英文摘要 |
This paper analyzes the politics of truth, the rhetoric of sympathy and the controversy of translation in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s sentimental novel, Hope Leslie. With the focus shifting to the marginal character, Magawisca, rather than the white heroine Hope Leslie, it is found that the Indian girl Magawisca is functional in many senses. Magawisca is the racial other, who speaks of the other side of the Pequot war, whose loss of one arm for love of the English boy, Everell, wins the reader’s sympathetic tears and whose role as a translator between the Indians and the English settlers negotiate the linguistic, cultural and racial differences. Granted that Sedgwick’s revisionary history of the Pequot war is progressive, Magawisca’s voicing of the suppressed “truth” endows the white, female author with authority, rather than leading to racial justice. Despite the fact that her representation of Magawisca subverts the literary stereotypes of the Indians, Sedgwick’s Indian story is still contentious, since the Indian removal is not challenged, and Magawisca’s sacrifice for love sentimentalizes the Indian girl and makes interracial romance tantalizing but impossible. More significantly, translation in Sedgwick’s novel is intended to cross the barrier of difference but ends up reiterating the untranslatability of otherness and justifying the removal of the other from social imaginings. Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie reveals its narrative anxiety and ambivalence about difference, sympathy and translation. Whether sympathy can be a vehicle for identification with the other and whether translation can be an ethical way of understanding difference are questions to ask. Or, after all, radical otherness is expelled in sympathy and translation. |