Sedgwick's Literary Influence

by Patricia Kalayjian [excerpted from "Revisioning America's (Literary) Past: Sedgwick's Hope Leslie," NWSA Journal 8.3 (Fall, 1996), 63-78.]

Because of Catharine Maria Sedgwick's now marginalized position, we tend to discount the influence she had in her contemporary world. The literary frontier of the 1820s existed as a temporal and temporary site of opportunity for women writers because the development of an "American" literature demanded the efforts of men and women alike. This frontier parallels any geographical borderland where necessity enables social and cultural flux to occur until a new hierarchy is enforced. Hence Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Kirkland, and others were originally welcomed. We forget that Sedgwick was considered not a dilettante or a scribbler but an artist deserving of serious review by peers such as Cooper, Bryant, and Edgar Allan Poe. She was an innovator in terms of both short and long fiction, as in the example of her regionalism and her nascent novels of manners (Redwood, Clarence) and her didactic narratives (Home, The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man), and in the directing of fiction toward specific audiences such as children, working women, and families. We forget that her residence was a meeting place for persons of literary import or that the famous meeting between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville occurred there. More difficult to document are the less quantifiable influences such as how her fictive depictions of women, who, like herself, chose to remain single-and relatively free of societal restrictions and limited expectations-made possible the career and life choices of Louisa May Alcott or Sarah Orne Jewett. . . .

Sedgwick's centrality to the early United States' literary community, her originality of genre and subject, her engagement in contemporary issues, the complexity and intelligence of her work, and her multiple connections to women writers before and after her make Sedgwick important to any real integration of women's writing into the study of American literature. Placing Hope Leslie with and against already canonical texts of the period illustrates that American literature has never been a monolithic structure but a site of radical (and fascinating) disputation. The voices of America's outsiders are always contesting cultural constructs of race and gender and critiquing the applied virtues of religion, government, capitalism, and democracy. What we currently label "multiculturalism" is not a new challenge but a named iteration of an ongoing contest to the dominant culture as it would be canonized. Recentering Hope Leslie and Sedgwick's other work recognizes the inherent dialogism of literature and normalizes not white maleness but the ongoing struggle to be heard and recognized within America's dream of democracy.

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English Department at Salem State College - ©2000