"A Tyrannically Democratic Force": The Symbolic and Cultural Function of Clothing in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie.(Critical Essay) (2002)

In his study On Human Finery, Quentin Bell observes that fashion is at best a force (63). The phrase tyrannically democratic is paradoxical, of course, since it associates idea of an absolute leader with idea of majority rule. In early nineteenth-century America, statement would have appeared especially paradoxical because recent American Revolution was widely interpreted as triumph of democracy over tyranny. Bell suggests, though, that, at least where clothing is concerned, democracy can be a form of tyranny. When a society imposes an official or unofficial dress code on its members and then attempts to impose that dress on other cultures, it is acting as a tyrant; subtly but aggressively, it is insisting on its own rightness and superiority. A strong cultural belief in propriety of uniform dress may indicate a deeper conviction that one's ideology and customs are right. Bell's observation calls into question degree of freedom posited by democracy, whic h can indeed become tyranny unless it contains a measure of respect for cultural or individual difference. Interpretations of early nineteenth-century literature can benefit from an understanding of connection between tyrannical democracy and clothing. Much of recent criticism of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Leslie (1827) has focused on novel's ambivalent attitude toward Native Americans, which poses a historical challenge to democracy that United States held up as an essential nation-defining ideal in wake of American Revolution. Dana Nelson argues that Hope Leslie is finally equivocal. While Sedgwick clearly sees necessity of reenvisioning racial constructs, she is so clearly invested in Anglo-America's historical inheritance that she cannot resolve 'Indian problem' in any meaningful way for her contemporary readers (202). Douglas Ford also concentrates on novel's problematic nature concerning questions of race, using ambiguity of Sedgwick's language to demonstrate novel's tension ... contrary to intentions Sedgwick outlines in her preface and to under score novel's complexity (82). Both critics reveal crisis of contemporary reader who wants to locate a resolution to problems of race that novel embodies. The novel's ambivalence applies not only to conflict between Native American and Euro-American culture but to other parallel conflicts, notably imbalance between men and women. Leslie is clearly a novel, but one with no clear moral. Any search to locate book's center is frustrated by its shifting emphases: reader doesn't even meet heroine until nearly one-third of way into novel, after narrative has been dominated by Magawisca, one of most eloquent and richly drawn Native American characters in nineteenth-century Anglo-American fiction. What would seem to be moral in last line of story applies to Esther Downing's decision to forego marriage, a platitude more relevant to Sedgwick's own life than to rest of book. There are glaring inconsistencies in way develops, or fails to do so, and narrator never fully accepts or rejects ideology of any of three cultures available to Hope: Puritan society, Native American s ociety, or Romantic individualism of Sedgwick's time. Using Foucault's writings, Ford addresses this interpretive difficulty by concentrating on the plurality of discourses which produce power rather than on novel's resolution (83). I would like to continue this discussion by focusing not on discourse of language but rather on non-verbal discourse of clothing which functions as a multivalent symbol in Leslie. Clothing in this novel carries its traditional significance, but it is also a symbol of that subtly links novel's race and gender issues to question of heroine's development. …