The Research of Hope Leslie by Catherine Maria Sedgwick

The seminal literary theoriser of diachronic fiction is widely acknowledged as Georg Lukacs (Foley 143, et end-to-end; Jameson passim), as is Lukacs's attachment to Sir Walter Scott as the prime mover of the diachronic novel. With Scott's Waverley there begins "the coordination amid an emergent new form, the historical novel, and an emergent new type of consciousness: a new star of hi reputation and a new experience of historicity" (Jameson 1). The coordination, or synthesis, to which Jameson refers in discussing Lukacs's criticism constitutes the thematic and narrative structure of historical fiction. It is energetic because it explains, non that changes happened but why and how and what is important about them. Moreover, in historical fiction the truth of the historical explanation is to be found in the smaller details of experience out-of-the-way(prenominal) more than in the broad outline of significant world-historical events. This is explained by Lukacs in his discussion of why Scott's typical hero is not such a world-historical figures as a king or god (as is often true of historical drama) but quite tends to be "a more or less mediocre, ordinary English gentleman . . . 'middling', merely correct and never heroical" (33). Lukacs says elsewhere:

What matters is that we should reexperience the social and human motives which led men to think, feeling and act just as they did in historical reality. And

rely Leslie resembles Satanstoe in the fact that it develops as an early colonial document. It also contains elements of narrative adventure, including the conflict between whites and Indians. The heroine of apprehend Leslie, like the hero of Satanstoe, is of the "middling" sort, neither as important as the historical Margaret Winthrop nor as insignificant as a servant. But Hope Leslie seems more overtly a document intended to examine the moral and social cognitive content of customs, practice, and manners as primary givens of existence than a story that, like Satanstoe, presumes a certain content of social practice and describes action that takes place within it.

This is the dynamic that dominates Hope Leslie, and it encases what Kelley sees as the two basic concerns in the novel--the subjection of Indians by Puritans and a tale of romance among Puritans (xxi). The narrative action surrounding Hope and Magawisca elaborates marginal experience (woman, Indian, commoner) in the Massachusetts Bay theocracy. This is the interchange thematic fact of Hope Leslie as a historical novel, and it is essential to understanding Sedgwick's presentation of character in Hope and Magawisca. Consider Lukacs's tangential remark about Cooper's treatment of "the coarse historical tragedy of those early colonizers who emigrated from England in order to refer their freedom, but who themselves destroy this freedom by their own kit and boodle" (Lukacs 65).

Historical authenticity means for him the quality of the inner life, the morality, heroism, force for sacrifice, steadfastness etc. peculiar to a given age. This is the important, ever-living and--for the history of literature--epoch-making thing about Scott's historical authenticity and not the much-discussed, so-called "local colour" of the descriptions which is only one among legion(predicate) ancillary, artistic devices and could never on its own reawaken the inwardness of an age. . . . It is neither by analysis, nor by psychological explanation of its ideas that S
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