Mixed Race Studies

“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Volume 24, Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2001)
Pages: 137-151
DOI: 10.1111/j.1537-4726.2001.2403_137.x

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a “marriage” of its various races, declaring that, in ”the natural progress of things,” Indians and whites “would meet and blend together… intermix, and become one people” (Wald 25). He invites (the Indians to “mix with us by marriage” and grandly prophesies, “your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island” (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a “marriage” of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of th nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield.

In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a “studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage” (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of  racial, national, and patriarchal accendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a “national” literature, registers this contradiction as a tense “silence.”

I will examine this “silence” more closely in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early-Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in ihe Massachusetts (1827).  As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the “historical,” the native realm of a solid “national” literature, into the nightmare world of me “gothic,” where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as “silence” but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of “diminishing fertility” manifest itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the ineveitable “curse” invoked by the “unnatural” mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and “half-breed” figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances—white and red, civilization and nature, future and past—and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring “nightmare” invading America’s dream of itself.

At the same time, a tradition of “hybrid texts” resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same years as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to “read against” the The popularily of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson’s idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers.  Jemison’s over-looked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that…

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Injun Joe’s Ghost: The Indian Mixed-Blood in American Writing

University of Missouri Press
2004
ISBN 978-0-8262-1530-7
288 pages
6 x 9

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

What does it mean to be a “mixed-blood,” and how has our understanding of this term changed over the last two centuries? What processes have shaped American thinking on racial blending?  Why has the figure of the mixed-blood, thought too offensive for polite conversation in the nineteenth century, become a major representative of twentieth-century native consciousness?

In Injun Joe’s Ghost, Harry J. Brown addresses these questions within the interrelated contexts of anthropology, U.S. Indian policy, and popular fiction by white and mixed-blood writers, mapping the evolution of “hybridity” from a biological to a cultural category. Brown traces the processes that once mandated the mixed-blood’s exile as a grotesque or criminal outcast and that have recently brought about his ascendance as a cultural hero in contemporary Native American writing.

Because the myth of the demise of the Indian and the ascendance of the Anglo-Saxon is traditionally tied to America’s national idea, nationalist literature depicts Indian-white hybrids in images of degeneracy, atavism, madness, and even criminality. A competing tradition of popular writing, however, often created by mixed-blood writers themselves, contests these images of the outcast half-breed by envisioning “hybrid vigor,” both biologically and linguistically, as a model for a culturally heterogeneous nation.

Injun Joe’s Ghost focuses on a significant figure in American history and culture that has, until now, remained on the periphery of academic discourse. Brown offers an in-depth discussion of many texts, including dime novels and Depression- era magazine fiction, that have been almost entirely neglected by scholars. This volume also covers texts such as the historical romances of the 1820s and the novels of the twentieth-century “Native American Renaissance” from a fresh perspective. Investigating a broad range of genres and subject over two hundred year of American writing, Injun Joe’s Ghost will be useful to students and professionals in the fields of American literature, popular culture, and native studies.