Visions and re/visions of the Native American

The 1800s saw the burgeoning of women authors in the United States, many of whom wrote within the genre of the sentimental novel. Recent theorists Jane Tompkins and Cathy Davidson have argued that sentimental novels, rather than reinforcing the status quo, re/vision in radical and revolutionary ways contemporary U.S. culture. Although critiques of U.S. culture were varied, one area of women's criticism is the focus of this study, the question of Native Americans' status and treatment by the federal government and by U.S. Anglo-American culture in general. While "feminine" qualities like nurturance allowed women to sympathize with and defend the ethnic Other, women were not innocent in the rhetoric and practices of domination and colonization. Women's use of sentimental novels and gender inscriptions did not escape inflicting the domination which many of these women deplored in Anglo society. This study traces the interplay of the sentimental novel and social reform in three novelists: Helen Hunt Jackson in Ramona, Willa Cather in The Song of the Lark and Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Barbara Kingsolver in Pigs in Heaven. The purpose of this study is to explore the variety of authorial positions in white women's portrayals of Native Americans and the range of female complicity in the perpetuation of the dominant culture's racist perspectives. Through the critical lens of postcolonial theorists Edward Said and David Spurr, the inherent instability and tension between social reform and inherited constructs of race that undercut the sentimental novel's reformist project emerge.