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In his study On Human Finery, Quentin Bell observes that "fashion is at best a tyrannically democratic force" (63). The phrase "tyrannically democratic" is paradoxical, of course, since it associates the idea of an absolute leader with the idea of majority rule. In early nineteenth-century America, the statement would have appeared especially paradoxical because the recent American Revolution was widely interpreted as the triumph of democracy over tyranny. Bell suggests, though, that, at least where clothing is concerned, democracy can be a form of tyranny. When a society imposes an official or unofficial dress code on its members and then attempts to impose that dress on other cultures, it is acting as a tyrant; subtly but aggressively, it is insisting on its own rightness and superiority. A strong cultural belief in the propriety of uniform dress may indicate a deeper conviction that one's ideology and customs are right. Bell's observation calls into question the degree of freedom posited by democracy, which can indeed become tyranny unless it contains a measure of respect for cultural or individual difference.
Interpretations of early nineteenth-century literature can benefit from an understanding of the connection between tyrannical democracy and clothing. Much of the recent criticism of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) has focused on the novel's ambivalent attitude toward Native Americans, which poses a historical challenge to the democracy that the United States held up as an essential nation-defining ideal in the wake of the American Revolution. Dana Nelson argues that "Hope Leslie is finally equivocal. While Sedgwick clearly sees the necessity of reenvisioning racial constructs, she is so clearly invested in Anglo-America's historical inheritance that she cannot resolve the `Indian problem' in any meaningful way for her contemporary readers" (202). Douglas Ford also concentrates on the novel's "problematic nature concerning questions of race," using the ambiguity of Sedgwick's language to demonstrate the novel's "tension...contrary to the intentions Sedgwick outlines in her preface" and to underscore the novel's "complexity" (82). Both critics reveal the crisis of the contemporary reader who wants to locate a resolution to the problems of race that the novel embodies.
The novel's ambivalence applies not only to the conflict between Native American and Euro-American culture but to other parallel conflicts, notably the power imbalance between...