Jane Johnston Schoolcraft's Sentimental Lessons: Native Literary Collaboration and Resistance

Abstract

Critical efforts to recover the oeuvre of neglected Native women writers have generally treated these authors’ engagement with sentimental social values and literary conventions as an embarrassing historical affectation that must be downplayed in order to foreground sincere expressions of subaltern protest. As can be seen from Karen L. Kilcup’s introductory remarks on the poetry of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800–1842), the earliest American Indian female author recovered to date, even influential exponents of indigenous women’s “double-voiced discourse” (6) must tactfully contain literary sentimentality’s disaffecting resonances as an imitative, Anglo-American departure from legitimately indigenous self-expression: “Although Schoolcraft writes romantic poems . . . that are indistinguishable from those of her white American and European contemporaries, she also writes poetry that affirms the power of her Indian grandfather” (5). The unease or even outright suspicion that, in Cari M. Carpenter’s assessment, “many scholars of American Indian literature and history” express when encountering sentimentality can be attributed to sentimental texts’ troubling history as “a key tool of nineteenth-century colonization” (5): “Lucy Maddox treats ‘sentimental’ as a synonym for ‘stereotypical’ . . . . [and] Robert Allen Warrior links sentimentality to assimilation” (7). This tendency to minimize American Indian sentiment also reflects a commonly held and arguably commonsense skepticism toward the authenticity of sentimental literature itself. Given scholars’ increasingly nuanced understanding of nineteenth-century women’s writing, the thematic breadth and stylistic diversity displayed by women’s poetry over the century have called into question the assumption that sentimental “women’s genres” offer a transparent, reliable representation of either gender or race. For example, contrasting the hypertextualized lyric voice of belles lettres against the subversive self-expression emanating from women’s experience of gender and racial injustice, Paula Bernat Bennett marginalizes literary sentimentality as a self-alienating echoing of eighteenth-century European males’ pensive introspection, tear-stained sympathy, and fantasies of “mother-love and home” (24). Bennett’s critical approach illustrates Mary Loeffelholz’s assertion that recent recovery efforts have privileged “authentic” lyric voices that express a “spontaneous domestic realism” with its concomitants of anger and resistance while dismissing “derivative” perspectives or overtly collaborative voices with the prejudiced themes and gendered conventions of sensibility (17).