Domestic Frontier Romance, or, How the Sentimental Heroine Became White

Abstract

According to the dominant literary critical tradition, the designation "domestic frontier romance" presents a contradiction in terms. Most accounts of American literary history proceed on the assumption that the cultural impulse behind the frontier romance opposes that responsible for domestic fiction.' Deliberately shaking off the conventions associated with the homebound novels of European middle-class women, American frontier fiction tells the story of racial warfare set on the line between settlement and wilderness. Gender and genre coalesce here in a familiar manner. The heart of the frontier romance is a masculine hero, neither genteel nor marriageable, who flees the settlement for the freedom of the "virgin land." Indeed, its story is often told as if the frontier novel itself were one of Mark Twain's late-nineteenth-century boy-heroes, turning its back on "sivilization" to "light out for the Territory" (Twain 362). As Leslie Fiedler tells us, the genre veered from "society to nature or nightmare" in order to "avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child-bearing" and the entire realm of the "chafing and restrictive" woman-centered home (25-26). Where Fiedler seems to celebrate the genre, Richard Slotkin and Philip Fisher, by contrast, have generated strident critiques of the culture of racialized violence to which this literature contributed. But despite their differences, all these accounts have persistently defined "male" frontier romance against "female" domestic fiction. It is not surprising, therefore, that this critical tradition has had little to say about the frontier fiction of such women as Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick. These novels concern themselves not only with Anglo-Indian warfare, but also with the question of how one conducts a courtship under such conditions. They thus meet the generic standard of domestic fiction as well. Recent literary criticism has sought to redress the neglect of women's frontier fiction by recovering these important works from near oblivion. But curiously enough, much of the existing scholarship on Child's Hobomok (1824) and Sedgwick's Hope Leslie (1827) seems to have reproduced the antithesis between