The return of the native repressed: Indian presence in early American literature

This research project is an attempt to point to the gap between real historical and political subjects and their transformation into imaginative characters in early American literature where one often finds an Anglo writer wrestling with the problem of what it means to be "white" in America, a question which was not possible twenty years ago. The dissertation attempts to show how such a question cannot be answered without an understanding of the centrality of American Indian presence.; The dissertation looks at the ways representative works in early American literature struggle with the vexed notion of Native American "presence" and identity by using Marxist and postcolonial theory to focus on preconceptions of class and race brought over from Europe to North America. Chapters one through three analyze New World travel narratives, Puritan works, Indian captivity narratives, and historical romances to show how an ideology of class hierarchy, developed during the early Renaissance period in England, was adapted by English colonists and their progeny to construct an Indian peasant identity that paralleled similar constructions of the Irish during the colonization of Ireland. The first three chapters attempt to connect class identity with unvoiced assumptions about land ownership and racial identity that inform much of the literature of the colonies and the new American republic as various white writers work at rationalizing the displacement of Native America by re-conceptualizing competing definitions of "native." Chapter three ends with an extended discussion of Catherine Maria Sedgewick's historical romance, Hope Leslie, a work that is routinely touted as a sympathetic portrayal of American Indians, but which is shown in this analysis to suffer from a pervasive phobia of contamination by Indian presence.; Chapters four and five focus on Henry David Thoreau and William Apess, two nineteenth-century writers who, in their own way, interrogate the legacy of Indian identities in order to reopen a space for a native presence that had earlier been repressed. Apess, as a Pequot Indian preacher and a "rediscovered" writer, logically concludes the discussion through his radical subversion of racial identity as mediated by his minority status within the dominant culture.