Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature

271 Pages·2008·1.849 MB·English

by  Laura L. Mielke

MOVING
ENCOUNTERS
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a volume in the series
Native Americans of the Northeast:
Culture, History, and the Contemporary
Edited by
Barry O’Connell and Colin G. Calloway
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Moving
Encounters
Sympathy and the Indian Question
in Antebellum Literature
Laura L. Mielke
University of Massachusetts Press
amherst
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Copyright © 2008 by University of Massachusetts Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
LC 2007022045
ISBN 978-1-55849-631-6 (paper); 630-9 (library cloth)
Designed by Jack Harrison
Set in Monotype Dante with Viva display by dix!
Printed and bound by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mielke, Laura L.
Moving encounters : sympathy and the Indian question in Antebellum literature /
Laura L. Mielke.
p. cm. — (Native Americans of the Northeast: culture, history,
and the contemporary)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55849-630-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-55849-631-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism.
2. Indians in literature. 3. Sympathy in literature.
I. Title.
PS217.I49M54 2008
810.9'352997—dc22 2007022045
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.
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To Scott and Henry
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Moving Encounter in Antebellum Literature 1
1. The Evolution of Moving Encounters in Lydia Maria Child’s
American Indian Writings, 1824–1870 15
2. Doomed Sympathy and The Prairie: Rereading Natty Bumppo
as a Sentimental Intermediary 36
3. “Be man!”: Emasculating Sympathy and the Southern Patriarchal
Response in the Fiction of William Gilmore Simms 51
4. Containing Native Feeling: Sentiment in the Autobiographies of
William Apess, Mary Jemison, and Black Hawk 70
5. The Book, the Poet, the Indian: Transcendental Intermediaries
in Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes and Henry David Thoreau’s
The Maine Woods 93
6. “Sorrows in excess!”: The Limits of Sympathy in the Ethnography
of George Catlin, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, and
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft 115
7. Restoring the Noahic Family: The Three Races of America in
Mary Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin and Mary Howard Schoolcraft’s
The Black Gauntlet 151
8. Staging Encounters and Reclaiming Sympathy through Indian
Melodramas and Parodies, 1821–1855 170
Conclusion: Moving beyond Sentiment or Cynicism 193
Notes 199
Index 245
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 1. Plate 22 [His Majesty visits Catlin’s Gallery, the Louvre],
from George Catlin, Notes of Eight Years’ Travels 126
Fig. 2. Plate 46, “Interior of a Mandan lodge,” from George Catlin,
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the
North American Indians 127
Fig. 3. George Catlin, Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon’s Egg Head (The Light)
Going to and Returning from Washington (1837–1839) 132
Fig. 4. Appendix C from Catlin, Letters and Notes 133
Fig. 5. George Catlin, Mah-tó-che-ga, Little Bear,
a Hunkpapa Brave (1832) 136
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