Page 50 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

CHAPTER ONE

Indian. 10 9 A seventeenth-century portrait of her, titled simply Pocahontas,
depicted a fair-skinned woman with a ruff around her neck and a fan
in her gloved hand A . n eighteenth-century painting by Mary Woodbury,
also titled Pocahontas, showed a woman with her dark hair pulled back,
her fair skin set off by a ribbon around her neck, her sloping shoulders
and narrow waist accented by a lace-trimmed dress with voluminous
skirts, and her delicate hand holding a single flower. In the nineteenth­
century portrait by Robert Matthew Sully, also called Pocahontas, there
was slightly more suggestion of naturalness in the subject's flowing hair
and in the outdoor background. Y e t here too was the face of a white
woman with Cupid's bow lips, soulful eyes, and bejeweled ears, displayed
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above an elaborate gown.
W h ite eyes saw the Pocahontas they wanted to see. She was to reap­
pear in many other forms throughout the nineteenth century.
Introduced on the stage first in 1808, through James Nelson Barker's
play "The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage," she was to flit over
many platforms, rescuing white heroes in the process. She was also the
subject of countless poems, such as Lydia Sigourney's 1 8 41 Pocahontas.
T o Sigourney, Pocahontas was "a forest-child" whose "spirit-glance
bespoke the daughter of a king." After many stanzas recounting
Pocahontas's story, Sigourney concluded that although her people were
gone, her memory should be preserved. "It is not meet," Sigourney
wrote, that Pocahontas's "name should moulder in the grave." III
Pocahontas's legacies were not all positive, however. Because her
marriage to John Rolfe proved that "savages" could be Christianized, it
provided something of a rationale for Indian women-white men rela­
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tionships. Still, whites generally opposed such marriages, which would
undermine notions of white superiority, social class formed by breed­
ing, and white nationalism based on white superiority and class. W h ites
who hoped to ensure racial purity had to control sexual desire, making
intermarriage as far out of bounds as possible. II 3 As a result, many writ­
ers opposed interracial unions. As early as 1 8 27, Cooper's The Prairie
made it clear that intermarriage, or miscegenation as Americans later
termed it, was unacceptable. The white hero refused the offer of an
Indian wife because he opposed "the admixture of the species, which
only tends to tarnish the beauty and to interrupt the harmony of nature."

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