Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-1830 by Tim Fulford

Abstract

MLR, I03.I, 2oo8 195 Richmond Lattimore's 1951 translation: 'The tongue of aman is a twisty thing [. .J The sort of thingyou say is the thing thatwill be said toyou' (Iliad, XX.248-50). There was a fairsprinkling of typos: 'superns' (p. i8), 'scultpture' (p. 35), 'Rapidilty' and 'Bernard' (p. 58), etc.; and the index entry for Waller is incomplete. Despite all the preceding reservations, this is an important study of literary translations which minutely covers much ground between the Maronolatry ofVida and the 'Oy7ypotavia ofMadame Dacier. Sowerby firmlykeeps 'his eye on theobject' and turns ours back toDryden's Virgil and Pope's Homer with a renewed zest. SWANSEA UNIVERSITY MICHAEL J. FRANKLIN Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-I830. By TIM FULFORD. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. x+ 3I8 pp- ?50. ISBN 987-0-I9-927337-9. Tim Fulford' ssubtitle reflectsa fascinating series of relationships, a cultural exchange inwhich North American Indians play a rarelyconsidered but, he argues, a formative role in the aesthetics and politics ofRomanticism. Concerned as he iswith represen tations,he begins with a section on 'FactualWriting', an examination of some of the accounts which proliferate inhis chosen period. The year I756 marks the startof the Seven Years War and alliances between theBritish and the Six Nations which led to increasing contact and co-operation, and so tomore closely informed narratives such as those of Samuel Hearne, JamesAdair, andWilliam Bartram. But itwas also a two-way exchange; JohnNorton, aka Teyoninhokarawen, an Edinburgh-educated Mohawk chieftain and later major in theBritish Army, commanded Regency drawing rooms but also translated The Lady of the Lake. Indeed, there is a distinctive Scottish strand in themix, with the fateof the clans inspiring JamesMacpherson and in turn prompting inThomas Campbell's Gertrude ofWyoming (I809) 'an imaginary stage' on which to play out their losses.When the hero ofMackenzie's The Man of the World (I 773) joins a band of Indians, theCherokees quote Ossian while embodying themanly virtues often seen as sadly lacking in the governing classes at home. With the development of natural sciences, these positive images of the redman had to compete with supposedly more empirical studies such as Samuel George Morton's CraniaAmericana (I839), enlistingtravellers' tales in the service of racist and colonial judgements often bogus and bigoted in their conclusions. In fact there is such awealth of potentially relevant information thatFulford has difficultyinorganizing it,though the second of his threeparts, 'BritishFiction', is the heart of thebook and the site of hismost challenging claims as thewriters themselves respond to more complex perceptions of theirsubject, a process in which 'stereotyped savages' often become 'ambiguous heroes' (p. 102). Though he discusses novels by Smollett, Robert Bage, and Charlotte Smith, it is thepoetrywhich reallyengages him; Southey, Coleridge, and their fellow Pantisocrats may never have made thebanks of theSusquehannah, but the effectof their research was deep and lasting. The Rime of the AncientMariner 'could not have been written ifColeridge had not readHearne's account ofNative American Shaminism' (p. I6 I), and a chapter examines itseffecton thepoet's sense of how theobject world isaffectedby superstition and guilt, both here and in 'Christabel' and in that curious collaboration with Wordsworth, 'The Three Graves', where Coleridge's headnote specifically referencesHearne indefending the 'exclusively psychological' merits of theballad. Wordsworth's familiarity with Hearne and Bartram can also be traced inLyrical Ballads. IfThe AncientMariner is themost profound literary response toBritish accounts ofNative Americans, it isalso, Fulford concedes, themost oblique, but Southey's Madoc (i 805) is set inFlorida, though this I96 Reviews time theparallels arewith the Welsh rather than the Scots, and Campbell's Gertrude centres on amassacre perpetrated byMohawks led by thewhite Major JohnButler. Already there is amove away from the radical representations of the I790s towards aweaker Romanticism, seen in Mrs Hemans andMrs Barbauld and perhaps inFeni more Cooper (forHazlitt 'theAmerican Walter Scott'), though the focus here is on theBritish, but tocomplete his tripartitestructure, in 'NativeAmerican Writing' Ful fordallows Norton, William Apes, JohnHunter (to give them their more manageable English names), and others a say,drawing on theirown hybridity in effect to decon struct some of the stereotypes. In an already overcrowded book it ishard to do them justice, though...