Eve in the New World: Indianness and Anglo-European Womanhood. -- Indians, Images, and Identity: The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal, Mary Rowlandson, and James Printer. -- Masculine Imagery and Feminine Voice in Revolutionary America: Paul Revere's "Sword-in-Hand" seal and Ann Eliza Bleecker's Domesticated Nationalism. -- "Mixed-Blood" Masculinity: Thomas Rolfe and Charles Hobomok Conant. -- "Mixed-Blood" Womanhood: Pocahontas, The Female American, and Feminine Authorial Identity. -- Curtains, Earrings, and Indians: Texts of Today
Summary:
Focuses on the intricate relationship between Indianness and the formation of a uniquely new identity in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: that of the American woman writer. Colonial and early national writers experienced an uneasy relationship with the "Indianness" they encountered in the New World. Numerous texts, images, and first person accounts in early America envision the Native other and the native landscape in a variety of incarnations, whether visual or textual, in order to create a more stable understanding of the colonial American and the new nation. By appropriating and revising Indianness, early American women writers (before 1830) capitalized on the instability and permeability of both Indian and Anglo-American identities as a ground from which they could contribute to the national struggle to organize a collective identity of what is "American." Through their use of Indian characters, narratives, and settings, these women write into being not only the American nation, but also themselves as specifically American women writers. By writing extensively about Native topics and by aggressively insisting upon a more complex relationship between race and gender, women writers like Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and "Unca Eliza Winkfield" of The Female American gained control over their own identities. Aims to bring often-neglected early American texts by women writers into focus as texts that actively participated in the racial, national, gendered, and historical discourses that ultimately provided the framework for American identity.
