The 'revolting' union: White/Indian intermarriage in nineteenth-century American women's fiction (Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Ann Sophia Stephens)

Although James Fenimore Cooper explored interracial unions between white women and Indian men in Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829), nowhere in his writings does he present the possibility for successfully “amalgamated” marriage. To even consider interracial union threatened major social upheaval; to most nineteenth century Americans, the choice remained incomprehensible. A woman's husband would determine her legal and economic standing, and by marrying across cultures, she seemingly had little to gain and much to lose. Historically, however, many such unions did take place, as confirmed in the narratives of transculturated captives such as Mary Jemison, who permanently transformed forced captivity into a willing embrace of her adopted culture when she married a Native American. Her narrative highlights the political, economic, and social advantages she found among the Seneca. This study uses Cooper's and Jemison's texts to establish the poles of tension found in nineteenth-century American women's writing about interracial marriage. Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824), Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), and Ann Sophia Stephens's frontier novels, most notably Mary Derwent (1838, rev. 1858), each depict white women who freely choose to marry across cultures. While this “revolting” union, as one of Child's early reviewers termed it, would suggest a revolutionary impulse on the part of the authors, these novels are riddled with paradoxes. Just as they call attention to the limitations imposed on women by traditional gender codes and yet seek neither the demolition nor abandonment of domestic ideology, so too does their depiction of Native Americans reflect this ambivalence. Child and Sedgwick provide images of fruitful, loving unions, but they send their most fully realized Native American characters west. In the end, however, “Little Hobomok” offers a tempered vision of successful amalgamation, while Faith Leslie's evocative silence suggests the limited access readers have to the transculturated woman's experience. Similarly, as Stephens offers her white queens a new empire of women's influence, she simultaneously illustrates the danger inherent in wielding this power carelessly. The important cultural work performed by these fictional intermarriages lies in their ability to bring these complexities to the fore.