“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a "marriage" of its various races, declaring that, in "the natural progress of things," Indians and whites "would meet and blend together...intermix, and become one people" (Wald 25). He invites the Indians to "mix with us by marriage" and grandly prophesies, "your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island" (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a "marriage" of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of the nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield. In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a "studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage" (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of racial, national, and patriarchal ascendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a "national" literature, registers this contradiction as a tense "silence."1 I will examine this "silence" more closely in Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827). As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the "historical," the native realm of a solid "national" literature, into the nightmare world of the "gothic," where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as "silence" but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of "diminishing fertility" manifests itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the inevitable "curse" invoked by the "unnatural" mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and "half-breed" figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances-white and red, civilization and nature, future and past-and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring "nightmare" invading America's dream of itself. At the same time, a tradition of "hybrid texts" resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same year as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to "read against" the frontier romance in its detachment of miscegenation from its conventional gothic associations. The popularity of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson's idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers. Jemison's overlooked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that professional readers were invested in the connection between race and cultural value, that those who generally consumed such fiction were not, and that the critical assumption that the "vanishing Indian" and the separatism he or she represents were integral to the popularity of the frontier romance deserves closer examination. …