38 pages • 1 hour read
Catharine Maria SedgwickHope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1827A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Religion
Written during the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840), prompted by the first Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) when Christian sects were splintering off in many different directions and nation was veering back toward its religious roots after the Enlightenment (1715-1789), Hope Leslie represents the growing Unitarian thought of time. While Unitarianism in that iteration was still Christian (as some Unitarian sects are today), and indeed decidedly Protestant, it was more accepting of differing beliefs and practices than most Christian ideologies of its day.
Still, the only religion presented as completely legitimate in Hope Leslie is Protestantism; yet, except for the charlatan Sir Philip Gardiner, different religious sects govern groups and individuals. The Fletchers and the Winthrops are Protestant, the dominant faith in New England. The Catholic Antonio is pitied and mocked for his Catholicism, while Faith Leslie, when it is learned that she has become a Catholic, is viewed with horror. Despite the overlap in their worship of Christ and their insistence on spiritual purity, the two religions are at odds throughout.
Magawisca, Faith, Mononotto, Nelema, and Oneco illustrate the novel’s other religion: the amorphous, animistic nature-worship of the Indians. They and their traditions are viewed with scorn and, at times, outright hatred by white society. However, despite the violence of the Indian attacks, they are presented as more introspective and at peace with themselves than are the whites. Magawisca is often presented with such serenity as to resonate a Mother Mary-type figure, and she is the one to point out that Christian pillaging Native American tribes is decidedly un-Christian:
Magawisca’s reflecting mind suggested the most serious obstacle to the progress of the Christian religion […] the contrariety between its divine principles and the conduct of its professors; which, […] is too often the darkest cloud that obstructs the passage of its rays to the hearts of heathen men (52).
In this way, Hope Leslie (which can be pronounced “hopelessly,” echoing how the characters are hopefully besotted with each other and how hopeless peace seems between whites and Native Americans) provides a chastisement of contemporaneous relations between the whites and Native Americans and a potential route toward coexistence.
The American Culture Founded on Racism
While Magawisca and her family (the only Native Americans known intimately to the white protagonists of the novel) are welcome exceptions, most Pequod are referred to as savages throughout the book. The rank and file of the tribe are, almost without exception, viewed as inferior, other, alien, children of the Devil, and ignoramuses. Despite Magawisca’s intelligence, grace, and loyalty, she is bound by the system of the whites, once she becomes enmeshed in their lives. It is clear that the only way for the Indians to maintain their way of life is for the whites to leave them alone. Historically, this will not be the case. The whites can only view them as heathens, dismissing as necessary casualties of a divine settlement mission those who will not assimilate as they expand their New England empire.
After his family is taken, Mononotto is portrayed as a violent warlord, consumed with a need for revenge, which operates on both a macro and a micro level. His most immediate grievance is personal: his children have been taken from him, but the vengeance he enacts at Bethel is a blow struck on behalf of all Indians, against all whites, for all wrongs, both real and perceived. When the reader hears his eloquent speech after his raid on the Leslie’s home, the reader sees his complexity and humanity. This is in stark contrast to the broken speech patterns of most tribesmen in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, where the pseudo-native Longstocking must whitewash Native culture to make it palatable to white audiences.
It is telling that, by the novel’s end, even though everything that can be put right has been corrected, it is ultimately presented as beneficial that the whites and Indians do not mingle. If they share the same space, their different ways will create conflict and acts that will result in the need for vengeance on each side. This is one reason Faith’s choices are not looked on favorably in the novel; rather Magawiska’s peaceful acceptance of her stunted arm and inability to create a family with Everell is lauded as the appropriate, emblematic place for Native tribes—subservient and content to allow themselves to be overtaken.
Feminism
Hope Leslie may seem odd and unwieldy to the modern-feminist, but it was a triumph for its time. Despite the author’s frequent allusions to women as a hysterical, gentle, simple, and even as the inferior sex, the women are the strongest characters. Magawisca and Hope are unbreakable. Their refusal to conform to what is expected of them by a religious, patriarchal society is the very definition of feminist progress. The women depend on men for all sorts of things, but they have their own minds, and can take credit for their own actions.
Indeed, it is Alice, Hope, and Magawisca that garner the most male admiration throughout the novel (a nineteenth century standard for female success), even though they are also the most “untamed” of the ladies. To wit, Sedgwick describes Hope as “a girl of seventeen, educated among the strictest sect of the puritans,” but with an “open, fearless, and gay character […] she lived in an atmosphere of favor and indulgence, which permits the natural qualities to shoot forth in unrepressed luxuriance—an atmosphere of love, that like a tropical climate, brings forth the richest flowers and most flavorous fruits” (127). Because female triumph at the time could only be expressed through domesticity, Sedgwick organized these wild female characters as dead (Alice), married (Hope), and a maimed single woman (Magawiska). Two thirds of the strong female characters do not receive their “just desserts,” and the third feels as though it was patched into marriage to appease the contemporary audience. In this way, Sedgwick managed to “portray the state the Puritans founded as one that exterminated Indians and oppressed women” (Zagarell, Sandra A. “Expanding ‘America’: Lydia Sigourney's Sketch of Connecticut, Catharine Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 6, no. 2, 1987, pp. 225–245).
