Indian Wife Research Articles

The Manifestation of Psychological Alienation in Jean Rhys'Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which has been analysed by academics from a number of perspectives, is generally acknowledged to be a prelude to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). In Charlotte Bronte's novel, Rochester's insane West Indian wife lives in the attic and prevents Jane from marrying him. When she ultimately perishes in the fire she starts, Rochester's home is burned down and he is rendered blind, but Jane is now free to marry Rochester. The only way to portray the insane person in Jane Eyre is from the outside. The insane West Indian wife is utterly repulsive and wicked in the view of writer and Rochester. In fact, Jane is unable to distinguish between the madwoman and the beast when she first sees them grovelling on all fours in chapter sixteen of the book. In this episode, the insane woman attacks Rochester like a hyena with swollen features. Wide Sargasso Sea is a sympathetic portrayal of the life of Rochester's insane wife, including everything from her upbringing in the West Indies, her Creole and Catholic upbringing, her courting and early marriage to the dishonest Rochester, to her last decline into madness and incarceration in England. It is obvious that in many ways Rhys' situation and the West Indian wife's situation are similar. She has created a "counter-text," a supplement to Bronte's book that fills in the "missing" testimonies and clarifies the topics that Bronte glosses over, to offer the foreign wife's side of the story. The present article focuses on how the female protagonist in Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys experiences psychological alienation and experiences loneliness, meaninglessness, and grief.

Managing domestic life and dream career in Kavita Daswani’s The Village Bride of Beverly Hills

Kavita Daswani’s second novel The Village Bride of Beverly Hills, also published as Everything Happen for a Reason is one of her romantic comedies. The novel deals with Priya married to Sanjay. After marriage she moves to Los Angeles with her husband. In America she encounters her husband’s demanding parents, who want her to be a good Indian wife, and is expected to fulfill all the needs of his family members. Priya wants to be a journalist, but her husband’s family forbids it. She eventually takes a job as a receptionist at a Hollywood Gossip magazine. She turns herself as an American by wearing western attire and begins to rethink the role of women in society and her role as a wife. When she gets a chance to interview a Hollywood star, she becomes a successful reporter. Her new career sets her newly found views of her family and husband, leading to confrontation.

A Transnational Approach to Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

Colonialism and post-colonialism have led to the development of transnationalism that is the interconnectivity between people and the economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states. When transnational approach is applied to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), it allows researchers to analyse how transnationalism impacts on gender, class, culture and race both in host and home countries. The traditional cultural heritage of India and British imperialism’s impact on Indian society are told through dual identities of the narrator Saleem Sinai who has double parents. Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, a Western-trained physician, scorns his wife Naseem who could not notice the difference between mercurochrome and blood stains. As a traditional Indian wife Naseem’s response to the immoral sexual desires of her husband who has adopted the Western culture is a reaction to British cultural environment in India. Saleem’s mother Amina’s cultural conflict caused by colonialism is emphasized because she has to carry on her traditional culture-specific daily habits in her new house bought from a colonialist without changing the order established by Methwold. Despite gaining their independence, Indians cannot get rid of the impact of British colonialism. In terms of transnationalism, Indians are considered as undeveloped, ignorant and wild by British.

The "Forgotten Era": Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier

The "Forgotten Era"Race and Gender in Ann Stephens's Dime Novel Frontier Rebecca S. Wingo In the summer of 1860 the House of Beadle and Adams (HBA) launched their first dime novel, starting a genre filled with sensational, typically Western adventure stories woven with a delicate layer of romance and lessons about Victorian morality and racial stereotypes. The first among many rival dime novel publishers, HBA's inaugural novel, Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter (June 9, 1860) by Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens, chronicles the relationship between Malaeska and her mixed-blood son. Two days before Malaeska's release, the publishing house ran an advertisement in the New York Tribune: "BOOKS FOR THE MILLION! A dollar book for a dime."1 Before they shut down their printing presses in 1898, HBA alone published 3,158 separate dimes.2 Despite their significant contribution to the genre of Western literature, dime novels were replaced as quickly as they started by the cloth-bound book, leading some scholars to term the dime novel era from 1860 to 1900 the "forgotten era."3 Stephens contributed six more dime novels between 1860 and 1864, ending with The Indian Queen, the third novel in a trilogy about a mixed-race woman who returns to the Seneca Nation to assume leadership after the chief (her father) dies. On the surface, Stephens's first and last novels are extraordinarily similar: they are about Native American tribes in the Northeast during the colonial period, center on women, and discuss interracial sex. Since HBA published them in 1860 and 1864 respectively, one might even link them to Civil War era racial ideologies. However, this connection elides a more probing read of the racial subtext. Malaeska actually originated in 1836, not 1860, as a short story called "The Jockey Cap," published in Stephens's first magazine, Portland Magazine. Comparing Malaeska to The Indian Queen highlights the cultural and social shifts that occurred in mid-nineteenth-century America. Between the 1830s and the 1860s, racial theories began shifting away from the [End Page 121] belief that Native Americans could assimilate into "civilized" white society, favoring instead the idea that no amount of social uplift could separate Native Americans from their "savage" blood.4 While Malaeska reflects more of the 1830s mentalité, The Indian Queen reflects the growing emphasis on scientific racism. These two dime novels tell a national story as they reveal dominant American attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. They also illuminate the cultural importance of female authors who used the power of suggestion in their narratives, both to challenge and to confirm the confines of Victorian gender roles, using Native Americans as proxy stand-ins for white women's liberation. ann stephens and the history of the dime novel Before we can understand the narratives, we must first understand the author and the period in which she wrote. It is no coincidence that HBA chose Stephens's work as their first dime novel. Her prolific writing career with a wide audience made her the ideal choice to boost their immediate popularity and success. Stephens grew up in a solid middle-class family. Her father, John Winterbotham, worked a steady job at Humphreysville Manufactoring Company in Connecticut, which ensured that Stephens would receive an excellent education. She read voraciously at the public library in what her biographer Paola Gemme calls a "self-imposed literary apprenticeship." She married Edward Stephens, a local merchant, in 1831. The couple moved to Maine in 1834 and started their own regional magazine called Portland Magazine. Edward served as publisher, Ann as editor and main contributor.5 Stephens's initial foray into editing, literature, and writing launched her career. The couple moved to New York City in 1837, where she became the associate editor of publisher William Snowden's Ladies Companion, a monthly magazine. In addition to contributing literature to the magazine, Stephens increased circulation from 3,000 to 17,000 readers per month. Her work for Ladies Companion further propelled her success: she went on to hold an associate editor position at Graham's Magazine alongside Edgar Allan Poe in 1841; co-edited Lady's World of Fashion, which later became Peterson's Magazine (1842–53...

Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship by Linda M. Morra

Reviewed by: Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship by Linda M. Morra Tanis MacDonald UNARRESTED ARCHIVES: CASE STUDIES IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CANADIAN WOMEN’S AUTHORSHIP, by Linda M. Morra. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 244 pp. $70.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $29.95 ebook. At the Affecting Women’s Writing in Canada and Québec Today conference held at the Université de Montréal in November 2013, poet and essayist Erín Moure noted, “It’s so hard for women to leave a trace.”1 [End Page 288] She was speaking about a series of chapbooks produced in the 1980s by the Feminist Caucus of the League of Canadian Poets: stapled booklets with bright paper covers enclosing typed or early word-processed pages of feminist writing. Those booklets, made for wide distribution and fashioned by expedience, are fraying; they may not last for more than another few years. Moure’s comment, made in post-presentation discussion, has rung in my head ever since and seems destined to ring there a little longer as I consider feminist archival theory and its satisfyingly subversive practices in Linda M. Morra’s Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship. In Canada, where a decade of conservative government cutbacks has profoundly threatened the existence and breadth of the national repository, Library and Archives Canada, the importance of preserving different histories through a wide variety of archival practices has become vital not only to scholarship but also, and more fundamentally, to acknowledging, recording, and asserting the significant materiality of those histories. Whenever I teach, I emphasize to students that the texts they are holding are in print only because a chain of people throughout history thought the texts good enough to print and to keep in print: a perpetually precarious state, especially if the text is more than two decades old and written by a woman whose background and politics are at odds with mainstream corridors of power. Unarrested Archives delves into women writers’ withheld, refused, or redistributed archival materials with an emphasis upon the nation-state’s reliance on official archives to shape its narrative. As Morra points out in her introduction, the dynamics of the archive—including its necessary partiality—also form the idea of the citizen or who can “say the nation,” and women are not always considered citizens with a say. “Unarrested” literary archives, repositories of papers that are strategically positioned by the author, assert that citizenship has been painstakingly negotiated by these women writers precisely because the nation-state has rendered their citizenship limited or non-negotiable on the basis not only of their gender but also their race, class, or sexual identity. The list of women writers chosen by Morra as her case studies reads like a who’s who of Canadian female writers: Pauline Johnson, Emily Carr, Sheila Watson, Jane Rule, and M. NourbeSe Philip. Morra’s writers demonstrate that canonicity is a double-edged sword; while their written texts are problematically preserved, their archives note the decades of struggle to assert the value of their voices, the writers’ desire to control their own narratives (both literary and lived), and their understanding that female citizenship is forever under the threat of erasure. I have been teaching long enough to see Johnson’s work resurrected in the late 1990s and early 2000s by feminist and First Nations scholars and now see that [End Page 289] her scholarly star has begun to wane. Morra’s investigation into Johnson’s popular performances of her politically accusatory poem “A Cry From an Indian Wife” (1885) in the years after the Northwest Rebellion as an archive (with due reference to Ann Cvetkovich) is enlivened by the texts of public protest coming out of the Idle No More movement. Morra’s work with the archives of Carr and Watson, the two modernists in the study, gives intriguing consideration to their choice to enlist male allies as designated archivists and prompts a welcome discussion about how men can be respectful allies in the political fight to preserve women’s voices. Carr and Watson are good examples of female authors who knew that they could not...

Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women’s Authorship by Linda M. Morra

Linda M. Morra. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Canadian Women's Authorship. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 244 pp. $29.95. Linda Morra opens the first case study of Unarrested Archives by describing an enticing archival lead that suddenly went cold: the material in question was simply missing from the fonds. This anecdote epitomizes Morra's own approach to the cultural politics of archives. That is, she doesn't shy away from the gaps and peculiarities of the record but instead highlights the circumstances that affect the formation and reformation of particular archives over time, especially as women writers have negotiated their presence in public and for posterity. Morra situates her contribution in terms of theory generally (including engagement with Foucault and Derrida) and scholarship on Canadian women writers' archives more specifically, to which she has already made an important contribution (Morra, Rule). As the book's title indicates, she develops terminology around arrest/unarrest that provides a conceptual framework for her analyses. Beginning with Derrida's discussion of the etymology of archive which evokes documents that would have been under house arrest in a magistrate's home, Morra plays with the varied definitions of arrested to situate different archives and their resonances. The unarrested is non-institutionalized--but archived material might also be unarrested as it is mobilized by researchers. As she deploys these terms, arrest/unarrest is not a staid binary; rather, it provides vocabulary for addressing the creation and uses of archives in very different circumstances. In other words, this terminology is productive because Morra exploits its slipperiness. It provides a continuity to the volume, as do the recurring themes of feminist self-agency, the national imaginary, institutional frameworks, and archival formation. Organized chronologically, the five case studies that make up the monograph draw on archival material that spans more than a century. The first case study uses Diane Taylor's concept of scenario to offer a critical repositioning of Pauline Johnson's public performances, particularly A Cry from an Indian Wife. The chapter is a wonderful combination of historical contextualization and innovative close reading that explores gaps in Johnson's arrested archive, as well as her on-stage transgressions of gender, race, and class norms. The second chapter draws on Judith Butler's notion of kinship to discuss how Emily Carr navigated her reliance on Ira Dilworth to legitimate her writings in the public sphere. In its discussion of Carr's Klee Wyck and Growing Pains, the chapter reflects on the masculinist underpinnings of the genre of autobiography and the extent to which Carr's narratives subvert those assumptions. The following chapter also traces a writer's recourse to male authority to manage her writings: this time, Sheila Watson's interactions with Fred Flahiff. Here, Morra suggests the especial collaborative nature of research in this particular archive: Watson deposits fonds with gaps (or imminence) that lend themselves to future unarresting by researchers. …

Division of Property between Matrimonial Partners Upon Divorce A Critical-Legal Study

The independence of women, particularly with regards to finances, has been recognized as the single most significant factor in achieving equality for women. With the onset of divorce laws, though, many women found themselves free to absolve themselves of the restraints of an unhappy or abusive marriage, they also found themselves on the brink of penury with most laws favoring ownership of property and family assets by the husband alone as his exclusive property. This was made worse by the fact that the contributions made by a home maker were hardly ever quantified by Indian Courts unlike in some other countries. However in order to set right the chasm that exists in the social and economic position of women vis-a-vis men in India society, many laws have been passed and reforms made. These include the right to receive equal pay, maternity benefits, to own or inherit property, to terminate unwanted pregnancies and the right to be protected from cruelty at the hand of husbands. The research paper discusses the economic rights of the Indian wife within the family structure especially after the breakdown of marriage. In doing so, it scrutinizes the women’s property rights at the time of marriage and upon divorce are then discussed in detail to highlight the pressing need for a uniform matrimonial property law. This Research paper confines itself to a study of economic rights of Indian women within the family structure especially after the breakdown of marriage. Post divorce maintenance and property division are of paramount importance because they signify the status of women within marriage and their contribution to the marriage.The concept of divorce was not available to the Indian Hindu population, until the year 1955. It was permitted only in certain restricted circumstances for Christians. The Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act of 1936 permitted divorce under limited circumstances, which were only changed and made more free after an amendment in the year 1988. Muslim woman’s statutory right to divorce was granted in 1939 under extremely restrictive circumstances. Even though women had the option to leave break away from an abusive or unhappy marriage such an option was usually never exercised by women as such an act also involved economic insecurity for the woman which they would otherwise enjoy if they remained married. For example the Hindu woman became a part of her husband’s joint family upon marriage and he was duty-bound to provide her with maintenance and if his death preceded hers the joint family was responsible for her support. The Hindu wife did not become coparcener but was provided with a minimum amount of economic security and shelter and a standard of living to which the husband was accustomed. With the advent of divorce laws, the same Hindu woman could be forced from the matrimonial home, deprived of her marital assets and isolated from the joint family upon divorce. The Indian wife’s economic rights have traditionally revolved around stridhan, maintenance and alimony. While stridhan was exclusively the woman’s property over which her husband could not have any claim, maintenance and alimony were linked to the concept of sustenance to prevent the wife from falling into ‘vagrancy and destitution’ and were distinct from an award of property. The concept of joint matrimonial property is sorely lacking in Indian personal laws. The supremacy of the separate property regime accounts for this fairly disappointing silence of the Indian laws regarding post divorce property division between spouses. This paper will deal with the law as it exists today and specify cogent recommendation to alleviate further the economics insecurities of women.

The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum

 Reviews progressive, well-educated” establishment, and have confidence that that establishment is solving regional and national problems. This collection offers little to help us learn whether those from less privileged positions understand region in similar terms. Perhaps laborers, youth, immigrants, down-winders, the poor, and others (people less likely to be accomplished writers, to be sure) experience the Pacific Northwest more as closed than as open space. John M. Findlay University of Washington, Seattle The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum The Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2011. Photographs, maps, notes. 420 pages. $26.00 cloth. Scholars of the American West will have trouble with this book. Howard Blum glosses the careers of three known figures of the turn of the twentieth-century West, each of whom found his way to the Alaska gold rush: George Carmack, who made the discovery claim in the Klondike; Jefferson“Soapy”Smith,the con man who preyed on the Argonauts passing through Skagway and paid with his life; and Charlie Siringo, who most historians know as a professional cowboy,Pinkerton detective,and determined author, one of whose cases took him to Juneau for a short time. Alternately tracing the adventures of each character,Blum brings them together in a dramatic, armed confrontation in the harbor at Skagway in 1898, the only time all three of their paths crossed directly. Except they probably did not. Like much else in the book, Blum surmises the meeting without providing his sources. The book includes no footnotes. Instead, Blum explains in a“Note on Sources”that the autobiographical accounts he consulted are inconsistent and likely exaggerated.He does faithfully list Howard Lamar’s thorough biography of Siringo,but does not note that Lamar makes no mention of the meeting Blum imagines. Neither does Smith’s great-grandson in his work, which is the most complete published account of Smith’s life, nor James Albert Johnson in his 2001 biography of Carmack. Blum is a storyteller, not an analyst. The stories he tells of his three protagonists will titillate the untutored; the three led extraordinary lives, and Blum captures, and somewhat inflates, the remarkable experiences they created or that befell them.But readers wishing to distinguish fact from conjecture will do better with the previously published works on each. Unfortunately, most of Blum’s analysis is implicit. Carmack took a common-law Tagish Indian wife but rejected her when he became rich, manifesting a syndrome Sylvia Van Kirk described in 1983 (Many Tender Ties). Blum simply describes the rejection, imagining for readers Carmack’s inner dialogue. Blum often attributes to Smith an introspective objectivity that conflicts with the impulsive thuggery he portrays elsewhere and that seems incompatible with the type. In his depictions of Siringo, Blum focuses on the same individualism and personal independence Lamar did. But Blum’s detailed presentations of specific episodes in all his characters’lives frequently reach beyond the available source material, indulging in a level of speculation more appropriate to a writer of adventure fiction than to an interpretive historian. In the trajectory he designs for each of his characters,Blum creates a sense of inevitability for their finally coming together for the meeting in Skagway Harbor. Had he not got them there with his narrative, Blum’s readers would have been sorely disappointed, and so, we may imagine, would have Blum. Stephen Haycox University of Alaska, Anchorage ...

Indian women in marriage: When the sacred marriage thread becomes a noose

abstract Violence against women is a worldwide problem that transcends all boundaries – cultural, geographic, religious, social and economic. However, it is maintained that there are also added particular cultural ‘dynamics’ or constraints inherent in specific cultural groups. This focus attempts to sketch out the features of a category of Indian women who are assumed as being compelled by particular systemic cultural constraints or familial pressures to ‘play the dutiful wife’ at the expense of enduring sustained emotional and physical trauma. While there is extensive, even sensational reporting of violence within Indian families and against Indian wives in (predominantly Indian) tabloids, there is conversely less scholarly attention on this category of women and the dynamics and conflicts within Indian households. This piece focuses a narrow scrutiny on the Indian wife within abusive marriages. It looks at what is referred to as ‘culturally systemic’ violence and a certain commonality of marital discord and abuse experienced by Indian wives who live in extended families, and pays attention to the presence of the mother-in-law within the living arrangement.

Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt

Reviewed by: Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt Helga Druxes Luftzug hinter Samtportieren. Versuch über E. Marlitt. Von Erika Dingeldey. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. 209 Seiten. €34,80. The popular author Eugenie Marlitt (1825–1887) published ten novels and three stories in her lifetime, many of which were serialized in the middlebrow family periodical Die Gartenlaube. Erika Dingeldey investigates Marlitt's feminist agenda and return to Enlightenment ideals, and contrasts her politics with the nationalistic patriotism after 1871 in the population at large. She also draws attention to the conflict between her views and those of the "not openly oppositional"—in fact, quite imperialistic and nationalist—agenda of the magazine which promoted her to a large readership. In recent years, Germanists have paid more serious attention to Marlitt, no longer dismissing her under the label of romance novelist. Elke Liebs (2004) shows that Marlitt's views on marriage and critique of bourgeois values put her in the company of Austen and Dickens. Dingeldey proves that the main impetus behind Marlitt's novels is to trace female development and a proto-modern view of marriage as a contractual partnership between individuated protagonists. Her novels hold up unhappy marriages to critical inspection, while not rebelling against the institution as such. She criticizes class prejudice, bourgeois self-absorption, bigotry, anti-semitism, and received notions [End Page 154] about the traditional role of women—in short, prejudice of all kinds. However, she is not as outspoken as her contemporary Fanny Lewald (1811–1889), whose novels and memoir offer a more radical feminist critique. Dingeldey rightly focuses on the novel Im Schillingshof as her central example of the overcoming of entrenched class barriers and ossified aristocratic values. She also provides an in-depth discussion of other novels, such as Goldelse, Reichsgräfin Gisela, Die zweite Frau, Das Heideprinzeßchen, Im Hause des Kommerzienrates, and Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen. Unfortunately, her discussion relies heavily on plot summary. This reader would have liked more comparison with other popular women's authors of the day, whose agenda was often more nationalistic and conventional. Ultimately, Dingeldey asserts, Marlitt blames a loss of liberal political ideals on the bourgeoisie themselves, not on external enemies (90). Even then, Marlitt's critique is muted by generalities and emotionalism; she does not name the oppressor, except to refer to those who foment class hatred against the bourgeoisie to further their own rise to power: "Die Abneigung, dem Bürgertum Vorschub zu leisten, oder vielmehr das Streben, es nicht stark werden zu lassen, liegen ihnen traditionsgemäß im Blute. Dagegen fühle ich Grimm, unbezwingbaren Grimm, gegen die feilen Fahnenflüchtigen aus unseren Reihen, die liebedienerisch und um des persönlichen Vorteils willen das eigene Fleisch und Blut bekämpfen [ . . . ]" (Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen, 1885). A return to family values, to the congruence of the bourgeois family with the social group, is intrinsic to such rhetoric. This stance is, however, at odds with Marlitt's ongoing critique of fictional bourgeois families as split by generational conflict, pecuniary greed, secrets, and disavowals. She feels compelled to introduce fresh blood, in the guise of exotic ethnic female others, into these dysfunctional families. In Schillingshof, Mercedes Valmaseda, a Mexican-American who lives in South Carolina, rescues her German step-brother's children and falls in love with his brother, a painter stuck in a loveless marriage to a Catholic fanatic. In Die Zweite Frau, the German protagonist Juliane von Trachtenberg reactivates the memory of the 'socially dead' invalid Indian wife by circulating an erotic portrait she painted of her. Marlitt creates an identification between "the Lotos flower" and "Liane" that infuses her own relationship to Baron von Mainau with new attraction. Freedom of artistic expression is a theme dear to Marlitt's heart, and serves to symbolize the Enlightenment values of freedom and humanitarianism. We rarely find mention of working-class subjects in the novels, but when we do, for example in Reichsgräfin Gisela, they live in a "Musterkolonie" and are educating themselves through reading books: "Und weshalb sollten sie nicht über diese Lebensstellung, die da mit anderen Worten Not, Elend und Entbehrung heißt, hinaus können [ . . . ] Haben sie nicht einen Kopf wie wir...

Interpreters With Lewis and Clark: the Story of Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau

When interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian fur trader living among the Hidatsas, and his Shoshone Indian wife, Sacagawea, joined the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, they headed into country largely unknown to them, as it was to Thomas Jefferson's hand-picked explorers. There is little doubt as to the importance of Sacagawea's presence on the journey. She has become a near-legendary figure for her role as interpreter, guide, and token of peace. Toussaint, however, has been maligned in both fiction and nonfiction alike—Lewis himself called him “a man of no peculiar merit.” W. Dale Nelson offers a frank and honest portrayal of Toussaint, suggesting his character has perhaps been judged too harshly. He was indeed valuable as an interpreter and no doubt helpful with his knowledge of the Indian tribes the group encountered. For example, Toussaint proved his worth in negotiations with the Shoshones for much-needed horses, and with his experience as a fur trader, he always seemed to strike a better bargain than his companions. During the expedition Sacagawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste. With her death in 1812, Clark assumed custody of her son and Toussaint returned to his life on the upper Missouri. Surviving his wife by almost three decades, Toussaint worked under Clark (then Superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis) as an interpreter for government officials, explorers, artists, and visiting dignitaries. Jean Baptiste traveled the Rocky Mountains as a mountain man, was a scout during the Mexican American War, and served as mayor and judge for the San Luis Rey Mission.

Rearticulating Violence

Rearticulating Violence

THE TROPICAL EXTRAVAGANCE OF BERTHA MASON

AS SUSAN L. MEYER SUGGESTS, “[a]n interpretation of the significance of the British empire in Jane Eyre must begin by making sense of Bertha Mason Rochester, the mad, drunken West Indian wife whom Rochester keeps locked up on the third floor of his ancestral mansion” (252). In Richard Mason’s deposition concerning the marriage of Edward Fairfax Rochester and Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica, Bertha is described as the child of Jonas Mason, West India planter and merchant, and Antoinetta Mason, identified only as a Creole. In Rochester’s account of Bertha’s family the “germs of insanity” are passed on by the Creole mother (334; ch. 27). In this essay I retraverse late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century ethnographic discourses about white Creole degeneracy and situate Brontë’s representations of the Creoleness of Bertha and Richard Mason in relation to them, arguing that Jane Eyre demarcates both femininity and masculinity in imperial and racial terms, while also blurring these categories. Brontë, I demonstrate, links the degenerate moral and intellectual character of the white Creole with the cruelties of the slave-labour system in Jamaica, and with historical Jamaican slave rebellions figured through metaphor and allusion. This depiction suggests that Brontë has carefully historicized the relationships among Bertha Mason Rochester, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and Jane Eyre.

Carnivals, Carnival, and Carnivalization, or How to Make a Living without Actually Working

A certain critic of mine, who shall be nameless, is quoted as having remarked that Crowley doesn't know Bakhtin (the Russian philosopher and sociolinguist) from Bactine, disinfectant. Following paradigm of man who didn't know shit from Shinola, and whose shoes as a result were quite a mess, it can be said that this address may be theoretically naive, but at least it will be clean, even antiseptic, and perhaps just a bit slick. But before I face up to august subject of this swan-song, I hope you will indulge me in a little autobiographical survey, to explain how I got here. My critic was right in pointing out that theory has not been my forte during my professional career now stretching back over four decades. Not only am I a self-confessed Boasian particularist-there are not too many alive who can say that-chary of supracultural generalizations, but far worse, I am much too much in love with my field data for its own sake to care too much what it all might MEAN - if anything. This fascination with cultural variety in our world is quite simply the fire in my furnace, and easier to understand when you realize that I was born in that doyen of American cities, Peoria, Illinois, grandchild of Irish and Alsatian-- French migrants, son of a surprisingly successful plumbing contractor, a whitecollar kid in quintessential bluecollar town. Having access to The National Geographic and a public library, I soon realized that there had to be better places for me than Peoria, and my subsequent career can be seen as a long hard struggle to get away from there and to stay away. This explains my exotic Trinidadian East Indian wife, focus on such obscure areas (in '40s anyway) as Africa and Caribbean, and concentration on such arcane subjects as narrative and festival. Eschewing Peoria-favored Notre Dame, I got an A.B. in Design at Protestant Northwestern in `43, getting my fill of opera, symphony, and museums, and after having signed on as a 90 day wonder two months after Pearl Harbor, I got my Ensign's Commission soon after. My ship, an aged ex-cruise liner, USS American Legion, known aboard as the AL Maru, Japanese Secret Weapon, carried on training operations for landing barge crews on San Clemente Island near Catalina. While considerably better than being shot at, those barges were unstable and dangerous, so I soon transferred to Communications, and spent rest of war over an early version of a computer coding and decoding secret messages. While decommissioning ship, I somehow contracted polio, and at age 24 found myself a partial quadriplegic with very limited use of my arms and legs. To their credit, Navy and VA came through with a stay at Warm Springs (which had a Navy unit founded by Roosevelt), a car, wheelchairs, help toward building a wheelchair house, legbraces, all other gear, money for education, and later an ample pension (which helped pay for all that travel). So when you pay your high taxes, remember that you know someone who gets some of it back! Indeed, because they put some thought and money into me, I too became employable and have paid taxes all these years. With help of my parents and some other wise people, I came to realize that if I were going to have a life, I would have to get out of back bedroom and find a way to make a living. As a semi-basket-case, I realized that all I could do was talk, but what to talk about that somebody might pay me for? My VA pension gave me insouciance to choose something I thought needed doing, i.e., improving race relations by rehabilitating image of African and New World African societies in eyes of both African and non-African. After an MA in Art History and two years teaching at Bradley in Peoria, a university famous primarily for basketball scandals, I went to see Herskovits and Bascom back at Northwestern to ask where I could find an Art History program that covered African art. …

A Brief History of Dime Novels

SUMMARY Irwin P. Beadle issued the first dime novel, Malaeska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann Stephens, in 1860. Although the last original dime novel was published in 1915, reprints appeared until 1933, but long since the radio and motion pictures had replaced dime novels in the popular imagination. This paper will give a concise history of American dime novels, describe their various formats, and review their contents.

Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin

Reviews 85 episode. As well as being involved with the Camposes, Clay places him­ self under the wing of a kindly older trapper who has an Indian wife. He learns to let go of past resentments that consume him. Gradually he jetti­ sons his anger, overcomes what racial reservations he has, and accepts what today we call multi-cultural values. Gradually he allows himself to love Lupita. He understands that a regard for her family and their values must underlie his love. As she says, “You respect me. Actually, you respect all of us, my family, and that’s important.” Increasingly sensitive and human, Clay Westbrook is very much a hero for our time. With the resolution of the plot’s first strand, the second can work itself out. Now emotionally anchored, Clay is ready to deal with those who hassle him and wish to steal his land. He shows himself as prudent in combat as in love. Even traditional Western violence is subdued in Twin Rivers. No one shoots anyone, and the fist fights that do occur are left inconclusive: Clay half-beats one of his antagonists and fights the other to a draw. Only the fatalistic Tony, with his lower boiling point, beats his opponent outright. When at the end the chief heavy shows up spoiling for revenge, it is a measure of Clay’s moral growth that he refuses to fight him again. The story closes with Clay no longer holding grudges against anyone, at peace in the land he loves. Even minor characters, such as the cowboys of the Cross Pole outfit to which Clay belongs, come across as individuals. Only the two “pil­ grims,” mouthing tourist platitudes and jokes (they want, inevitably, to see “les Tetons"), are cardboard: parodies of Easterners, false notes in a book that generally rings true. The narrative informs as it entertains: here a disquisition on the importance of buckets in homesteading, there one on the grim reality behind “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” If Nesbitt sometimes insists too much, the moral tale he tells offers its quiet rewards. JOHN CLUBBE University of Kentucky Unlocking the Air and Other Stories. By Ursula K. Le Guin. (New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 207 pages, $31.00/$22.00.) In Unlocking the Air and Other Stories, Le Guin demonstrates her sensitive and intimate relationship with the English language and her capacity to bring out the beauty of words and the human experience they describe. She admits that though the stories “talk about reality . . . reali­ ty is a slippery fish that often can be caught only in a net of spells,” so she 86 Western American Literature weaves together in this collection of short stories the power of suggestion, ambiguity, and poignant insight to explore “the mysteries of name and time and ordinary living and ordinary pain.” “Half Past Four” reminds us that people with the same name exist all over the world and yet have their own stories to tell. Not until the third vignette of eight does the reader realize the narratives have nothing to do with each other even though they all talk about Ann, Ella, Stephen, and Todd. In “The Spoons in the Basement,” Le Guin explores the mystery of time by explaining that one of the previous tenants of Georgia’s house, “leaving for the holidays in June of 1910 or for a year abroad in September of 1951,” accidently left six apostle spoons. In “Daddy’s Big Girl” Le Guin studies ordinary living from a most unconventional per­ spective, that of the sister of a young girl who never ceases to grow in height even after she reaches a stature of forty-five feet at the age of fif­ teen. “Olders” tells the story of a farm wife who must confront not just the death of her husband but his planting as well, for in his dying he metamorphosizes into a tree. After his skin browns and grains, he is stood upright in a bucket of water to sprout roots until he can be planted in the Old Grove with his ancestors. Le Guin wonders if there was cruelty in his not dying. At the end of “Half...

Rewriting the Indian Tale: Science, Politics, and the Evolution of Ann S. Stephens's Indian Romances

On June 9, 1860, the publishing firm of Irving P. Beadle and Company announced in theNew York Daily Tribunethe publication of their first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens'sMalaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. The narrative was advertised as “the best story of the day,” and its writer as “the star of American authors.” Stephens, whose name is familiar today only to scholars of the dime novel, was indeed well known to the reading public around the mid-19th Century. She was on the editorial board of several magazines, including the illustriousGraham's Magazine. She had published her own journal,Mrs. Stephens Illustrated New Monthly. And she wrote for a plethora of popular magazines, among others theColumbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, theLadies' Wreath, Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, andPeterson's Magazine. Her 1854 urban melodramaFashion and Faminehad to be printed three times during the first month of publication to satisfy the demand of the public, and eventlually sold a record eighty thousand copies. Her historical novels, generally of European setting, were so successful that they were systematically printed in book form by the Philadelphia publisher T. B. Peterson after they had appeared serially in Charles J. Peterson's literary monthly. And Stephens had the sanction of the critics as well as the public: already in 1848 theAmerican Literary Magazinehad eulogized her by stating that “of the numerous female writers of our country, Mrs. Stephens is deservedly classed among the first.” Charles J. Peterson had declared in the pages ofGraham's Magazinethat “no writer, since Sir Walter Scott, had excelled her in … power of description.” And even Edgar Allan Poe had acknowledged that Stephens could “seize adroitly on salient incidents and present them with vividness to the eye,” was “not unskillful in delineation of character,” and could, in conclusion, be granted “the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.”

Kinship Structure and the Role of Women in the Urban Upper Class of Mexico

In 1970 we began a study of kinship structure in an upper-class family in Mexico City that ranged over five generations of men and women, including 118 nuclear families.1 These were the descendants of Carlos Gomez (1825-76), a small-town merchant of the state of Puebla, who had three children by his first, criollo wife, and six by his second, Indian wife. From this nuclear family emerged a number of branches, within which socioeconomic stratification developed. One of the mestizo sons, who

Swimming Man Burning by Terrence Kilpatrick

Reviews 65 that promulgated new styles of uniforms and adopted new types of arms and equipment. The author’s illustrations mesh very well with the text and with the overall purpose of the book. The style is well suited to this type of exposi­ tion. The drawings have been meticulously executed and often make per­ fectly clear what some of those delightfully arcane nineteenth century regu­ lations and specifications had otherwise made obscure. They often make clear how various items worked as well as how they looked. Such things as the arrangement of equipment on the trooper or the saddle, the relative size of these items, and their methods of attachment need to be illustrated. The consistency of style of these illustrations also promotes comparisons among the different periods and provides a view of the evolution of uni­ forms, arms and equipment. The effectiveness of the illustrations, however, might have been enhanced by more use of color, especially in depictions of uniforms. The arrangement of illustrations and text has been well done, the lay­ out is appealing, and index and table of contents are adequate. The second new paragraph on page 261 is garbled but is one of few printer’s errors in what is otherwise an impressive volume. JOHN TAYLOR, Fort Collins, Colorado Swimming Man Burning. By Terrence Kilpatrick. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977. 230 pages, $8.50.) Terrence Kilpatrick’s Swimming Man Burning — “A Rip-Roaring Novel of the American West,” the subtitle tells us — is set in the 1870s and centers around four Plains Indians (a Kiowa, a Comanche, an Arapaho, and a Sioux) who embark on a decidedly bizarre mission. Following a year’s schooling in the whites’ language and manners, the Indians set out for the East Coast, intent on seeing the Great White Father and learning the secret of the white man’s magic. The tale’s narrator, Clay Benton, is cunningly captured by the Indian coalition and made to serve as the four’s guide, teacher, and protective den mother. Along the way the group encoun­ ters a United States senator who is seemingly friendly but ultimately shows himself to be greedy and dishonest — the embodiment, apparently, of all that was wrong with the politics and social ethics of the Gilded Age. Eventually they manage an audience with President Grant, a meeting that dissolves in total cultural confusion. Not unexpectedly, each of the Indians succumbs, over a period of time, to a different “evil” of white society: 66 Western American Literature one falls victim to the charms of a white girl, one to booze, another to disease, the last to the white man’s books and religion. Given the historical record, there is no way to alleviate the bleak fate of the tribes the four ambassadors represent; the best that can be said of the abortive battle recounted in the “Epilogue” is that it is redundant. All too improbable and neatly allegorical? Well, yes, but then so are most of the events that comprise the plot of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, now generally acknowledged to be one of the classics of recent West­ ern American literature. Indeed, speaking of Little Big Man, the parallels between that work and Swimming Man Burning seem rather too pro­ nounced to be accidental. Clay Benton, the narrator of Swimming Man Burning, is an old codger (though not, to be sure, as old as Jack Crabb) who has been all over the West and done everything from trapping beaver to hunting buffalo. He has had a beloved Indian wife who was killed by cavalrymen at Sand Creek. Like Jack Crabb, Clay Benton is torn between the Indian culture and Anglo culture. He always seems to survive, how­ ever, in a very non-heroic way. Benton has run across, in his travels, var­ ious personages of historical significance: U. S. “Sam” Grant had been an earlyday acquaintance in the Pacific Northwest; General George Arm­ strong Custer turns up, inevitably, as a minor character in the novel. Sound familiar? I do not wish to be flippant or excessively critical. Kilpatrick’s tale has its modest virtues. The author’s style is crisp and readable, and his story...

The Sad Tale of an Indian Wife

When in May, 1814, the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer sat in the White House or Union Hotel at Ancaster, in Upper Canada, to try those accused of High Treason against King George III by joining the American invader, about seventy Indictments for High Treason were found by the Grand Jury. Only nineteen of those charged were in custody and they were duly tried-four were acquitted, eight executed, three died in prison, one escaped and three were eventually allowed to go to the United States. Many of those accused had gone to the United States before the Court sat, and many had otherwise eluded the Canadian soldiers and officers of the Crown, amongst them Epaphrus Lord Phelps. Those who had gone to the United States, the country was well rid of; such of them as had no property were not thought of again, but those of them who had property were kept in mind, because by High Treason they forfeited all their property to the Crown. The forfeiture, however, took effect not on indictment, or even on conviction, but on attainder-that is, when judgment was pronounced upon the traitor.1 This was the law of England, for as Blackstone somewhat sententiously says: After conviction only . . . there is still in contemplation of law a possibility of his innocence. Something may be offered in arrest of judgment, the indictment may be erroneous, which will render his guilt uncertain and thereupon the . . . conviction may be quashed, he may obtain a pardon, or be allowed the benefit of clergy. . . But when judgment is once pronounced, both law and fact conspire to prove him completely guilty. . . U.pon judgment, therefore, of death, and not before, the attainder of a criminal commences, or upon such circumstances as are equivalent to judgment of death.2