1996

Scheckel, Susan. "Domesticating the Drama of Conquest: Barker's Pocahontas on the Popular Stage." ATQ 10.3 (1996): 231-43. This essay "explores how the figure of Pocahontas was reimagined and represented on the American popular stage as part of the project of defining American national identity. It also considers, more generally, how race and gender inflected nineteenth-century discourses of U.S. nationalism." Pocahontas is the foster mother of the infant colony, achieving mythic stature "preserving, nurturing, and legitimizing what will become the American nation." The romantic plot parallels and intertwines that heroic one, obscuring the "violence of conquest by translating conquest into the terms of domesticity. . . . Romantic conquest rather than colonial conquest takes center stage." Colonial conquest, in fact, occurs through "the power of love when Pocahontas falls in love with the Euro-American conqueror and his culture." Barker produced a "romanticized version of American history that resolved conflicts implicit in past acts of conquest and revolution and defined national identity in terms that reinforced a sense of moral and cultural integrity."