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Abstract
My dissertation places the work of three early Native American women writers—S. Alice Callahan, E. Pauline Johnson, and Sarah Winnemucca—in dialogue with texts by Lydia Maria Child, Ann Stephens, and Maria Susanna Cummins. Although these Native and Anglo-American writers are usually studied separately, I argue that by examining them together we can expand predominant conceptions of sentimentality and acknowledge anger as its long neglected counterpart.
This is a project not about how anger was felt by Anglo and Native American women in the nineteenth century but how it is defined, performed, and represented in certain texts. I treat anger as a system of relations, a mark of the connection between self and community that is always informed by race and gender. In sentimental literature as well as the conduct manuals, phrenological tracts, and psychological studies of the period, anger oscillates between being a frightening, foreign entity and a “natural” element of every American. Anger assumes multiple forms in my analysis, including maternal rage, national rebellion, and rhetorical irony.
Although I would argue that anger is a neglected element of a wide range of sentimental texts, early literature by Native American women is a particularly important subject for such a study. Often represented by Anglo-Americans as savages or stoics, early indigenous writers had the difficult task of mounting a respectable protest that would not be reduced to such racial stereotypes. These authors faced an additional challenge given existing sanctions against certain forms of female anger. Together, these texts' visions and revisions of anger amplify our understanding of the literary and political dimensions of sentimentality. My intent is not to propose a new definition of sentimentality or to track its precise evolution over the course of the nineteenth century; rather, I seek to broaden our conception of the genre to include anger-and to consider why popular conceptions of sentimentality rarely do so.
