SOURCE: “Magawisca's Body of Knowledge: Nation-Building in Hope Leslie,” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring, 1999, pp. 41-56.

In the following essay, Stadler explains that, by investing narrative authority in the figure of Magawisca, Sedgwick uses an individual to dramatize public issues of conflict between the colonists and Native Americans in her novel Hope Leslie.

It has now become something of a critical commonplace in American cultural and literary studies to argue that the conceptual division between public and private spheres—a paradigm which has been particularly influential in work on the antebellum era—is artificial, ideological, and largely designed to enforce a social hierarchy between the genders. It has even been persuasively argued that the repeated critique of this binarism by feminist and other critics has unintentionally helped to maintain its authority.¹ But before doing away with this dualism as a frame of analysis, we...