which is not without fault, as she succeeds by placing her friends in jeopardizing circumstances and manipulating them. In 65 addition, she is wielding her will in this scene upon people she, as a wealthy girl, has social power over, a tutor and a guard. In those ways, her stubbornness, charm, and sense of entitlement are manifestations of her class privilege, as they are most definitely markers of her racial privilege. Hope Leslie as the white heroine can manipulate the institutions of justice without being subject to the same sort of punishment as we see Nelema and Magawisca receiving. Her racial and class standing protect her from that, as do her charm and likeability, which most characters succumb to even when reluctant or frustrated by her. Hope Leslie’s charm and appeal, as I am claiming, are markers of her race and gender formation, what I am describing as roguish femininity. 41 Moreover, the text can justify the shift in attention—and in Everell’s love—from Magawisca to Hope because Magawisca lacks the more pleasing personality, affect then becoming racialized as the white heroine is charming and humorous, while the native character is mournful and serious. The text does not want to remain with these mournful and morbid scenes—that affect is not the affect to bring forward into politics or into the discourses of imperial femininity. If we see Hope and Magawisca as offering a potential alliance, combined they speak out against and manipulate unjust colonial practices, articulating their own alternatives, which scholars have unpacked as the potential of sisterhood and interracial friendship. 42 The potential offered by their connection is limited, as it ends up with Magawisca insisting on separation, denying the possibility of interracial coexistence on the settlers’ terms, 41 Ivy Schweitzer notes how the character of Digby, friend and keeper of land, when discussing Hope “redefines what looks like spoiled self-centeredness as the freedom of self-disposition” (Schweitzer, 177). Judith Fetterley writes that “Sedgwick accomplishes nothing less than the deployment of biological woman as the representative American. Witty, smart, compassionate, gutsy, Hope Leslie is a lover of self and a challenger of arbitrary authority who, while insisting on her physical and intellectual freedom, is willing to take extreme risks for what she believes” (Fetterley, 76). 42 Judith Fetterly is one who writes about sisterhood and Hope Leslie, while Ivy Schweitzer prefers to explore the friendship of the novel. 66 and having “disappeared for ever from their site” (334). This denial allows Hope Leslie to remain as the legible resistant femininity, and indeed her happiness triumphs as she marries Everell at the end of the novel. The novel articulates differing modes of resistance. Yet it creates a femininity that expresses a politics that displaces a women-of-color-centered politics. Both are linked in their critiques, but only one is the “favourite.” Fetterley muses that “Sedgwick ultimately had to confront her fear that her case for the equality of white women would be undermined if she made the same case for racially other women, that her argument for gender would be hopelessly compromised by the issue of race” (Fetterley, 86). Karafilis, moreover, claims that the relationship between the characters allows “the pernicious appropriation of Native Americanness” that informs Magawisca disappearing from the text and Hope being predominant, leading to why one heroine becomes more dominant: “Since Hope incorporates white woman, colonial subject, (traditionally male) political agent, and Native American—a microcosm of the New World territory—she herself seems to represent much of the multiplicity inherent in a democratic society and in a disturbing way makes the presence of Magawisca at the close of the novel less ‘necessary’” (341). This is why Hope is represented as so vital and lively, why this femininity manifests as so exceptional and special because it must capture attention—to be the one who is looked at and paid attention to, and the one who is always already the preferred. The politics can be dismissed as just her individual will or unique character rather than as a form of collective politics or alliance. This flashy femininity and its process of racialization and whitening then should make us question the limits of a feminism that is expressed through strong, charming will. Fetterley argues that the novel “potentially argues for the equality of race but ultimately abandons that 67 potential to participate in the ideology of removal, the ‘inevitable’ and ‘natural’ disappearance of the Indian…making the argument for gender equality look less radical by comparison” (Fetterley, 88). Along these lines, Karafilis notes the novel’s tension how Hope “helps the colony and its consolidation into a nation as well as works against its racist and oppressive institutions” (Karafilis, 338) and, crucially, suggests “achieving democratic participation for Anglo American women may occur at a dear price for their indigenous ‘sisters’” (Karafilis, 342).. The novel indeed forecloses racial equality and reaffirms racist tropes, while reinforcing the mythology of the nation, and it does this through a gender formation that works against political injustice through charm. 68 Chapter Two Friendship’s Roguishness in Leonora Sansay’s Haiti If Hope Leslie explores colonial violence in the historical past, Leonora Sansay’s The Secret History; or the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) represents the violence of the author’s immediate past and present, and how it intertwines with misogynistic violence. The Secret History is a novel made up of a series of letters sent mostly from the American narrator Mary to Aaron Burr who is the Vice President of the United States at the time the novel is set. Mary is living in the French colony Saint-Domingue, what will be Haiti, and recounts the torment of her sister Clara who is married to a jealous and violent French colonist named St. Louis. The Haitian Revolution is the context for the discord, and the colonial and domestic violences are intertwined in this novel. Reality and fiction also connected, the character of Clara is thought to be a stand-in for Sansay, who too traveled with her husband, Louis Sansay, a French creole plantation owner, during this time. 69 Zelica, the Creole is an 1821 novel about many of the same characters as Secret History. The authorship of Zelica, the Creole, published in London, is only attributed to an “American,” but most scholars refer to Zelica as written by Sansay because it narrates many of the same events. But important differences, including the abandonment of the epistolary format, cause others to doubt that Sansay authored the novel. 43 Based on the current evidence, I believe that Sansay did write Zelica, but rather than focusing on the specific authorship of the later novel, I want to focus on the story itself, which has been revised from Secret History to Zelica, the Creole, whether by Sansay or another. These differences include the ultimate focus on Zelica, who is born of an African-descended enslaved woman and French white landowner-turned- revolutionary. Zelica spends the novel protecting Clara from this threat, but Clara dies at the end of Zelica, the Creole, an ending significantly different from Secret History, which recounts how Clara and Mary flee from Haiti through Cuba and Jamaica, eventually to return to the United States. In this chapter, I am juxtaposing the texts Secret History and Zelica, the Creole to explore the political and historical stakes of gender representation in this transnational space. In the novels, roguish women negotiate real moments of oppression and violence with skillfulness and ingenuity, but not without shoring up their own racialized power. Scholars have started to 43 Zelica is more often than not attributed to Sansay, though the authorship isn’t discussed in much depth. Sarah Johnson (2009) mentions Zelica as written by Sansay. In This Violent Empire (2010), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg refers to Sansay as the author of Zelica. So too does Kimberly Snyder Manganelli in Transatlantic Spectacles of Race (2012) referring to Zelica as being written by Sansay, though she qualifies it by saying says: “Whether the author is Sansay or someone else reappropriating her work, the change in genre and narrative structure from Secret History to Zelica is worthy of consideration” (33). Manganelli is referring to Michael Drexler who doubts that Sansay is the author of Zelica in the introduction to Secret History (2007) because of the narrative and plot changes. These are the most recent published scholarly accounts, but online Jennifer van Bergen has done extensive research on Sansay (http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2010/01/03/reconstructing-leonora-sansay) and van Bergen notes that publisher referred to Zelica, the Creole as written by “Mme. de Sansée.” I checked one of van Bergen’s footnoted sources, The Edinburg Review Quarterly List of Publications from March 1821 and they indeed attribute Zelica to “Madame de Sansée.” 70 interrogate these texts, most notably by tracing the link between the domestic discord and the hemispheric conflict, and I want to build upon this basis to examine how roguish femininity forms in the transnational conflicts that represent rebellions against gender, racial, and colonial rule. In the first half of the chapter, I will move through the historically-specific and generic literary terms that critics often use to discuss these two texts—Clara as a coquette and Zelica as a creole. I will emphasize how the characteristics attributed to these concepts are used to express the characters’ protests against gender oppression. The texts present the women’s protests as based in each character’s unique and special difference from other women, and what the novels’ maintain as each characters’ exceptionality to gender conventions. If scholars note that “the Haitian Revolution became the basis of yet another claim for the distinctiveness of the United States” (White, 248), we can see how the Haitian Revolution also contributed to the maintenance of the exceptional aura around the roguish woman. In these spaces, roguish femininity resists conventions while embedding itself in the discourse of oppression and liberty and the setting of revolution. Therefore, even though these roguish women are represented as special exceptions in a way that is individualistic, the second novel shows how the revolutionary politics enables resistant friendship; it identifies friendship as a way for the characters to enact their own resistance to oppression and vulnerability. In the latter half of the chapter, I will interrogate female friendship as a tool of an oppositional politics. These bonds of friendship inform a roguish femininity that is resisting forms of power it deems oppressive. All that is steeped in racialized if not racist bonds, as the exceptional woman, Zelica, is embedded in a racialized history, but is displaced from it with her light skin and denial of connection with black revolutionaries on the island. Even with its limits, Zelica, the Creole is an 71 early transnational nineteenth-century text that articulates the injustices and resistances of a woman of color likely imagined by a white American female author. And, if as many critics have argued, the United States attempts to repress any connection to creole and hybrid characteristics that exist in the New World, Zelica is bringing that complex history to the U.S. As “the shadowy presence of creole American identities underlies anxious efforts to construct exceptional U.S. ‘American’ identities and literary and cultural traditions” (Goudie, 9), then so does a politics of gender exceptionality work through this tradition. The ambivalence resonates with the novels’ own views of the revolution in Saint- Domingue, fearful of black power, but also supportive of the end of slave-fueled colonial rule and supportive of the values of liberty and equality. Scholars have turned to these Sansay texts in order to understand the history of the Haitian Revolution, as Joan Dayan does: “Hassal/Sansay’s insights into the relations between castes/colors during the last days of Saint- Domingue reveal more about the kinds of mixtures and erosion of boundaries that prevailed there than any other document about this period” (Dayan, 172). Michael J. Drexler elaborates to say, “Of all the socio-political hierarchies under strain, Sansay is most overtly interested in what happens to marital and sexual relations in moments of intense socio-political change” (Drexler, 26). Indeed, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg expands on the U.S. political context that informs much of the Sansay’s work, especially in Zelica, the Creole, particularly how the novel reflects a shifting between republican values of virtue, sacrifice, and liberty and liberal Enlightenment values (Smith-Rosenberg, 458). 44 Sansay’s texts help us understand the political workings of both Haiti and the United States, and, importantly, the exchange between the two locations. 44 In terms of republicanism, Smith-Rosenberg argues: “Zelica’s message, which is also Zelica’s message, which is also the message of classic republicanism and of the American Revolution, seems clear: where there is no freedom, there is no virtue, no honorable life” (Smith-Rosenberg, 454). 72 In focusing on this exchange, the work of this chapter overlaps with the aims of feminist scholars who want to understand gender politics beyond national boundaries. The editors of the collection Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions seek to create an understanding of how feminist thought manifests into different cultural, racial, class, national contexts in this time period, in part to understand “a new history of feminism that abandons national framework” (Moore, 6). They write: “In incorporating writings from a diverse range of traditions, we also hope to open up a new and more complicated sense of the historical origins of feminism,” which they note was “galvanized by the ideals and the rhetoric of the American, French and Haitian Revolutions” (Moore 31, 8). The collection Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies defines their feminist approach as “not solely an analysis of gender but of the intersections of gender, race, class, nationality, and other markers of difference that characterize individuals and their relationships to institutionalized power” (Carruth, xvi). Throughout this chapter and the broader project, I am identifying actions, embodiments, and perspectives that are may be “feminist” and see this work as adding to a feminist understanding of historical and literary manifestations of gendered resistance, but I am not identifying these characters or authors as necessarily feminists. Rather, this chapter continues my exploration of how expressions that a reader of the present might see as feminist and, indeed, that historically were viewed as rebellious, subversive, or eccentric are tied up with justifications of imperialist expansion and white supremacy, even as it has a complex racial politics and transnational affiliations. Secret History and Zelica, the Creole represent roguish femininity using the setting and rhetoric of revolution to fight against violent gender restriction. This chapter allows us to see more closely the racialization of this roguish woman—how someone who is the daughter of an enslaved mulatta woman uses the discourse of gender 73 complaint to efface her own ties to blackness. Yet, I want to attend to the complexities that disrupt a reading that would see the texts only working in one way, especially because the novels’ politics do not so easily fit into a rigid framework—they are both racist and aligned with racial liberation, particularly the liberation of a woman of color, which Zelica is even with her light skin. The story’s revision, shifting the heroine from the white American Clara in Secret History to the biracial creole Zelica, show a more intersectional gender politics emerges out of struggles for racial liberation. But the obfuscation of Zelica’s racial history, as well as her connection to French culture, speaks to the problematic whitewashing that often accompanies a “feminist” politics that is focused solely on claims to individual rights and liberties. The Coquette’s Resistance In Secret History, Clara is described as being charming, intelligent, and attention-loving. In one of her letters, Mary writes to Aaron Burr, “It is Clara’s fate to inspire great passions. Nobody loves her moderately” (SH, 109). Clara is “proud and high spirited” (SH, 81), flirting with many men and seeking public attention. Stories that discouraged women from acting as coquettes were popular in this time period, moralizing against female sexuality, most famously in Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). Making the connection between tales of fallen women and gender politics in Early American literature, Cathy Davidson reminds us that the “question of what role women should have in the new country was being vigorously debated as America worked out its own definition of democracy” (Davidson, Intro to Coquette, ix). This historical context affects how scholars have read Sansay’s own biography, as she has been identified as “a public woman, a coquette” and “capricious, witty, and inconstant in her attachments” (Drexler, “Introduction,” 27). Sansay’s husband Louis Sansay, model for St. Louis, wrote to Aaron Burr saying, “You know, Monsieur, the lightness and inconstancy of 74 Madame Sansay” (Drexler, “Introduction, 27). Leonora Sansay’s stand-in Clara is chastised in the novel for her coquettish ways. In one of her letters to Aaron Burr in Secret History, Mary says about her sister Clara: “there is a vein of coquetry in her composition which, if indulged, will eventually destroy her peace” (SH, 77). Mary is critical of her sister in this moment, but she is more concerned with the violent threat of Clara’s jealous husband St. Louis. Statements like this have caused critics like Michael Drexler to acknowledge that “Sansay envisions a world in which women’s happiness seems all but circumscribed by violent masculinity” (Drexler, “Introduction,” 33). Sansay and her stand-in, Clara, both possess a roguish femininity that expresses itself through coquettishness, charm, and cleverness. Burr’s presence in the novel and in Sansay’s history adds another dimension to this roguishness, as this man too is a controversial figure, one historian identifying Burr as “a rogue” (Kennedy, 4). Leonora Sansay had a long friendship with Aaron Burr and many critics assume that they were lovers for at least part of that friendship. Likely meeting in the tavern Sansay’s father owned in Philadelphia in the late eighteenth century, Sansay and Burr often confided in each other, and he encouraged her to marry Louis Sansay in 1800. Leonora Sansay, like Clara, wrote letters to Burr while she was in Haiti and he was Vice President of the United States during Thomas Jefferson’s first terms as president (1801-1805). 45 Disliked by Jefferson, the Republican President, and by Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, Burr seemed to be ambitious for the sake of his own success without a clear set of political principles. In 1804, while still Vice President, he shot Hamilton in a duel after Hamilton slandered Burr’s reputation. Burr was under murder investigation by New York and New Jersey, but was never charged for the crime. Because his killing of Hamilton ended his 45 Michael Drexler discusses the relationship between Sansay and Burr and exerpts many of the letters among Leonora, Louis, and Burr. 75 political prospects within the U.S. government, he traveled through the west, including to Kentucky, Tennessee, and New Orleans. In the years that follow, Burr’s rogue status becomes aligned with traitorous activity, when he begins to conspire to, at the least, overthrow Spain in Mexico and set himself up as king in nation alternative to the U.S., and, at the most, to overthrow Jefferson and the U.S. government. Historical accounts posit him as motivated by his own personal ambitions rather than any clear political beliefs, though he did play upon others who were looking for freedom against Spanish rule or settlers in the West that resented the politics of Washington. Burr employed many people in his schemes, and was eventually arrested and charged for treason in 1807, but of this too he was never found guilty. 46 Leonora Sansay was involved in the Burr Conspiracy, traveling with Burr and his party along the Mississippi River. She met with Burr and his conspiring associates in New Orleans after she fled from Saint-Domingue in 1804. Drexler contends that Sansay served as a messenger between Burr and architect Benjamin Latrobe, whom Burr tried to use to gain supporters of his plan. These actual and would-be rebellions show the complexity of hemispheric politics in the early nineteenth century: “The Burr Conspiracy belongs as much to the history of the Haitian Revolution as it does the intrigues of political partisanship in the Early Republic” (“Introduction,” 31). Sansay’s relationship with Burr and her work link the events in Haiti with instability in United States. Drexler says that Sansay’s “narratives—one, of the end of an abusive marriage and, the other, of the implications of the revolt on Saint-Domingue— point toward the sociopolitical experiment evolving on the western banks of the Mississippi River” (“Brigands,” 187). If Sansay was contemplating political collectivities and revolutionary possibilities, then her work is evidence of the complexity and contradictions of forms of power 46 References on Burr include Kennedy, Roger G. Burr, Hamilton, Jefferson: A Study in Character and Stewart, David O. American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson’s America. 76 that often leave women vulnerable. The young nation’s borders were not solid and constantly being redrawn, affecting cultural production and, I would add, discourse surrounding femininity and women. Not only were potential and real rebellions occurring, but questions about gender and treatment of women were circulating, especially after the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. A supporter of women's rights, Burr “hung above his hearth a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft” (Stewart, 7). The Haitian Revolution and the Burr Conspiracy imbue Sansay’s own exploration of violence against women and alliances between women with conspiratorial possibility. In Secret History, Clara’s resistance manifests though coquetting. By coquetting, Clara tries to trade upon her charms to avoid reliance upon her husband, but faces St. Louis’s violent opposition, which includes physical violence, rape, and threat of maiming. St. Louis’s violence is often prompted by Clara’s flirtatiousness and the attention she receives. Even more, the attention she receives from men like General Rochambeau affects his military strategies; for instance, when it was planned that Clara and Mary would return to Philadelphia, Mary narrates Rochambeau’s reaction: “The general, thinking Clara was sent away against her will, and determined to thwart the intentions of her husband, laid an embargo on all the vessels in the port” (SH, 86). While text also outlines military maneuvers that limit these women’s mobility, it becomes obvious that it is not only movements of the Haitian revolutionaries that affect these military operations, but also the threat of Clara’s movement. In response to Rochambeau, St. Louis keeps her locked in a room. Clara becomes a pawn in the power battle between Rochambeau and her husband St. Louis. This battle has implications for the colonial system itself, Dillon stating, “Clara finds herself implicated in a greater system of patriarchal violence— one that encompasses the politics of colonialism as a whole rather than just the gendered divide 77 between men and women.” (Dillon, 92). However, Clara resists that oppression through her coquetting, which again links her to the revolutionaries: “revolutionaries and coquettes emerge in Secret History as [. . .] risk-taking figures whose actions threaten to turn into victims those [. . .] who help to bring them into being” (Burnham, 179). 47 These scholars rightly note the ways that colonial and gender violence intertwine, so, building upon these analysis, I want to consider what type of resistance is imagined within this violent system. The gender politics in Secret History manifest through a femininity that tie together her roguishness, or resistant flirtatiousness, and her identity as an American in transnational spaces. Writing to Burr, Mary points out the unfairness in labeling a woman a coquette as an act of social shaming and punishment, defending her sister by insisting on the superiority of a coquette like Clara, how different she is from other women and other men. When Mary defends her sister, Clara is imagined as being more than a coquette and better than her husband, a unique and exceptional woman. Clara’s status as an American and her performance of that becomes a part of her coquetting. When giving a dinner party, French General Rochambeau shows Clara and the other guests a room “ornamented with military trophies, and on every panel was written the name of some distinguished chief” (80). Clara objects, saying “it was very pretty, but that Washington should also have found a place there” (SH, 80). Mary identifies that “General Rochambeau has given a proof of his attention” to Clara when he soon after places a panel in the ballroom of the government house that says “Washington, Liberty, and 47 The novel defends them in a way that posits her coquettishness as the articulation of her independence and autonomy. Late in the novel, Mary, defends Clara, writing: “It is true, Clara is said to be a coquette, but have no ladies of superior talents and attractions, at all times and in all countries been subject to that censure? unless indeed theirs was the rare fortune of becoming early in life attached to a man equal or superior to themselves!” (SH, 153). Mary condemns St. Louis for not being equal enough to Clara, maintaining that he acted as a “tyrant” with his charismatic wife, pointing out the vulnerability of a woman in marriage. Clara suffers because of this gender imbalance, which causes her reliance upon him in this colonial space. 78 Independence!” (SH, 80). With Rochambeau, she manipulates her identity as a form of flirtation, and he compliments her through acknowledging her nationality. After Clara and Mary escape Saint-Domingue and the domineering men for Cuba, Clara learns Spanish and makes friends with many residents, one woman in particular who “loves not the French character”; however, she warms to Clara because “Clara is an American; and the influence of her enchanting qualities on the heart of her fair friend is strengthened by the charm of novelty” (SH, 108). With her Cuban friend, Clara receives affection and special treatment because of her “novel” American identity. In these transnational spaces of European colonialism, Clara’s Americanness is a novelty that becomes part of her charm and appeal to both men and women. The text creates a femininity that resists through coquetting and charming others, and that is effective as an act of resistance and survival because others read her and her Americanness as novel. That newness not only applies to Clara, but also imbues those in the United States imagined to be reading this, including the imagined recipient Aaron Burr, as novel, new, and different from the “horrors of St. Domingo.” This text does contribute to the work of shoring up an ideological divide between European colonial spaces like Saint-Domingue and the republican United States. It “traded on the public’s appetite for descriptions of racialized violence” (Drexler, “Intro,” 32) and, similar to the function of other travel narratives, it displaces scenes of violence, exploitation, and power struggle onto other spaces. Though both places having a different historical legacy, the revolutionary struggles in Haiti implicate the United States in the early nineteenth century. For one, France’s failure against the revolutionaries did set up the United States’ own historical trajectory: “France’s loss of Saint-Domingue [. . .] enabled the United States to expand westward. After the defeat in the Seven Years’ War followed by loss of Saint-Domingue, France’s vision of an American empire 79 vanished” (Sepinwall, 317-8). Before the revolution, Haiti was a colony that was extremely profitable for France, and trade relations with Saint-Domingue and other Caribbean colonies became important to the United States government and economy post-U.S. Revolution. As Sean X. Goudie shows in his study of the relationship between the Caribbean colonies and US literature and culture: “there was a near consensus in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution about the need to reestablish vigorous trade relations between the United States and the West Indies in order to ensure the Republic’s survival and future economic prosperity” (Goudie, 2). However, colonial powers such as France, Britain, and Spain “each severely limited direct commerce between the islands and the upstart North American nation” (Goudie, 5). The young United States needed the colonial Europeans powers to keep trade and relations running smoothly, even as the new country critiqued the European colonizing powers. The Haitian Revolution was a long and complex conflict that started in 1791 with slave insurrections and ended in 1804 when revolutionary general Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti an independent black republic. Cities in the United States were directly affected by the conflict: “In 1791 and again in 1793, when European and Creole planters and settlers were forced to flee from the ravages of a uniquely black revolution, they settled in the new democracy, especially in the cities of Norfolk, Baltimore, and Philadelphia” (Dayan, 162). And even though the displaced colonists were welcomed in the United States, Americans “scrutinized the exiles’ flight and found the departure of thousands of able-bodied men problematic” (White, 248). The presence of those emigrants and their stories destabilized US understandings of itself as a slave- holding nation. But instead of seeing connections between the displaced white colonists and themselves, the Anglo-Americans linked the exiles from Saint-Domingue to creole stereotypes of 80 degeneracy and excess, the opposite of republican values, so as to insist upon the distinctiveness of those in the United States (White, 248). Before and after Haitian independence, the United States was ambivalent about the revolution and what it represented. As many scholars have noted, the Haitian Revolution from the early nineteenth century until the time of the Civil War came to represent a fear of black uprising in the United States in Southern slave plantations. The United States had inconsistent and ultimately damaging polities toward Haiti. Joan Dayan writes that in 1802 “when Napoleon decided to attack Toussaint’s government, destroy those who he called ‘rebels,’ and reinstitute slavery, Jefferson’s newly elected government in Washington abruptly changed U.S. policy and refused to support Toussaint” (Dayan, 189). (That refusal to support Haiti lasted many years as the United States did not recognize Haiti as an independent nation until 1862.) However, the U.S. reaction to the Haitian revolutionaries was not monolithic. Many Americans had an economic tie to the rebels, and Sara C. Fanning writes how there was “tremendous outcry” after Jefferson banned trade with the island: “American merchants made tremendous profits outfitting Louverture’s military with arms, ammunition and food supplies. Throughout the 1790s, the United States’ willingness to trade without reservation allowed the revolutionaries under Louverture to consider independence from France” (Fanning, 66). The economic importance of Haiti was not the only thing clear to those in the U.S. Michael Drexler explores the ambivalent attitude of early American novelist Charles Brockden Brown: “Though much of the reaction to the Haitian Revolution in the Untied States concerned its relation to the progress of the French Revolution or its dire implications for the slaveholding economy of the American South, the significant of Haiti’s postcoloniality was not lost on U.S. Nationalists. [. . .] Saint-Domingue was to be admired as much as feared” (Drexler, 177). 81 Saint-Domingue, both admired and feared by the American public, is the setting for Clara’s roguishness, her attempt to fashion herself as exceptional in order to liberate herself from oppression conditions. Scholars have noted this liberation is racially charged: “Clara’s liberation from her husband runs parallel to the revolutionary liberation of Saint-Domingue” (Drexler, “Brigands,” 191). Clara and her sister escape from these violent men just as the French are once again being overtaken by the Haitian revolutionaries, “the Haitian revolutionaries’ acts of rebellion seeming to enable and ennoble Clara’s own” (Goudie, 211). 48 Clara and her sister Mary are able to escape the island of Haiti for Cuba and then Jamaica, as their white male persecutors are rendered impotent by the black revolutionaries and as Haitian leader Dessalines decrees the execution of French and creole whites on the island (though Clara and Mary would be exempt as white Americans). This text represents women’s liberation—here articulated through the twinning of gender and racial liberation—as created in a space outside of the United States. It represents the struggles and liberation of this “superior” woman in a way that ties her beauty and appeal to her American identity, forming a roguish femininity that has its roots in transnational revolutionary historical events. The Female Creole’s Resistance The identity of the “creole” is often seen as distinct, though interrelated, to the identity of “American.” At its basis, creole was used to refer to “colonists of European descent, as well as black and mulatto slaves and freedmen born and raised in the New World” (Goudie, 8). More broadly though, creole took to refer to “admixtures, or syncretisms, between Old and New World ‘races’ and cultures” (Goudie, 8). Often, the creole signified degeneracy, particularly for British 48 See also: Tessie Liu has observed that “black victory actually liberates Clara and initiates both sisters’ path to greater self-determination” (Liu, 391). Dillion says, “a surprising effect of the revolution is thus 82 colonists in North America, who turned into “Americans”: “Ultimately U.S. Anglo-Americans suppressed their associations with the term ‘creole’ in favor of a specific creole identity designating their liberation from Europe: ‘American’” (Goudie, 9). However, strains of creolism remain even in the figuration of an American identity. In writing about Secret History, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues for “a counter-discourse of creolism in the novel: a counter-discourse [. . .] that represents the creole as an individual of great resources—an individual capable of social reproduction under conditions of duress—rather than a sterile figure.” (Dillon, 89). Goudie argues along the same lines as Dillon by saying that “Clara recreates her identity [. . .] as the culturally impure figure of postcolonial creolité, acquiring the ability during a West Indian odyssey that propels her across the Francophone, Hispanic, and Anglophone West Indies to reassemble languages and cultures, histories and philosophies fragmented by the violence of colonialism and countercolonial revolution” (Goudie, 209). These critics identify Clara’s implicit tie to creole identity in Secret History as something that complicates dominating discourse of “Americanness” and of the creole as degenerate. 49 In attempting to recover erased or ignored histories, these critics look to what exists in figures like Clara, who seem resistant to certain dominating discourses and who create alternative ways of being, ways that often get read as special, unique, or exceptional. I too want to avert our attention away from the republic to see how gender is formed in transnational, colonial, ostensibly non-“American” locations. Even more complex than looking at the white Clara is to look at Zelica, literally named as creole and identified as biracial. This is especially important as to enable white women to escape from the power of men” (Dillion, 92). 49 There are critics would complicate this reading. Tessie Liu argues that “Sansay’s novel is rather an example of the rejection of colonial hybridity (even in the midst of transnational and transimperial hemispheric travel), intended to establish an American identification mapped onto the political territory of the United States (although those boundaries are themselves changing with colonial expansion” (Liu, 406). 83 the coquetting drops out of this second book, with Clara and Zelica both becoming sincere and consistent figures, lacking some of the characteristics of mischief and playful charm that I have been identifying as a component of roguishness. Instead, the roguishness manifests itself more directly as an objection to unjust authority and sexual threat, and as a mode of subversion and trickery, especially disguise, that are used to create safe space for the women. The ability to employ these modes of subversion and disguise are characteristic of creoleness as these critics identify—the reassembling of fragments to create spaces of new ways of being. However, to direct our focus on the way that gender is implicated in this space, we need to see these actions as manifestations of roguish femininity, specifically, as manifestations of female friendship. In this space, the friendship between Zelica and Clara becomes a manifestation of roguishness and a tool that is used to resist the dominating and violent colonial and misogynist structures. Zelica, born in Haiti, educated in France, is a light-skinned woman of color who struggles with her father’s will and her own desires. Her father wants Zelica to marry Henri Christophe, a revolutionary general and important historical figure, to cement their political alliance, while Zelica wants to marry a man she fell in love with in France. In Saint-Domingue, Zelica, alone and without a home, befriends Clara, who in this version of the story is not only threatened by a jealous husband and rapacious French military officials, but also, most urgently, by Glaude, a fictional black revolutionary. Juxtaposing Secret History with Zelica the Creole allows us to see shifting representations of race and gender in Sansay’s work, from a focus on the white American coquette to the focus on a creole woman of color. This shift is enabled and manifests in this transatlantic space, in these movements between United States and Haiti, France and England, where Zelica, the Creole was published. This space allows for a revision between these two novels, so that our focus shifts from Clara to Zelica, at the same time as they mirror one 84 another. Zelica replaces Clara as the more dynamic character—dynamic in her ability to change herself, to hide, and to disguise, and to move more freely than the white American woman whose mobility is limited because of threats from both the white military men and the black revolutionaries. Though Zelica experiences some of the same threats, she is imbued with characteristics that make her a more active hero. Zelica possesses ingenuity, seeming to appear at the exact correct moment to save Clara, minus the climax of the novel, and she disguises herself, at one point darkening her own skin, and another time she disguises Clara in “a habit of coarse blue cotton, such as is usually worn in the colonies by slaves” (vol 3, 83). Zelica employs the signifiers of race to preserve her interracial friendship, though, importantly, it is because her privilege as a light-skinned woman of color who was born free to a French father that is she is able to darken and lighten her skin at will. These constant retranslations, revisions, retelling show interplay between white femininity, women of color femininity, and liberal feminist notions of independence, agency, and empowerment—how “rebellious” femininity is always already racialized, whether co-opting and erasing or retranslating the race into roguish resistance and gender empowerment. Instead of this story being tied to flirtatious roguishness of Clara, the story articulates a more modulated politics of liberation through Zelica’s sentimentalized roguishness, which is manifested through her sincere desire to save Clara. Through political deals, disguise, and insider knowledge, and that is, her status as a biracial creole woman, Zelica is able to negotiate the revolutionary space better than Clara. One of the initial descriptions of Zelica places her in the context of creole identification: Zelica, whose large black eyes swam in melting langour, and who had not been deprived, by a long abode in France, of the gracefully indolent movements that are the 85 distinguishing characteristics of the creole ladies—formed by nature to fascinate, and furnished by education with all the powers of pleasing—was a perfect enchantress, but she appeared wholly insensible to the flattery or gallantry of St. Louis. To Clara all her gratefulness was due, and to Clara all her attention was directed (Zelica, vol 1, 46-47). The description invokes the conventional associations with creole women in Haiti and in the Caribbean more generally—as languid and with “characteristics of intemperance, indolence, and sensuality” (Manganelli, 19). Some of these characteristics can be attributed to Clara in Secret History, but the text here modulates that form of female “power,” minimizing some of the association of creole women with coquettishness (and with Clara in Secret History). Instead of being coquettish or flirtatious, Zelica is insensible to the male attention that her beauty brings, and her sincere affection is directed toward Clara. Her beauty is much discussed in the novel, but the racial stakes of that beauty are rarely overtly mentioned. Zelica’s racial heritage is not immediately apparent as the novel at first obscures her family lineage (as she does) and Zelica passes as white. Yet racial lines are drawn when a white creole woman Justine seeks to undermine St. Louis’s amorous affections for Zelica, implicitly making a distinction between a white creole and a creole of color. It is through the conversation between these two white creoles that Zelica’s history is revealed halfway through the novel, she being the daughter of white French landowner De la Riviere and Marguerite Danois, a slave who is “celebrated for her extraordinary beauty” (vol 2, 138). When St. Louis recalls that he has “frequently heard” of the beauty of Marguerite Danois, Justine seeks to undermine the connection: “But still a slave, and but one degree removed from black.” St. Louis replies, “Which does not prevent her lovely daughter from being the fairest creature in existence” (vol 2 138). The politics of her beauty, constructed by a white colonizer, demonstrate how she is privileged and restricted by what her beauty represents, a signifier of her racial and 86 colonial status. She is the daughter of a white French landowner-turned-revolutionary and an enslaved biracial woman. 50 Born in Saint-Domingue, raised in France, Zelica falls in love with a French man, but her father refuses to allow the connection because he has pledged his daughter to revolutionary black leader Henri Christophe to cement the interracial revolutionary alliance between the two men. She refuses that alliance and, because she then sees herself as doomed, she devotes herself to her friendship with Clara, which is primarily manifested from saving Clara from peril, especially the sexual threat of fictional black general Glaude. Zelica is enabled to save Clara because of this lineage, because of her position as a political pawn, the daughter of a white French man pledged to black revolution. She is privileged because of her light skin and white father, but still not in control of her body and choices as the daughter of an enslaved woman. Politics of Resistant Friendship The politics of friendship offers an important revision to Secret History, especially the relationship of Zelica and Clara to that of Zelica’s father De la Riviere and revolutionary Henri Christophe. In different scholarly approaches, friendship has been a fruitful site to explore alliance and politics. About friendship in the context of nineteenth-century United States, Ivy Schweitzer maintains that friendship needs to be understood as something not necessarily confined to the private or domestic, but as something that is “an underrated story of social and political life” (Schweitzer, PF, 25). Other scholars see the potential for political resistance within friendship; Leela Gandhi identifies affiliations among those on the periphery of 50 If we think about Zelica’s mother, Marguerite Danois, being “but one degree removed from black,” we are to assume that her mother, perhaps from Africa, was sexually violated by white landowner, possibly De la Rivierie’s father, something which then would suggest incestuous pairing. However, there is not evidence for that in the text, and the last name “Danois” signals a different patrilineal heritage. 87 imperialism—“sexual misfits, slaughterhouse animals, factory slaves, colonized subjects, unruly women”—as offering potential for radical connection, an anti-imperial “utopian order of things” (Gandhi, 7, 8). Though Gandhi’s historical context of “friendships and collaborations between anticolonial South Asians and marginalized anti-imperial ‘westerners’ enmeshed within the various subcultures of late Victorian radicalism is different (10), her concept of the “politics of friendship” is useful to think about in the colonial space of Saint-Domingue, which makes urgent the friendship between a white American woman and a multiracial Haitian creole woman. Yet, the politics of friendship can be normative even as it is disruptive; again in a Victorian context, but this time through exploring female relationships in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus argues that “relationships between woman are central to the history of gender, sexuality, marriage, and the family” (Marcus, 14). Marcus argues that we must pay attention to female friendship as constitutive to normative femininity, as many friendships between women, though openly erotic or resistant, lead to marriage and other normative participation in nineteenth-century England. 51 As I will explore in this section, the friendship between Zelica and Clara is embedded in and enabled by anti-colonial discourse, both critique the actions of colonial France. However, though Gandhi’s framing of friendship offer us a useful way to think through anti-imperial friendship in a colonial space, the differing social and historical context necessitates that we think about friendship through normative gendering, as Marcus does. Therefore, I will examine how friendship is enabled by anti-imperial energies, bonds between women forming in the location of political struggle. What makes the friendship anti-imperial is the implicit critique of colonial power that emerges through a critique of male authority, and that friendship also enables their adept resistance and subversion of gender oppression, what I have been identifying as their 51 Transcendentalists lauded friendship, and further connection will need to be made in another version of this piece. 88 roguish femininity. The biracial creole and the white American’s friendship ties together resistance to gender oppression and anti-colonial resistance, but what empowers that resistance and that friendship are hierarchized racial dynamics. Ivy Schweitzer, considering the stakes of interracial female friendship in Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, argues: “Sedgwick offers a specifically ‘feminine’ alternative—reciprocity—to masculine domination, but mobilizes a discourse of the noble female savage in need of a Christian civility that thinly veils an imperialist expansionism” (Schweitzer, “IC,” 143). 52 Similarly, much of the resistance in Zelica is against the alliance between black male revolutionaries and white anti-imperial men, and within that their friendship is constitutive of normative femininity that uses roguish traits to uphold white female purity and obscure black femininity. The friendship of Zelica and Clara is figured as exceptional because it is forged under distress and violent revolutionary circumstances. It motivates and gives direction to the roguish characteristics of Zelica who expertly wields the forces available to her through disguise, mobility, and access to power. It is a fantasy of a friendship that imagines a light-skinned Haitian woman of color devoting herself to the preservation of a white American woman in a way that is similar to the enslaved black woman, Madeleine, who attentively cares for and remains loyal to St. Louis and Clara. But Zelica’s devotion to Clara obscures the racial dynamics and makes the friendship about gender solidarity. Instead of being a black woman struggling against these uneven power dynamics, Zelica is figured as a white-identified creole woman who struggles only against the gendered injustice. She is unlike the white creoles and 52 She spends several chapters discussing interracial friendship in the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Sedgwick, identifying it as important to “emerging forms of national identity in the early Republic” (Schweitzer, PF, 23). She identifies how the masculine narratives of interracial friendship “generate and reinforce a dominant white national idea that, even in the face of colonization, imperialism, slavery, and the genocide of indigenous populations, allows its readers to sustain inclusive and egalitarian American ideals” (Schweitzer, PF, 135). 89 the black slaves, a fantasy of racial exceptionality. This exceptionality privileges whiteness and obscures blackness even while the motivation for the friendship is one that steeped in racial politics and is due to the intersection of race and gender oppression. Sexual threat makes manifest the gender oppression, and it also makes the politics racist. The sexual threat is the basis of their friendship, as Zelica positions herself as the savior of Clara. Their friendship is imagined as being a resistance to unjust political formations that position women as victims and that places them outside of male political alliance. Both the expression and limits of their friendship is embedded in revolutionary Saint- Domingue. Originally, Zelica asks for Clara’s protection and to accompany the party of prisoners to the mountains, a journey that seemed better than remaining in Cape Francois to await the revolutionaries burning down the town in response to the impending arrival of General Le Clerc and the French army. Clara complies with Zelica’s request because, for Clara, “It was sufficient to have asked her friendship with confidence to inspire her with a belief that it was merited” (Zelica, Vol 1, 42). Because of Clara’s openness, Zelica devotes herself to Clara, particularly to protecting Clara from sexual threat, and this devotion defines their relationship. When Clara first offers the comfort of her friendship, Zelica feels that Clara’s “voice whispers hope to a heart that has long been the seat of despair,” but links her misery to her physical location and circumstance: “In another clime I would not for an instant refuse the hope thus offered, that your friendship would save me from danger, soothe and protect me; but in this country, hope itself, which comes to all, cannot come to me; my foe here is all powerful, and against him the efforts of friendship, or the energy of benevolence would be of no avail” (Zelica, vol 1, 70-71). 53 Zelica sees the potential friendship as offering hope as she suffers emotionally 53 Zelica identifies limits to the power of friendship due to her powerlessness in this particular country where her “foe” is “all powerful” so that the “effort of friendship” cannot prevail. Yet, later in the novel, 90 and materially because of her father’s demand that she marry Christophe. Hope, she says, “comes to all,” but not to her because she is not being “freed” by the liberation struggle on the island; instead, that struggle limits her. This complaint operates within racist logics that condemn the black revolutionaries, but more specifically her struggle is against her white French father, and an alliance that does not take into account the experience of women, particular women of color. Though Zelica does not reveal her “foe” to Clara until late in the book, the reader eventually learns that the “foe” seems to be the alliance between her father and Christophe, which subsumes Zelica’s will to marry a white Frenchman named Lastour, as well as limits, she believes, her own liberties. Therefore, the friendship between Clara and Zelica is something that unites, as Clara says to her friend: “we have all our share of pain; allow my friendship to supply the place of those friends whose loss you mourn—you shall be my friend—my sister—we will united our efforts to resist the misfortunes that assail you, and we will succeed” (vol 1, 74). Clara is joining Zelica to resist the alliance of white male patriarchal authority with black male authority, offering an interracial female alternative to friendship of the two political men. The friendship between De la Riviere and Christophe is more overtly identified as political than that between Clara and Zelica and is imagined as that which is oppressing Zelica (but that also is allowing for Clara’s redemption). The friendship commenced when De la Riviere “viewed with pity the abject condition of the negroes, who, condemned to hopeless when Zelica does submit to the hope in a friendship with Clara, she against attributes it to the location: “I love with all the ardour of the burning climes from which I derive my origin: you did not refuse to listen to me when throwing myself at your feet, I entreated you to take me to the Mountain; your kindness— your sweetness—your sympathy, won my heart—hope revived; and I felt that life had still some value since it could be devoted to you" (vol 3, 134). Zelica’s drive to protect Clara is also imbued with her own racial and geographical origins, even as she originally says that these origins make her hopeless. Zelica invokes the tropes associated with the “burning climes” of the colonized Caribbean spaces, identifying 91 slavery and unremitting toil, appeared to have been deprived of all rights of humanity” (vol 2, 194). He then “commenced on his own vast estates the philanthropic experiment,—seeking to ameliorate the condition of his slaves, and to teach them this great fundamental principle, that for the general good each individual much submit to laws by which they are all governed” (vol 2, 195). De la Riviere’s aim, though the text presents it as a “philanthropic experiment,” is a politically important one, even as it is paternalistic. However, when his vision of gradual “progressive freedom” is interrupted by violent revolt on the island, he cements his friendship with Christophe: “The only being with whom, in this state of rude anarchy, his soul held communion, was Christophe, a black chief who had thrown off his chains at the first sound of freedom, and vowed never, but with life, again to resign it” (vol 2, 195). The relationship between De la Riviere and Christophe is one of teacher and student, the white Frenchman acting as the “voice of reason” for the black man who allows himself to “be guided by the lessons of experience” (vol 2, 195). De la Riviere’s paternalistic treatment of Christophe is also inflected with homosocial bonding and homoerotic potential that is redirected to Zelica: “In this retreat his constant companion was Christophe, in whom, during this season of uninterrupted intercourse, he discovered talents and qualities that heightened his friendship for the young chief to enthusiasm, and, in the warmth of his affection, he promised him the hand of his daughter” (vol 2, 196). It is not uncommon to describe friendship in terms of warmth and enthusiasm, homosocial bonding important to such relationship, but the erotic potentiality suffuses the alliances between Zelica and Clara and between the two men. Because the men are devoted to freedom (as are the women but with a different “foe”), the erotic is in service to the anti-colonial, and the fight for freedom her “ardour” and passion as coming from her status as a creole in Saint-Domingue, inflected with racial intermixing. 92 becomes more important than erotic, romantic, or familial bonds. Even after De la Riviere becomes more sympathetic toward Zelica’s wishes, he still denies her: “But he was devoted to Christophe—his engagements with him were not of a nature to be broken—he could not retract without betraying the cause of freedom, that he pledged to support with all the powers of his soul” (vol 3, 288). Like a true republican, everything is to be sacrificed in support of liberty, a stance that the text views as unjust. The text uses Christophe and De la Riviere to critique the abuses of the French, while it celebrates Christophe, much in the same paternalistic and glorifying way that De la Riviere does. Henri Christophe was one of the generals of the Haitian Revolution under Toussaint Louverture and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines after Toussaint was taken prisoner by the French in 1802. Christophe was eventually elected President of Haiti and then declared himself King Henri I. Besides the belief that Christophe participated in the United States’ Revolutionary War as a child, Christophe had a presence in U.S. culture and discourse in the early nineteenth century, as he “publicized his nation-building activities,” tried to entice African Americans to move to Haiti, and defended his leadership (Fanning, 69-70). 54 As leader, Henri Christophe adopted British values, including teaching English as well as French in schools which was “reported in the leading American newspapers” as well as other promotions of Anglophilism to make Haiti friendly African Americans (Fanning, 71), and one could see how those values would also appeal to anti-slavery whites. As U.S. society wrestled with the meaning of Haiti for their own slave- holding society, Christophe became an important figure for black freedom. 54 Joan Dayan in her history of Haiti mentions Christophe in connecting Haiti with the United States: “It is easy to forget how permeable were the borders between the young republic of the United States (which had been helped in its revolutionary struggles against the English by French and Dominguan blacks, such as Henry Christophe) and the colony of Saint-Domingue” (Dayan, 162). 93 Zelica, the Creole was published in 1821 soon after the now unpopular Christophe committed suicide rather than be deposed as leader, some critics attributing this to Sansay trying to profit on the death of Henri Christophe in 1820. And if we want to read Zelica in terms of the biography of Sansay, her involvement with the “Burr Conspiracy,” with the attempt to foment revolution in Mexico and perhaps against the United States government gives a context for Sansay to question colonial violence, republicanism, and national allegiances. Sansay is familiar with extranational coalitions, and her literary work explores these political issues. Sansay’s connection to Burr places this book at the unstable boundaries of the U.S. In Secret History, Clara has an escape though her letters to Aaron Burr. But in the revision of the text in Zelica, the reference to Aaron Burr is erased, though one wonders how much of his presence remains with characters like De la Riviere or Christophe, whose long passages on liberty perhaps signifies the male politicians in the young United States. These friendships and connections to historical figures show the transnational relationships at play in this novel. In Zelica, the roguish woman’s strategies for survival include an ability to wield the discourse that politicizes all these friendships, but, as I will explore in the next section, the novel portrays Zelica’s politics as an individual assertion of rights that is based on her exceptionality. The Politics of Choice Zelica lives in hiding, estranged from her father because he demands that she marry Christophe. She critiques her father for his treatment of her, but also notes the similarities between them. She tells Clara: My father [. . .] idolizes Christophe; he talks with enthusiasm of his unspoiled energy, the ardour of his untaught feelings, and the native grandeur of his soul; he thinks the fate that devotes me to the love of his hero, the most propitious to my happiness, and laughs with scorn at objections that he ascribes to female caprice, or mere maidenly affectation: he 94 knows not, does not even suspect, that his daughter, all soft, all submissive, as I appear to be, inherits from him his own energy, and that I will sacrifice my life to save my feelings from violation. (Zelica, vol 3, 205) Zelica objects to being characterized with “female caprice” or “maidenly affectation” because it restricts who she believes she really is. Indeed, Zelica here is articulating a femininity that manifests in softness and submissiveness, but that has a spirit and energy that is masculine and, moreover, is one that is political and revolutionary. She is the combination of her enslaved mother and her white colonial father, possessing vulnerability to sexual exploitation with his rhetorical abilities: “To all the beauty of her mother, Zelica joined her father’s firmness” (vol 2, 202). Though she is adept and privileged, her “beauty” makes her desirable to the men like Christophe and St. Louis, and also signifies her racial vulnerability as her former slave-owner father tries to control her sexuality, exchanging the beauty she has received from her mother for alliance with Christophe. The book identifies how the oppression is gendered, but there is also an unspoken racial oppression that this book alludes to, even as it denies its full possibility. In this passage we can see that the novel abandons ideas of collectivity through friendship, at least interracial male friendship. The friendship between Christophe and De la Riviere, though complimented in the novel as doing the important work of working against racial injustice, is condemned as the justification to support the oppression of Zelica. Moreover, Zelica identifies her fight as an individualized and sentimentalized one; as she says, “I will sacrifice my life to save my feelings from violation.” She believes she is unable to make her own life because De la Riviere has promised his daughter in marriage to Christophe in order to “cement the union that had been formed between him [De la Riviere] and the black chiefs” (Zelica, 130). Zelica sees this as infringing upon her liberty and invokes the language that is circulating at the time of revolutions; when she reunites with her father in the novel’s second volume, she asks him: “Why, my dear father…is your unfortunate daughter the only creature whom you would deprive 95 of the freedom of choice which you say is the inherent right of every human being” (vol 2, 202). Zelica, like her father, possesses stubbornness and a fixity to principle; and, like her father, she manipulates rhetoric, persuasively invoking the language of liberal politics, of rights and individual liberties. Zelica condemns her father’s control over her marital choices using the discourse he uses to express the reasons for his alliance with the black Haitians. Zelica is directly articulating the hypocrisy of her father, who attempts to solidify an alliance against racial oppression by, as Zelica sees it, an unjust limiting of her rights. However, she does not frame it in the terms of gendered oppression—rather she obscures collectivity with other women, both white and women of color, by identifying herself as the “only creature” that her father thinks should not have freedom of choice. Though Zelica is identifying many of the same contradictions women were noting during the age of revolutions (Moore, et al, 8), she identifies herself as the “only creature” who suffers under a value system like her father’s, and continues in the construction of her own exceptionality. Yet, even as Zelica obscures collectivity, what is at stake through the friendship between Zelica and Clara is articulated when Zelica fights with her father. When Zelica asks her father why he would deprive her of “the freedom of choice which you say is the inherent of every human being,” De la Riviere responds that he is merely trying to “direct that choice” and prevent her marrying a man with a “wandering heart”; he says to her “You will never, when his wife, feel the pains and mortifications that have been the share of your friend Madame St. Louis” (203). Here, De la Riviere does articulate one of the critiques maintained through both Secret History and Zelica the Creole—that a woman is vulnerable in a marriage, especially if her husband is unfaithful or jealous. As true to his character, De la Riviere’s guidance is paternalistic, and he is articulating the link between Zelica and Clara, their vulnerability in marriage and with others 96 choosing their marriages for them. But because he is also asserting white patriarchal authority over his daughter, Zelica’s way to resist him is to align herself with Clara in a way that is self- effacing. Because her father restricts her own choices, she devotes herself to her friend’s safety: “To be allowed to watch over the safety of Clara,—to protect her from the machinations of Glaude, was a purpose sufficiently interesting to render existence supportable” (vol 2, 203). Zelica’s limited choice urges into an alliance with Clara, a bond that does not promote Zelica’s own “freedom” but rather seeks to free Clara from her peril. Even though Zelica’s roguishness is articulated through her drive to save Clara, the saving also reveals the racial bias within the text and the racial formation of roguish femininity. For instance when Zelica in disguise reveals herself to her friend, Clara reacts negatively: “she recoiled with horror and affright, when she perceived that the voice she had taken for the voice of Zelica was that of a being whose skin bore the sable hue of Africa.” Reacting to Clara’s rejection, Zelica attempts to soothe here: “Do not recoil from a disguise assumed for your preservation [. . . .] I stained my cheeks with berries [. . .] and watched at your door to prevent a design intended for your destruction” (vol. 3, 115-6). This scene reveals how Zelica manipulates racial signifies to work on her goal, similar to when she disguises Clara with a handkerchief in her hair and a “tattered dress, a habit of coarse blue cotton, such as is usually worn in the colonies by slaves” (vol 3, 83). Though Clara’s revulsion could be identified as confusion between the voice she identified as Zelica’s not seeming to look like Zelica, Clara’s act of recoiling with horror is the general perspective of the book when white women are faced with interracial physical closeness, excepting the light-skinned Zelica. Indeed, the book sensationally recounts the potential “destruction” of white women by black men, particularly the vulnerability 97 of Clara to the revolutionary general Glaude, who is represented her as desiring her with a single-minded passion. By protecting Clara from the demonized Glaude, Zelica is upholding white feminine virtue that is threatened by black male corruption. This novel reinforces the sanctity of heteronormative white feminine under threat of black male sexuality and interracial sex. This novel is anti-slavery, but it and its protagonist focus on saving the white woman Clara; as Tessie Liu says, “Thus from the perspective of a white woman’s grievance in the decolonization struggle, the overthrow of white patriarchs and husbands only clears away one layer of domination to reveal yet another potential patriarchal threat (the liberation of black men to become patriarchs) to be refused or escaped. For this reason, the self-liberation of white women is, in this case, posed in opposition to black male sovereignty” (Liu, 412). The novel circulates racist images and value systems, but the racial politics of the book are not so monolithic. Zelica, though passing as white for much of the novel, is still a woman of color struggling against her white colonist father’s control of her sexuality. In addition, the book rehearses discussions dialogs about racist ideology. In particular, when Zelica is advocating for herself against her father’s command to marry Christophe says: “how can you, who are the advocate of freedom,—the enemy of oppression, devote your daughter to a fate her soul abhors?” (vol 2, 205). Her father replies to her: “I do not listen to you unmoved, my dear Zelica, [. . .] but the repugnance you now feel is a prejudice that time will vanish” (vol 2, 206). This discussion goes on for pages, including lengthy passages where Zelica advocates for her “love and liberty” and De la Riviere chastises her for her “fleeting prejudices” (vol 2, 209, 208). Zelica’s language becomes more racist, criticizing her father’s love of Christophe: “the savage virtues you admire, pity or forgiveness were never blended” (vol 2, 210). De la Riviere rebuts 98 her: “this people, uncivilized, savage, as you call them, has virtues that would stand the test of trials from which your boasted Europeans would shrink against” (vol 2, 211). In this passage, Zelica starts with advocating for her own freedom and liberty, and then, as she realizes that tact will not work, starts to use the discourse of natural racial difference, saying about his fixity to principle: “the votaries of freedom have steeled their hearts against the voice of nature” (vol 2, 212). Zelica’s anti-interracial marriage language and own identification as white obscures her own racial heritage. Furthermore, it seems against the racial categorization in Saint-Domingue, the United States, and post-colonial Haiti (which decrees all inhabitants to be considered “black). Saint-Domingue had a complex racial system and U.S. culture tended to follow narrative of the “one-drop” rule even for those who passed as white, retelling tragic mulatta tales. Because Zelica constantly speaks of the misfortune of her fate, telling her father that she “will seek no refuge from [her] horrible fate but the grave” (vol 2, 212), some critics read Zelica as on a spectrum with the tragic mulatta trope. Kimberly Snyder Manganelli argues that this text “subverts the typical Tragic Mulatta’s narrative in which the mixed-race slave is threatened by sexual violation by white men who read her mixed-race blood as a sign of her wantonness” (Manganelli, 33). Zelica’s connection to the Tragic Mulatta narrative is further complicated in that she does not have a tragic ending—she does not die: “But in this narrative, the American lady is left behind in a grave in Haiti, a casualty of the revolution. Zelica, however, is reunited onboard with her French fiancé, who had come to Saint-Domingue in search of her” (Manganelli, 35). Because the text portrays the failure to save and preserves the life of the “tragic mulatta” thereby complicating the gendered racial politics even further and suggesting 99 that Zelica’s roguishness seems preferable to Clara’s white femininity and is something that is being imported into the United States. As Joan Dayan describes it, “If, in the perverse ethics of the planter the spiritualized, refined images of white women depended on the violation of black women, the bleached-out sable Venus accommodated both extremes. In the crossing and unsettling of enforced (and contrived) duality, the free woman of color would be served, fed, honored, and adored, and at the same time excluded from marriage, threatened by poverty, and often abandoned” (Dayan, 57). Though the text does not identify Zelica as a free woman of color, that is what Zelica is even with the privilege her light skin gives her. Zelica is “trained” to be white, to forget her origin, by being educated in France. Her father sends her there to avoid her internalizing the racism structuring Haitian society, but it makes her disaffiliate with her racial and national origins. When she returns—called back by her revolutionary father, who has stained his skin dark—she lacks connection and investment in family, nation, or politics. This disaffiliation motivates her to latch on to Clara, a white American woman, another stranger to this land, both negotiating the gender politics of this politically unstable place. This is the politics of the text—a politics and affiliation that is out of gender, patriarchal oppression—one that is deemed analogous to the racial politics, but also that is a response to what the text sees as the misguided racial politics of Zelica’s father. This process reveals the racialization of the roguish woman, how blackness becomes obscured, but still manifests through her survival and tools to make that survival. In writing about Zelica, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg says that “Sansay’s novel addresses two of the most critical issues of her day: the challenges slavery posed to those who so proudly proclaimed all men endowed with inalienable rights and the dangers many feared emancipation posed to orderly and virtuous republics. Zelica, however, is unable to resolve those issues, as it 100 is equally unable to project a coherent political persona” (463). Zelica indeed enacts those tensions, but out of this emerges a politics of racialized femininity and interracial friendship made out of these violent (in)consistencies. The novel exposes, though not literally, that women lack a collective politics in the face of these colonial violences that are enacted in the name of liberty. In the absence of full humanity culturally and materially given to women of color, we have Zelica as a roguish-adept woman who devotes herself to saving a white American woman who has come with her husband to participate in the exploitation of the resources of this colonial space, but finds herself subject to its systems and power struggles. Zelica’s struggle to save Clara is indeed a struggle to preserve sanctified American white femininity; however, their coalition is a coming together across difference and within privilege. The politics of friendship and the politics of this biracialized roguishly heroic woman emerge from, but are not fully encompassed by, the discourses of liberty and republicanism. They inspire us to tend to how women are imagined to bond in order to survive sexual and psychic violence that discursively is a racist insistence on white supremacy and a feminist condemnation of the political vulnerability of women. However, the emphasis on Zelica as representative of a woman of color obscures black women of Haiti. As Dayan reminds us: “What happened to actual black women during Haiti’s repeated revolutions, as they were mythologized by men, metaphorized out of life into legend? It is unsettling to recognize that the hyperbolization necessary for myths to be mutually reinforcing not only erases these women but forestalls our turning to these real lives” (Dayan, 48). Dayan recounts various legends centered on women during the revolution, Sister Rose and Defilee. In a broader Caribbean context, black women such as Nanny of the Maroons rebelled against the intersections of racial and gender oppression: “Nanny of the Maroons, horrified by 101 the treatment of female slaves on Jamaican plantations, escaped and founded Nanny Town in 1720, a successful community of former enslaved and indigenous people” (Moore, et al, 13). Zelica, the daughter of enslaved mother who was eventually “freed” by her father, is not invested in the racial struggle, and, as such, embodies the rebellious qualities that end up being suitable for the white supremacist United States. As Tessie Liu argues, “Sansay’s novel is rather an example of the rejection of colonial hybridity (even in the midst of transnational and transimperial hemispheric travel), intended to establish an American identification mapped onto the political territory of the United States (although those boundaries are themselves changing with colonial expansion” (406). But to consider Zelica’s struggle one of the struggle of a woman of color is to pay attention to the complex racialization processes occurring in these transnational, revolutionary spaces. At the end of the novel, Zelica fails in her mission to save her friend and Clara dies, their alliance unsuccessfully kept (though, in the logic of preserving a white woman’s sexual and racial purity, Zelica succeeds). When seeing that Clara is dead, Zelica tries to kill herself by jumping from a cliff, but she survives. And with that survival, however, the conventional tragic end of the noble woman of color is upended. Though upset about her friend’s death and her own failure to save Clara, Zelica remains with the reader as representative of survival—her own traits and abilities to disguise herself, to wield the discourse of liberty, and to allure, are what enable her to survive in this violent colonial world. Moreover, she seems to take Clara’s place, as the boat she escapes the island on, is heading toward the United States. This novel ends with Zelica, as a refugee bringing with her Haiti’s colonial and racial conflict to the United States, while the American white woman is remembered with a grave that is kept by a Haitian former slave who stays behind. 102 Zelica, a biracial woman, born in a colonized land, educated in the colonizer’s country, travels at the end to a newly-formed country both rejecting colonialism but profiting from their own and others’ imperial ventures. This woman who is characterized by a “spirit that was ever kept on the alert by the dangers that surrounded her,” by her “astonishing degree of self- possession” (79) floats in the Caribbean in the final pages, reunited with her white French beloved, not joyfully, but suffering and injured. The novel characterizes her as an exceptional woman, and we can unpack that to see a fictionalized imagining of racial and gender politics merging with colonial and imperial practices that was interesting to the author Lenora Sansay, a white independently-minded American writer who had a liaison with controversial American political figure while married to a French creole. That this politics and these identities resonated with a white woman who imagined characters struggling with the social restrictions on gender and race tells us a something about what a politics against gender oppression manifests and ignores. 103 Chapter Three The Roguish Cross-Dressing Soldier This chapter follows the roguish woman as she cross-dresses as a United States soldier, focusing on two texts, one that is set during the US-Mexico War and one that occurs during the Civil War, both stories representing women who retain a strong feminine identification even when disguising themselves as men. The Female Volunteer; or, the Life and Adventures of Miss Eliza Allen, a Young Lady of Eastport, Maine (1851) presents itself as a true account of a woman named Eliza Allen’s involvement in the U.S.-Mexico War. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater, first published serially in 1864-5 in the New York Ledger and then later as two novels Fair Play and How He Won Her, is a novel about four women who participate in the Civil War in various ways, including through the eponymous heroine’s cross-dressing. Eliza Allen and Britomarte Conyers do not represent the femininity conventionally associated with the nineteenth century; even before they cross-dress, these women are not represented in the model of sentimental heroine. Yet, they do resemble some other character types that emerge in mid- century sensational literature. For instance, one popular novel Fanny Campbell, the Female 104 Pirate Captain (1844) tells of a woman who disguises herself as a sailor in order to rescue her imprisoned lover, one of a genre of “heroic and virtuous women who literally saved men and their country” (Cutter, 147). Another popular author, Wesley Bradshaw, the pseudonym for Charles Wesley Alexander, made a career of publishing stories of about female soldiers and spies during the Civil War, creating characters that were “eccentric but lovely and patriotic” (Pauline of the Potomac, 49), women who could “brave the dangers of an occupation, from which the stoutest and bravest men would almost have shrunk” (Pauline, 88). 55 Stories of these disguised women tell of sensational exploits, of “exciting and thrilling adventures” (Female Volunteer, 7) and of “brave, spirited, energetic amazon[s]” (Southworth, FP, 4). Exciting and spirited, these women are represented as feminine, even when they are cross-dressing or acting in conventionally masculine ways. Eliza Allen is introduced as a “tender and delicate female” who assumes a “rugged and turbulent character,” (FV, 15). Britomarte is “the man hater, the woman's champion, the marriage renouncer, first in beauty, grace, and intellect” (FP, 4). Before, during, and after they cross-dress, these characters are not masculine-identified, but rather they are seen as a particular type of feminine woman—an eccentric or an amazon, spunky and brave, always beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished. Therefore, this chapter maintains that these stories show that normative femininity is being revised and articulated through acts of female-to-male cross-dressing. These characters decide to disguise themselves as men and engage in the war because of sought-after or thwarted marriages. For both women, “love” is the excuse for them to assert their “right” to serve in the military. 55 With Pauline of the Potomac; or General McClellan’s Spy (1862), patriotism and devotion to republican ideals serve as justification for cross-dressing, particularly for a woman who is of non- American origin. The French-born “beauty” becomes a white American by having “the judgment of a good general.” The French Pauline becomes “American” through what the text describes as unfeminine acts—her active engagement in the Civil War as a spy who often cross-dressers—that guide her to her beloved. 105 Though this chapter is looking at stories of cross-dressing, it does not extensively explore the descriptions of cross-dressing. Instead, this chapter interprets the reasons for and consequences of cross-dressing, in order to understand popular conceptions of femininity represented in these texts. These representative texts show that characteristics of nineteenth- century heteronormative femininity (some of which are beauty, grace, accomplishment) have a stake in the characteristics of the fictionalized female-to-male cross-dresser (which are spunk, bravery, strength). Scholars have made points similar to the one I am making: “masculinity is as much within the domain of female identity as femininity” (E. Young, 20), the ideal of true womanhood is “revised to include adopting male dress, engaging in bloody physical fights, and rescuing helpless males” (Streeby, 119), and “the act of a woman’s passing as a man among men layers rather than abandons femininity” (Laffrado, 114). Yet, even with these astute claims, most scholarship examines cross-dressing through several general modes. One I have gestured to is the liberal feminist examination of the phenomenon of the “Warrior Woman” or “Adventure Feminist,” which David Reynolds uses in Beneath the American Renaissance to describe “an especially tough, active version of the moral exemplar” (Reynolds, 345). Though Reynolds describes the Adventure Feminist as a distinctively American form of womanhood (using the portrait of Eliza Allen as a representative example), cross-dressing and female adventurers have a long Anglo-American and European literary and cultural tradition, as well as a history in Latin America. Dianne Dugaw traces the history of the “Female Warrior” identifying the narrative: “transvestite heroine masquerades as a man and goes to war or to sea for love” (xi). She says that this figure “flourished from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, her story appearing in plays, poems, life histories, and songs that were known to a wide range of people, especially 106 people of the lower classes” (xi). Scholarship is often invested in the “provisional autonomy and transgressive nature of cross-gender impersonation” (Laffrado, 106). 56 An overlapping reading of cross-dressing is focused the boundary crossing offered by these figures. Cross-dressing for women who disguise themselves especially as soldiers and adventurers has been seen as offering freedom from restrictive gender and sexual norms and as providing opportunities for queer desires. Many of the ways that “freedom” is imagined in these scholarly accounts is through the indeterminacy that is often created through moments of cross- dressing. For example, in her analysis of women writing about the US Civil War, Elizabeth Young sees the autobiography of cross-dressing Confederate solider Loretta Vasquez as “linking a nation divided between regions and races and an individual oscillating among sexes and sexuality” (156). This idea of an individual “oscillating” between gender and sexuality representations is a familiar way of reading cross-dressing. Reading Velazquez’s story as a “blurred narrative of gender indeterminacy and same-sex eroticism” (162), this scholarship is part of a field that finds moments of potential crisis potentially fruitful for destabilizing gender and sexual norms. Fluidity often becomes a keyword, which links the gendered character to larger social process, as when Bryan Sinche writes about early American military cross-dressing: “The transvestite character—simultaneously male and female and citizen and non-citizen— eliminates the gap between gendered forms of virtue and thereby intimates the possibility of a both amore fluid notion of personal identity and a more capacious American citizenship” (Sinche, 84). Much of the scholarship on cross-dressing is aligned with Margaret Garber’s influential book Vested Interests, in which she argues that cross-dressing represents “a challenge 56 Scholarly work that could be said to examine cross-dressing adventurers from this perspective include Uncommon Women by Laura Laffrado, Patriots in Disguise: Women Warriors of the Civil War by Richard Hall, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe by Dekker and van de Pol, 107 to easy notions of binarity, putting into question the categories of ‘female’ and ‘male,’ whether they are considered essential or constructed, biological or cultural” (Garber, 10). She goes further to argue that cross-dressing signifies a “crisis of category itself” (Garber, 17). Cross- dressing then offers a way to interrogate categories of gender and other modes of identity, allowing scholars to examine why and how a cross-dresser appears in a particular historical moment. 57 The cross-dresser is an interesting figure because often the spectacle of gender play denaturalizes an easy understanding of how gender and sexuality are socially manifested. Indeed, Young postulates that “nineteenth-century women may have found the Civil War battlefield a liberatory arena for the expression of same-sex desire, in a period just before the sexological codification of the category of lesbian” (E. Young, 170). The cross-dressing character has rightly been examined as offering a disruptive queer potential. Even so, many critics have also argued that the representation of the female soldier ultimately has a disciplinary function. Although this figure is often heralded as a proto-feminist or queer icon, critics sometimes are concerned by how the “gender flexibility” is “undermined” by associations with conventional femininity (Laffrado, 132) and emphasize her normative trajectory: “Female Warriors in the early modern literature are generally motivated by a traditional feminine goal: the desire to be reunited with husbands or lovers gone off to war” (Cohen, 14). Even when marriage is not the end goal, the cross-dresser’s disruption can be used for non-subversive ends. For Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America by Laura Browder, In the Company of Men by Elisabeth Krimmer, as well as Dugaw and Reynolds. 57 Some scholars who examine the relationship between cross-dressing, genre, and/or narrative form: Iglesias, Luis. “‘And Yet He May Be Our Man’: The Cross-Dressing Sailor in Cooper’s Early Sea Novels.” Kahn, Madeleine. Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel. 108 instance, Sherry Velasco writes about the changing representations of Catalina de Erauso, a seventeenth-century Basque noblewoman who escapes from a convent, dresses as a man, and fights for Spain in the New World. Velasco sees Erauso as representing a “transvestite spectacle” that “is read as both a threat to the fixed nature of gender and sexual identity and an antidote for this disruptive potential” (Velasco, 9). She continues to say that “the cross-dresser’s body is proof of the need to police violated borders. It is also the site for the solution to this potential disruption” (10). In other words, the cross-dresser’s body is a threat to stable gender and sexual borders, but also the place where those borders are restabilized when the cross-dresser is inevitably outed and restored to his/her “true” gender. Demonstrating the connection between cross-dressing, gender subversion, and imperial projects, Anne McClintock reveals that “Cross- dressing can likewise be mobilized for a variety of political purposes, not all of them subversive….; that cross-dressing disrupts stable social identities does not guarantee the subversion of gender, race, or class power” (McClintock, 67). Instead of deciding if these acts are “truly” subversive or not, I am claiming that these acts are roguish, reflecting a femininity that bucks against restriction, radical perhaps for the time, but engaging in violent imperial processes. This chapter shows how through marriage and imperial trajectories normative femininity is revised. The role of marriage in society, particularly the trajectory toward conjugality, has important political meanings. In Empire of Love, Elizabeth Povinelli claims that “the intimate couple is a key transfer point between, on one hand, liberal imaginaries of contractual economies, politics, and sociality and, on the other, Logan, Lisa M. “Columbia’s Daughters in Drag; or, Cross-Dressing, Collaboration, and Authorship in Early American Novels.” For the relationship between cross-dressing and citizenship, see Sinche “Cross- Dressing and Virtuous Citizenship in The Female Marine and ‘The Mess-Chest.” 109 liberal forms of power in the contemporary world” (17). 58 Relevant to the time period of this chapter, Shelley Streeby considers the nationalism and imperialism at work in story-paper fiction about American soldiers and Mexican cross-dressing soldiers who meet during the US-Mexico War and then eventually marry after the women’s identities are revealed. The Female Volunteer and Britomarte, the Man-Hater (and perhaps other such stories) imagine a satisfying love match through a cross-dressing imperial love trajectory, creating a world that is invested in a re- formation of a couple based on a woman’s choice independent from her parents, independent from expectation and institution, and even independent from her would-be mate. I consider how the traits of this cross-dressing soldier enable marriage, and an enable “eccentric” or “radical” women to engage in war and empire actively. 59 Cross-dressing becomes a part of heteronormative femininity in these stories, but by emphasizing how it allows for a way to incorporate more non-sentimental gendered personality traits into one who can still traffic in the social world (e.g. be marriageable). If all three texts are devoted to the right of a woman to act the way she desires—to choose her own husband, to choose her nation, to choose not to participate in an unjust institution—her act of cross-dressing 58 Though Povinelli works in a very different historical context, her framing of love with the “macro- practices of certain forms of state governance and certain forms of capital production, circulation, and consumption” (191) is useful to how I am reading the texts of these feminized cross-dressing soldiers. This also relates to Ann Laura Stoler’s work on connecting the intimate with the consolidation of imperial formations. See Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North America. 4. 59 Thinking again of Pauline of the Potomac, I want to point how the text invokes the involvement of France during the American Revolution, making a transatlantic case for a woman like Pauline come to be. Early in the story, before her ill father dies, he drapes an American flag upon the shoulders of his kneeling daughter. This flag, which has been given to him by Lafayette “after having been borne through several bloody battles of the Revolution” (31), rests upon Pauline “like a bridal veil.” Her father says to her: “I devote you to America, the land of our adoption [. . .] This starry flag, the standard that Washington loved, the standard that Lafayette loved, the standard that your father loves, this flag, Pauline, is the veil that you now take” (33). The text makes a clear trajectory from Washington to Lafayette to Pauline’s father to Pauline. It reminds readers of French involvement in the American Revolution and makes Pauline’s devotion to the US an outgrowth of that. A scene like this is offering a patriarchal excuse for Pauline’s behavior, placing her in a “bridal veil” that ties her to these military men. It also justifies her future participation as a cross-dressing spy. 110 becomes an assertion of her rights, expression of her politics, and a consolidation of her gender, class, and racial identity—what I am referring to as roguish femininity. This is recognizable with feminist politics based in individual rights. This politics is one of the reasons I have chosen texts from mid-century up through the Civil War—a time that aligns with the development of the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement. When the tradition of the cross-dressing woman warrior develops along with the women’s rights politics of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, relationships between men and women and the conventions of the beauty and love narrative are imagined to be revised. The stories of these women guide her to a marriage as well as guide her to an active stake in the national and its imperial trajectory, while revising the gendered characteristics that are associated with femininity. By contextualizing these stories within the women’s rights discourse and the geopolitics of the time, this chapter observes that cross-dressing works as a critique of marriage that aligns with the discourse of women’s rights advocates, while also being used as a technology of the United States’ imperial formations. Cross-dressing in these stories then shows the revision of heteronormative love that is embedded in mid-nineteenth-century feminism, but that is also enabled by the imperial form that cross- dressing can take. The Female Volunteer’s “Rugged” Femininity On the frontispiece of The Female Volunteer, which tells a “true” story of a woman cross-dressing during the US-Mexico War (1846-8), Eliza Allen has her long hair pulled back with a flower in it, a dress that conforms to a feminized shape, the skin of her neck and upper chest exposed as she holds more flowers (Figure 1). Because the caption says “Eliza Allen” and not “Eliza Allen Billings,” which is to be her married name, this picture suggests her as the 111 young woman before the “wonderful adventures” she had while disguised as a man. Later in the text, there is an illustration of Eliza in the uniform of a soldier, and the image portrays the uniform as cinched in at the waist, showing the curve of her hip (Figure 2). Though in masculine garb, she has many of the same qualities as the other overtly feminized image. Figure 1: Eliza Allen as a Young Lady of Eastport, Maine Figure 2: Eliza Allen as a Soldier This image exists in the same category as the 1725 depiction of Anne Bonny, pirate of the eighteenth-century Americas, which is used on several scholarly histories of cross-dressing women. 60 She stands, dressed in baggy clothing of a sailor, legs apart, arm outstretched as she points a gun, shirt open to reveal the shape of her breasts, hair flowing in the breeze (Figure 3). These two images are emblematic of a common image—a cross-dressing woman, who, though in male attire, still looks feminine, imagined to be attractive. 60 Two include: In the Company of Men by Elisabeth Krimmer and The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe by Rudolph Dekker 112 Figure 3: 1725 depiction of Anne Bonney If illustrations in Eliza Allen’s narratives connect her to a visual tradition of images of feminine cross-dressers, the text of the narrative connects her to a literary genealogy. Eliza Allen refers to two of the most popular American cross-dressers to situate her own story: “I have read in the life of Deborah Sampson, who served in the ranks as a soldier in the revolutionary army for several years, and was honorably discharged without her sex being discovered; I had also read the life of Lucy Brewer, who served as a marine in the Navy, in the late war with England, and who distinguished herself on board of the frigate Constitution, as a topman in several engagements with the enemy, and who served out her enlistment and received an honorable discharge without discovery” (15-6). Eliza Allen invokes the narratives of Sampson and Brewer, whose narratives tell stories about participating in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, respectively. In The Female Marine (1815), fictional Lucy Brewer too places herself in the genealogy: “the remarkable instance of Miss Sampson, who during the revolutionary war 113 disguised like a male by the name of Robert Shurtliff, and as such, by the most scrupulous concealment of her sex, served her country as a private soldier, and performed her duty without a stain on her virtue and honor” (71). The story of Deborah Sampson trafficked widely in the post- revolutionary United States through the narrative The Female Review (1797) and through Sampson’s lectures and performances when she appeared in uniform. According to biographer Alfred F. Young: “Just as young Deborah may have learned about her predecessors from narratives about Hannah Snell, so some nineteenth-century women became aware of her” (A. Young, 277). Indeed, the Sampson legend endured in the nineteenth century “via a genre of literature about adventurous cross-dressing women” (A. Young, 277). 61 Though these women are represented as exceptions to the norm of domestic femininity, the representations attempt to normalize their own actions and gender play. The US-based trajectory of the female soldier—including but not limited to The Female Review, The Female Marine, and The Female Volunteer—invoke the femaleness of the subjects. This tradition serves as justification and context to these women telling their stories. When Eliza Allen invokes Deborah Sampson and Lucy Brewer—women who enlisted for their own economic or patriotic reasons—she stakes her own claim: “why should I hesitate to emulate their example? I had equal, if not superior incentives to induce me to the undertaking” (16). Eliza’s motivations for enlisting are love for her future husband William and the emotional abandonment of her parents who refuse to allow the couple to marry. This too is part of a literary tradition; the ballads popular in an Anglo-American context often centered on women who “went into the army or 61 When Elfie, one of the four central women in Britomarte, the Man-Eater, desires to enlist in the Union army as a woman, she receives incredulous reactions and is told: “Women have enlisted, and have served; but always when disguised as men” (Kindle Locations 668-669). In a context like this Southworth novel, cross-dressing is the more reasonable way for a woman to serve in the military, partially because there is a historical precedent for it and also because the bounds of the white middle-class femininity are usually so structured as not to allow room for the characteristics of a soldier. 114 navy in pursuit of a lover their parents had forbidden them to marry” (A. Young, 6). If these women are overtly feminized at the same time they are performing traditionally male-dominated roles, femininity ends up meaning something other than sentimental domesticity, though it still ends normatively in marriage. The Female Volunteer is a story of how thwarted romantic love is eventually achieved through female independence manifested through cross-dressing. 62 In the tradition of the ballads, Eliza Allen is motivated to cross-dress by romantic love; in addition, she adds onto the U.S.-branch of the warrior woman by this “superior” rationale. The daughter of a “respectable and wealthy” family in Maine, Eliza describes herself as an “obedient daughter” who is “the center of all [her family’s] enjoyments, the object of all their cares” (9). But then she falls in love with William Billings, a “poor, but respectable” Canadian man who moves nearby (10). When her parents find out about their mutual love, they chastise her for “stooping so low” and forbid her from seeing him again, threatening to disinherit her (12). However, Eliza does not bend to their will: “This love, instead of being controlled by me, became my master—nay, it became my sovereign, and I its willing and most loyal subject. I, who, but a few days before, was so timid and delicate, could now brave any danger, and toil or privation, even death itself, if 62 Deborah Sampson may be the US-based reference point for these stories of cross-dressing women in the nineteenth century, but there are many other reference points beyond the US-centered. Young makes clear: “The disguised women warriors of England were widely known in the eighteenth century to an Anglo-American audience through newspapers, magazines, and memoirs, as well as ballads” (Young, 9). But even those women warriors of England are situated within a significantly vast genealogy. In studies of the Middle Ages, critics have noted that “female cross dressing was a common literary device and a significant, although rarely recorded, historical phenomenon” (Hotchkiss, 3); this is similar to analyses of cross-dressing in Early Modern Europe that claim that women dressing as men “should not be categorized as incidental human curiosities, but…part of a deeply rooted tradition” (Dekker and van de Pol, 1). In her study of German cross-dressing at the turn of the nineteenth century, Elisabeth Krimmer summarizes the various circumstances of cross-dressing: “Vacillating between criminality and saintliness, cross-dressers seems to cover the entire spectrum of social valuations. But our fascination with such glamourous cases of gender-bending should not obscure the fact that there were also numerous instances of rather mundane cross-dressing” (24). Krimmer’s study is crucial because it contextualizes German 115 I could only enjoy him who had become the food of my existence” (10). She resolves to disguise herself and follow him to Mexico, positing her love for him as directly leading to her cross- dressing. With love becoming her “sovereign,” Eliza is undergoing undergoes a mental transformation that will lead to her physical one. While placing herself in a love narrative, Eliza is characterizing characterizes herself as lacking will or autonomy, carried away by greater forces, excusing her behavior for those who might find it unseemly. But Eliza is making an interesting connection between love and a feminine-accessed masculine strength, that romantic love between a woman and man could cause that women to access the world of a man. Similarly, Eliza claims that growing up in “the lap of ease and affluence” makes her a “tender and delicate female” with “a fragile and slender form,” but the act of refusing her parents and becoming subject to love causes her to adopt a “rugged and turbulent character” (15). Eliza describes herself as fitting in with the feminine ideal of sentimental culture and seems to have no real critique of it, though she does implicitly connect her fragility and delicateness to her class standing. Yet, rather than keeping her fragile, the privilege that comes from her background cause her to turn to a rugged, or masculine, character so that she can pursue her love. Eliza Allen’s trajectory from domestic ease to a “rugged and turbulent character” comes through her love for a man. And though Eliza represents herself as being invested in the domestic center, she proves herself to be more invested in her own desire, which here is manifested through her beloved. Though stories like Eliza Allen’s offer, as critics will argue, “an image of female heroism in the early modern era that challenges nineteenth- and twentieth-century ideas about women’s ‘natural’ frailty and limitations” (Dugaw, xiii), I am not trying to add any more evidence to that cross-dressing among the other stories, traditions, and narratives of cross-dressing that existed across Europe and the United States. 116 proves that women are strong and heroic. Still, part of my argument is claiming that feminine cross-dressing soldiers challenges the often held belief that normative femininity in the nineteenth-century was one coherent thing (e.g. women are frail), and this chapter is invested in how strength and heroism are constructed and represented. Strength and even heroism are not aberrations to normative femininity in the nineteenth century. Historian Barbara Cutter disrupts that idea and points out “the importance in antebellum fiction and history and history of extremely assertive and heroic women who saved themselves, their families, and sometimes their country” (Cutter, 143). In the case of Eliza Allen, her “strength” is brought on by her devotion to love, but this is not a love that restores the domestic setting. Instead, Eliza decides that her love will transform her to be more like her beloved: “I came to the determination, at all hazards, to follow him, to share with him through life each and every danger which he might be called to encounter” (15). After dramatically recounting the physical and psychological effects of learning of William’s departure, Eliza stakes the relief of her unhappiness and the fantasy of future happiness on imagining an alternative mode of companionship; she will “share…each and every danger” he will encounter in Mexico. Though Eliza does not share the experience directly with William, she mentally does; over and over, especially after she is disguised as a man, she talks about how difficult the experience is, but insists that her love for William and desire to be with him makes her strong. When doing military training with new recruits, Eliza says that “by dint of a dauntless resolution, and a keen anticipation of again beholding the one for whom I was making such unmitigated sacrifices, I was enabled to sustain myself against every obstacle” (23). Eliza strength and resolution comes from her devotion to William, and this is not just an excuse that “allows” to act in unfeminine ways. Instead, this strength and her current masculine affiliation are constitutive of a femininity educated by the cross-dressing genealogy. In other 117 words, this type of woman is inspired to seek love because of stories about adventure and non- domestic labor, which are also the ways she attains love. Eliza’s negotiation of both masculinity and femininity produces a spectacle in the text, as is the convention in narratives of cross-dressing soldiers. It is the attainment of romantic love that restores Eliza to her feminized social standing. Eliza disguises herself as a man named George Mead and fights in several battles including the Battle of Cerro Gordo, in which she is wounded. 63 While recovering from the wound on her arm, Eliza-as-George finds William in the infirmary and befriends him. After the war in Mexico is over, William decides to travel to California to find gold because he is swindled out of the money he earns in the war, and Eliza again follows him, both eventually discovering gold. Eliza has the trajectory from a pampered woman to a hardened soldier and then gold prospector, and when she changes back into a “woman,” she is different both to herself and to William. When in disguise, Eliza relates how the war has affected her, how she becomes tanned and develops larger blistered hands, and her experience not only changes her appearance: “I had also acquired a considerable knowledge of my duty, and of the affairs of mankind. I had becomes inured to hardships, which, had I been told of before I left home, I should have either disbelieved or hesitated to undertake” (25). 64 She relates the violence of the battle, and U.S. military victories such as the one at Cerro Gordo 63 Battle of Cerro Gordo is a successful victory for the U.S. military in 1847. More research should be done on connection between this text and that battle. 64 Dressing like a man has, in fact, made her more masculine, transforming her body—with enlarged and blistered hands, for instance—and it implicitly also signifies a change in her class standing. In the slippages between class identification and gender identification, when a wealthy woman becomes more masculine, she also becomes more like a poor woman who does physical labor. But the text does not acknowledge the way that class affiliation shapes gender expression; according to the logics of this text, Eliza would be disempowered as a hardened working class woman, and it bypasses this connection by making the transformation about gender—about her becoming a man, a soldier—and by insisting on her wealth and privilege. She has followed William through Mexico and then around the continent to California, and in the meantime has engaged in the labor of a working class person who seeks wealth. Indeed, the social position that this wealthy privileged woman is co-opting is that of a poor man; moreover, it is the position of William, her lover. 118 enable her own trajectory toward her romantic love. This change in constitution lasts even when she returns to her female clothing: “The transition was almost as odd as the one I had experienced nearly three years before; but when I had completed my new dress, which seemed so strange that it made me feel awkward and unnatural, and, viewed myself before the mirror, I could not but be astonished at the sudden and striking change” (59). Eliza feels awkward and unnatural in the clothing of a woman, having worn men’s clothes for so long. Moreover, she is recognizing the oddness of her more masculine physical body in the clothing she recently purchases—“an entire lady’s wardrobe of rich and costly materials” (58). Her tawny complexion and muscled body are dissonant with woman’s clothing; the body of a laborer unexpected in the attire of an idle wealthy woman. There has been a critical tradition of reading scenes like this in terms of Judith Butler’s notion of performativity. This could well be done with this scene—Eliza revealing the unnaturalness of sex/gender, how the repetition of signifiers of gender “performs” the coherence of gender, while revealing how it is unstable, having little material basis. More relevant to this chapter, however, about scenes like this is how gender “change” and social dissonance enable femininity that leads to romantic love. For instance, when William sees Eliza for the first time not in disguise, he says, “I see the lovely features of her I so much admired; but how changed from what they then were” (63). She is a physically stronger woman now, used to hardships and more knowledgeable about the world around her, and all that is evident on her “changed” face. She still possesses “the lovely features” as admired by the male lover, but what does “changed” mean? She physically looks different, but still possesses “lovely features,” especially after she once again adopts women’s clothing. 119 One of the things that has changed seems to be the terms of the relationship—she has adopted the role of the lover who pursues her beloved, toiling as he toils and even succeeding where he doesn’t succeed. She may be “changed,” but that does not preclude their happy reunion or the marriage that follows. When Eliza reveals the whole story of dressing as a man and following him to Mexico and then to California as his friend and confidant, William reacts: “My God! can I be worthy of such an object! You have been my guardian angel—you have saved me from perdition; and how shall I, how can I, ever reward such love and devotion?” (64). William is surprised by Eliza’s revelation, having had no idea that she was his good friend George Mead, but William, having spent the duration of the time after the war not realizing that people are trying to cheat him of any money that he has made, is not the keenest of observers. Because he has again been swindled of his money, William, at this moment, is not the empowered and glorious soldier; rather, he is one who might not be “worthy” of Eliza. His worthiness has been in question this whole time, whether her parents question his socioeconomic worthiness or he questions his moral worthiness in gendered terms. Yet, Eliza and William are able to marry because they establish themselves as self- sufficient individuals, especially true for Eliza who manages not to gamble away or be cheated out of her money like William. Therefore, when they finally come together as a couple, they are financially solvent: “On examining our money we found we had, after all our losses, nearly thirteen thousand dollars; and we began to make preparations for our intended union” (66). This money enables their marriage, and it also enables Eliza to entreat her parents for their blessing: “Having gained in our voyage to California ample means of living, without being in any way burdensome to you, our only prayer is that you will forgive your erring daughter and sanction the choice of her heart” (66). This wealthy woman transforms into a poor man, engages in intense 120 physical labor, and then comes out of it a financially independent woman, able to marry her beloved even without her parents approval (though they do give it and Eliza has a warm homecoming). She establishes her own terms, insisting on her own “choice” for how to live her life, something that she achieves through cross-dressing. Seeking and attaining “the choice of her heart,” Eliza implies the stakes of this love story in the letter to her parents: “having served as a volunteer in the army throughout the whole of the Mexican war; made a voyage to California and back, without ever having betrayed my sex; all for the sake of one who now sits beside me, and in whom are centered all my hopes and anticipations of future happiness” (66). Eliza’s quest for love and act of defiance against her parents takes her to Mexico and into the new territory of the United States. Being able to make “the choice of her heart” is enabled by the imperial trajectory of the United States, as it wars with Mexico and takes over land in the west and southwest. Therefore, her “feminist” act works as an imperial formation, her love story following the movement of Manifest Destiny. Her own transformation into a “changed” woman even attests to that with her expensive clothing and her gold jewelry, which act as spoils of her voyage to California and back. Her revision of femininity therefore is deeply embedded and enabled by the resources and opportunities of the US expansion westward and southward, one example among many fictional women who act as soldiers and adventurers intertwined with the transnational movements and imperial trajectories. 65 These types of characters enact a femininity with roguish orientations toward the world—a femininity that often justifies itself through romantic love that eventually is achieved through the economic possibilities of one who participates in war and empire building. 65 Barbara Cutter mentions cross-dressing solider stories like The Female Warrior (1843) in which the heroine is compelled to “serve her country” by her father (akin to Charles Wesley Bradshaw’s Pauline of the Potomac) and enlists in the U.S. Army as a man and fights as a man and female adventure stories like 121 Roguish Femininity & Women’s Rights Eliza Allen’s narrative represents a changing relationship to herself and to the world, manifesting as a revision to a feminine role in a romantic relationship that leads to marriage. Though marriage is an expectation for women, especially a marriage that leads to a domestic life for the upper- and middle-class white women about which I am writing, the women’s rights reformers of mid-century did seek to address marriage as a key institution that defines women. Indeed, companionate marriage is represented as something to be desired and an activist like Elizabeth Cady Stanton removed the word “obey” from her wedding vows when she married her husband in 1840. 66 Though this issue might not be direct in texts like The Female Volunteer or other cross-dressing solider tales, it is apparent in the desire they have to marry who they want to marry even when their parents forbid it in Eliza’s case. With E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Britomarte, the Man-Hater, the politics are much more direct. For instance, Britomarte condemns “laws of marriage that take away a married woman's property and liberty, and even legal existence” (FP, 6). When writing about this novel, critic Laura Browder points out that the characters’ actions are intertwined with the women’s rights movement, saying that the novel’s heroines “use their participation in the armed services as a means of determining their obligations and rights as female citizens” (Browder, 49). She says that Southworth’s female soldier “might not just gain full political rights but could even dramatically revise the institution of marriage” (Browder, 48). Starting here, I will examine what this revision of marriage looks like, specifically placing Amelia Sherwood; or the Bloody Scenes at the California Gold Mines (1850) travels to the California gold country where she is eventually reunited with her estranged beloved (Cutter, 149). 66 Sally G. McMillen. Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 27. 122 Britomarte within the discourse of the Women’s Rights Movement, showing how feminized beauty and feminism become intertwined in the roguish woman. Britomarte Conyers—her name akin alluding to Britomart, a female knight from Spenser’s Faerie Queen—opens the novel expressing to the three other main characters her passionate beliefs about the oppression of women, including the proclamation that “[a woman] should never commit the moral suicide of becoming the nonentity of which man's law makes a wife” (FP, 3). Immediately after opening with Britomarte words, the words of the narrator emphasize her beauty: “She was a splendid creature who uttered this heterodoxy, a magnificent and beautiful creature! She spoke fervently, earnestly, passionately, with blazing eyes, flushed cheeks and crimsoned lips that seemed to breathe the fire that burned in her enthusiastic soul” (FP, 3). Britomarte’s politics and beauty are intertwined, her physical qualities detailed minutely and admiringly by the gaze of the narrator who does the same with the other central female characters. 67 Her ardently expressed politics enhances her beauty: at the very first moment she is 67 As is conventional with sensation and sentimental fiction genres, the female heroines are beautiful— otherworldly, astoundingly, ethereally beautiful. Indeed, on the first page of the novel, the narrator introduces the four main characters by saying “four more beautiful young creatures than these could scarcely be found in the world” (FP, 4). The narrator goes on to elaborate on their beauty: “Yet beautiful as each one was, the four were not rival belles; because, in fact, each one was of a totally different style from all the others. They might be said to represent the four orders of female beauty—the blue, gray, hazel and black-eyed woman” (FP, 4)). The narrator expresses a sort of solidarity among the women that she attributes to their beauty—how they are different, yet also complimentary to each other. Significantly, how they each offer “a totally different style,” imagining each in terms of the burgeoning consumer culture in which a woman can choose a dress based on the color which best flatters her. During the 1850s, according to historian Karen Halttunen, that there was shift in the mainstream women’s culture that emphasized “a new cult of individual style” in which “women were urged to study their own personal style so their dress might emphasize their good points and play down their bad ones” (Halttunen, 159). Though perhaps advice that informs women that it is their “business to be beautiful” (Halttunen, 159) might seem anti-feminist, this discourse fits right in with the feminist discourse that was circulating during these decades. Indeed, women’s magazines criticized a one-style-fit-all approach to fashion and called for women to practice self-scrutiny, so that they can determine which style is best based on their body type. The type of logic used by these women’s magazines had similarities to the language used by women’s rights activists when discussing fashion. Fashion was much debated in women’s rights circles and a certain type of self-knowledge was required by women to accept the critiques of fashion. Fashion was much debated in women’s rights circles. Amelia Bloomer in her periodical Lily advocated for a 123 introduced with cheeks flushed, eyes blazing, lips red from expressing her beliefs. The way the narrator describes the beauty of Britomarte and these women suggests the expression of cultural value that is aligned with validating women by standards that include ideals of beauty and the conventions of women warrior genres in which the heroine is usually beautiful. Because it is her beliefs that flush her cheeks and crimson her lips, her politics become a central part of her feminized physicality, associating a rights-based feminism with normative beauty. In the mid-nineteenth century, normative feminine beauty was often defined through the values of sentimental culture. Beauty was attached to a woman’s “uplifting moral influence”; as historian Karen Halttunen explains, “True womanly beauty was not an accident of form; it was the outward expression of a virtuous mind and heart” (Halttunen, 71). According to the narrator, Britomarte possesses an “earnest soul,” as well as being a “brave, spirited, energetic young amazon” (FP, 4). Like many such “amazons,” Britomarte possesses the sentimentalized virtuousness of mainstream women’s culture, as well as the energetic and brave characteristics of the woman warrior trope, tying both of these to a politics that are read into her beauty. And Britomarte is not the only such character to combine these characteristics; Barbara Cutter notes that novels about heroic women figured “heroic actions as part of [women’s] duty to preserve the moral and religious health of the nation” (Cutter. 129). Like many reformers, Britomarte is both a religious person as well as a women’s advocate, and the narrator recognizes the importance of the possibility of Britomarte’s power of influence: “if law and custom had allowed her freer action and a fairer field, she would have influenced the progress of humanity and filled a place in change in women’s dress, “asserting a woman’s right to reject cumbersome dresses and tight lacing and to wear pants” (McMillen, 130). Though some women’s rights activists adopted change in their dress, others felt that it was too distracting for the mainstream public and their critics, who predictably made fun of these women in bloomers. 124 history” (FP, 4). In order to unpack how roguish femininity manifests physically, I am claiming that the power of political, moral, and historical influence is literalized through her beauty. Even as the novel ties feminized beauty with impassioned belief, the popular pressed undermined women’s rights movements by feminizing of political actors, describing political meetings as an “Insurrection in Petticoats” and attendees as “pretty girls” and “Amazons of the New World” (McMillen, 125). 68 Though the title of Southworth’s novel is a mocking Britomarte, the Man-Hater, this novel does not present Britomarte as the butt of a joke, differently from how women’s rights discourse is generally presented in popular culture. (For instance, a New York Herald headline from 1853 pronounced claimed that “Strong-Minded Women are Getting Up Their Pluck” (McMillen, 117)). The narrator does make fun of the man- hater for her beliefs, but her politics are most often taken seriously, while the story carefully and affectionately follows Britomarte, invested in how this heroine makes sense of her heteronormative trajectory toward marriage within what she sees to be unjust gendered institutions. Her graduation essay “The Civil and Political Rights of Women” is shown to have “bravely asserted not only the rights of married women to the control of their own property and custody of their own children, but the rights of all women to a competition with men in all the paths of industry and a share with them in all the chances of success” (FP, 23). Britomarte’s treatise mimics much of the language in the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” presented at Seneca Fall in 1848, which makes indictments of “man toward woman”: “After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it” and “He 68 Cutter makes note how women’s rights advocates reappropriated the “amazon” label: “Transforming the slur ‘Amazon’ into a positive expression, these reformers focused on the female warrior’s heroic bravery and attention to duty rather than her supposedly unnatural physical resemblance to a man” (Cutter, 130). 125 closes against her all the avenues of wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself.” Britomarte is a character who has internalized and expresses this politics and the novel uses moments like the public recitation of her essay (by a male professor and not by Britomarte because, as the narrator facetiously reveals, “in that immaculate institution it was deemed unladylike for a young lady to stand upon a platform before a mixed audience and read her own composition aloud” (FP, 22)) to rehearse some of the reactions to the politics. The narrator clarifies its own position to Britomarte’s work while also describing the reactions of others: “It was altogether a clear, warm, strong, brilliant article; and, like all works of genius, it received an almost equal share of enthusiastic praise and extravagant blame. It was excessively admired for the strength, beauty and ingenuity of its argument, and bitterly censured for the heterodoxy of its doctrines” (FP, 22-3). Again, the description of Britomarte’s work links the qualities of strength and beauty with her politics and with the character: warm and brilliant, having strength, beauty, and ingenuity. The description of Britomarte’s person and her political work relays the appeal of this also express her character through the warmth, brilliance, strength, and beauty—characteristics I am identifying as those of the roguish woman, particularly in the work of Southworth. These characteristics also lead her to her love story, causing her future husband Justin to take notice of her; he says after hearing her essay, “That is the most original, outspoken and morally courageous assertion of right against might that has been made since the immortal Declaration of Independence!” (FP, 24). (Justin referring to Britomarte’s essay through the lens of the Declaration of Independence is particularly apt as the “Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” declared “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”) Britomarte’s roguish appeal emerges from her expression of politics and becomes the gateway to 126 romantic love. And though the politics enables love, it also works as the source of conflict. When Justin proposes to Britomarte early in the novel, women’s rights is seen as a player in a love triangle between Britomarte and Justin: “Come, darling, come! I never can be less than your lover! let me be more! accept me for your husband!" "For my master, you mean! that is what 'husband' signifies in your laws!" said the man-hater, coldly turning away, as once more Woman's Rights throttled and threw down woman's love. (FP, 40) This is the battle between women’s love and women’s rights that the narrator sarcastically represents, while disapproving of the apparent domination by the personified women’s rights that is throttling romantic love. The narrator imagines the personified Woman’s Rights being an aggressor, more physical, with a heel on the neck of more fragile Woman’s Love. Again, the idea of physical strength is being associated with this roguish character’s beliefs. Though it is imagined as a conflict, the interplay between the politics and normative femininity shape Britomarte’s roguishness and is the reason for Justin’s love. Moreover, the imagery of battle becomes literalized later in the novel with Britomarte and Justin in war, Britomarte disguising herself to be with him. The Transnational Civil War and the “Feminist” Couple For Southworth’s novel, women’s rights politics—particularly the belief that the institution of marriage is unjust—shape Britomarte’s character and the love story that emerges, enabling love, but proving to be the obstacle which initially blocks the inevitable resolution in marriage. The novels I am juxtaposing both tell of the struggle to resolve a love story by way of and in spite of a woman’s expression of independence. While in The Female Volunteer Eliza Allen procures the material conditions that allow her to marry William through her participation 127 in imperial movement to the west and south, Britomarte achieves a romantic resolution to her plot through the shift in her belief system that occurs through her own transnational travel. But in order to understand the novel’s middle section and Britomarte’s voyage to South Asia, I want to here examine here what happens after they return to the United States in order to consider what kind of “couple” the novel’s transnational trajectory enables. After Justin enlists in the Union army and receives his marching orders, Britomarte, upon parting from him, still refuses to marry him, but says, “I congratulate you, Justin. I would to Heaven I could stand at your side— your brother-in-arms—on the day of battle!" (HHWH, 78). Her desire to be equal to him reflects not only her belief in women’s rights, but also how her view of their relationship is shifting. Soon after he leaves, she decides to join the military as well, and her decision offers an expansive vision to male-female coupling: “A vehement, passionate desire to be all this to her beloved; to be to him more than wife, sister or brother had ever been to man before—more than all these combined could ever become—to be his brother-in-arms, his inseparable companion, his shadow, his shield, his guardian angel, in the tented field, in the pitched battle, in the rebel prison, or in the grave” (HHWH, 79). In the Female Volunteer using similar language about her own beloved William, Eliza Allen vows to “follow him, to share with through life each and every danger which he might be called to encounter” (FV, 15). Britomarte takes this further, articulating the function of these women warrior love stories, expressing desires to redefine the limits of male-female relationships to include not only romantic and familial relationships, but also companionship based on masculine-bonding—she wants to be both his brother-in-arms and also his guardian angel. She imagines different expectations for women in relationship with men, invoking the angel of the battlefield trope that also exists in Eliza Allen’s narrative as well as many other texts. 69 But it is not only to enact that particular sentimentalized dynamic in the 69 Cutter writes that “Civil War nurses also were constantly likened to angels” (Cutter, 162).This language 128 scene of war; instead, she wants to juxtapose the virtuousness and selflessness of the guardian angel trope with the realism and pragmatism of the brother-in-arms, in order to transform coupling in a way that is acceptable to her. Laura Browder states that “the novel suggests that women might use the gun, and engage in military service, not only to shoulder the burdens of citizenship but also to forge new relationships of full equality” (Browder, 56). Britomarte is seeking equality, especially as is tied to “female heroism and love” as Browder points out. Though these stories are embedded in the discourse of rights and equality, I am maintaining that there is something in the stories of wanting to revise gender, but not in a way that is on the terms of equality. Rather, stories like this are trying to associate a subjectivity that can be beloved—which become an expression of national, racial, and class privileged femininity—with rebellious actions that can signify either feminism, nationalism, or just wanting to get one’s way. By interrogating Britomarte’s language—her desire to be “more” to Justin than any other person—can help us understand how this revision of femininity to include lover, brother-in-arms, and guardian angel relies on the discourse of exceptionality, of being beautiful and charming and of being recognized and loved because of those charms. Moreover, that this orientation is expressed through militarized actions complicates this politics and should trouble an understanding of equality as gender justice. Yet, Browder calls Justin “the ideal feminist partner” (Browder, 55)—he is able to identify and resonates with the language that is used in other cross-dressing soldier love narratives, including Eliza Allen’s and Pauline of the Potomac. Eliza is described as a guardian angel after she reveals her disguise to William, and that conflates the cross-dressing soldier, women warrior, and sentimental angel tropes. Pauline too is figured acts in a femininized caretaker role, first when serving as a Union nurse and then while imprisoned when she nurses her would-be husband back to health before they fall in love. This type of care-taking is very specific to the Civil War as there were many narratives of female nurses (including Louisa May Alcott). Moreover, care-taking and nurturance are expectations of normative femininity as expressed through sentimental culture and the culture of sympathy. Circulating within these discourses, all three of these texts incorporate these white sentimental caretaker characteristics into the 129 respect Britomarte’s vision of the world. Indeed, Justin first falls in love with Britomarte after her college graduation speech about women’s rights, and her later military service enables their eventual marriage, placing them on equal ground not only as war heroes, but also as individuals who look out for each other. When Britomarte does enlist in the military as the “dainty” Adjutant Wing, Justin is able to see through the disguise: “in the ugly, awkward little raw recruit, to my unbounded amazement I recognized my beautiful Britomarte Conyers” (HHWH, 287, 441). Yet, he never reveals the disguise: “I reflected that I had no right to betray your secret, or to interfere with your plans, or in any way invade your free agency; and I resolved to let you take your own course and to protect you in it as far as in me lay” (442). Justin seeks to preserve Britomarte’s “free agency” and to enable and protect her feminist aims. The contrast between the “ugly” recruit Wing (Britomarte in disguise) and the “beautiful Britomarte Conyers” get to what is at stake in heteronormative love that is achieved through cross-dressing. Because Justin sees her beauty through the potential ugliness of her politics, he is able to paternalistically let her enact her “agency.” Britomarte’s beauty is the physical manifestation of a charismatic feminism that is able to convince her beloved and perhaps her audience of the importance of her rights. Those rights are particularly important because they fit into logics of heteronormative love stories and citizenship through military subjecthood. This reconceptualizing and fostering of “feminist” heteronormative partnership is embedded in the plot events that occur between Britomarte refusing to marry Justin and her joining the military because she desires to be with him. The revision to Britomarte’s politics and feelings toward Justin comes in the transnational space that includes missionary work, privateering, and US Civil War conflicts in the Indian Ocean. Her feelings—and the love adventurous warrior feminine beauty they are also representing. The combination of these characteristics enables their love stories. 130 story—develop in non-U.S. locations. Before the war and after graduating from school, Britomarte lacks family financial support and refuses proposals of marriage or help from friends, so she decides to join the Board of Foreign Missions as a teacher. The intended trajectory of the Sultana, the East Indiaman on which they embark, is first Cape Town before heading to Calcutta and then eventually to Cambodia. Britomarte seeks to make her way in the world as a woman who refuses marriage and who lacks family support by engaging in transnational work. The ship follows the path of British imperialism, while representing missionary work that came out of the United States. Indeed, the “American Protestant empire” is embedded in this missionary work as “American Protestant women missionaries were central to the connections between domestic and global events that shaped American imperial culture” (Ellington, 2). Moreover, cultural celebration of female missionaries in the nineteenth century gave some women are stake in the public world, while helping to “envision women as cultural heroines,” such as Harriet Newell who became celebrated after her death before ever reaching her destination of India (Cayton, 70). The representation of the character turning to missionary work to achieve economic and conjugal independence expands her roguish orientation and politics away from the U.S. (while diverging from real live missionary women who were often required to marry in order to travel abroad). The text uses this transnational trajectory as another part of the love story of Britomarte and Justin. Justin joins the party of missionaries unbeknownst to the object of his desire, and their subsequent interactions combine US women’s right discourses abroad, settler colonialism, and desert island narratives. After the Sultana is destroyed in a storm in an the Indian Ocean, Britomarte and Justin survive and Robinson Crusoe-like inhabit an island with another survivor, an Irishwoman named Judith, but with no other people on the island apparently. They inhabit the island in ways they are used to—managing to salvage furniture, livestock, and other resources 131 from the ship before it sank and thus creating their own version of U.S.-style home. Indeed, when others eventually discover the three who come refer to it as their colony: “You seem really to be comfortable and permanently colonized here!”(FP, 244). And when a sailor observes “I had no idea that there was a European colony here” (FP, 199), Justin denies that they are colonists: "There is no colony. We are not colonists. We were cast away on this island nearly two years ago” (FP, 199). The American Justin denies any association with European colonial practices, even though they are remaking the land so that the familiar (the U.S.) exists within the unfamiliar (the island in the Indian Ocean). All the while, the materialities realities of imperialism are ignored, as potential inhabitants of the island are erased and the two Americans and the Irish woman who acts as a servant can avoid being implicated in the European-style colonialism. With the American feminist going abroad one might anticipate a narrative of the white Western woman attempting to “save” the women of countries like India and Cambodia from “oppressive” indigenous cultural practices or, realizing the importance of religion to Britomarte, expect the narrative of the “benevolent empire expansion” that told of “Heathen women [who] awaited the gentle religious influence of [American] women” (Cayton, 87). Instead the trope of the shipwreck disrupts both these narratives with the desert island becoming the place where Britomarte comes to terms with her “man-hating” ways: “the lesson learned on the Desert Island, where I found by experience how utterly helpless woman was without her brother man” (HHWH, 509) and “woman could not possibly exist without man; though he might live without her. This was a humiliating truth to the proud man-hater; but it was truth, and as such she accepted it" (HHWH, 509). In their ambivalently colonized island, Britomarte adopts a more traditionally feminine role, serving as keeper of the domestic space they create, while Judith does the servant- 132 like physical labor as Britomarte’s attendant, upholding a class and national distinction. Paradoxically, learning to believe that men are stronger than women and that women and men are co-dependent opens up the possibility for Britomarte to admit that she is in love with Justin and inspires her to enact heroic feats to save him, leading her to cross-dress and enlist in the military. So while expressing essentialist ideas about gender and the body, Britomarte revises associations of femininity that are conventional to the nineteenth century through her acts of heroism. During the two years that Britomarte, Justin, and Judith are on the island, the novel also recounts the stories of the other main characters who are in the United States at the start of the Civil War—though the novel has one consistently sentimental domestic character, the other characters have their own roguish relationship to the war, including Elfie who tries to enlist in the Union Army, but is refused, and Alberta, the novel’s tragic figure, who fights with her Confederate husband and dies. While Britomarte does eventually disguise herself as a man to join Justin in the war when they return to the United States, the expression of her warrior roguishness through her love of Justin begins after they have been rescued. They are taken from the island by a Union ship, the captain describes his ship’s purpose: “We are cruising in search of privateers, reported even down as low as these latitudes, lying in wait for our returning East Indiamen, which offer them a rich and easy prey" (FP, 242). The “rebel privateers” (FP, 245) that they are searching for are Confederate ships that are impairing the trajectory of the merchant ships. Before the Union ship found them, the stranded Britomarte and company are first discovered by another passing ship, but it is a privateer ship flying a Confederate flag called the Sea Scourge. The captain of that ship becomes the colonist’s prisoner of war, as Justin refuses to allow this man to continue his piracy. Justin, Britomarte, and Judith act on behalf of the Union 133 even though they are on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and had not known of the outbreak of the war prior to encountering the ship. Through a battle in the Indian Ocean between the Union Navy ship and the Confederate privateer ship The Sea Scourge, the text shows how the US national conflict enacted in a transnational setting enables the expression of Britomarte’s own roguish heroics. In order to make their way back to the U.S., Britomarte and company are to accompany the Union ship on its attacks with Confederate privateers ships. During this skirmish, Britomarte at first insists on helping the doctor on board: “forget that I am a 'young lady,' and look upon me only as a human being, able and willing to be useful!" (FP, 279). She insists upon the humanist understanding of her capability in demanding that she help the doctor treat wounded sailors. Though a contested field for women, many women did do nursing labor during the war, both formally and informally (McMillen, 151). Moments like the novel make the case for some sort of equality that forgets gender. Britomarte is able to prove herself as calm and able in the high stress situation of a battle, so that the doctor can “utterly forget that she was a young lady” (FP, 280). Yet, her success in doing so is also framed through her exceptionality via her heroism. To the doctor, she demonstrates that she is “formed of the metal of which heroes are made” (FP, 279). The case for women’s rights is being made through the warrior woman metal from which Britomarte seems to be formed. So even before her stint as a cross-dressing solider for the Union, Britomarte acts the part of the warrior woman in this transnational conflict. During the battle on the ship, Britomarte takes arms in the battle and saves Justin’s life. The novel describes her when she realizes Justin is in danger: “she caught up a cutlass from an arm-chest near, and crying: ‘Oh, God of battles! give strength to my weak woman's arm this day!’ She rushed over to the deck of the Sea 134 Scourge, in the midst of that hell of war, and stood by her lover's side” (FP, 242). She saves Justin’s life as the Union sailors defeat the Confederate privateer ship, a moment of triumph that follows the tropes of the women warrior tradition. Britomarte identifying her “weak woman’s arm” mimics Britomarte’s own experience on the island where she says she learns a “lesson” about “how utterly helpless woman was without her brother man” (HHWH, 509), struggling with the limits of her physical capacity on the deserted island. (Though the lesson Britomarte learns is that she lacks the same physical strength as Justin, she also depends upon Judith, who, according to Justin, is “a model of strength” who helps him with salvaging heavy loads from the ship (FP, Kindle Location 4127).) Though Britomarte articulates her supposed fragility, the novel keeps showing Britomarte’s physical strength. As Justin exclaims that he owes his life to her, Britomarte says, “I have owed mine many times to you” (FP, 283). The novel is trying to humanize its “man-hater” to set up the eventual romantic union of Britomarte and Justin, yet this emphasis on her “woman’s weakness” is not completely embedded into anti-feminist sentiment; instead, it represents a development of Britomarte’s politics that encourages interdependence—a type of heteronormative interdependence between men and women, but a revision to marriage which is very similar to what women’s rights activists of the nineteenth century were arguing. This gender politics in embedded in national and transnational conflicts and movements, so that even before official joining the Union military, Britomarte participates in a battle imbued with both (trans)national and economic, empowered by not only (as of yet unacknowledged) love for Justin but also the righteousness of belief in the Union. This revision to femininity includes transnational movement that absolves itself of imperial possibilities, making this skirmish a proxy for what is happening back in the U.S. 135 Cross-dressing can be an act of defiance or rebellion, and it is also a way to achieve love and matrimony on the cross-dresser’s own terms or in alignment with political aims, a connection which has important links to the nineteenth-century Women’s Rights Movement. By realizing the geopolitical stakes of these women—how the revision to heteronormative femininity and critique of marriage through cross-dressing are shaped through imperial wars or through transnational trajectories of capitalism and Christian missionizing—this chapter adds to the call for careful reconsideration of what is considered “feminist.” I do not wish to condemn these gender expressions or politics or to find only fault in expressions that seek to revise oppressive gender conditions. Instead, I do want to treat fairly the revisions to femininity and marriage-relationships that these figures attempt to make manifest. However, one must rigorously think about how these interventions are framed—what one uses to “empower” herself and what she is “empowering” herself to do. The last line of Britomarte the Man-Hater makes this heteronormative individualism clear: “While I live…I will advocate the rights of woman— in general. But for my individual self, the only right I plead for is woman's dearest right—to be loved to my heart's content all the days of my life !" (HHWH, 512). 136 Chapter Four The Hidden Hand and its Charming Empire Writing her publisher Robert Bonner in 1862, E.D.E.N. Southworth, living in Washington D.C., expressed disgust at the “she-rebels” that were “parading the secession colors and proclaiming their sentiments.” Angry at the Confederate women, Southworth declared that if they dared to return, “I will take our water hose and drench them.” 70 Fantasizing about acting on her anger, Southworth shows the same passion and mischief with which she imbued many of her heroines, including those characters in Britomarte, the Man-Hater that I explored in the previous chapter. Southworth’s imagined drama in the letter mimics a scene in that novel when Elfie is upset by “so many strange new flags flying round” as her state Virginia and other states secede (FP, 155). To assert her loyalty to the Union and displace the Confederate flag, she creates her own American flag out of curtains and a dress, which she then hangs outside of her house. In response to Elfie’s defiance, local men come to pull down a flag, but she wages war on 137 them: "Then, still cursing and swearing, like a crow of pirates in a sea fight, they went to the flagpole and began to climb it. Seeing which, I went and got father's gun, examined it and found it all right” (157). After Elfie fires and wounds one man, she describes the other invaders: “They slid down that pole like monkeys, and ran off like quarter horses, leaving their wounded upon the field. Then I laughed. I could not help it. I sung out: 'See how they run! see how they run!’” (157). Elfie, shooting at and laughing at her adversaries, is a defiant character that is full of life and humor, characterized in another part of her novel by her “roguish eyes.” This character enacts Southworth’s epistolary fantasy, Elfie protecting her American flag while Southworth too imagines rebelling against the Confederates near her own home. These revenge fantasies reveal the intersections of rebellion, gender, anger, politics, loyalty, and potential violence. However, in Southworth’s world, it is a comic and justified violence, shaped by the righteousness and charm of the roguish woman and shaped in opposition to the parading, degraded she-rebels or emasculated Confederate men. Similar to Elfie in spirit is Capitola Black, the main character of Southworth’s The Hidden Hand. This chapter focuses entirely on this one Southworth work and Capitola in particular because this character, second only to perhaps Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was one of the most popular female characters of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Hidden Hand’s Capitola is a young woman not afraid to laugh at her adversaries and threaten them with violence. Indeed, Capitola wields a weapon in a scene similar when she shoots a villainous suitor with gun loaded with split peas. The cross-dressing, adventure-seeking, bold and brave Capitola is a character who stands out, both to readers of the twenty-first century and 70 Sari Edelstein makes note of this particular letter in her article “‘Metamorphosis of the Newsboy’: E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and the Antebellum Story-Paper” (Edelstein, 40). The complete letter, belong to Duke’s Southworth Collections can be found ONLINE. 138 to readers of her time likely because the story aggressively characterizes Capitola as one who would stand out. Her key traits—her “humor, mischief, and roguery” (HH, 386)—enable her to survive on the streets of New York as an orphan and inspire her exploits in Virginia after she is rescued by her guardian and taken to his plantation. This character was incredibly popular, her story published many times in both newspaper serial and novel form, performed as a play in both the United States and Europe, and translated into many languages. More than just a literary phenomenon, it was a cultural one—soon after The Hidden Hand was published, Capitola was the name of horses, boats, and other racing vessels recorded in the era’s newspapers—one late nineteenth-century tongue-in-cheek periodical identified Capitola as one of the “Suitable Names for Yachts.” 71 Hers was a name that traveled west when an early inhabitant of a seaside California community named the town Capitola because his daughter’s favorite novel was The Hidden Hand. 72 And it also circulated back to sentimental culture; for instance, in 1871, twelve years after it was first published, Godey’s Lady’s Book mentions the novel’s climatic scene between the young heroine and her only worthy adversary: “many of us can yet recall the delight with which we once read Capitola’s ingenious efforts to foil Black Donald in ‘The Hidden Hand.’” 73 Capitola is remembered with delight because she is intelligent, funny, honest, and kind, constantly seeking a just cause, described as a “a bit of a Don Quixote” (HH, 269). In addition she is lovely and lovable, almost always charming the other men and women in the 71 “Suitable Names for Yachts.”Puck (1877-1918); Mar 30, 1887; 21, 525; American Periodicals Series Online pg. 75; and an example about horseracing: “Three Days’ Trotting at Jackson, Michigan :Jackson City Track." Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (1835-1861) 23 Jul 1859: American Periodicals Series Online, ProQuest. Web. 18 Oct. 2011. A keyword search would find many examples of horses and boats named after Capitola. 72 More information can be found on the city’s website. Caroline Swift. “About Capitola.” City of Capitola. <http://www.ci.capitola.ca.us/capcity.nsf/AboutCapIntro.html> This is a particularly apt origin story if we consider the novel, published on the eve of the Civil War, actually is set during the U.S.- Mexico war of the late 1840s, which gave the United States the land that would be California. 139 novel, as well as the narrator. The particular feelings that she is imagined to engender orient the other characters’, narrator’s, and reader’s pleasures toward the adventures of the girl. Capitola Black is an especially apt example of roguish femininity not only because of her popularity, but also because of the national, imperial, and nascent feminist discourses that circulated during the 1840s and 1850s. However, rarely is this character read in that context, and instead Capitola has so often been separated from these discourses and viewed as a subversive figure, similar to how other rogues have tended to be read as uncommon or exceptional to their time. 74 Carefully considering a character like Capitola in terms of the way she is gendered within the novel shows us how and why certain types of femininities are constituted, imagined to be attractive, and then eagerly consumed by a reading public. She allows us to see how a normativity alternative to sentimentality is displayed and then celebrated by the popular culture. Furthermore, by considering this type of reception, we can see how women like Capitola are not some rare manifestation of future feminist values or desires, but a manifestation of the cultural, economic, and national logics circulating, in this instance, in post-Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago and Civil War-era United States. Capitola’s tendency to bend the rules is not only a rebellion against gender regulation, but also an expression of her class and racial positioning. This chapter places Capitola in her hemispheric context, reading her adventures and behavior in the context of the U.S.-Mexico War and the discourse of Manifest Destiny. In addition, it considers how sentimental discourse shaped Capitola’s gender formation, and how roguish femininity is palatable and “just” because it is steeped within a milieu of Christian 73 L.R. Fewell,“The Books We Read.” Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine (1854-1882); Jul 1871; 83, 493; American Periodicals Series Online. pg. 58 74 For scholarship about Capitola, see Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth Century American Women’s Novels.” American Quarterly 38:2 140 sympathy. The first section places Capitola in a critical context that often examines Cap as a subversive, proto-feminist figure. I look at her scenes of cross-dressing early in the novel and then her return to normative feminine appearance in order to explore the intersections between potential queerness, sentimentality, and roguishness. The remaining sections analyze Capitola’s actions and adventures, particularly the narrator’s preference for her, through discourses of imperialism and Manifest Destiny. The chapter ends with considering Capitola’s roguishness in terms of the novel’s male rogue, the lovable villain Black Donald. In the scenes between them, rebellion and sentimentality are conflated, as lawlessness becomes just and charming. Sentimental Cross-Dressing Capitola Black’s roguish femininity is an offshoot of the canonical model of sentimental femininity as represented by Ellen Montgomery in Wide Wide World, Gertrude Flint in The Lamplighter, or Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—the religious, emotional, often sickly young girl whose fierce passions must be tamed in order for her to properly embody an idealized nineteenth-century sentimental femininity. E.D.E.N. Southworth writing many serial novels in the ante- and post-belleum United States often included many different female types, from those who seem to perfectly embody sentimental femininity, like The Hidden Hand’s Clara Day, to those who would seem to reject it, like her woman warrior Britomarte. Southworth’s own favorite work Ishmael and the Depths portrays Claudia Merlin much in the same fashion as Cap—a girl who grows to a young woman, often known for shaking her black curls haughtily (Summer, 1986): 223-242; and Amy E. Hudock, “Challenging the Definition of Heroism in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand.” American Transcendental Quarterly 9:1 (Mar 1995): 5-20. 141 and then being described as a “self-willed elf.” 75 And though characters like Capitola and Claudia become less haughty as the stories develop and they mature, to read them as tamed into sentimental femininity is too limiting and makes it too easy for us to condemn or celebrate certain representations over others. Capitola’s roguish femininity is not in stark contrast to sentimental femininity nor is she wholly subverting it, but rather she offers a variation of type of femininity that is normative because she is rebellious and attractive because she enacts an “unfeminine” orientation to her surroundings. One of the clearest examples of the blurring between the sentimental heroine and the rogue is through the scene of cross-dressing early in the novel. A familiar trope of the sentimental novel—a poor girl without family—is aligned with the literary tradition of the cross- dressing female adventurer. The reader first meets Capitola along with her soon-to-be guardian, Virginia plantation owner and retired major Ira Warfield, or Old Hurricane as he is better known. When he first sees Capitola she is in the clothing of a boy: He was a handsome boy, too, not withstanding the deplorable state of his wardrobe. Thick, clustering curls of jet black hair fell in tangled disorder around a forehead broad, white, and smooth as that of a girl; slender and quaintly-arched black eyebrows played above a pair of mischievous, dark gray eyes, that sparkled beneath the shade of long, thick, black lashes; a little turned-up nose, and red, pouting lips, completed the character of a countenance full of fun, frolic, spirit, and courage. (33) In New York, Capitola has been dressing as a newsboy in order to make a living and to keep herself safe from harm. Passing as a working boy, she embodies the mischievousness and spirit of youthful boyness. However, though the reader has not been told that this “handsome boy” is Capitola Black in disguise, Southworth telegraphs the plot twist by describing the boy’s face and hair as “that of a girl.” Old Hurricane does not yet know Cap’s “true” gender, and the text plays indle location 3863 142 with both knowledge and ignorance that the trope of cross-dressing allows. This description suggests Cap’s queerness, a feminized boy who is both handsome and pretty, robust and delicate. After Old Hurricane discovers Capitola is the girl he has been looking for and not a newsboy, he claims her as his ward and immediately takes her to a clothing shop. There, Capitola is transformed from her newsboy disguise into the proper attire of the sentimental heroine, her physical attributes highlighted and her beauty made obvious as feminine: Capitola was indeed transfigured. Her bright black hair, parted in the middle, fell in ringlets each side her blushing cheeks; her dark-gray eyes were cast down in modesty at the very same instant that her ripe red lips were puckered up with mischief. She was well and properly attired in a gray silk dress, crimson merino shawl and a black velvet bonnet. (50) The text maintains that Capitola is “transfigured” after she changes her clothing, and indeed she is, her tangled hair now falling in contained ringlets, blushing in a sentimentalized fashion, and her eyes now demurely looking down, instead of sparkling with mischief. However, the mischief is not gone; rather it has been transferred to her puckered lips. These two descriptions revel in describing Cap dressed as a boy and as a girl in minute and pleasurable detail. Despite the claimed transformation, these two descriptions show how little Capitola has changed—still mischievous with dark hair and eyes and red lips, attractive and beautiful through the mischief. Though Capitola’s eyes are now “cast down in modesty” like a good sentimental heroine, she still has the “countenance of fun, frolic, spirit, and courage” that Old Hurricane recognized in the newsboy. So Capitola’s mischievousness remains and mars the transformation in the sentimental heroine. And this is the point: there is little difference between the spirited newsboy and the mischievous ward. In this case, the sentimental heroine is and has always been the masculinized figure of fun, frolic, spirit, and courage. Moreover, the reverse is true: the description of the newsboy was always feminized, the sentimental always existing in the persona of the courageous 143 youngster. A heroine like Capitola both gazes down modestly and smiles mischievously because that combination of qualities informs her charisma and attractiveness—her appeal to the audience. The reader is asked to read Capitola generously, even if she is askew from sentimental standards, because she is rebelling out of necessity from a society that does not help her out materially when she is an abandoned orphan in New York. She then takes those same qualities into the domestic space, but she is not tamed sentimental heroine either. She is both at once— the mischievous newsboy and the modest girl. Capitola becomes a useful figure to see how these complexities manifest because of her popularity in her time, but also her popularity among scholars, who often seem to be attracted to Capitola because she is “boldly inverting the stereotype of the selfless, long-suffering heroine” (Hudock, 17). Indeed, the critical attention that The Hidden Hand has received over all Southworth’s other texts reveals the way that Capitola attracts attention. Scholars have often seemed to be interested in seeing Capitola as a reflection of their own desires for a feminist figure, and scholarship on The Hidden Hand identified Capitola as subverting the traditional gender roles of sentimental femininity. Some have considered her in terms of historically- shifting categories of femininity, as Michelle Ann Abate has done in claiming a movement from “True Womanhood to tomboyhood” and arguing that “Capitola’s tomboyish physical strength, emotional fortitude and intellectual cunning enable her to overcome obstacles that have ruined many female figures before her” (9). The physical and emotional adeptness of Capitola does mark her difference form sentimental heroines, but critics tend to overemphasize the exceptionality of a figure like Capitola, applying ahistorical concepts to this character when saying that she “calls into question prevailing beliefs about the biological basis of gender” (Abate, 10). But Abate’s implicit argument is important: that the tomboy figure, and ultimately 144 Capitola Black, emerges for and through a normative purpose—the expansion of culturally- desirable normative femininity. 76 Sensational fiction, war fiction, and story-paper fiction all inform Capitola’s character as much as sentimental domestic fiction does. Joanne Dobson identifies Romance and adventure genres as informing Capitola’s characterization as well: “By placing a heroic protagonist, an adventurer who owes much to the masculine heroes of Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas, in a feminine sentimental framework, Southworth challenges the limits of genre and stretches imaginative boundaries” (Dobson, xxx). Capitola’s particular feminine attractiveness—the juxtaposition of modesty and mischief—is then not exceptional, but is in dialogue with other generic and cultural influences. So when Capitola cross-dresses or refers to herself using a male- gendered pronoun, the reader is not jarred by queer potential, but rather has had their expectations informed by these cultural representations. And it is not just that these potentially queer figures are being tamed or straightened, their true sexual identity or masculine-affiliation being repressed. Rather, beauty and (hetero)femininity is being rearticulated to include the play at masculinity. Part of her beauty, that which makes her feminine, includes what would be considered her masculine attributes, which become reoriented instead as roguishness. 76 Michelle Abate uses Capitola in order to trace what she is identifying as the shift from “True Womanhood to tomboyhood” that occurred in the 1840s and 1850s. The tomboy figure became important for many culturally-specific reasons including the fears of race suicide that occurred during the influx of immigrants and wanting to reproduce a healthy and vigorous new generation. These social and cultural anxieties are represented through the cultural emergence of “female figures who displayed the tomboyish traits of athleticism, adventurousness, and autonomy began to emerge in domestic and sentimental novels by women” (Abate, 7). However, Abate notes that Capitola is not that radical because “even the young woman’s seemingly most daring acts of boyish bravery can be seen in gender- appropriate ways” (14). Granted, Capitola is “gender-appropriate,” kind of, but this chapter is not searching for the line between gender appropriateness and gender trouble. 145 Capitola’s Empire Capitola’s personality, which so aided her when she was surviving as an orphan in the city, cause her to be restless in her new country life in Virginia. That restlessness inspires her movement and mimics the historical context in which she exists. After Capitola is adopted by Old Hurricane Warfield and taken to his plantation, she purposely upsets the trappings of bourgeois sentimental culture by adventuring in her new backyard and surroundings (Figure 4). Figure 4: Capitola at the Hidden House from New York Ledger, 1859 Southworth writes about how Old Hurricane’s regulations upon her movement inspire her to interact with his rural environment: “And no sooner had Cap been commanded, if she valued her safety, not to cross the water or climb the precipice, than, as a natural consequence, she began to wonder what was in the valley behind the mountain, and what might be in the woods across the river! and she longed, above all things, to explore and find out for herself” (HH, 110). And Capitola does explore, mostly limited to her neighborhood and the surrounding community, but expressing and enacting an orientation outward. This new territory—full of mountains and forests and rivers—catches Capitola’s imagination, inspiring her to explore and category the new territory. However, Capitola’s spirit is one that resists, but not upends, the commands of her 146 guardian. She wants to explore and discover, but she will always come back home. She resists the authority of the plantation patriarch, but she asserts her own authority over the land that is worked by the invisible labor of the slaves who exist in the novel in mostly comic moments. She tests the boundaries, desiring to expand her own borders, but she has no desire to topple the authority of Major Warfield, having too much affection and love for him. Her actions represent a the desire to push the boundaries but not break them, to act roguishly but not in full out rebellion. Her orientation toward discovery—exploring both her unknown surroundings and the regulation on her behaviors—is set against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico War. Capitola’s roguish type of femininity contributes to the spirit motivating the endeavors and conflicts of imperial expansion. In a cultural text like this one, the act of discovery and exploration on newly acquired territory becomes associated with a certain charismatic spirit rather than any type of material practices. The U.S.-Mexico War (1846-8) ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago, which gave the United States new territory in the west and southwest. This particular war is important in understanding the imperial history of the United States, especially the discourse of Manifest Destiny that positioned national expansion as inevitable and righteous. In her study of the sensational literature during the war, Shelley Streeby shows that “1848 was a ‘watershed year’ in the history of U.S. empire, a year when the boost to U.S. power in the world system provided by the U.S.-Mexican War, combined with the distracting social upheavals in Europe, made the United States a major player in the battles for influence in and control of the Americas” (Streeby, 8). 77 A figure like Capitola tests her own power and influence in terms of the hemispheric events, including the ambivalences of empire as the United States expanded 77 Streeby has a good description of the scholarship that situates the war within U.S. imperial history. 147 westward, traversed southward, and tried to negotiate its own internal conflicts on the eve of the Civil War. This serialized novel was published in the New York Ledger in 1859 making this young woman a cultural force on the eve of the Civil War, while the story is set primarily in Virginia but also in New York and Mexico a decade before. The displacement of The Hidden Hand’s setting to a decade earlier with a military conflict that spurred many cultural texts reinforces the fantastic characteristic of Capitola’s femininity, all the more appealing because she was associated with a successful military conflict. In making a case for Capitola’s popularity and charisma, the novel makes a clear connection between the fighting men and the women back at home. Southworth follows the men to Mexico for a time, but she does this self-consciously and is more interested in presenting the “battles” that Capitola herself fights: Now, we might just as easily as not accompany our troops to Mexico and relate the feats of arms there performed with the minuteness and fidelity of an eye-witness, since we have sat at dinner-tables where the heroes of that war have been honored guests, and where we have heard them fight their battles o'er till "thrice the foe was slain and thrice the field was won." We might follow the rising star of our young lieutenant, as by his own merits and others' mishaps he ascended from rank to rank, through all the grades of military promotion, but need not because the feats of Lieutenant–Captain–Major and Colonel Greyson, are they not written in the chronicles of the Mexican War? We prefer to look after our little domestic heroine, our brave little Cap, who, when women have their rights, shall be a lieutenant-colonel herself. Shall she not, gentlemen? (HH, 348) This passage’s reference to “the chronicles of the Mexican war” hints at the way that this conflict is associated with an explosion of print media, especially fiction. 78 While acknowledging the availability of writing about the war, Southworth asserts the dominance of her heroine’s narrative 78 Streeby outlines the fiction industry around the time of the war. Christopher Looby considers the novel’s seriality within the New York Ledger, the periodical in which it originally was published. Looby argues that Southworth interacted with the publication and was influenced by the periodical’s stories 148 by narrating an authorial and readerly preference to “look after” this girl and to imagine her with military rank. Mocking the “gentleman” readers who live in the glory of the past, Southworth ironically situates Capitola as both “our little domestic heroine” and “our brave little Cap,” an act which places her heroine in the genres of sentimental fiction, adventure fiction, and war fiction, but also keeps her separate from them. This discourse does change when it transfers the readerly focus from the men’s story to that of Capitola. Southworth does not need to recount the “feats of Lieutenant–Captain–Major and Colonel Greyson” and men such as him because they are already “written in the chronicles of the Mexican War.” In displacing this masculine militaristic narrative, Southworth positions the narrator and reader’s pleasure as bound up with the roguish Capitola rather than the official war narrative. Askew from “the chronicles of the Mexican War,” but empowered by them, Capitola is connected to the glory that comes through the war, but in a way that denies any real connection to it. This description of Capitola offers an implicit critique of romantic narratives of war. The insertion of Capitola into the discourse of war, even if facetious, reveals how a certain kind of feminism, one that insists on “when women have their rights,” is in service to nationalistic discourse and imperialist aims. In this passage, the novel places Capitola’s adventures through the lens of nationalism, while also implying that Capitola’s orientation is the preferable one. This is a kind of roguish nationalism in which the liberal individual, when seeming to flaunt convention (here, gender), upholds the discourse supporting the exploits of the nation. The reader then is charmed into imagining Capitola as “lieutenant-colonel,” desiring a fantastic about the Mexican War. This focus on the war was, he argues, an attempt to integrate story with the contents of the paper. 149 women’s rights through military endeavors. 79 However, Southworth connects her heroine to glory and greatness, referring to Capitola using the feminist discourse circulating at the time, though facetiously mocking the notion of women’s rights. Capitola then is placed at an ironic distance both from the war narrative and the women’s rights narrative. Southworth claims that she is dissociating The Hidden Hand from the materialities of war, though she makes these events crucial to many of her stories. For instance, Britomarte, the Man-Hater makes a similar though less brash claim: “I shall not burden this light and simple story with the politics of the Civil War. I shall only allude to it where it immediately concerns the people of whom I am writing” (FP, 118). 80 This self-effacing claim that she writes a “light and simple story” is contradicted by the characters who take their own politics so seriously that they do participate in the war, whether through cross-dressing like Britomarte or Elfie shooting Confederates who attack her self-made flag. In the process of making an Union flag in defiance of all the Confederate flags, Elfie has cannot remember the precise number of stars and stripes on the flag; in her own words, she has “forgotten all about my geography and history.” So she ends up making a flag with forty-eight stripes and a hundred stars, and in defending her own ignorance, Elfie declares, “it was only a prophecy of the future, for the dear old flag is bound to grow and increase; and if she isn't entitled to a hundred stars now, she will be when we have annexed South America and the rest of creation!” (FP, 156). Elfie cannot remember the precise number of stars on the flag, perhaps because of the new territory being claimed and annexed by the United States, and brashly articulates the country’s imperial vision. She expects that accumulation of land and stars will continue as the U.S. inevitably annexes “the rest of creation.” 79 This is very much connected to Jasbir Puar’s contemporary concept of homonationalism, in which the gay rights movement comes to support nationalistic discourse and military endeavors. Terrorist Assemblages. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 80 E.D.E.N. Southworth, Fair Play. New York : A. L. Burt Company, 1900 150 That type of visionary spirit aligns with the enthusiasm of Southworth’s imagining of Capitola as lieutenant-colonel, the young women characterized as vibrant and charismatic in a way that is constructed to be appealing to the reader. Elfie’s imperial enthusiasm is the same affect that inspires her to battle with her secessionist neighbors, a scene revealing how this patriotism is also tied to an imperial spirit that proudly imagines the country creating a far-reaching empire. Though the novel indulges her ignorance, Elfie’s understanding of history and geography is exaggerated and the audience is figured to see through her mistake. The implicit irony in her ignorance amounts to a critique of her attitude and others like it, similar to the way that Southworth speaks of the gentleman readers’ countless retelling of their exaggerated military glory in The Hidden Hand. The critique becomes more obvious in that novel through the ambivalent words of one of the heroes, Traverse Rocke: “but what had I to do with invading another’s country?—enlisting for a war of the rights and wrongs of which I know no more than anybody else does!” (HH, 345). Traverse’s words invoke the contemporaneous critiques of the war with Mexico, situated with the discourse of the sentimental man. So that even in their outlandishness and sentiment, these texts do offer critical views of complex events. It is because of the uncertain ethics of the U.S.-Mexico war that Cap’s antics become important and more attractive in The Hidden Hand. After spending several installments detailing the men’s endeavors in Mexico, Southworth recounts her preference for Capitola in the following aside: “How glad I am to get back to my little Cap; for I know very well, reader, just as well as if you had told me, that you have been grumbling for two weeks for the want of Cap. But I could not help it, for, to tell the truth, I was pining after her myself, which was the reason I could not do half justice to the scenes of the Mexican War” (HH, 465). Southworth’s tone is both facetious 151 and serious, sentimental even, as she expresses nostalgia for a character who has been absent from the more recent installments, and acknowledges a connection with her audience. Throughout this novel, the reader is imagined as not wanting to engage in critiques like those of the morose Traverse, but rather as aligning themselves with the joyous spirit of Capitola, who engages in her own battles. The glory associated with war and national pursuits is shifted onto the adventuring and roguish girl. The focus on this charisma and spirited girl is important thing in 1859 when the country is bitterly splitting apart, anticipating civil war. Similar with Elfie in Britomarte which is published just after the Civil War, the imperial drive is retranslated onto the orientation of this young woman, as the reader is positioned to desire her story more than the precise politics of the conflict. The type of community formed by this text, and the type of pleasure that the serial form engendered is crucial to the version of femininity that Capitola and Elfie represent. The narrator and the reader are imagined as eager to see, as Southworth writes, “what new heroic adventures she [Capitola] has achieved” (HH, 465). And this longing, created by the weeks without an installment about Capitola, displaces the ambivalence of the war and the significance of the men whose story the narrator has been recounting apparently half- heartedly before. Defending the Roguish Empire Through characters like Capitola and Elfie, imperial desire is reoriented through the articulation of a roguish femininity. They act in ways that have been considered subversive and rebellious to gender norms at the same time they are constructing a femininity that resonates with hemispheric events. Instead of revealing the specifics of the United States’ empire building, the texts represent the expansion of the empire of this roguish girl, into, what could be read as, the 152 territory of the middle-class white proto-liberal feminist. In asserting her individual will, the white roguish woman’s aim is to explore, expand, colonize, and annex desire, which is why her charm and vitality are so important—they are her weapons. And these are important weapons in the oeuvre of Southworth, who constantly represents vulnerable femininity and insufficient masculinities. In The Hidden Hand, Southworth explores these logics when the villainous Craven Le Noir comes up with a plan to make Capitola his. He spreads rumors that besmirch her reputation, assuming that once everyone shuns her, Capitola will be forced to marry him. When Capitola hears of Craven’s betrayal, she angrily turns to the men in her life, asking them to defend her honor in a chapter entitled “Cap’s Rage.” However, her would-be husband is at war, her guardian is too old, and her visiting male cousins refuse to duel because “chivalry is out of date. The knights-errant are all dead.” With precocity, righteous anger, and a flair for the dramatic, Capitola replies to that statement with, “The MEN are all dead! if any ever really lived!” (HH, 366). In portraying Capitola’s quest for aid, the novel identifies a failure of masculinity, and the audience is aligned with Capitola’s own passionate quest to preserve her own reputation. Southworth is offering the best form of femininity to thrive in the absence of men due to imperial wars and to fight off the threat that the remaining ones represent. In The Hidden Hand the disappointing masculinities have a direct link to the conflicting discourses about imperialism that circulated around the time of the war. Significantly in this instance, one man who represents the unsatisfactory masculinity is Edwin Percy who owns a sugar plantation in the West Indies and is described as “a victim of constitutional ennui that yielded to nothing but the exhilaration of Capitola’s company” (HH, 361). Southworth invokes the stereotypes associated with creoles from the West Indies, something she does in other texts like Self-Raised when Ishmael Worth and company are shipwrecked in Cuba and in India when 153 describing the languid mother of the eponymous character. In contrast to the failure of the creole, often a representative of bad European colonialism and racial decay in the popular culture of the time, more appropriate representatives of U.S.-Americanness must fight individual battles to establish their own identity, Ishmael becoming successful after his low birth through hard work and India’s Mark Sutherland deciding to free his slaves and start a new life in the West. In the Hidden Hand, Capitola becomes the representative of “real” Americanness by preserving her own white womanhood. In contrast to the liminal figure of her cousin, white but inflected with foreign and racialized difference, Capitola’s own racial status and superiority become clarified. She is a beneficiary of the spoils of empire and the slave system, but more attractive than the listless and one-dimensional Edwin. In exploring the hemispheric intersections, Streeby shows how “class and racial formations and popular and mass culture in Northeastern U.S. cities are inextricable from scenes of empire-building in the U.S. West, Mexico, and the Americas” (15). This is true of The Hidden Hand’s Virginia setting as well. Indeed, in this conflict, the white upper class femininity is articulated against a man who exists as a trope that signifies all that is bad with imperial greed and complacency, while Capitola’s own implication in this system is elided. It is around scenes in which Capitola interacts with male characters like Edwin who find her attractive that her roguish power becomes most obvious. Characters who react to her beauty, who find her desirable and charming, inform Capitola’s racialized privilege, how certain characteristics (dark haired, dark eyed, talking like a working-class boy) can be read as attractive for a newly-wealthy white woman. 81 Many scholars have noted that Capitola “Black” offers a 81 Though invoking a different racialized history, this is similar to Claudia Merlin in Ishmael in the Depths who is described as having the air of an Indian princess, coming from ancestry that includes Powhatan and Pocahontas. Qualities of headstrong girls are often connected to a racialized history, but one that is whitewashed. The qualities that add to the beauty of Capitola Black and Claudia Merlin 154 potential for racial transgression, but current scholarship seems to suggest that any of Capitola’s racialized qualities and, indeed, her supposed gender transgression are “modeled after blackface behaviors” 82 (Abate, 19). Furthermore, according to other scholars, the reason she was so popular in the supposedly conservative era of sentimental culture is because “what appears to the late twentieth-century readers as emergent feminism was, in fact, the logical conclusion of white racial consciousness” (Okker & Williams, 142). Importantly, Capitola’s gendered power is intertwined with her racial power, as “Southworth’s portrayal of Capitola’s strength is largely dependent on the novel’s stereotypical images of black men and black women” (Okker & Williams, 137). Roguing through the Virginia plantation, Capitola is implicated in the slave economy, benefiting through her racial and class power. As I have argued, her adventures in Virginia also invoke the battles in Mexico, and I would suggest that Capitola also circulates in the same milieu of the international race romances that Streeby shows become an allegory of reconciliation after the US-Mexico War. In the story- paper fiction, cross-dressing Mexican woman fight against US soldiers until their “true” gender is discovered. These women are revealed to be beautiful and light-skinned, and the American soldiers fall in love and marry them. The stories, Streeby argues, “try to justify, present an alternative to, or compensate for the military invasion of Mexico by displacing scenes of force and coercion with a vision of loving, consensual relationships between the two nations” (Streeby, 131). In certain ways, Capitola too alleviates the feeling of the threat to national cohesion and racial cohesion at which her boundary transgression hints in a text published in 1859. She among others—dark hair and dark eyes—tease at a provocative racial history, but do not threaten racial confusion. 82 Michelle Ann Abate, Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. For an example of racial transgression, see Katharine Nicholson Ings, “Blackness and the Literary Imagination: Uncovering The Hidden Hand.” Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 155 displaces the U.S.’s internal tension over race and slavery and imperial expansion, and instead inserts gender play that most characters find charming, if not simultaneously impossible. She invokes the most attractive elements of this story-paper fiction—of the adventuring, exotic, beautiful woman—and reconstructs it so that we understand her as a charismatic white American femininity that is transgressive. But instead of that transgression being destabilizing or threatening, her racialized gender play is constructed to be attractive by both the novel's characters and its readers. The fantastical narrative of a woman asserting her independence is what the reader sees and feels, instead of the imperial spirit that too is motivating it. Through a listless character like the creole Edwin and through the critiques of the war occurring by those participating in it, the novel distances itself from the logics of empire. And by celebrating Capitola’s “power and passion,” the novel seduces the reader into desiring the roguish girl’s story. However, the characteristics that inform Cap’s narrative are inflected with the same imperial spirit, and the charm and seeming exceptionality hide her affiliation with the racialized imperial events. Instead, the reorientation of imperial desire is most obviously aligned with the failures of masculinity in ways that become battles over gender. Though beloved, Capitola is not beyond criticism. After her cousin Edwin refuses to help her, she asks her other visiting cousin John Stone to fight a duel on her behalf, and he replies to her request by scolding her: Tut, Cap? you are a very reckless young woman! You—it’s your nature—you are an incorrigible madcap! You bewitch a poor wretch until he doesn’t know his head from his heels; puts his feet into his hat and covers his scalp with his boots! You are a will-o’-the- wisp who lures a poor fellow on through the woods, bogs, and briars, until you land him in the quicksands! You whirl him around and around until he grows dizzy and delirious, and talks at random, and then you’d have him called out, you blood-thirsty little vixen! I tell you, Cousin Cap, if I were to take up all the quarrels your hoydenism might lead me into, I should have nothing else to do! (HH, 366) 156 John describes Cap as reckless, incorrigible, a madcap, bewitching, blood-thirsty, a vixen, and a hoyden. These are qualities that other characters often find endearing in her, even if they complain. But they are also qualities that leave her vulnerable—in this case, vulnerable to the rumors and gossip spread by Craven Le Noir, if not also the threat of sexual violation and violence. Her cousin here refuses to mitigate that threat because he claims that he would be fighting on her behalf all the time if he were to “take up all the quarrels [caused by Cap’s] hoydenism.” Being a hoyden—a tomboy, a young masculine-acting woman—leaves her open to unwanted attention to others and leaves her alone in her being able to protect herself. In the logic of The Hidden Hand, the men are insufficient, their masculinity has not evolved to match the woman that Capitola is. Indeed, after being rejected by her cousins, Capitola decides to defend her own honor, and the novel self-consciously places its heroine in a historical context: “And then with burning cheeks and flashing eyes, she went to her own sanctum, and after taking off her habit, did the most astounding thing that ever a woman of the nineteenth or any former century attempted—she wrote a challenge to Craven Le Noir” (HH, 367). The novel here declares Cap’s exceptionalism, insisting that she is doing something that no other woman has ever done. However, as I am suggesting, Capitola is a point on a spectrum of many types of roguish femininities appearing in the nineteenth century—the female soldier, cross-dresser, adventurer, the women’s rights activist of many other cultural locations. The novel ignores that lineage and context, instead making Capitola a champion of ahistorical women’s rights that combines chivalric gender codes and individualistic white feminism. She creates a model for the individual who acts in the face of the failure of her social world, which cannot adequately protect her. She must then protect herself, upholding gender ideology, sexual mores, racial status, and American affiliation. This novel works to create this idea of novelty, of 157 exceptionality, of Capitola being unlike any other woman in the nineteenth century, and that is crucial to the articulation of this type of femininity. Because it created by so many genres, exists in so many moments, that gender affiliation must be represented as being constantly recreated— it is always “new.” For this type of gender manifestation, the woman always seems uncommon, rebellious, or subversive. She is constantly represented as being novel, even if she is not, even as she is constantly rehearsed in many cultural moments and in many different forms and iterations, including over and over in the serial novels of Southworth. The newness is the way the genre, the culture, and, as I am claiming, the nation also figures itself as exceptional, vital, and dynamic. It finds it useful to align itself with the roguish, the hoyden, the spirited beauty because then it constantly seems to be vibrant and vital, and yet still familiar, deeply rooted in generic conventions, cultural traditions, and hegemonic ideology. Capitola fights her own battles while the other men are battling in Mexico, fighting someone who threatens her own sovereignty, her territory, and her ability to adventure in her neighborhood—her own sense of identity—while the United States is waging its own imperial war, extending its own borders. When Capitola meets Craven to duel, she makes this connection: “I happen to be without a father or brother to protect me from affront, sir, and my uncle is an invalid veteran whom I will not trouble. I am, therefore, under the novel necessity of fighting my own battles” (HH, 370). Capitola positions her inclination to fight as “novel” because she is without protection and also because she feels as if she must protect her elderly guardian. Both her future husband and Capitola are imagined as fighting battles, and Capitola, by invoking Major Warfield’s status as a veteran, is positioned as protecting the values for which he once has fought, as well as her own novel ones. However, she is not taken seriously. When she rides up to him on her horse and offers him a choice of weapons, Craven laughs “partly in 158 surprise and partly in admiration” and says to her “you are a very charming young woman, and delightfully original and piquant in all your ideas,” but he refuses the weapons and instead makes an insinuating remark that the novel leaves unrecorded (370). Capitola responds with violence that combines the “old-fashioned” duels and the violent warfare contemporary to her time: “She raised her pistol, took deliberate aim at his white forehead and fired. Bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! bang! Six times without an instant's intermission, until her revolver was spent” (371). After Capitola shoots him (or after “Capitola Caps a Climax” as the chapter title says), the text describes the “terrible vision” of Craven Le Noir face bloodied, falling off his horse. On a horse with a gun aimed at one who encroaches upon her territory and compromises her values, Capitola enacts the violence that has been erased from the war scenes that Southworth describes in Mexico. Instead the text recounts a battle of the novel’s true hero, one that protects the novel’s values. However, though Capitola shoots Craven, the violence is muted because she has loaded the gun with split peas rather than bullets. Craven is not dead, but he instead humiliated. Unlike the violence of imperial warfare, Capitola’s aim is not to kill, but rather to protect herself by her enemy. She displays how much smarter and more resourceful she is than this insufficient masculinity. Capitola own battle is tied up with the men’s battle—her war to assert and preserve her autonomy against the French-inflected invader resonates with the United States actions against Mexico. The crises of imperialism and national expansion are elided by making the “crisis” into a sex war. When her reputation is undermined by someone like Craven, Capitola needs to defend it to be legible and mobile in the world in which she exists. Moreover, because of the failure of men around her and their lack of protection, Capitola must fashion herself in this particular way in order to survive. Similar to her reasoning for cross-dressing in New York early 159 in the novel, she needs to protect herself from “bad boys and bad men” (HH, 45). Hers is a way of living that is grounded in her privileged position, but Capitola, and the roguish women like her, feel the constraints of gender ideology and seek the tools that give them an identity that is livable. Capitola Black History Capitola’s roguish vitality, and those like hers, orients readerly affect in such a way that it becomes aligned with an imperial spirit. That spirit is further clarified through her relationship to the past and her orientation toward United States history. Important to the re-narrating of the past is Capitola’s bedroom history as well as her final climatic encounter with Black Donald in her bedroom over a secret trapdoor. Early in the novel, Hurricane Hall’s white housekeeper Mrs. Condiment recounts violent colonial legacy of the house. This Virginia house, according to Mrs. Condiment’s suspect history, is “built as far back as the old French and Indian war,” and Capitola is given a room in a part of the house that “dates back to the first settlement of the country.” According to the housekeeper, the house’s first owner was Henri Le Noir who wanted to buy land from the Succapoos, “a little tribe of Indians that was nearly wasted away” (HH, 73). However, the Succapoos refused to sell it, and so Henri Le Noir invited leaders to a meal at his house where he tricked them all into standing over the blanketed trapdoor, while they swore loyalty to one another. And while they stood there, Mrs. Condiments describes, “the black villain sprung the bolt, the trap fell, and the six men went down—down, the Lord knows where” (HH, 73-4). With that pit, Capitola sleeps and lives directly over the remnants of “bloody, bloody days” (HH, 75), of a history that is characterized by violent imperial urges and by a false and insincere brotherhood. Scholars have read the pit underneath Cap’s bedroom floor as 160 “serv[ing] as a warning, both to the reader and Capitola, that Hurricane Hall’s past splendor has been built upon the death and suffering of human beings, both slaughtered Indians and abused slaves” (Jones, 72). Though this history may serve as a reminder, it mostly exists as a source of titillation for Capitola, who is fascinated with a pit that is described as “an awful black void— without boundaries, without sight, without sounds” (HH, 76). The hidden room, trapdoor, and mysterious history insert Capitola into the narrative of a Gothic romance—she could be Jane Eyre or a character in an Ann Radcliffe novel. She uses these Gothic tropes as inspiration for the adventure tale that she self-narrates: “It is awful to go to bed over such a horrible mystery; but I will be a hero!” (HH, 77). This inclination toward heroism is also the desire that causes Capitola to adventure in her neighborhood. By finding the violent history titillating and by having no real context for the events (it is a black void), Capitola can use it as an excuse for her own assertion of self and independence. She can be a hero because the history exists only as sensation at a safe distance, and then she can renarrate that history in order to identify herself in relation to it. Even more, the violent imperial history is deflected from the Anglo-American genealogy in Virginia, which was settled by British colonists. The historical “bloody, bloody days” were mostly between the British and the Native American tribes in Virginia, but Mrs. Condiment’s narrative attributes the land disputes, broken agreements, and violence to Henri Le Noir, a solitary French man, racialized even as the “black villain.” Though the reader does not know it in this moment, Capitola is his descendent and rightful heir to his fortune. But because she has the more sympathetic orientation, as a charming, righteous, and compassionate person, Capitola is positioned as the justified heir of the ill-gotten money. However, the implications of that history are again deflected because she, in this moment, is Capitola Black, not Capitola Le Noir. The nation’s history has been properly assimilated and the dirty deeds forgotten when the 161 righteous heir avenges them. Through Capitola’s fascination with the history, condemnation of it, and then desire to triumph over it, the reader is presented with a imperial orientation which is routed through a charmingly rebellious femininity that allows for disaffiliation with the material facts of the history and how they inform the power structure of the present. The colonial history is decontextualized and serves the purpose to prop up Capitola’s roguish orientation away from the sentimental heroine. And as the rightful heir of the Le Noir fortune, she becomes empowered as the beneficiary of that legacy, though it is through a circuitous route. In this house and on the land that is hers by genealogy and adoption, Capitola wages her final battle in the novel. She fights yet another white character identified with “blackness,” Black Donald who stalks Capitola the novel with his charm and appeal, an appropriate match for Capitola. Critics often read Black Donald as Cap’s double, as “her masculine counterpart: a vital, lawless, extraordinary presence whose energies and resourcefulness are boundless” (Dobson, xxxix). Unlike the Le Noirs and many of the other men in the novel, Black Donald is dynamic and charismatic, and the novel spends quite a bit of time reveling in his characterization unlike, say, that of Herbert Greyson, the man whom Capitola eventually marries. Even as the reader is introduced to Black Donald in the context of the outlaw gang’s den, he is put into the context of how desirable he is: “He had a well-formed, stately head, fine aquiline features, dark complexion, strong, steady, dark eyes, and an abundance of long, curling black hair and beard that would have driven to despair a Broadway beau, broken the heart of a Washington belle, or made his own fortune in any city of America as a French count or German baron!” (143). The narrator places Black Donald in a circuit of desirability (breaking the hearts of belles), illegality, and deceit (with an ability to disguise himself as aristocratic to make money). Black Donald, the charming criminal, represents a more vital masculinity, the appropriate companion to Capitola’s 162 femininity—a roguish masculinity that is compliment to her roguish femininity. And even scholars seem to desire “this magnificent man” (Dobson, xxxix), and the combination of violence and sexual energy infuses Cap and Black Donald’s relationship, even even if they do not have an overtly romantic plot line. Capitola wants the glory of catching the notorious villain, and Black Donald wants to claim Cap as his own, both wanting to assert their own dominance over the other. Black Donald was originally hired by Craven’s father Gabriel Le Noir to kill Capitola, so that no one would discover that she was the true heir of the Le Noir fortune. However, Black Donald becomes enraptured with Capitola and decides to kidnap her and make her his wife before killing the girl and collecting the money from Le Noir. After several failed attempts to kidnap Capitola, Black Donald is able to sneak into her chamber because of the “unprotected state of the old house” in the time between Christmas and the New Year (380). During this time, the slaves have a holiday, leaving Capitola in the great house with only Old Hurricane and old housekeeper Mrs. Condiment. Black Donald’s invasion is enabled by the rhythms of the slave system, the build-in holiday that upholds the system but also makes the slave-holding class exposed by the absence of those upholding their power. When Capitola discovers Black Donald in her bedroom, she imagines their meeting as a battle. Indeed, with Capitola’s initial words to herself as she discovers Black Donald in her room, she conflates the that battle with a history of sexual violence: “Now, Cap, my little man, be a woman! don’t you stick at trifles! Think of Jael and Sisera! Think of Judith and Holofernes! And the devil and Doctor Faust, if necessary, and don’t you blench! All stratagems are fair in love and war—especially in war, and most especially in such a war as this is likely to be—a contest in close quarters for dear life!” (384-5). Capitola draws upon a biblical and literary 163 history to empower herself to face Black Donald. She invokes women who seemed to offer hospitality to enemy men only to kill them in their sleep, women who negotiate their interior space from men who threaten not only their sanctity but also their community. And her reference to Faust signals how her ambivalence to hurting Black Donald will play out, as she believes she would be doing evil by killing him. Capitola again invokes the discourse of war to refer to the defense of her territory, here directly engaged with love and sex. Capitola plays a game of seduction and desire for Black Donald, something that is based in reality because she has desired Black Donald all throughout the novel, wanting to come into contact with this legendary villain and, best of all, to capture him. Keeping abreast of her exploits, amused by the way she outsmarts Craven, Black Donald wants Capitola for sex, while Capitola’s desire is for glory. In this scene, however, she adopts Black Donald’s own appropriative desire to trick him into complacency. They mimic each other, exchanging gazes, mirroring body language, moving throughout the room together. Because Black Donald is a charmingly intelligent villain, knowing Cap as well as he knows himself, he resists Capitola’s seduction, remembering earlier in the novel when she tried to capture him: “Ah! you little vampire, how you thirsted for my blood! And you pretended to like me!” said Black Donald, eyeing her from head to foot, with a sly leer. Cap returned the look with interest. Dropping her head to one side, she glanced upwards, from the corner of her eye, with an expression of “infinite” humor, mischief, and roguery, saying: “Lor! didn’t you know why I did that?” “Because you wanted me captured, I suppose.” “No, indeed, but because—” “Well, what?’ “Because—I wanted you to carry me off!” (386) Capitola is described with the keywords, “humor, mischief, and roguery.” Here, she is troping at those qualities, knowing that Black Donald will find them intriguing, so she manipulates the 164 characteristics that have informed her exploits in the book in order to lure Black Donald into complacency. The qualities of humor, mischief, and roguery, as routed through feminine seduction, are expressed through a sideways glance through which she expresses her false desire to run off with him. Capitola returns Black Donald’s appropriative sexual gaze, though it is artifice. However, what makes Capitola so effective in this scene, and also so appealing both to Black Donald and to the reader, is that her lie in based in truth. In explaining her desire to be carried off, Capitola says, “I was tired of hum-drum life, and I wanted to see adventures!” (387). This performance, the game that Capitola plays, has truth at its basis, as most of the novel is based on Capitola’s desire to see adventures. Though there is a sexual charge in this exchange of glances, the desire she expresses in her performed lie is not desire for Black Donald, but rather desire for the adventure that he represents. And the reader desires not consummation, but rather Capitola to victor in this current adventure. The desire is routed away from a seduction narrative or a love narrative toward a roguish narrative of an adventuring girl who victors over her enemies, as affirmed by the writer in Godley’s Lady Book who celebrates “Capitola’s ingenious efforts to foil Black Donald.” Capitola’s popularity, and the popularity of Southworth more generally, can be attributed to her Christian morality that accompanies even the most mischievous and haughty of female characters. And Capitola’s combination of adventurous spirit and a Christian heart is what appeals to the characters in the novel like Black Donald. In this scene, he never quite falls for Capitola’s act, able to recognize both her roguishness and her virtue. Indeed, that is what he finds so attractive, described in a preceding chapter as laughing about her duel with Craven, appreciating her roguery as it is used to uphold her honor. However, he enjoys playing the game as exchanged gazes, verbal sparring, and in the encounter that follows, a domestic scene of 165 making eggnog. Through this charged encounter, Capitola is moving Black Donald closer to the trapdoor until finally he is standing over it. When his life is in peril, she switches tactics, displaying how embedded she actually is in Christian sentimental discourse: “Your Creator, Donald, gave you the strength, courage, and spirit that all men and women so much admire; but he did not give you these great powers that you might use them in service of his enemy, the devil” (390). In honestly appealing to Black Donald, she invokes the community’s reaction to him, saying that they admire him. Black Donald, aware that Capitola is being a “flatterer,” says that “Women always like men with a spice of the devil in them” (390). But Capitola insists on strength, courage, and spirit as admirable masculine qualities—moreover, qualities that are divine, that come from God and should be used in service to him. She attempts to convince him to reorient the qualities that she and others find attractive in him: “however misguided you may have been, there is really something great and good in yourself that might yet be used for the good of man and the glory of God” (390). Capitola is using the familiar discourse of sentimental religious influence. The power of sentimental culture was seen in its ability to change hearts and minds with the power of its discourse, but here even the discourse of Christian sentimentality is routed through the language of desire and attraction. Capitola is trying to resist repeating the imperial history, attempting to convince Black Donald to repent and leave her safe, so that she does not have to enact the violence of dropping him through the trap-door. In this scene her turn to Christian sentimental discourse is actually an attempt to resist the repetition of the violence of the pit. As Kaplan says, Capitola “reenacts the originating gesture of imperial appropriation” when she drops Black Donald through the trapdoor. Yet Capitola does not want to do it. Her position as sentimental heroine resists violence and destruction, instead embracing an impulse to forgive and repair. Cap does finally 166 press the spring to send Black Donald into his trap, but only after trying to find a peaceful outcome and only because of the immediate physical threat (Black Donald is reaching out for her when she presses the spring). Acting out of compassion and roguery, she attempts to find a new ending of that history. Moreover, though racialized, the white Black Donald is not quite aligned with the Succapoos who were massacred with the pit nor is he equivalent to the Le Noirs, as he has forsaken his affiliation with them by desiring Cap as his own. Katharine Nicholson Ings claims that “[d]ropping Black Donald into such a racially and historically inflected pit, then, paints him not as a criminal but as a victim who does not deserve incarceration” (Ings, 146). So this version of the scene does not quite replicate that imperial history, but instead shows how this fictional battle scene wishes the history to be rewritten. Through the distillation of that history, the femininity that Capitola embodies is able to dominate completely, besting the novel’s best man and rewriting history to make it seemingly more compassionate. Capitola represents a feminine spirit that allows one the opportunity to deny the repetition of a violent imperial history, but also align herselves with the spirit of one who benefits from that history, as Capitola’s wealth and her desirabiliy is due to that violent history of plunder. The ending to the narrative does differ from those original founding stories, as Black Donald is not dead and the mystery of the pit is somewhat exposed. With the removal of the injured Black Donald, an attempted redress for the past is enacted, and the perceived black villain is not left to die. Moreover, Cap decides that she “shall never occupy this room again; its associations are too full of horrors” (398). Rather than romanced by the gruesomely violent stories as before, Capitola is now repulsed by and rejects them. After this event, though she was “lauded for her brave part in the capture of the famous desperado,” Cap is “too sincerely sorry for Black Donald to care for the applause” (Southworth, 399). Prior to her encounter with Black 167 Donald, Capitola wanted nothing more to capture him and would have reveled in the community celebration of her bravery; however, here she is disgusted by the materialities of her adventure, at the possibilities of real violence. After Black Donald recovers from his injuries, he is sentenced to death and scheduled to be executed on the same day as Capitola’s wedding to the former sailor, now army officer, Herbert Greyson. Yet on the day of her marriage, Capitola defies the law and the will of her community, and helps Black Donald escape from prison. Like many woman writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who employ the mechanisms of sentimentality to express the horrors of slavery, Capitola positions herself as Black Donald’s redeemer as she brings him “the means of deliverance and escape” from jail (HH, 479). Capitola expresses her sense of entitlement along with her compassion: “For Donald, as I was the person whom you injured most of all others, so I consider that I of all others have the best right to pardon you and set you free” (480). Here, her language of entitlement and desire to set free is reminiscent of Hope Leslie’s rescue of Magawisca. The individual will of the roguish girl is the one that is honored, as she honors the freedom of the man who she has now redeemed. The discourse of imprisonment and freedom is stripped away of its racialized connotations, and is rerouted to express the relationship between the white, but roguish, characters of Black Donald and Capitola Black. History is rewritten, but the present only includes vague allusions to political realities. My line of argument in this section is very much indebted to Amy Kaplan demonstrating how sentimental culture is implicated in empire and to her brief reading of The Hidden Hand. Kaplan rightly connects Capitola’s final battle with Black Donald to the imperial history of the pit: To protect the sanctity of her home and her own chastity, Capitola performs a founding national narrative of conquest. She drops the rapist through a trap door in her bedroom 168 into a deep pit dug by the original owner in order to trick the Indian inhabitants into selling their land. The domestic heroine thus reenacts the originating gesture of imperial appropriation to protect the borders of her domestic empire and the inviolability of the female self. (48) Capitola does reenact this imperial history, as well as connect herself to the war being fought Mexico, but this reading is too focused on seeing it as a domestic novel claiming that “the novel tells a tale about reconstituting domesticity on a Virginia plantation during the Mexican- American War” (48). There are elements of domesticity being reconstituted in the novel, especially with the parallel plots of Clara Day and Marah Rocke, but to read Capitola’s adventures as ultimately about domesticity is limiting. Capitola’s roguish orientation requires expressing a sentimentalized condemnation of such violence and bloodshed. As with most popular nineteenth-century women’s novels, there is an attachment to the sentimental, but this story has a much different relationship to those values than novels like Wide Wide World. Rather than protecting sentimental values, Capitola is rewriting them in her triumph and her regret. That is not to say that these rewritten values are any more progressive or feminist, but that the relationship to history and to domesticity is more complex and uneven. I do see Kaplan’s description of Capitola as a “domestic heroine” as representative of a scholarly discourse that has been imprecise about the gendering processes occurring within both literary and mass culture in the nineteenth century. Placing The Hidden Hand and the novels of Southworth, the 1871 article in Godey’s Lady’s Book that mentions the “delight” in anticipating Capitola besting Black Donald says: “In the sensational school, Mrs. Southworth must also take a prominent place. Few will deny her genius for dramatic effects, and the gorgeous colors and rapidly shifting scenes of many of her works fit them more for the stage than for the domestic 169 circle. With the young, who like the excitement, her books are always popular.” 83 Even this review denies the domesticity of Southworth, instead placing her work as “more fit” for the stage as sensational spectacles. As this contemporary literary criticism reveals, we miss the more complicated ways that gendered subjectivities are formed if we rely too much on simplistic categories that assume that sentimentality genders or creates affiliation in the same way all the time (from Catharine Beecher to Sarah Josepha Hale to E.D.E.N. Southworth to use some of Kaplan’s examples). We can better understand the ways in which imperialism and gender works if we back away from domesticity and sentimental culture to see how gender itself is formed through multivalent loci, rather than trying to understand how gender functions through one generic type. That overemphasis on sentimentality and domesticity causes us to make generalizing claims about women and also limits our understanding of the way that power works to form national feelings and the justifications of empire, as well as strands of resistance and critique. Women’s culture and femininity were and are constituted around many things— sensational fiction and the Gothic romance, story-paper fiction of the U.S.-Mexico War, the reoccurrence of cultural narratives of cross-dressing women, especially cross-dressing soldiers, the cultural prominence of actresses, performers, and activists. However, we misread Capitola and cultural expressions of femininities like hers when we overemphasize sentimental culture as the primary expression of normative femininity and of women’s culture. If we only read Godey’s Lady’s Book, focus too closely on Stowe’s Little Eva, or only pay attention to the taming process of the sentimental heroine, we ignore how these artifacts of women’s culture are actually much more multivalent. Not in a way that makes them subversive or feminist or a 83 Fewell, L.R. “The Books We Read.” Godey's Lady's Book and Magazine (1854-1882); Jul 1871; 83, 493; American Periodicals Series Online. pg. 58 170 model for a type of anti-hegemonic femininity (though some of that may be true and we must take those claims seriously), but rather as a tool to help us understand how femininities are constituted around many cultural, economic, and national processes. Women’s culture does not only constitute women, but, as many scholars have argued, also constitute the nation, economics, culture. Therefore, to consider only sentimental culture as the expression of the “ideal” mainstream femininity circulating causes us to misread how femininity is created and creates, how desire constitutes and is constituted, and what really is normative in a particular era. And, significantly, when we think of Capitola and what I have identified as other femininities like hers, how one expression of identity can be both normative and rebellious at the same time with no contradiction. If we want to understand why and how certain gender and sexual expressions manifest and become important, we have to finish up our business of privileging sentimentality in American culture as the main expression of women’s culture. 84 84 Much of my reading of women’s culture and larger cultural forces in influenced by Lauren Berlant’s Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. 171 Postscript Anti-Charm, Affect, and Harriet Wilson Roguish femininity pushes against boundaries and steps over the line—lines of propriety, of social standards, and of racial and gender conventions. This term is not meant to identify and categorize the individual that do and do not qualify as a rogue; rather it exists as a way to explore gender formations, specifically the intersections of gender, race, power, and affect. Though I focus on understudied or less canonical literary objects, I believe this term could allow a new way of looking at long-explored characters and stories, even those that exists within sentimental culture. When one recalls traditional heroines of mid-nineteenth-century literature of the United States, one usually thinks of Little Evangeline of Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Ellen Montgomery of Wide Wide World. Of a young girl described as having “an airy and innocent playfulness” that “seemed to flicker like the shadow of summer leaves over her childish face” (Stowe, 230). Thinking through roguish femininity, we can consider the next line of the novel, which describes Eva as “always in motion, always with a half smile on her rosy mouth, flying hither and thither, 172 with an undulating and cloud-like tread, singing to herself as she moved in a happy dream” (Stowe, 231). Though still seeped in Christianized sentiment, Eva also suggests the roguish movement of those in these chapters, how they are often shaped by motion, activeness, as well as beauty. But she also shows how the tie of boundary-play and beauty is a privileged knot. These chapters have explored how gender and imperialism are intertwined in the hemispheric United States. To articulate the connection between gender and imperialism, the project has offered the term roguish femininity to signify how femininity subverts gender and racial hierarchy through of beauty and charm. However, because beauty and charm most clearly and effectively signify through a white body, roguish femininity most often works for imperial expansion even if it implicitly and explicitly critiques it. Thus is the complexity of gender formation in colonial contexts for bodies that are calling norms into question, but still remaining legible and appealing for heteronormativity. All the chapters’ locations are situated in zones of conflict—colonial wars, revolutions, imperial expansion, global capital flows, and internal civil wars. The female characters are made of and react to these confluences of racial, gender, class, and hemispheric conflicts. The chapters imply, if not argue directly, that a gender politics devoted to the triumph of an individual white(ned) woman is often at stake in these texts, especially in the final two chapters. The first two chapters do explore the alliances possible through interracial friendships and alliances— through female bonding and sisterhood. However, these bonds are based in values of the liberal individual at the expense of the demonization or displacement of communities of people of color. In the latter two chapters, the individual woman triumphs, her will is the one that is achieved and celebrated in the narratives of empowerment or self-discovery. 173 Secondarily, this project has concerned itself with the lens through which women in the nineteenth-century are evaluated. As explored in the introduction and in the chapter on Capitola Black, this project has suggested sentimental culture is often overprivileged as a way to understand women and women’s culture in the nineteenth-century. It contents that femininity— femininities—are created by more than just what represents hegemonic women’s culture, a point that has implications for the way that scholars theorize about women’s culture, gender, affect, and empire. I would hope that the study of gender and literature will continue to pursue questions about why certain rebellious, subversive women are so often represented in the United States’ popular culture, and why that figure is often represented as something shocking and transgressive when she exists almost ubiquitously. Why is the subversiveness and shockingness often coupled with charming qualities or virtuous qualities? How is the reader positioned to consume this figure and, significantly, to desire in her? How do these desires and ideologies mutually reinforce one another? The work on literary studies and American studies should pay attention to the gendering process happening in specific historic and hemispheric locations. This includes observing how the gendering process occurs, how normative gender affiliations are consolidated and contested, and how the representation of gendered subjectivities incorporates many hemispheric influences. This project steeped in literary, feminist, and American Studies, also speaks to affect studies. I have unpacked how charm works as an affective registry signifying the beauty and appeal of a character. In addition, I have started to suggest how charm may have limits as a political tool and as a tool of a feminist subjectivity. Charm makes more palatable the subversive, unruly, or potentially upsetting actions. It works as a lubricant to allow them to pass through moments unharmed and with their will being honored. It seduces audiences and feeds 174 into the popularity of particular kinds of characters and particular kinds of stories. The types of stories I have explored focus on white or whitened girls of mostly privileged socio-economic standing. They are girls who suddenly inherit wealth, who come from aristocratic family, or who have important social connections. All these stories are fictional or fictionalized—and so it is unlikely that “real life” women, even privileged bourgeois white women, would get away what these characters get away with. For instance, Capitola Black, in all likelihood, would’ve been socially shamed, if not actually raped, if her encounters with these dominant men were more realistic. These stories are sensational and sentimental fictions—fantasies of active femininity that does not suffer sexual violence, abuse, or torture. Therefore, the charm is as much fantasy as it is a tool developed for survival and success. Considering affect and charm, and how these are racialized is why I want to spend the remainder of these concluding thoughts briefly thinking about a text that was published in 1859, the same year as The Hidden Hand with its feisty, fierce Cap. This other novel tells of a roguish girl but with a different affect, a different intention, and a different race. Harriet Wilson wrote Our Nig (1859) to show “that slavery’s shadows fall” in the antebellum North. It tells a fictionalized version of Wilson’s own story as a black girl growing up with a white New England family. Standing is for Wilson is Frado, a “beautiful mulatto” who is abandoned by her poor fallen white mother. Her mother leaves her with the Bellmonts, a family who lives, as the title page describes, “in a two-story white house, North.” An indentured servant to the family, Frado is terrorized by Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter, who physically and verbally abuse Frado. The novel focuses on Frado’s youth as she grows up laboring in the Bellmont household, recounting Mrs. B’s sadistic violence and the rest of the family’s affection for but ultimate inability to help the young girl in any material way. 175 Though hated by the Bellmont women, Frado is beloved by several characters in the novel. She is beloved because of her beauty and also because of her intelligence and humor: “Frado […] was a beautiful mulatto, with long, curly black hair, and handsome, roguish eyes, sparkling with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint” (Wilson, 11). Frado’s roguishness, her beauty and her spark, is what attracts others to her and what gains her some of the positive attention she receives. When Mr. Bellmont insists that Frado attend school, she charms all of her classmates with her stories and jokes, often causing “some outburst of merriment, of which she was the original” (Wilson, 22). When Frado labors outdoors, she often enacts feats of daring to amuse herself and others, climbing a ladder to the top of the barn for instance. The others love her jokes and actions and the narrator muses at the stamina of her spirit: “Strange, one spark of playfulness could remain amid such constant toil; but her natural temperament was in a high degree mirthful, and the encouragement she received from Jack and the hired men, constantly nurtured the inclination” (Wilson, 31). Frado possesses a “natural temperament” that is playful and mirthful similar to not only Capitola Black but also Hope Leslie, Unca Eliza Winkfield, and Elfie from Britomarte, the Man-Hater. The combination of beauty, mischief, charm, and physicality is how I’ve been identifying roguish femininity throughout these pages, yet with Frado, as an abandoned black girl of her lower class standing, the physical means something else entirely. She does not bound around the rivers and hills around her home like Capitola; rather Frado labors physically and intensely, all the while receiving explicitly described beatings. At first Frado’s youth and the resilience of her body protect her spirit: “Her jollity was not to be quenched by whipping or scolding” (Wilson, 22). But also the novel progresses, the mundaneness of the inhuman violence builds, and Frado becomes infirm and loses much of her vivacity and spark as she grows into adulthood. 176 Though recounting that Frado possesses charm that enraptures the male Bellmonts and her classmates, the novel does not spend time dwelling in Frado’s appeal. Kyla Wazana Tompkins reads this denial as intentional: “the text for the most part refuses its audience—which Wilson imagines, as she tells us, to be both white and black—the kinds of pleasure in consuming on which both Hawthorne and Stowe count” (Tompkins, 119). Tompkins reads acts of consuming, eating, and being in nineteenth-century texts including ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but in Our Nig, Tompkins shows how Wilson’s novel refuses pleasure with its stark, but not over-the-top, representations of violence and misery. In refusing pleasure, the novel and Wilson also refuse charm, creating a character that is not meant to go down easy—nor to amuse and delight or to escape horrors in fantastical and exceptional ways. Rather the focus is on the inhumane treatment she receives and how she endures, not triumphs. And though she is described as charming and roguish, funny and mischievous, the narrative itself does not charm the reader; rather these passages are recounted almost from a distance, almost passionless, without the vividness of someone like Southworth or Sedgwick. Instead, her “playfulness” is described as “strange” because it is “amid such constant toil.” These descriptions do not represent a failure of authorship or writerly style; rather this is a tactic to create a certain tone, a mood that refuses pleasure. Roguishness signifies differently for this black character, toiling in a white household in New England. Roguishness signifies not someone who is charming and who will delight the reader with her exploits. It does not signify someone who will triumph over her adversaries and enact justice and fairness for her friends and community. In fact, roguishness is infuriating for the white women in the text, for Mrs. Bellmont and her daughter Mary. Because she hates the attention and love Frado receives, Mary often frames Frado for crimes she does not do, and one 177 punishment for her supposed wrongdoing, includes Mrs. Bellmont and Mary beating Frado, propping her mouth open with a piece of wood, and then locking her in a dark room. Tompkins brilliantly reads the scene and the image of a bruised and agape Frado in the context of sentimental readership: “This representation seems to render Frado’s open mouth and face monstrous, but in doing so the image testifies to white inhumanity: the image of the black mouth opened is not simply a sign of physical torture; it confronts the figurative open mouth of the sentimental reader with its mirror image” (Tompkins, 120). In examining Wilson’s text, Tompkins unpacks the violent relationship between white women’s subjectivity and empowerment and black female dehumanization and objectification, and states that the novel is “repudiating the relationship between black objectification and white female empowerment— and the reliance of the former on the latter” (Tompkins, 122). In a novel written by a black woman about a black woman, the woman is called “our nig” and dehumanized by the white supremacist womanhood. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Davidauskis, April (author)

Core Title Roguish femininity: gender and imperialism in the nineteenth‐century United States

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 02/10/2017

Defense Date 01/12/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American studies,Gender Studies,Imperialism,nineteenth‐century American literature,OAI-PMH Harvest,women writers

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Halberstam, Jack (committee member), Halttunen, Karen (committee member)

Creator Email april.davidauskis@gmail.com,davidaus@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-532020

Unique identifier UC11298318

Identifier etd-Davidauski-3178.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-532020 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Davidauski-3178.pdf

Dmrecord 532020

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Davidauskis, April

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA