Hope Leslie: or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

"Hope Leslie is a historical novel published in 1827 that looks back to seventeenth-century New England. It’s a useful place to start because it reflects on a longer history of American writing, especially early colonial histories. It focuses on the relationship between two young women, the Puritan Hope Leslie and the Pequot Magawisca, as their friendship and loyalties are tested amid rising conflict between white settlers and the region’s Indigenous inhabitants. The literary critic György Lukács argued that the genre of the historical novel —with Walter Scott as his primary example—explores the lives of ordinary people against the backdrop of major events as a means of thinking about how historical forces shape human consciousness, and how a past marked by schisms and conflict could produce a shared national heritage or identity. Lukács’s framework clarifies what makes Sedgwick’s novel stand out, along with several related works, including James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans and Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok. It’s particularly interesting to read this trio together. All three took Scott as an explicit model; all three want to remember, retain, and often appropriate elements of Indigenous cultures. And yet all three could also be said to reinforce the trope of the “Vanishing Indian,” or the idea that declining Native American cultures would inevitably give way to an emerging modern, American identity. But Hope Leslie bears special mention and attention because it also contains a significant challenge to the self-justificatory project of Puritan historiography, which so often depicted Native peoples as demonic savages standing in the way of a holy errand. In a crucial scene, Sedgwick has Magawisca re-narrate the Pilgrims’ 1637 attack on a Pequot village, celebrated as a divinely sanctioned military victory in William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation but revealed by Magawisca as a brutal massacre of Indigenous civilians. Hope and Magawisca represent their respective cultures but also stand apart from them, witnessing what Sedgwick characterizes as the narrowness of both Pilgrim and Pequot patriarchy. These central characters become icons of Sedgwick’s vision of the novel—perhaps especially the novel written by women—as having the power to interrupt self-serving national amnesia. This is a theme I’ll return to in my final pick. Yes, and while I try to follow Edgar Allan Poe’s model and cultivate a discerning disdain for Boston, I’ll admit it is fun to teach this material here, near so many significant sites. The New Bedford Whaling Museum , Walden Pond, and The House of the Seven Gables are some of my favorite places to connect with literary Massachusetts. I often say to students that, in some ways, the very idea of nineteenth-century American novels could seem sort of unlikely: the U.S. didn’t have the landed gentry’s social milieu that laid the scene for Jane Austen’s novels or the millennium of monarchical strife that provided fodder for Scott. The U.S. had, well, Massachusetts. But authors like Sedgwick and Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized that the Puritans—those grim, boring prudes—were actually pretty interesting for the intensity of their convictions, their passions, the brazenness of their hypocrisies, and the fundamental conflict between their vision of a “new” world and the Indigenous people who already populated it. Hawthorne is also a good link to the Transcendentalists (e.g., Ralph Waldo Emerson , Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau , and Bronson Alcott), because he recognized that Puritans were, like those subsequent nineteenth-century reformers, utopians of a sort. Reading The Scarlet Letter alongside Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance , for example, makes it easier to see how the philosophical and political ferment of the 1830s through the 1850s in and around Concord, Massachusetts—efforts to rethink gender roles, work, and the obligations of the individual in the face of unjust laws—were in some ways a continuation of the Puritan experiment, even as they were also a rejection of its dogma. Those novels, along with Thoreau’s Walden , Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Transcendental Wild Oats , and Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century, make a nice syllabus of greater Boston utopianisms."