Heaven's Interpreters

Front matter

Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America

R eet ot

HEAVEN’S INTERPRETERS

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Writing Women’s Religious Agency in Nineteenth- Century America

. “My Resolve Is the Feminine of My Father’s Oath”: Ritual Agency and Religious Language in the Early National Historical Novel

CHAPTER 1 “My Resolve Is the Feminine of My Father’s Oath”

Ritual Agency and Religious Language in the Early National Historical Novel

In the late eighteenth century, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, wife of the Federalist politician Theodore Sedgwick and descendant of the Connecticut Dwights, was frequently ill. She suffered from severe depressions for which she was occasionally institutionalized; these depressions were exacerbated by her husband’s long absences from the family’s home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Theodore, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives or on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, left his wife and children for months at a time while he performed his civic duties in Philadelphia or New York. In a 1791 letter to her husband, Pamela pleaded with him to come home to Stockbridge; she had “lost [her] understanding,” and she feared that in her weakened state she would leave their children unprotected.’ While Theodore was sympathetic to Pamela’s trials, he continued his public career, and his wife’s illnesses worsened until her death in 1807.7 As adults, Pamela’s children offered varied interpretations of her difficult life. After her death, her son Henry Sedgwick composed a eulogy in which Pamela’s pain worked to the spiritual benefit of her husband, her children, and her country: “It may not be profane or irreverent to suppose that, with some distant resemblance to our Redeemer, she did not suffer solely for herself . . . ; and we may be permitted to hope that her example and her memory . . . will contribute to the eternal welfare of those she most loved.”* Henry’s eulogy invokes the Christian doctrine of atonement: the cosmic mechanism by which

Christ’s painful death on the cross effects humankind’s redemption from sin. By indicating Pamela’s “distant resemblance to our Redeemer” and its potential effect on the “eternal welfare of those she most loved,” Henry implies that Pamela shared in Christ’s soteriological mission: that as with Christ’s crucifixion, Pamela’s suffering and death would bring about the eventual salvation of others. Henry’s eulogy releases Theodore from culpability: Pamela suffered because she was like Christ—not because Theodore left her alone on the Massachusetts frontier for months at a time—and listeners would do well to learn from her noble self-sacrifice.

Pamela’s daughter, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, wrote of her mother’s life and death in starkly different terms. In Catharine’s memory, Pamela had indeed made Christlike sacrifices for her family and her country: her chief traits were her “character, her wisdom, her conjugal devotion, and self-negation,” and she never “expressed one word of remonstrance or dissatisfaction” despite the fact that her “long separations from my father seem to have been almost cruel to her.”* But in Catharine’s telling, Theodore subtly shoulders the blame for Pamela’s suffering and death. While he was sorry that Pamela’s sequestration exacerbated her physical and mental anguish, his “compunction [was] tempered by the conviction of an overruling duty to his country.” Theodore’s devotion to public duty, Catharine asserted, “overruled” his consideration for Pamela’s private pain. And unlike her brother, Catharine was unwilling to assign atoning power to Pamela’s death: in describing the loss of her mother she would say only that Pamela’s “sufferings [we]re past, and . . . prepared her to enjoy more keenly the rest and felicities of heaven.” For Catharine, Pamela was Christlike, but she was no Christ: her trials brought about no greater good in this world and only speculative benefit in the world beyond.

By the time of their mother’s death, Catharine and Henry Sedgwick had heard many sermons about the doctrine of atonement: about Christ’s painful death on the cross and the cosmic mechanism by which his unearned suffering secured the salvation of humankind. They had been raised in Stockbridge under the strict orthodox Calvinist regime of the town’s Congregationalist clergyman, Pamela’s uncle Stephen West, who had assumed the Stockbridge pulpit when it was vacated by Jonathan Edwards. West was an acknowledged authority on the doctrine of atonement: his treatises on the subject explained in precise detail how Christ’s agonizing “sufferings and death . . . sensibly and gloriously expressed” God’s ostensibly benevolent nature. His sermons, meanwhile, encouraged hearers to emulate Christ’s self-abnegation, an instruction Pamela Sedgwick took deeply to heart.° As adults, both Catharine and Henry Sedgwick would leave the religion of their childhood to join the Unitarian church, a liberal offshoot of New England Congregationalism that openly rejected the doctrine of atonement. Unitarian theologians of the early nineteenth century vociferously questioned the meaning and purpose of Christ's death on the cross: as doctrinally liberal Christians who insisted on God’s “parental character,” they were horrified by the idea that a loving father would require his sinless son to die painfully for the benefit of sinful humankind.’ And yet, as Henry’s eulogy for his mother suggests, the idea that the public good required the sacrifices of women and other already disempowered people continued to structure early national rhetoric even for the most liberal of thinkers.

Many of the Sedgwick siblings would follow in their father’s footsteps, becoming public figures in their own right. Henry would make a career as a lawyer and abolitionist, while Catharine would become the most prominent female author of her generation and one of the earliest American writers to gain a reputation beyond the borders of the young nation. In the first decades of her career, Catharine would take up the problem of atonement in her fiction, particularly in her historical novels Hope Leslie and The Linwoods. While the historical novel is always preoccupied with national sacrifice, Sedgwick and other religiously liberal women authors of the early national period, particularly Lydia Maria Child, transformed it into a specifically theological form, one that explores the doctrine of atonement in order to question what—and who— will be sacrificed on the altar of the nation. Sedgwick and her contemporaries adopted the popular genre of the historical novel as a means of interrogating the gendered nature of vicarious sacrifice—the way that models of sacrifice, including the Christian theology of atonement, exacerbate the suffering of the already disempowered in the name of an often dubious higher good.

The problem of vicarious sacrifice was both a religious and a political one in the early United States. Carol Pateman and other feminist scholars of political history have shown how the works of social contract theory that gave rise to the United States’ political structures sacrificed women’s claims to citizenship by constructing and naturalizing a binary opposition between men’s freedom and women’s dependence. John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other Enlightenment political theorists attributed individuality exclusively to men by constructing men’s political freedom as the corollary to women’s supposedly “natural” subjection. Under liberal political theory, “men possess the capacities required for citizenship”—namely, the ability to “use their reason to sublimate their passions, develop a sense of justice and so uphold the universal, civil law”—while women “cannot transcend their bodily natures and sexual passions” and thus “cannot develop such a political morality.”* This model of “natural” difference justified the division of social life into public and private spheres, with the public the realm of politics and commerce and the private the realm of domesticity and sexuality. As Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has noted, “the logic of this particularization of women involves not simply pulling rank” but actually “requires defining women as . . . constitutively unable to exercise choice and agency.”’ For the philosophers whose work formed the foundation of the new American republic, the political and public agency of “woman” was sacrificed so that “man” could become the paradigmatic liberal individual.

Thus, even as influential Unitarian clerics were dismantling doctrines of atonement that insisted on vicarious sacrifice as a means to cosmic reconciliation, early American political theory was insisting on the sacrifice of women’s self-determination as the price of the new nation’s progress. As religiously liberal and politically progressive women authors, Sedgwick and Child stood at the intersection of these discourses, and they composed historical novels that interrogated sacrifice at both of these levels. Child’s Hobomok and Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie and The Linwoods proliferate scenes of sacrifice and then trace the consequences of those sacrifices for characters living at critical moments in the history of settlement and national formation. In highlighting the similarities between “savage” and “civilized” notions of sacrifice, Hobomok and Hope Leslie participate in the deconstruction of atonement theology that characterized much Unitarian thought in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Not content with merely questioning atonement, however, Sedgwick would go on to displace sacrifice altogether in her novel The Linwoods. Set during the American Revolution, The Linwoods replaces atonement doctrine with a model of religious language that enables women to actively participate in history. Isabella Linwood, the novel’s heroine, exercises a type of religious agency grounded not in the sacrifice of her body but in her “resolve” —Sedgwick’s term for a form of spontaneous and embodied language that expresses the speaker’s most sincere beliefs and in doing so transforms the listener's actions. Revising Unitarian theology through the medium of the historical novel made it possible for Child and Sedgwick to imagine a nation united by forces other than violent sacrifice, in which women contributed actively to national advancement instead of being relegated, like Pamela Sedgwick, to seclusion and silence."

Even as they sought to imaginatively rescue white women from the necessity of perpetual self-abnegation, however, Child and Sedgwick raised (but did not settle) the question of where nonwhite Americans fit into national narratives of atonement and sacrifice. Sedgwick’s fiction was perpetually haunted by the remembrance of her mother’s painful life and death and by the way her suffering was framed as necessary both to her husband’s public career and her children’s salvation. But there is another figure who reappears throughout Sedgwick’s work: Elizabeth Freeman, the African American servant who acted as a “second mother” to the Sedgwick children when Pamela was ill. For Catharine Sedgwick, Freeman provided the model of religious “resolve” offered in The Linwoods, one that was not grounded in silent sacrifice but in active self-advocacy. This resolve stirred Sedgwick’s literary and political imagination, but it had limited utility for the real-life Freeman and her family. Elizabeth Freeman’s persistent presence in Sedgwick’s writing—as herself, as an Indian maiden, as a revolutionary-era servant, and elsewhere—indicates the precarious status of people of color in otherwise triumphant early national narratives of women’s increasing religious agency.

Sacrifice without Blood: Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok

Both Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick spent their childhoods in households deeply influenced by a strict New England Calvinism, and both would eventually defect, as adults, to more liberal Christian denominations. Sedgwick took a deep interest in religious and political issues even in childhood: one of her earliest extant letters, written to her father, Theodore, in 1804 when she was fourteen years old, describes a recent election in Stockbridge won by the “Jacobins”—the local Democratic party—who upon their victory had immediately voted to lower Stephen West’s clerical salary.'! As an adult, Catharine would attribute some of the blame for Pamela’s mental illness to her mother’s severe Calvinist belief system. And yet it would take much urging from her brothers to convince her to leave the “orthodox” Congregationalist church to join a Unitarian congregation. Writing to her friend Susan Channing in March 1821, Sedgwick confessed that she considered the Unitarians to be “nearer the truth, by a very great deal, than the orthodox”; still, she protested, “there are some of your articles of unbelief that I am not Protestant enough to subscribe to.”!* Despite these reservations, Sedgwick transferred her membership from the Stockbridge church to a Unitarian congregation later that year.”

Child, like her contemporary, spent her childhood in a Massachusetts town thoroughly imbued with Congregationalist Calvinism. Her “gloomy and withdrawn” father imposed his “‘fierce theology’” upon her, and her reaction against this early training led to a lifetime of spiritual seeking. After being baptized in her father’s Congregational church in 1821, Child did not unite herself with that institution but instead joined a Swedenborgian Society in Boston, despite having assured her family that she was unlikely to be swayed by the sect’s “fanaticism.” '* Child’s religious beliefs and affiliations would continue to evolve over the course of her lifetime. But when she composed her first novel, Hobomok, she was living with her brother, Convers Francis, a Unitarian minister, in Watertown, Massachusetts, and the novel shows evidence of a Unitarian preoccupation with atonement and vicarious sacrifice.”

The rise of Unitarian thought was part of a long liberalizing movement among Protestant Christians that stretched back to at least the early eighteenth century. Beginning as a theological insurgency within American Calvinism, by the early nineteenth century the spread of Unitarian ideas had produced a very public and rancorous schism in the Congregational church.'° New England Unitarianism’s three primary tenets were “a commitment to logic and reason in theology, a biblicism that was strict but that demanded critical and historical analysis, and an overriding concern for moral aspiration as the focal point of the Christian religion.” Applying critical and historical analysis to the Bible produced Unitarianism’s most controversial theological innovation, the one that gave it its name: its rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity, a pillar of Western Christianity since the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. Finding no clear exposition of this doctrine in the Bible, Unitarians rejected it, insisting instead “that there is one God, even the Father; and that Jesus Christ is not this one God, but his son and messenger.”'® Christ, then, did not partake of God’s divine nature but instead was fully human. This conclusion, in turn, unsettled another cornerstone of Christian theology: the doctrine of Christ’s atonement.

In its most general terms, atonement is “the satisfying [of] Divine Justice by Jesus Christ giving himself a ransom for us, undergoing the penalty due to our sins, and thereby releasing us from that punishment which God might justly inflict upon us.”'? Most Catholic and Protestant theologians (including Martin Luther and John Calvin) have held to the Anselmian, or satisfaction, theory of the atonement (named for its primary formulator, the eleventhcentury archbishop Anselm of Canterbury). The satisfaction theory posits that Christ's sinless death “satisfies” the debt demanded by God for the crime of original sin (committed by Adam but imputed to all humankind): the sinless Christ is sacrificed on the cross and thus bears the punishment earned by humankind. Unsatisfied with the satisfaction theory, Christian liberals of the mid-eighteenth century (including the forerunners of Unitarianism, Jonathan Mayhew and Charles Chauncy) adopted the governmental theory of the atonement. This theory (which was also espoused by the orthodox Congregationalists Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards Jr., and Sedgwick’s great-uncle Stephen West) posits that Christ’s crucifixion does not satisfy a debt but instead displays the true majesty of God: it “exhibit[s] . . . the righteous displeasure of God against sin, made in some other way than in the punishment of the sinner.” Under the governmental theory, Christ’s painful death demonstrates God’s “divine purity, and hatred of iniquity”: God requires Christ to atone for the sins of man because only by allowing his son to die can God display his hatred of sin.”

Nineteenth-century Unitarians rejected both the substitutionary and governmental models of atonement because neither of these explanations for Christ’s death accorded with the loving, parental, and forgiving God they claimed to find in their reading of scripture. William Ellery Channing, the unofficial leader of the nineteenth-century Unitarian movement (and brother-in-law of Sedgwick’s friend Susan Channing), insisted that the God posited by the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, “instead of being plenteous in forgiveness, never forgives; for it is absurd to speak of men as forgiven, when their whole punishment is borne by a substitute.”?! For Channing and other Unitarian theologians, the merchant God of substitutionary atonement was not merciful; he was simply a businessman demanding payment of a debt. The God of the governmental theory was, if possible, even worse; Channing imagined him “erect[ing] a gallows in the center of the universe, and... execut[ing] upon it, in room of the offenders, an Infinite Being” while requiring “all beings in heaven and earth . . . to fix their eyes on this fearful sight.” Rather than choosing between the satisfaction and governmental theories of atonement, Unitarian theologians of the early nineteenth century objected to the doctrine altogether, for both theological and practical reasons. Not only did the doctrine of atonement make God into a monster who assented to the murder of his own son, they argued, but trying to worship this monstrous God produced gloomy and spiritually stunted Christians incapable of comprehending the Deity’s true, kindly, and parental nature.

As works of Unitarian historical fiction, Child’s Hobomok and Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie participate in the deconstruction of atonement theology that preoccupied liberal Christian thinkers throughout the early nineteenth century. While Channing and other Unitarian theologians argued against atonement in sermons, sectarian journals, and polemical pamphlets, Child and Sedgwick examined the doctrine not only as an abstract concept but as a concrete, embodied problem with political and social implications. Hobomok and Hope Leslie, both set in the early years of English settlement in New England, draw parallels between the “primitive” blood sacrifices of their Native American characters and the ostensibly “enlightened” doctrine of atonement embraced by their fictional Puritans. Both structures, they argue, limit women’s religious agency by positioning them as perpetual victims in an endlessly repeated cosmic ritual. Together, these novels suggest that the United States’ future cannot be secured through the unwilling sacrifices of its female inhabitants.”

Hobomok was Lydia Maria Child’s debut novel, published in 1824 when she was only twenty-two years old. Set in the 1630s, the story centers on Mary Conant, a gentle maiden who is summoned from England, where she has been living with her grandfather, to the Salem colony to care for her aging mother and father. Mary is in love with the Englishman Charles Brown, but the match is forbidden by her strict Puritan father, who sees Charles’s adherence to the Church of England as little better than paganism. When Charles Brown is lost at sea in a shipwreck and Mary’s beloved mother dies from the strain of life in the colony, Mary agrees to marry the Native American man Hobomok, who has loved her from afar since her arrival in Salem. Mary bears Hobomok’s child, also named Hobomok, but when the couple has been married for three years, Charles Brown reappears in Salem, reports of his death having been greatly exaggerated. Seeing that Mary prefers Charles, Hobomok divorces her and disappears from the colony, leaving his child behind to be raised by Charles and Mary.

Hobomok depicts white women and Native American men as victims of a patriarchal Puritan ideology that demands superhuman sacrifices in the name of filial and conjugal devotion. It tells the early history of the Salem colony as a tale of forced sacrifice imposed on English women by selfish Puritan men. The novel’s female protagonists—Mary Conant, her mother (Mrs. Conant), and Lady Arabella Johnson—make devastating sacrifices for the sake of their husbands’ religious ideals: they give up comfortable homes and beloved family members in England to follow their husbands to a howling wilderness where starvation and disease blight their lives and take their children. The Salem patriarchs’ strict religious proscriptions reflect stubborn defiance as much as theological conviction, but their wives and daughters are nevertheless unwillingly sacrificed to those patriarchs’ beliefs. Reflecting Child’s increasingly liberal religious attitudes, Hobomok decries this demand for sacrifice on the part of white women; at the same time, however, it celebrates the selfelected sacrifice of the novel’s titular Native American. Hobomok does less to undermine the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice than to reconfigure it, shifting its burdens off the shoulders of white women and onto those of Native men.

The motif of sacrifice appears early in Hobomok, when Mary Conant steals out of her father’s dreary cabin on the edges of the Salem settlement to perform a forbidden ritual that she hopes will reveal her nuptial future. The novel’s unnamed narrator watches from behind a tree while Mary stoops beside a stream and “taking a knife from her pocket . . . open{s] a vein in her little arm, and dipping a feather in the blood, wr[ites] something on a piece of white cloth” (13).”4 Mary then uses a stick to trace a circle on the ground, steps into it, and walks three times backward and forward around its circumference while chanting a rhyme meant to summon her future husband. Mary is expecting Charles Brown to appear, but to her dismay Hobomok jumps into the circle instead. Hobomok, like Mary, has brought a knife to the edge of the stream. But rather than shedding blood, he uses the weapon to cut branches that he will place on his tribe’s “sacrifice heap.” “‘Hobomok much late has been out to watch the deer tracks,” he explains to Mary, “‘and he came through the hollow, that he might make the Manitto Asseinah green as the oak tree’” (14). This early scene links Mary and Hobomok—long before the plot links them in marriage—by revealing their shared investment in sacrificial rituals. But whereas Mary, the supposedly more civilized of the two, has initiated a bloody “pagan” ritual (even Sally Oldham, Salem’s resident flirt, is shocked at Mary’s having done such “an awful wicked thing”), Hobomok’s sacrifice to the Manitto Asseinah involves only the cutting of branches, not skin (20).

By beginning Hobomok with sacrifices performed by a white woman and a Native man, Child invokes the central role of sacrifice in the historical novel. Scenes of sacrifice are everywhere in the genre; indeed, sacrifice is at the heart of Georg Lukacs’s originating theory of it. For Lukacs, the historical novel is the product of the revolutionary era and its Enlightenment theory of history, in which “the national idea becomes the property of the broadest masses.”” In order to represent both “the people” and the best that the new nation has to offer, the hero of the historical novel must be simultaneously “mediocre” — that is, bourgeois or middle class—and the embodiment of a perfect ideal. The feature that marks the hero’s simultaneously middling and ideal status is his “capacity for self-sacrifice,” which he possesses alongside “a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency.””° The hero of the historical novel incarnates the best that the nation has to offer, including a willingness to sacrifice everything to bring a country and a people into existence.

But while the hero of the historical novel may possess the capacity for self-sacrifice, the actual victims of sacrifice in historical novels are most often women and people of color. Historical fiction relies heavily on scenes of sex and gender violence to consolidate national identity, with the rape, murder, or suicides of female characters providing the impetus for national cohesion. In the works of British historical novelists including Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson, and Walter Scott, Scottish and English national identities are solidified through originary acts of violence against women’s bodies.” The American historical novel likewise seeks to produce a “usable past, . . . one that democracy can profit by,” but as Nina Baym has demonstrated, the most usable objects in American historical fiction are women.” James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, Baym notes, present women not as individuals or persons but as types; they are objects of exchange among men, for whom they signify the spread of “civilization.” Because “they are vital for man’s civilizations . .. man has to take them along wherever he goes, and at whatever cost.”” That cost, however, is usually paid by the woman herself, as with Cora Munro, whose double doom as both female and mixed race necessitates her self-sacrificial suicide in The Last of the Mohicans. In both the British and American historical novel tradition, the woman’s contested body is the site on which nationhood is built. In the early scene in Hobomok in which Mary Conant predicts her future, her bloody arm signifies her status as the woman whose romantic desires will be sacrificed for the ostensible good of the struggling Salem colony.

As a text that embraces a doctrinally liberal, Unitarian-inflected Protestantism, Hobomok depicts the Puritan colony of Salem as a backward and primitive settlement guided by violent principles, the effects of which are borne by the women of the colony rather than the men. The things and people women love are sacrificed for principles that the men themselves do not clearly understand and that, Child’s narrator repeatedly implies, have more to do with pride than religious conviction. Mrs. Conant follows her husband to the New World and endures there the death of her two sons as well as other scenes of “privation and hardship” (8). Mary Conant, summoned from her home in England to the Salem settlement, must leave behind her beloved grandfather in an act of ““painful sacrifice” that she nevertheless “‘ma[kes] with serenity” (79). When Mrs. Conant and Lady Arabella Johnson lie dying side by side in the Conants’ cabin, Child’s narrator pronounces them “both alike victims to what has always been the source of woman’s greatest misery—love—deep and unwearied love” (111). In Hobomok, the white women of the New England colonies are sacrificed on the altar of love and womanly devotion to men who are more concerned with dry religious questions than with actual relationships and human feelings.

When the Native man Hobomok appears in Mary Conant’s enchanted circle with an offering of branches for his “sacrifice heap,” he announces himself as the superior of the Puritan men whose notion of religious sacrifice requires the protracted suffering and painful deaths of their wives and children. Hobomok’s devotion to a nonviolent form of sacrifice—branches rather than blood—prepares the reader to accept his eventual marriage to the white heroine by symbolically elevating him above the other “savages” that populate the story—including, the novel implies, the savage Puritan men who have ruined their families’ lives for the sake of a dubious good. In emphasizing Hobomok’s capacity for nonviolent sacrifice, both here and in his later act of peacefully divorcing Mary, Child defies depictions of Native Americans as violent savages and despoilers of white women—the roles they most often played in early national historical novels by Cooper and others. In Hobomok it is white men, not Natives, who demand painful sacrifices from the women they have sworn to cherish and protect.

Hobomok’s capacity for nonviolent sacrifice repudiates the stadialist ideologies of human progress that had dominated Western historiography since the eighteenth century and that underpinned the historical novel as a genre. According to the “four stages” model of civilizational development, which arranged all cultures on a scale from “savage” to “civilized,” one clear mark of indigenous cultures’ “savagery” was their supposed engagement in violent, vengeful, and even cannibalistic rites of sacrifice. European explorers in North America had disseminated—often from little evidence—elaborate stories of bloody Indian “sacrifices” meant to establish the primitivism of Native cultures and their need for Christian conversion. Drawing on classical (mis)representations of both the Far West and the Far East and the faulty ethnography of early New World travelers, early modern depictions of native North Americans often conflated torture, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and trophy taking (the collection and display of human body parts collected from the dead in war) and accused all tribes of engaging in these practices.’ William Robertson’s multivolume History of America (1777), one of the most influential works of stadialist history, described native North Americans as “characterised by a ‘hard, unfeeling temper.’ . . . They torture prisoners to death and . . . makfe] war solely in order to capture prisoners for sacrifice.”*! In stadialist models of history, “civilized” peoples were those who had ostensibly left cultural and religious rituals of violent sacrifice behind.

But as Unitarians and other liberal Christians of the nineteenth century asserted, the Anglo-American West’s religio-cultural system was itself grounded in a story of violent sacrifice: the atoning death of Christ on the cross. Protestant theologies of atonement—including those espoused by the New England Puritans who form the subject of Hobomok—posit Christ’s painful death on the cross as the necessary price exacted by God for the sins of humankind. What stadialist theories did, then, was distinguish the “bad,” vengeful sacrifices ostensibly practiced by indigenous peoples from the “good,” atoning sacrifice modeled by Christ on the cross. Jean-Luc Nancy, describing the role of sacrifice in Western historiography, labels these the “old” and “new” models of sacrifice. The “old” sacrifice appears as a “pure economy of barter between man and the divine powers. Everything is reduced to the formula of .. . sacrificial ‘“economism.’”*? The “old” sacrifice (of grain, lambs, or, as Robertson asserted, men) must be endlessly repeated because the “economy of barter” is circular: offerings are exchanged for good favor, but once favor is granted, sacrifices must once again be offered in thanksgiving and to solicit further blessings. According to Nancy, the “new” sacrifice, exemplified in the death of Christ on the cross, is distinguished from the “old” by four characteristics: it is self-sacrifice, chosen or at least consented to by the victim; it is unique in its occurrence and is “accomplished for all”; its uniqueness “lies in its elevation into the principal or the essence of sacrifice itself”; and it is “itself the transcendence of sacrifice,” such that repetitive ritual sacrifices need no longer be performed.” In stadialist histories, savages could be recognized by their commitment to an “old” model of pagan sacrifice: imposed, vengeful, and endlessly repeated. Civilized cultures, by contrast, had embraced the “new” model of sacrifice, in which Christ’s selfless death on the cross was the single act that made further sacrifice obsolete.

Hobomok defies the stadialist classification of cultures by casting the Englishmen of the Salem settlement as practitioners of the “old” sacrifice: they not only embrace a bloody doctrine of atonement but demand from their wives and children sacrifices unto death. Hobomok, by contrast, practices the “new” sacrifice, best exemplified in his choice to divorce Mary at the end of the novel. His sacrifice is self-chosen, unique, and irrevocable: he divorces Mary without informing her of his decision and disappears by the time she discovers what he has done. He frames his decision to leave as a self-elected offering to a beloved idol: ““She was first his,” he reflects upon Charles’s return to Salem; “Mary loves him better than she does me. The sacrifice must be made