Spectacle Islands: Indigeneity, Performance, and the Archipelago in Hope Leslie

Scholars have long examined the textual archive on which Catha rine Maria Sedgwick drew as she wrote Hope Leslie. This article moves beyond this well-known written archive to demonstrate that Sedgwick evokes cultural memories preserved by other means. Though largely excluded from the nation’s budding historical societies and libraries, cultural memories of seventeenth-century colonists’ violence against Indians are present in the novel, evoked through dramatic devices well known to Sedgwick, a lifelong theatergoer, as well as by oral traditions about Boston’s environments, most notably Deer Island. Beneath the novel’s apparatus of quotation and citation, then, lurk other histories—Indigenous, environmental, and performative— that are especially relevant to the novel’s often ignored second volume. Reading the novel’s islands as theatrical stages, with their capacity to conjure historical traces through surrogation rather than the written record, allows Sedgwick’s writing of Indigenous and environmental history to surface. In reminding us that Boston’s harbor and islands were integral parts of town in the seventeenth century, and by representing these island and water settings as theatrical stages, Sedgwick calls attention to urban Indigeneity and speaks back to the colonial archive. Ultimately Sedgwick’s theatricalization of history simultaneously evokes and erases Indigenous suffering.