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This essay examines the Virginia Company's advertisement of the marriage between Pocahontas and John Rolfe, an English settler. The symbolic promotion of Anglo-Indian intermarriage served as a substitute for actual miscegenation as a colonial practice and concealed the reality of open hostility, xenophobia, and endogamy in the Virginia colony.
Disney's recently released animated film Pocahontas continues the historical and literary trend of adopting her as a symbolic representation of the sexual availability and cultural tractability of native American women to European colonizers. This particular representation of Anglo-Indian miscegenation is only the most recent step in American preoccupation with the figure of Pocahontas; there has been a long history of novels, poems, paintings, sculptures, songs, and plays based on the Pocahontas legend, a history that emphasizes the amorous and exotic elements of her relationship with the colonists. For example, Vachel Lindsay, in his poem "Our Mother Pocahontas," pronounces the value of Pocahontas's intermarriage in American claims to the land: "We rise from out the soul of her / [...] Our mother, Pocahontas" (lines 28-33). Similarly, Hart Crane proclaims that Pocahontas constitutes "the natural body of American fertility" (qtd. in Young 408). American writers from James Barker to John Barth represent Pocahontas as a figure whose overtly sexualized body allows for the synthesis of the native and European. Works such as Philip Moeller's Pokey; or the Beautiful Legend of the Amorous Indian indicate that the myth of miscegenation constitutes the basis of artistic interest in Pocahontas. Philip Young argues that Pocahontas's rescue of John Smith and marriage to John Rolfe allows her to "stand with the most appealing of our saints" (385). Mary Dearborn notes the negative influence of this myth of intermarriage: "The ethnic woman writer sees in the Pocahontas metaphor both her sexual and her ethnic oppression" (100). Similarly, Rayna Green argues that Pocahontas is an "intolerable metaphor" (714) that situates native women as the "object of lust to white men" (703). Robert Tilton dates the interest in Pocahontas from the Revolutionary period, "when Americans had begun to scan the colonial past in search of figures [. . .] who could be rewarded retroactively for their proto-nationalist sentiments" (33). However, the problematic conjunction of gender, ethnicity, and inheritance in Anglo-Indian intermarriage was a part...