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ON A VISIT TO THE Jamestown settlement in Virginia, I saw a young, white boy, accompanied by his parents, who was looking at the statue of Pocahontas, a pleasant bronze of a girl marking the entrance to the grounds. The boy said, "Indian," and spat at the statue; the parents said nothing in reprimand or comment. I was startled by both his hostility and their silence. That moment crystallized my curiosity about the connection between the interactions of the earliest English settlers and the indigenous population and the development of modern codes of race and class. As a feminist scholar of Renaissance drama, my interest was further provoked by the discovery that Pocahontas had actually seen a masque at the Jacobean court, a seemingly fortuitous intersection that offered the possibility of access to Pocahontas's reaction to the spectacle of English culture.(1) To examine the intertwining grids of race, class, and gender in the early seventeenth century, I decided to try to reconstruct the perspective of Pocahontas, an outsider, albeit a highly privileged one, who actually saw English society herself. My initial purpose was altered by the discovery of the restrictions of the documentary record. Pocahontas did not produce her own narrative, and the documents written by Englishmen display a remarkable indifference to her opinion of them. This absence of curiosity about the judgment of a woman and a Powhatan demonstrates a central aspect of the process that establishes the hierarchy of subject and other in which the "reciprocal claim of the other" is never acknowledged or even imagined (Beauvoir
1949
1974, xx). The limitations of the documents do not allow the production of a narrative of a subject who viewed and judged the English but do allow the tracing of her shadow within European texts, disturbances that mark an alternative presence. I focus on those disturbances in trying to discover, not the voice of the other, but traces of her presence.(2)
The masque and contemporary comment on it provide a small example of the processes of erasure that occur repeatedly. On January 18, 1617, John Chamberlain reported in a letter to his friend Dudley Carleton, English ambassador to The Hague, "The Virginian woman Poca-huntas, with her father counsaillor hath ben with the King and graciously...