This essay argues that Catharine Sedgwick's 1827 novel, Hope Leslie, posits an American identity forged in structurally incestuous families of siblings connected through a joint ethic of sacrifice. Sedgwick foregrounds chosen, affective relationships and relationally constituted subjects by theorizing miscegenation and incest–exogamy and endogamy–not as mutually exclusive but as identical with each other.
Hope Leslie and early American histories of puritan settlement