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Rewriting the Indian Tale: Science, Politics, and the Evolution of Ann S. Stephens's Indian Romances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Paola Gemme
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Extract

On June 9, 1860, the publishing firm of Irving P. Beadle and Company announced in the New York Daily Tribune the publication of their first dime novel, Ann S. Stephens's Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter. The narrative was advertised as “the best story of the day,” and its writer as “the star of American authors.” Stephens, whose name is familiar today only to scholars of the dime novel, was indeed well known to the reading public around the mid-19th Century. She was on the editorial board of several magazines, including the illustrious Graham's Magazine. She had published her own journal, Mrs. Stephens Illustrated New Monthly. And she wrote for a plethora of popular magazines, among others the Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, the Ladies' Wreath, Frank Leslie's Ladies' Gazette of Fashion, and Peterson's Magazine. Her 1854 urban melodrama Fashion and Famine had to be printed three times during the first month of publication to satisfy the demand of the public, and eventlually sold a record eighty thousand copies. Her historical novels, generally of European setting, were so successful that they were systematically printed in book form by the Philadelphia publisher T. B. Peterson after they had appeared serially in Charles J. Peterson's literary monthly. And Stephens had the sanction of the critics as well as the public: already in 1848 the American Literary Magazine had eulogized her by stating that “of the numerous female writers of our country, Mrs. Stephens is deservedly classed among the first.” Charles J. Peterson had declared in the pages of Graham's Magazine that “no writer, since Sir Walter Scott, had excelled her in … power of description.” And even Edgar Allan Poe had acknowledged that Stephens could “seize adroitly on salient incidents and present them with vividness to the eye,” was “not unskillful in delineation of character,” and could, in conclusion, be granted “the effervescence of high talent, if not exactly of genius.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 19 , October 1994 , pp. 375 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

NOTES

1. Quoted in Johannsen, Albert's The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickels Novels: The Story of a Vanished Literature (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), vol. 2, p. 264.Google Scholar

2. I am indebted for biographical information on Stephens to Madeline B. Stern's essay “The Author of the First Dime Novels,” in her We the Women: Career Firsts in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Schulte, 1963)Google Scholar. Eastman, James A.'s master thesis, “Ann Sophia Stephens” (Columbia University, 1952)Google Scholar is also useful in this respect.

3. “Mrs. Ann S. Stephens,” American Literary Magazine 2 (1848): 335.Google Scholar

4. Peterson, Charles J., “Mrs. Ann S. Stephens,” Graham's Magazine 25 (1844): 234.Google Scholar

5. Poe, Edgar Allan, “The Literati of New York City,” Godey's Magazine 33 (1846): 15.Google Scholar

6. Ladies' Companion and Literary Expositor 11 (1840): 18.Google Scholar

7. All historians of the dime novels, including Albert Johannsen in his outstanding The House of Beadle and Adams, assert that the edition of Malaeska published by Beadle in 1860 was a mere reprint of the 1839 serial in the Ladies' Companion. My comparison of the two texts, however, has revealed that Stephens actually inserted in the volume edition of the novel a lengthy description of the courtship between the half-blood William Danforth and the novel's white heroine, Sarah Jones.

8. See Prucha, Francis Paul's “United States Indian Policies, 1815–1860,” in Handbook of Native American Indians, ed. Washburn, Wilcomb E. (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1988), vol. 4, pp. 40–50.Google Scholar

9. “Publisher's Notice,” in Stephens, Ann S., Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, (New York: Beadle, 1860), p. 4.Google Scholar

10. Stephens, Ann S., Malaeska, Ladies' Companion and Literary Expositor 10 (1839): 267.Google Scholar

11. Stephens, Ann S., King Philip's Daughter, Peterson's Magazine 34 (1858): 428.Google Scholar

12. Stephens, Ann S., Esther: A Story of the Oregon Trail (New York: Beadle, 1862), p. 9.Google Scholar

13. Sheehan, Bernard W., Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), p. 148.Google Scholar

14. See Montrose, Louis A.'s “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,” in The New Historicism, ed. Veeser, H. Aram (New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 15–36.Google Scholar

15. Montrose, , “Professing the Renaissance,” p. 23Google Scholar. See also Jane Tompkins's excellent introduction to her Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xi–xix.Google Scholar

16. Beadle initially published only 10,000 copies of Malaeska. Soon, however, another 20,000 were issued. In time, 300,000 copies and, according to some, as many as half a million were sold (see Stern, 's “Author of the First Dime Novel”).Google Scholar

17. Stephens, Ann S., Mary Derwent: A Tale of the Early Settlers, Ladies' Companion and Literary Expositor 9 (1838): 292.Google Scholar

18. President Jefferson on Indian Trading Houses, January 18, 1803, in Prucha, Francis Paul, ed., Documents of the United States Indian Policy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), pp. 21–22.Google Scholar

19. Secretary of War Crawford on Trade and Intercourse, March 13, 1816 (Prucha, , Documents of the United States Indian Policy, pp. 27–28).Google Scholar

20. Civilization Fund Act, March 3, 1819 (Prucha, , Documents of the United States Indian Policy, p. 33).Google Scholar

21. For an excellent discussion of the inadequacy of the justifications of the removal policy to the situation of the Cherokees, who had adopted an agricultrual mode of life, had converted to Christianity, owned livestock, dressed in white attire, and spoke English, see Dippie, Brian W.'s The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and the United States Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), pp. 56–78.Google Scholar

22. Indian Commission Crawford on Indian Policy, November 25, 1838 (Documents of the United States Indian Policy, p. 73).Google Scholar

23. Alfred Finney and Cephas Washburn to John C. Calhoun, October 1, 1834, quoted in Sheehan, , Seeds of Extinction, p. 145.Google Scholar

24. Smith, Samuel Stanhope, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human SpeciesGoogle Scholar, quoted in Berkhofer, Robert F., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 41.Google Scholar

25. Head of the Indian Office Thomas McKenney to P. Milledorer, August 9, 1820, quoted in Sheehan, , Seeds of Extinction, p. 145.Google Scholar

26. Caldwell, Charles, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human RaceGoogle Scholar, quoted in Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 119–20Google Scholar. Horsman offers and extensive discussion of the development of scientific racism before the institution of the American school of ethnography in the late 1830s.

27. I am indebted for my discussion of the American school of ethnography and the consequenc.es of scientific racism on Indian policy to Berkhofer, 's White Man's IndianGoogle Scholar (esp. pp. 55–59), Dippie, 's Vanishing American (esp. pp. 82–86)Google Scholar, and Horsman, Reginald's “Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century” (American Quarterly 27 [1975]: 152–68).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Quoted in Horsman, , “Scientific Racism,” p. 156.Google Scholar

29. Quoted in Berkhofer, , White Man's Indian, p. 58.Google Scholar

30. I am indebted for this date to Horsman, 's Race and Manifest Destiny, p. 135.Google Scholar

31. Quoted in Horsman, , “Scientific Racism,” pp. 167–68.Google Scholar

32. Stephens, Ann S., Mary Derwent: A Tale of the Wyoming Valley in 1778 (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.: Dick and Walker, 1908), p. 379.Google Scholar

33. See Berkofer, 's White Man's Indian, esp. pp. 134–38.Google Scholar

34. Secretary of War Crawford on Trade and Intercourse, March 13, 1816 (Prucha, , Documents of the United States Indian Policy, p. 27).Google Scholar

35. Indian Commissioner Crawford on Indian Policy, November 25, 1838 (Prucha, , Documents of the United States Indian Policy, p. 74).Google Scholar

36. Quoted in Horsman, , “Scientific Racism,” p. 164.Google Scholar

37. Stephens's radical revision of her plot from the amalgamation of the Indian into white society to the removal out of the path of civilization of a decimated tribe is accompanied by other less conspicuous but equally significant changes, also suggestive of the evolution of white discourse on the improvability of the Indian that occurred between 1838 and 1858. This is how, for instance, the serialized version of Mary Derwent describes Tahmeroo's journey to her village: “She bent to her task with an energy that sent the perspiration like rain-drops to her forehead. The paddles glanced rapidly in and out of the water, and the canoe sped on and on, with the velocity of a sparrow-hawk in the air. At length it curved round with a bold sweep, and shot into the stupendous gap through which the Lackawanna empties its coal-stained tribute into the bosom of the Susquehanna. It was like the meeting of the sinful and the good in the valley of death – the commingling of those streams in the gathering of twilight – the one so dark and turbid, the other so bright and beautiful” (p. 89). In the 1858 edition of the novel, the passage depicting the merging of the waters of the Lackawanna and the Susquehanna was omitted and substituted by a long paragraph describing the “sublime” beauty of the landscape. If one reads the the description of the mingling of the two rivers as a metaphor for the intermixing of Caucasians and Native Americans, no matter in what ethnocentric terms, its exclusion from the 1858 revision of the novel is symptomatic of the eclipse of the project of assimilation of the Other.

38. When Mary Derwent was published in 1858, Harper's New Monthly Magazine hailed it as “a highly successful production of the popular American novelist” (17 [1858]: 407), and Peterson's Magazine predicted it was “destined to have an immense sale” (33 [1858]: 464). For analogous comments, see the reviews of Mary Derwent in the Knickerbocker (52 [1858]: 329) and in Godey's Magazine (57 [1858]: 181).

39. I am indebted for my discussion of the implementation of the reservation system to Prucha's “United States Indian Policies, 1815–1860.”

40. Tompkins, , Sensational Designs, pp. xi–xix.Google Scholar

41. For a brilliant discussion of the notion of the inevitable demise of Native Americans, see Dippie, 's Vanishing American.Google Scholar

42. Between 1845 and 1850, Graham's Magazine, which Stephens had started editing in 1841, published a series of articles on various Native American tribes. The first essay, dedicated to the Black Feet, opened with the assertion that “the once proud nations who owned our forests and gave name to our mountains are no more. To use one of their own figurative phrases, they have passed away like the mists of morning” (26 [1845]: 92). As one of the editors of the magazine, Stephens must no doubt have read these materials.