The Pocahontas narratives in the era of the romantic representations of the native americans and their influence on the construction of an american national identity

Abstract

This dissertation analyses five literary texts about Pocahontas and some of the visual representations about the Native American girl, which were produced during American Romanticism comparing / contrasting these texts with the founding narratives of James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans and The Pioneers, as well as with two other novels of the same period, Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie and Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok. The objective of this research is to show that the Romantic narratives on Pocahontas are important for the definition of an American national identity through the discussion of themes like miscegenation, liminal figures and the captivity narratives inserted in these texts. In order to make such analysis, this dissertation begins with a discussion of the historical aspects concerning the story of Pocahontas, then a survey about the theoretical background, dealing with the theories on nation and national identity of Ernest Renan, Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha. The theoretical chapter is followed by a comparative / contrastive analysis of the texts, including the visual representations, which concludes with the idea that Cooper's narratives portray a traditional view of the American nation, while the Pocahontas textual and visual narratives give a different view of it. This analysis also led this dissertation to conclude that the story of Pocahontas has had a great influence on the construction of a national identity in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the moment when the American nation was establishing itself as a new one. The Pocahontas narratives do not deal with nation and national identity in the same way the other narratives do, but they are