Domesticating the Natives: The
Cynthia Patterson
Edgar Allan Poe is said
to have famously observed that if one were to remove the covers from these
middlebrow illustrated monthly magazines (Godey’s,
Graham’s, Peterson’s, Sartain’s Union,
Miss Leslie’s), one could not distinguish
between them because all relied on the same authors and the same embellishers.
Likewise, an astute male reader of Godey’s (and Godey’s styled
itself as a “Lady’s Book”) complained of the preponderance of images of women
and children in the magazine. Most scholars who have consulted the full-page,
pullout art engravings in these magazines have made much the same mistake
as did Poe and Godey’s male reader
– homogenizing these images and largely overlooking the subtle differences
between publishers’ differing treatment of certain genres of images, and what
those differences reveal about imagined audiences. Images of Native Americans
were ubiquitous in these magazines, and generally fell into one of three categories:
historical, protoethnographic and idealized/romanticized. A careful examination
of how publishers marshaled these images of Native Americans, while revealing
subtle differences in imagined audiences, also reveals that they functioned
to uphold hegemonic gender, class, and racial discourses at mid-century. These
images worked to imaginatively domesticate not only the Natives that served
as subjects, but the middlebrow reading audience as well. As such, these images
functioned hegemonically to uphold the doctrine of separate spheres, the cult
of true womanhood, the cult of domesticity, and an emerging discourse of domestic
masculinity.
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| Penn's Treaty with the Indians, eng. by Bannister from original by West, Sartain's Union Magazine, August 1850 | Fort Mackenzie, drawn by K. Bodmer, eng. by Rawdon, Wright & Hatch, Graham's, Nov. 1847 | Domestic Life Among the Indians, des. by F. O. C. Darley, Godey's, June 1845 |