INDIANNESS AND WOMANHOOD: TEXTUALIZING THE FEMALE AMERICAN SELF Except where reference is made to the work of others, the work described in this dissertation is my own or was done in collaboration with my advisory committee. This dissertation does not include proprietary or classified information. ______________________________ Cathy Rex Certificate of Approval: ___________________________ ___________________________ Penelope Ingram Hilary E. Wyss, Chair Associate Professor Associate Professor English English ___________________________ ___________________________ Cedrick May Kathryn H. Braund Associate Professor Professor English History ______________________________ George T. Flowers Interim Dean Graduate School INDIANNESS AND WOMANHOOD: TEXTUALIZING THE FEMALE AMERICAN SELF Cathy Rex A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Auburn University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Auburn, Alabama August 9, 2008 INDIANNESS AND WOMANHOOD: TEXTUALIZING THE FEMALE AMERICAN SELF Cathy Rex Permission is granted to Auburn University to make copies of this dissertation at its discretion, upon the request of individuals or institutions and at their expense. The author reserves all publication rights. ___________________________________ Signature of Author August 9, 2008_______________________ iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT INDIANNESS AND WOMANHOOD: TEXTUALIZING THE FEMALE AMERICAN SELF Cathy Rex Doctor of Philosophy, August 9, 2008 (M.A., University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1996) (B.S., Auburn University, 1992) 327 total typed pages Directed by Hilary E. Wyss This dissertation 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.‖ That is, through their iv 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 but also by aggressively insisting upon a more complex relationship between race and gender within the same texts, women writers like Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and ―Unca Eliza Winkfield‖ of The Female American were able to gain control over their own identities. My goal with this dissertation project is to bring often-neglected early American texts by women writers into focus as texts that actively participated in the production of racial, national, gendered, and historical discourses that ultimately provided the framework for American identity. v Style manual used: Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Computer software used: Microsoft Word (Office 2007 edition) vi TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................... vii INTRODUCTION Eve in the New World: Indianness and Anglo-European Womanhood .................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE Indians, Images, and Identity: The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal, Mary Rowlandson, and James Printer ..................................................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER TWO Masculine Imagery and Feminine Voice in Revolutionary America: Paul Revere‘s ―Sword-in-Hand‖ seal and Ann Eliza Bleecker‘s Domesticated Nationalism ........................................................................................................................ 82 CHAPTER THREE ―Mixed-Blood‖ Masculinity: Thomas Rolfe and Charles Hobomok Conant .............................................................................................................................. 161 CHAPTER FOUR ―Mixed-Blood‖ Womanhood: Pocahontas, The Female American, and Feminine Authorial Identity ............................................................................................................................. 221 EPILOGUE Curtains, Earrings, and Indians: Texts of Today ................................................................................................................. 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 302 vii LIST OF FIGURES 1. Adam and Eve in America. Engraving by Theodor de Bry in Thomas Harriot‘s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land Virginia (1590) ................................................................................. 4 2. The Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal (1629) ................................................................ 19 3. The Present Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (2008) .................... 22 4. Wax Impression of the Original Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629) ......... 31 5. Impression of Governor Leverett‘s Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal in Paper (1672) ................................................................................................................. 32 6. Governor Edmund Andros‘ Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, side one (1686) ........................................................................................................................... 33 7. Governor Edmund Andros‘ Seal, side two (1686) ....................................................... 35 8. Samuel Green‘s Printer‘s Cut of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal (1672) ............. 36 9. John Foster‘s Printer‘s Cut of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Seal (1675) ................. 41 10. President Dudley‘s Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1686) ........................... 45 11. Paul Revere‘s ―Sword-in-Hand‖ Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1775) .................................................................. 85 viii 12. Various Renditions of the Revised Indian Seal of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1780-1885) ...................................................................................... 104 13. The Sedgeford Hall Portrait. Artist Unknown (19th century) ................................................................................. 167 14. Pocahontas‘ Earrings ................................................................................................ 173 15. Matoaka als Rebecca. Engraving by Simon Van de Passe (1616) ............................................................... 226 16. Captain John Smith. Engraving by Simon Van de Passe (1616) ............................................................... 231 17. Matoaka als Rebecca. Engraving by W. Richardson after Van de Passe (late 18thc).................................. 232 18. The Booton Hall Portrait. Artist unknown (mid 18thc) ..................................................................................... 233 19. Pocahontas. Painting by Mary Woodbury Jones (1738) .............................................................. 235 20. Pocahontas. Painting by Mary Ellen Howe (1994) ...................................................................... 236 21. Eiakintomino in St. James Park. Engraving from Michael Van Meer‘s Album Amicorum (1614) .............................. 250 22. Title Page of The Female American, London Edition (1767) .................................. 260 ix INTRODUCTION EVE IN THE NEW WORLD: INDIANNESS AND ANGLO-EUROPEAN WOMANHOOD In 1590 Theodor de Bry‘s folio edition of Thomas Harriot‘s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, complete with copperplate engravings based on water color drawings by John White, was first issued.1 It was to be the first part of America, De Bry‘s sweeping series on the discovery and exploration of the New World. Although Harriot had published his Briefe and True Report two years earlier as an unpresuming quarto volume without illustrations, it was not until the publication of De Bry‘s edition with the engravings, which was released separately in four different languages—Latin, English, German, and French—that Harriot‘s work assumed the form that is today celebrated as ―one of the monuments of early modern printing‖ (B. Smith 500) and as one ―The Adventurers, Favorers, and Well Willers of the Enterprise for the 1 Thomas Harriot, while better know as a mathematician and scientist, made his ethnographical notes, the basis for his Report, during Sir Richard Grenville‘s expedition of 1585-6 to establish a colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of the Carolina Outer Banks, then called Virginia ―in honor of Queen Elizabeth, who granted Raleigh a permit to settle there‖ (Hulton vii). Harriot‘s duties were, ―to make astronomical observations, advise on navigation for the voyage, and, on land in close cooperation with John White, to study the native Indians and natural products of the country