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Reviews of Books
Frank Shuffelton, University of Rochester
| The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. By Gordon M. Sayre. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 368 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $22.50 (paper).
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The big hit in New York theaters in 1829 was John Augustus Stone's Metamora, a play based loosely on the story of King Philip, also known as Metacom, who had terrorized New England a century and a half earlier and been reviled by Cotton Mather, Benjamin Church, and New Englanders in general. Stone's play turned the tables, and the hero of his story was not the Indian killer but the Indian killed. The appeal of Metamora was increased by the presence of the leading matinee idol of the antebellum American theater, Edwin Forrest, who played the title role of the doomed yet heroic Indian leader and who had commissioned the play in the first place. Earlier in the 1820s, several poems, plays, and novels portrayed Indians who delivered noble, often elegiac speeches of death or surrender. Washington Irving's "Philip of Pokanoket" (1814), James Eastburn and Robert Sands's Yamoyden (1820), and Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824) all helped lay the groundwork for the revised story of Metacom. In turn Metamora kicked off a craze for Indian dramas in the 1830s, when more than thirty-five such plays were written or performed, some of which also offered sympathetic renderings of Metacom. This reversal of the usual portrayal of one of the most feared figures of early New England, as surprising in its way, the author points out, as if an American staged a sympathetic play about Osama bin Laden, was hardly the first such reevaluation of a leader of Indian resistance to European invasion. |
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In this rich and suggestive study, Gordon M. Sayre examines seven examples of revisionary accounts about Indian resistance, beginning with representations of Moctezuma in the sixteenth century and later and ending with Tecumseh and the ways in which his reputation was managed and used in the antebellum era. Sayre seeks common strategies of representation in the writings about these Indian heroes, looking at a range of literary and nonliterary texts: poems, novels, and plays, as well as speeches, histories, propaganda, and reports. As his title suggests, he finds tragedy a recurrent mode in later representations of leaders of Indian resistance, and he argues that examining "the resistance of Native Americans to colonization as a tragedy and its leaders as tragic heroes yields a better explanation of these phenomena than do the concepts of the vanishing Indian or of imperialist nostalgia—phenomena caused by both the historical patterns of Indian uprisings and the responses of their participants" (5). He develops a rich and shrewd understanding of tragedy, based as much on a reading of Aristotelian notions of catharsis as on the thinking of Rene Girard about the connections between tragedy and sacrifice. On the one hand, he is able to reveal how a play such as Metamora could evoke historically grounded responses of fear and pity in its audiences and, on the other, he shows the elaborate "mimetic rivalry," to use Girard's phrasing, between figures such as Moctezuma and Cortés, representatives of two great empires come face to face. As suggested by his allusions to nineteenth-century tropes of the vanishing Indian and to more recent explanations such as Renato Rosaldo's description of imperialist nostalgia, Sayre consistently and thoughtfully attends to historiographical problems raised by his events and texts from the sixteenth century to the present.1 His critical examination of previous scholarship on representations of Native Americans in this era is one of many rewards this book offers. |
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