The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (review)

Abstract

Renée Bergland has provided an insightful reading of a particular motif in American literature that presents new perspectives for those interpreters of American literature who teach American Studies-grounded survey courses in high school and undergraduate college classrooms. However, one must accept Bergland's premise—which many, but not all, American Studies professors do—that American "land is haunted because it is stolen" (9) in order to accept her most compelling and unique conclusions. Her broad understanding of American intellectual history informs her initial discussion of the topic of "Indian Ghosts and American Subjects," and her frame of reference ranges chronologically in the balance of the text from Cotton Mather and Mary Rowlandson to Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, and Samuel Woodworth to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In the final chapter, she engages in a concluding discussion concerning the "Spectral Indian" which illustrates its argument through continuing reference to Stephen King's Pet Sematary (1983) and to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977). Although her informed discussion deftly justifies the relevance both of King's popular culture and of Silko's work of high culture in the same paragraph (indeed, often in the same sentence!), her discussion of Ceremony is not as nuanced and insightful as her treatment of earlier American writers in the text.