Hope Leslie and the rise of American Gothic feminism

This study uses Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 novel, Hope Leslie, Or, Early Times in the Massachusetts, to explore the genre of early American literature that critic Beverly Voloshin has characterized as “female Bildungsroman” (Voloshin 284). As Voloshin points out, conflicting interpretations of this literature reflect conflicts endemic to the literature itself: in the case of Hope Leslie the conflicts are about women’s roles in the context of the patriarchal legacy of Puritanism and the building of the New Republic, and about the history of early American relations with Native people. Her work continues from Nina Baym’s initial discussion of the “cult of domesticity,” in Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (11). With Baym and Voloshin, I see Hope Leslie as an example of this form of literature; but my thesis departs from their conception by showing that the protagonist’s agency is only possible within the American Gothic frontier. I will explore how Gothic motifs function in frontier literature, and in particular how Sedgwick uses this genre to develop ideas about women on the frontier, where the ‘frontier’ encompasses paradoxical ideas of an untamed ‘haunted’ nature where wild and savage Indians lurk and oppositely something alluring which holds “feminist possibility” because women and nature are closely intertwined (Alaimo 2). I contend that as the young heroine Hope Leslie matures, drawing strength from the frontier instead of fearing it, her increasing agency gives rise to a distinctly American kind of Gothic feminism. Sedgwick uses her heroines to deliver a Gothic feminism that Diane Long Hoeveler contends is a coded yet subtle critique of masculine spaces put in place to contain women (xii). The Gothic, concerned as it is with the effects of terror on human psychology, allows Sedgwick to use the genre’s tropes to explore what happens to women at the margins of society. However, this journey also has a hidden underside, in which the heroine’s agency comes at the cost of Native exploitation. In Hope Leslie, Sedgwick has her protagonist Hope interact with and eventually replace the Indian Magawisca by the end of the story.