Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-189) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Indians on paper -- Indians, images, and identity: the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal, James printer, and Mary Rowlandson's praying Indians -- Revising the Indian of the seal: Anglo masculinity, Paul Revere's "Sword-in-hand" seal, and Ann Eliza Bleecker -- Transculturated, "mixed-blooded" womanhood: Pocahontas and The female American -- "Mixed-blooded" masculinity: Thomas Rolfe and Charles Hobomok Conant -- Conclusion: curtains, earrings, and Indians: text of today.
Summary:
Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers. Women such as Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Rex argues, co-opted and revised images of Indianness such as those found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the numerous variations of Pocahontas’s image based on Simon Van de Passe’s original 1616 engraving. Doing so allowed them to posit their own identities and presumed superiority as American women writers. Sometimes ugly, occasionally problematic, and often patently racist, the Indian writings of these women nevertheless question the masculinist and Eurocentric discourses governing an American identity that has always had Indianness at its core. Rather than treating early American images and icons as ancillary to literary works, Rex places them in conversation with one another, suggesting that these well-known narratives and images are mutually constitutive. The result is a new, more textually inclusive perspective on the field of early American studies.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.