Catherine Maria Sedgwick y la ambigüedad política de su protofeminismo

Abstract

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was one of the most popular writers in antebellum United States. Credited with having initiated a tradition of sentimental fiction, her work has attracted the attention of criticism in the last decades of the twentieth century for her relevance in the creation of a national American literature. This essay analyzes one of Sedgwick’s most popular texts, Hope Leslie (1827), as an example of Sedgwick’s political ambivalence. Such a stance led her to the creation of female characters such as Hope and Magawiska, who question patriarchy and therefore show clear protofeminist characteristics. Sedgwick, however, also
puts forward conservative visions on race and gender alongside. The paper argues for an assessment of Sedgwick’s work that takes the complexity of her position into account.