The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 by Sandra Wilson Smith Ashley Reed SMITH, SANDRA WILSON. The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2018. 280 pp. $55.00 hardcover; $55.00 e-book. It is perhaps fitting that Sandra Wilson Smith’s The Action-Adventure Heroine: Rediscovering an American Literary Character, 1697–1895 should have appeared in the same year that saw the death of the groundbreaking literary historian Nina Baym. The Action-Adventure Heroine is clearly inspired by Baym’s crucial works of literary recovery, including Woman’s Fiction (1978) and Women Writers of the American West (2011). Like Baym, Smith seeks to reshape our understanding of American literary history, and particularly of the role of women in that history, by unearthing a forgotten female archetype. Smith’s work traces a character she calls “the action-adventure heroine” from the captivity narratives of Puritan New England to the detective stories of Gilded Age dime novels. “This bold heroine,” Smith asserts, “tramps alone through the forests, demonstrates tremendous physical strength, braves dangers without hesitation, enters the public realm to earn money, and even kills her enemy when necessary” (1). While other critics have discussed gender-bending female archetypes such as the tomboy and the masculine girl, the figure Smith examines is characterized by her participation in an “extended, physically rigorous journey” (5) and, in many cases, by her willingness to use physical violence in defense of herself or others. To recover this forgotten figure, Smith arranges her text chronologically, with the first three chapters exploring the role of the frontier heroine in the colonial and early national eras. Chapter 1 unearths the action-adventure heroine as she appears in Indian captivity narratives, whether factual (the Puritan goodwife Hannah Dustan), fictional (the unnamed protagonist of the Panther captivity), or somewhere in between (the “fierce woman of Crab Orchard” [43] in early histories of Daniel Boone). In addition to tending her home, the woman in each of these narratives is also called upon to violently defend it, usually from marauding (and ambiguously motivated) Indians. Just as the dangers of the frontier extenuated female violence in the captivity narrative, America’s wars of national independence provided a fictional warrant for female adventure. In her second chapter, Smith locates the action-adventure heroine in tales of female soldiers and sailors, including Mercy Otis Warren’s The Ladies of Castile (1790), Herman [End Page 324] Mann’s The Female Review (1797), and the anonymously authored The Female Marine (1815). In these texts, the female heroine who fights in the Revolution or the War of 1812 “suggests metaphorically that Americans—men and women together—were building a powerful, model nation” (55). Smith’s third chapter addresses one of the most popular literary forms of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries: the seduction novel. In discussions of The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1789–90) and The Female Wanderer (1824), Smith highlights how wandering heroines of the early national period repudiated the figure of the cast-off victim of seduction by leaving home to pursue their true (and unfailingly faithful) loves. “In these anti-seduction tales,” Smith asserts, “women have the strength, intellect, and moral fiber to protect and promote bourgeois values, which contribute to the development of a strong nation” (87). The next three chapters of The Action-Adventure Heroine address antebellum texts, where the presence of this archetypal figure, Smith suggests, has been obscured by a longstanding critical focus on sentimental domesticity. Smith devotes her fourth chapter to the early novels of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A New-England Tale (1822), Redwood (1824), Hope Leslie (1827), and The Linwoods (1835). While Sedgwick’s action-adventure heroines (including A New-England Tale’s Jane Elton, Redwood’s Deborah Lenox and Ellen Bruce, Hope Leslie’s Magawisca and eponymous heroine, and The Linwoods’s Isabella Linwood, Rose, and Mrs. Bengin) are rarely physically violent, they do participate in extended journeys that take them “beyond the boundaries of the home [to] perform active feats of heroism in public spaces” (102). Chapter 5 turns to western frontier novels of the 1840s and 1850s which...