In spite of its misleading brevity (a mere 178 pages), Removals, by Lucy Maddox, presents its reader with so much food for thought that it’s difficult at first reading to distinguish the main course from the rest of the meal. Although I read the introduction with my usual over-attention to note taking, it wasn’t until I reached the end of the book and turned around to re-read the beginning, that I felt I had a good grasp of which idea Maddox proposed as her main thesis. This is through more fault of my own for being largely ignorant of the whole context surrounding the removal of the Indians to the west of the Mississippi than through errors on Maddox’s part. My own amazement at the historical record diverted my attention, and with so much new material coming at me, it took a concerted effort at the end of the book to realign the direction of my thoughts with Maddox’s thesis. That said, I believe Maddox’s book can best be characterized as a double indictment, critical of both the treatment of the American Indian during the time of the Indian removals and our present-day ignorance of their true significance to the American literary tradition. For Maddox this impact was great enough that she feels that “all serious literature scholars” should be “familiar” with the white American response to “the Indian question” (12). The first removal described by Maddox was the removal of 1839 when thousands of Indians were forced to move west of the Mississippi. This removal was performed with the common underlying assumption that this was just the first step in the eventual extinction of the American Indian. The second removal Maddox describes continues to this day and is defined as the lack of attention to the impact that the Indian question had on the shaping of American discourse, literature, and mythology.

In addition to outlining her thesis in her introduction, Maddox also discusses the ambiguous position of Indian texts themselves. She questions whether the otherness of these texts can allow them to be accommodated within the literary culture of today, and whether such an accommodation would result in “linguistic colonization.” According to the viewpoint held by many scholars that history is of necessity culture-specific, such a revising of history to represent voices that were not allowed to speak at the time would be impossible. Therefore, these scholars feel that the two histories, white and Indian, must remain distinct, and history must be limited to reporting the “past as lived” (4). Other historians take the opposite view that we have enough resources from this era and have moved far enough away from ethnocentrism to be able to merge these histories.

Several dichotomies of thinking that defined all discourse concerning the “Indian question” are also explained in the introduction. The fate of the Indians was seen as resting on the question of whether they should be assimilated or allowed to become extinct. With the debate couched in these terms, and the overwhelming evidence pointing to the unsuitability, if not downright refusal, of Indians to assimilate, the whites became resigned to the seemingly unavoidable conclusion the there was no hope for the long-term continued existence of the Indian. Of course, the fact that they had set up the rules of the game in such a fashion that the Indians could not possibly win, didn’t seem to occur to any of the leaders quoted by Maddox. Many other dichotomies entered into the evaluation of the Indians. For instance, they were tribal rather than national in their organization, they were nomadic as opposed to land-owning, they were pagan rather than Christian, they preferred idleness to industry, and their language showed that they were not yet “disenthralled with nature” (George Bancroft, qtd. 9).

In chapter 1 Maddox goes into great detail regarding the civilization vs. extinction debate and the historical context of the removal of the Indians to the lands west of the Mississippi. This chapter was extremely helpful to me, since I guess I must have been absent when they covered this in my American history classes. This chapter is still important for others with a more in-depth background, however, since Maddox stresses the quotes and points that become a basis for her overall thesis. The wealth of sources used here strongly support the idea that the great majority of writers during the early 1800s saw the Indian question solely in terms of assimilation or extinction. Even Emerson, who wrote to President Van Buren upon hearing the plans for removal that “a crime is being projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude” (qtd. 16), admitted that all efforts at civilizing the Indians had failed. Because living in close proximity had resulted in so much violence and ill-will between the Indians and the white men, the decision to remove the Indians was often couched in the terms “it’s really for your own good,” even by the more sympathetic thinkers of the day (20).

Toward the end of the chapter, Maddox begins to lay the literary groundwork for her thesis by making some general statements about the representations of Indians in the literature of the early and mid-nineteenth century. In the midst of the Indian debate, the question of how the new country would develop its own distinct literary identity was also under investigation. The existence of new frontiers and an indigenous people were seen by writers and scholars as the best foundations on which to base a national literature. Consequently, inclusion of the Indians in literature was seen as a legitimate goal; however, a realistic portrayal was usually seen as so offensive to literary taste that the Indians had to be revised into prototypes such as the noble savage. Thus began a long line of questionable portrayals of Indians in American literature.

In chapters 2-4 Maddox discusses the literary works of Melville, Hawthorne, Child, Sedgwick, Fuller, Thoreau, and Parkman, grouping them according to the types of writing and Indian portrayals present in their works. Of these writers only Melville, who gets a full chapter to himself, is held up as an example of writing against the grain of the prejudices of the time. Melville serves as a perfect example for Maddox’s overall thesis because he refuses to speak for the Indian or the various “others” found in his works. Melville’s work revolves a recurring theme of “unsettling encounter[s] with the silent other”(53) that illustrate the limitations of the writing of the period. The silence of Melville’s “other” characters can not be taken as accidental because his white characters mention or allude to this silence themselves. A good example of this is when the narrator of Bartleby, the Scrivener describes how the “materials” just do not “exist” to do a “satisfactory biography” of Bartleby (qtd. 67). Maddox also mentions that Melville’s descriptions of Indians and other natives as child-like appear to undermine the statement of their silence by representing them in stereotypical fashion, but I disagree. Instead, I believe that it can be read as another statement by Melville to the effect that the white’s true knowledge of the native is so lacking that a realistic portrayal is not possible.

Chapter 3 describes how Catherine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie and Lydia Marie Child’s Hobomok, both published in the 1820s, attempted but fell somewhat short of portraying the Indians in an more individualistic style. Both of these writers were concerned with women’s rights and linked in some fashion the treatment of women and the treatment of the Indian. In both books white female characters become involved in personal relationships with Indian characters in order to escape the repression of their lives. Ironically, however, in both books there are no more choices represented to the Indians than in the discourse of the time. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is then held up in contrast to these two novels for its very clear message that to fraternize with Indians (even against your will) is to step out of the natural bounds of society and degrade yourself.

Chapter 4 looks at works by Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Francis Parkman, who wrote about Indians as they experienced them in their actual travels. Of these three writers Fuller presented the most positive portrayal of the Indians, not because she had positive firsthand observations, but because she pretended to look back behind the Indians she saw to their more dignified past in a more romanticized view that fit with her belief that America’s destiny was to “elucidate a great moral law” (139). Unfortunately, even Fuller believed that this destiny would be fulfilled in relation to the black man and women long after the red man had disappeared. Thoreau is also described as having a “poetic” view of the Indian, although no particular Indian that he encountered in his travel notes for The Maine Woods fit his own stereotype of the “wild and natural” incarnate (150). The contrast to these writers’ poeticized view is depicted by Francis Parkman in his book The Oregon Trail, which depicts the Indian as “unstable” and “capricious” with an “intolerance of control” and characterizes Indian women as “hags” and Indian children as “mongrels” (160-65). For Parkman, the Indians’ only suitable role in literature is as tragic heroes whose flaws far outweigh any virtues and must result in extinction.

Maddox’s journey through the portrayal of Indians in early 19^th century literature leads her to conclude that the majority of the discourse served to propagate the prevailing myths of our culture--white supremacy, male domination, and manifest destiny. Using Barthes’s definition of myth as “discourse that transforms history into nation,” she claims that these myths were central to the building of our identity as a nation. In accordance with Barthes’s definition, these myths serve to “suppress “ history and mask injustice. According to Maddox, the fact that Indian behavior did not fit into the existing myths of family and nation made Indian culture seem doomed to failure. Literary criticism that looks back at the literature of this time without seeing the ramifications of the treatment of Indians is missing the critical role that the Indians played in defining and shaping our mythology as a new nation. By ignoring this fact, literary criticism is guilty of a second “removal” of the American Indian.

Viewed from an ecocritical perspective, Maddox’s book can be used to draw parallels between the settlers’ treatment of the land and their treatment of the American Indian. The use of Barthes’s mythology and nation-building ideas is quite effective in illustrating how the concepts of manifest destiny and the various dichotomies defined the Indian as so totally “other” that their extinction seemed not only inevitable, but almost natural. The quote by George Bancroft is particularly effective because it shows that, not only was the white settler “disenthralled” with the land, but the whole concept of feeling connected to the earth was considered primitive and undesirable (9). Whether Maddox’s other point is well-grounded, it is hard to determine from what I have actually read myself. Her analysis of the discourse of the era appears to be representative; however, her assertion that the impact of this discourse on the literary tradition has been ignored requires an extensive study of literary criticism, which she does not produce. T o support this claim Maddox would have to write a more extensive book and include such a study.

Maddox, Lucy. Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.