Writing America: Race, gender and nationalism in American frontier fiction (James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, William Gilmore Simms, Robert Montgomery Bird, Catharine Maria Sedgwick)

This dissertation focuses on five nineteenth-century American novels that employed history to explore contemporary issues of their day. James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, and Robert Montgomery Bird each wrote about times when Indians and colonists co-existed, and each explored historical settings and characters to frame discussions about the impact of the Revolution, Indian-white relations, and concerns about religion and gender. Despite their significant differences, these authors shared a common goal: to create a usable past that promoted their visions of what America could and should become.; Reading these five novels together highlights the changing social climate of the young nation. Ostensibly about frontier battles long since settled, Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, Child's Hobomok , Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Simms' The Yemassee , and Bird's Nick of the Woods actually engaged contemporary problems still percolating in society. The authors' genders, political leanings, and religious prejudices helped to shape their portraits of America's past, and also to articulate their visions of the nation's future.; Central to the discussion are Indians, especially regarding the mixing and blurring of other cultural and racial boundaries. Such blurring presupposed a primary question of the post-Civil War era: how to accommodate the freed slaves. The Indian-white marriages found in several novels took aim at traditional attitudes about religion and gender roles, showing women having influence in their communities. I begin with Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, which confronts the issue of racial identity and extends, only to reject, a vision of a future of mixed-races. Child's Hobomok challenges patriarchal Puritan society by admitting the possibility of a multi-racial community. In Hope Leslie, Sedgwick uses shared traditions to couch her modern interpretation of the present, while Simms employs his historical setting in The Yemassee to promote his conservative position supporting the slavery and the Southern plantation way of life. Bird's Nick of the Woods situates the future in the western territories, celebrating the nation's march west even as it measures the cost of such progress.