“Great Cause to Mourn”

As is often noted, The Book of Mormon attaches normative value to whiteness and generally ignores women’s spirituality. This essay insists, however, that the book’s presentation of gender and race should be read with an eye to characters who, from within the volume’s own narrative, identify and critique the racial and sexual presuppositions of the narrative. Focused on the racialized prophet Samuel and the countercultural prophet Jacob, the authors thus read The Book of Mormon as aware of and critical toward its own apparent racial and sexual problems. They argue that The Book of Mormon would in this way likely have struck its earliest readers as in step with the then-nascent genre of domestic fiction, represented in the 1820s by Lydia Maria Child (Hobomok) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (Hope Leslie). Yet, unlike such novels, The Book of Mormon does its work through inventive (but subtle) reimaginings of key biblical texts.

Unhistorical Fictions: Sedgwick and Neal

Chapter 2 attends two early works that, I argue, resist rather than participate in the formation of the historical romance tradition in antebellum U.S. literature and, in doing so, offer an implied critique of historicist assumptions and procedures. John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) each experiments with writing (and experiencing) history through the present tense. Deploying anachronism as both narrative method and trope, Hope Leslie’s narrative of colonial New England disrupts the unidirectional course of time, challenging fundamental conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as in Sedgwick’s time. In Seventy-Six, Neal strives to render an account of history that neither refers nor means, but that simply is. Impossibly, Neal seeks to evacuate the narrative of temporality, to circumvent the inherent tendency of narrative to shape and bestow coherence upon experience—a coherence that inevitably distorts the particular tang of now.

Sisters in Arms: Incest, Miscegenation, and Sacrifice in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie

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.