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The Pocahontas Story in Early America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Philip Gould
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Extract

Near the end of Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson offers a notably ambivalent assessment of Captain John Smith: “To his efforts principally may be ascribed [the colony's] support against the opposition of natives. He was honest, sensible, and well-informed; but his style is barbarous and uncouth. His history, however, is almost the only source from which we derive any knowledge of the infancy of the state” (177). Such ambivalence registers the degree to which late 18th-century ideologies of civility and refinement mediated historical accounts of Virginia's colonial past, and it begins to suggest an overlooked context for reconsidering the cultural meaning of the Smith–Pocahontas story during this era. For the episode traditionally has been read in terms of race and “the birth of the nation” (Jenkins, 10). While influential critics of Smith have extolled his enterprising “genius” and his “doctrine of hard work and self–reliance,” revisionist critiques of Smith's version of American heroism manage only to reproduce the same interpretive categories. Indeed, to revisionists, the Pocahontas story instances an ethnocentrism endemic to colonial encounters: Smith fails to recognize the huskanaw ceremony (whereby he is made a werowance to Powhattan); and Pocahontas's “self-abandonment” prefigures the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 99 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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