The Vanishing of Indian Princesses, or The Sentimental Transformation of the Pocahontas Myth

Abstract

The Indian Princess is a recurring figure in the sentimental plots of historical novels on the white-Indian conflict in post-revolutionary America. In Susanna Rowson's Reuben and Rachel (1798), or in Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827), and Joseph Hart's Miriam Coffin (1934), such a figure shares the "vanishing Indian" paradigm of sacrifice and disappearence, but with gendered and racial specifications that define the notions of republican womanhood and monoracial family. By comparing the Indian princess's fictional destiny with that of the sentimental heroine, the essay investigates similarities and differences, and focuses on "rape" as the event whose absence, or presence, provides narrative evidence of the new order in matters of gender and race.