Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
3. What positive, even utopian, aspects does Mascwisca’s tribal home
possess? What negative aspects?
4. What impact does Mascawisca’s comment on Samoset’s death’s belying
Christian law have on Everell? Why?
5. Mascawisca tells the “loser’s” side of the Pequod War. Why does Everell
think it’s the true version?
4.6 LYDIA HOWARD HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY
(1791–1865)
Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney was
born in Norwich and died in Hartford,
Connecticut. Under the supervision and
through the help of her father’s employers,
Sigourney educated herself, established a
school for girls, and published her rst
book, Moral Pieces (1815). It set the
tone for much for her voluminous later
work; she published over sixty volumes
of poetry and prose and thousands of
periodical essays. She always maintained
an interest in morality and virtue—a
“proper” concern for women at that time.
She supported Republican Motherhood
and often placed women’s work within
the separate, domestic sphere. Women
could work for public good, but in their
relegated realm. She herself publicly
Image 4.4 | Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney
supported schools for the hearing Artist | Mathew Brady
Source | Wikimedia Commons
impaired, protested for Native American
License | Public Domain
rights, and advocated Abolition.
In 1819, she married Charles Sigourney, a hardware merchant. He discouraged
Sigourney from publishing her writing—until they needed money due to nancial
losses in his business. At rst, she published her work anonymously, in deference
to her husband. As her reputation grew, though, she published once more under
her own name.
In 1840, she traveled to Europe, seeking out literary lions and seeking to be
lionized herself. Her travelogue Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands (1842)
augmented her reputation and respect in America. That respect did not survive long
after her death; she became primarily associated with the outmoded lachrymose
elegies of the graveyard school of poets, such as those Mark Twain parodies in
“Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d.”
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