Examining the appropriations and revisions of Indian identity first carried out by Anglo-American engravers and later by early Anglo-American women writers, Cathy Rex shows the ways in which iconic images of Native figures inform not only an emerging colonial/early republican American identity but also the authorial identity of white women writers. Women such as Mary Rowlandson, Ann Eliza Bleecker, Lydia Maria Child, and the pseudonymous Unca Eliza Winkfield of The Female American, Rex argues, co-opted and revised images of Indianness such as those found in the Massachusetts Bay Colony seal and the numerous variations of Pocahontas's image based on Simon Van de Passe's original 1616 engraving. Doing so allowed them to posit their own identities and presumed superiority as American women writers. Sometimes ugly, occasionally problematic, and often patently racist, the Indian writings of these women nevertheless question the masculinist and Eurocentric discourses governing an American identity that has always had Indianness at its core. Rather than treating early American images and icons as ancillary to literary works, Rex places them in conversation with one another, suggesting that these well-known narratives and images are mutually constitutive. The result is a new, more textually inclusive perspective on the field of early American studies.
'In Anglo-American Women Writers and Representations of Indianness, 1629-1824, Cathy Rex compellingly explores how women writers from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century exploit contradictions in European and Euro-American treatment and representation of Native Americans in order to critique the treatment of women and develop their own agency. Rex's extended attention to images, material culture, and neglected historical figures provides more finely delineated contexts for her analyses of well-known print narratives by Anglo-American women, yielding both a richer sense of their literary and intellectual sophistication and a more clear-eyed understanding of the ways they were enmeshed in the often exploitative and racist activities of their day.' Tamara Harvey, George Mason University, USA
