The same tactics are used in the scene between Monelia and the French Roman Catholic priest. He has earlier attempted to initiate a sexual transaction through the language of romance and seduction that Hulme identifies (and that parallels the exchanges of gifts and statements of friendship of the governors). When circumstances take away the time needed to claim Monelia by seduction, the Priest resorts to brute physical force, much like Honnyman does to claim the furs he desires. And when the attempted rape is interrupted, the Priest attempts to impose a blatantly falsified system of reason, naturalism, and balance in God’s will (rather like the supposed exact rightness and balance of the traders’ scales): ‘I have a Dispensation from St. Peter / To quench the Fire of Love when it grows painful, / This makes it innocent like Marriage Vows; And all our holy Priests, and she herself, / Commits no Sin in this Relief of Nature: / For, being holy, there is no Pollution / Communicated from us as from others’ (IV ii). Even under its conventional anti-French, anti-Catholic cover, this scene replicates symbolically the economic and political relationships that have been set up in Act I. Once again, the elements of the narrative are entirely typical – corrupt French priest, beautiful maiden, last-moment rescue – and yet it is not the same. This is first because Monelia is rescued by Chekitan, which gives the Native man the qualities of virtuous heroism that Britons conventionally imagined in themselves and in their staged representations. Locating heroic virtue in Chekitan emphasizes the absence of such qualities in the British colonists in the play, a point that is pressed even closer to home by the fact that the action of the French priest is aligned so explicitly to the earlier acts of the English that the scene becomes one of equation, rather than differentiation of the two European nations and their relative values.41
Rogers’ play uses metaphors of rape and gender consistently (though not universally) to translate the threat of cultural violation into a form that English audiences might be expected to understand more easily. Such metaphors can be read as a two-step aid to identification: the articulation of Indigenous identity in the play depends at times upon the conventionalized vulnerability of the feminine, and the idea of an identity eradicable by force is rendered through metaphors of rape. This is, of course, not a new set of connections in colonial imagery, even in the eighteenth century. Ponteach’s metaphors of sexual vulnerability fall into alignment (both perfect and skewed) with long-standing conventions of personifications of North America as a sexually vulnerable Indigenous woman, most memorably in Theodore Galle’s 1580 engraving America (reprinted here, page 57).42 The alignment is perfect in the assumed powerlessness of the not-European, not-male, but skewed in that images like America were not, at least initially, expected to suggest abuse and eradication, but rather potential for germination, in ideas of conversion, illumination, and economic expansion. Rogers’ play implies that those naïve if noble goals have led not to an expanded age of enlightenment, but to something altogether less noble.
In Ponteach, the threat of subordination is quite consistently framed in gendered terms: those who are disinclined to be brought to battle in the name of small, hugely emblematic acts of disrespect and betrayal or by arguments of avenging the deaths of a few with the deaths of the many, are described by the battle-ready men as ‘womanish’ and ‘unmanned.’ When Chekitan suggests that reason must rule over passion in matters of war, Philip accuses him of being ‘a very Woman in thy Heart.’ Chekitan retorts, ‘Is it all womanish to reconsider / And weight the Consequences of our Action, Before we desperately rush upon them? / Let me then be the Coward, a mere Woman / Mine be the Praise of Coolness, yours of Rage’ (II ii). Every character uses a language of assumed weakness in femininity, and such language appears even in unexpected places: the lover Chekitan uses it to ironize Philip’s view of war, and later to communicate his fear of being ‘unman’d’ by love. Similarly, the monstrous villain Honnyman is allowed a sympathetic moment as he fears he will have to witness the torture and murder of his children, but until he is ‘unman’d’ by the thought that ‘Dear Tommy too must die’ his response is to prohibit his good wife from prayer, concerned that his captors will ‘say Religion makes us all mere Women’ (IV iv). In this similarity between Philip’s speech and that of the worst of colonists, it is, of course, possible that such echoes are simply the effects of an inexperienced writer, failing to differentiate the speech patterns of different characters. But given that Philip and Chekitan do explicitly discuss the significance of this feminized language to their own identities, the potential complexity signified by its use seems plausibly significant. We may see in characters on both sides of the conflict the conundrum that Julie Ellison points out in Anglo-American modes of masculine sensibility: many men who mocked women for their emotional excesses ‘wrote at times in the pathetic vein themselves, read and admired the literature of sensibility, and, all told, were able to justify their own emotionalism while rejecting the emotional displays of women. A man could have his sensibility, in other words, and despise it too’ (20).
Citing Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ellison sets forth a foundational premise that ‘effects fundamental to the genres of sensibility are organized by gender and race’ (7).43 As Edward Said and others have similarly noted, there is a long-standing association of femininity and weakness with the racialized Other (figured as East in Said’s analysis), and masculinity and strength with the West. In the speeches cited above, however, Rogers has both the colonist and colonized cultures make the same equation, demonstrating the absorption of the colonists’ valuations of both gender and race by the Ottawa and Mohawk men. This in spite of the likelihood that both Rogers and the Indigenous men he knew would almost certainly have been familiar with nearby communities such as the Huron, who had a partially matriarchal political and familial system. As in so many representations of colonial transculturation, though, the mimicry is ambivalent: the very hostile Philip accepts the characterization despite his hatred of those who make it (using the language of power as it is used by those who devalue and disempower him), while Chekitan who, as we have seen, has absorbed other modes of European language, both accepts and rearticulates that formulation in an example of the slightly distorted way in which the colonized repeat the colonizers’ discourse. His speech reflects a version of the gendering of racial identity that is ‘almost but not quite’ European (Bhabha, ‘Mimicry’ 126; original emphasis) as he infuses reason and consciousness into that which is presumptively passionate and reactionary, creating space for the same possibility of rearticulation in the parallel construction of race in colonial discourse.
And though powerless in the broad movements of the play, women are at the centre of every action – they are, as Chekitan observes, ‘the Tie, the Centre of the Whole’ (V iv). Philip betrays his brother and murders the Mohawk prince and princess Monelia and Torax because his brother has sold as a slave a woman whom he would like to have kept once he ‘saw her and instantly loved her.’ Chekitan initially argues against Ponteach’s plan to go to war without the Mohawks because it will risk alienating him from his beloved Monelia; he then leaves Monelia alone in the forest so that he can lead a team in war (instead of his more qualified brother) because Philip tells him that this is the best way to protect Monelia. The French Priest betrays Ponteach’s plan to the French in part because he is angry that Chekitan has thwarted his attempt to rape Monelia; and even Ponteach sees himself as constantly in service to the Fates, which are gendered female here.
Certainly, heroic drama, tragedy, and republican drama all tend to depend upon such roots to some degree, but here the central role of women – their vulnerability and the desire for revenge they can foster – is not just about establishing masculinity through the defence of femininity. What Rogers foresees as the broad outcome of the North American conflict is to some degree emblematized in the figure of Monelia and in her violent death in a struggle for the succession of power. Despite the historical problem of locating the metaphor for Indian vulnerability in a Mo
hawk woman,44 Monelia’s body does function in the play as a fairly straightforward metaphor of the body politic. As a character, Monelia owns no discursive strategies to counter her relegation to dehumanized object and geographical metaphor (whose presence forces others to act, even if only to claim possession), and her psychic and physiological resources are presumed available for consumption. Even in sympathetic European accounts like that of Rogers, indigeneity as identity is performed defensively, enforced by an increasingly dominant European presence.
History always diverges from its accounts, of course, and in fact the British were much more successful at negotiated settlements than in violent conflict with the Great Lakes Nations, but Ponteach is like so many contemporary representations of indigeneity (even the sympathetic ones) in its fostering of popular perceptions of the idea of the Indian. Had his play been produced, Rogers might reasonably have expected it to be influential in some degree. As Colley shows, though many North American colonists’ direct experience might have led to a ‘gut fear and dislike of Indians,’ Britons’ understandings of North American Indians were still being developed in the 1760s: ‘On the British side of the Atlantic, things were different. Overwhelmingly preoccupied for so long with European enemies, and substantially ignorant of Indians – as of much else about the land across the Atlantic – many Britons at home held understandably to a wider spectrum of attitudes’ (Captives 161). Rogers’ play strives to establish the humanity and human range of temperament and experience among the Ottawas, the Mohawks, and other nations, perhaps contributing to what Felicity Nussbaum calls the ‘inconsistencies and confusion … characteristic of racial discourse’ (139) in the eighteenth century.45 Even with his efforts at individuation, however, conventions of constructed identity are concurrently interrogated and entrenched by Rogers: even as he points out the errors of perceptions of identity and the tragic outcomes of a political strategy based on misconstruction, his play cannot help but contribute to the mythology of the doomed Indian, driven to presumed extinction by failures to communicate effectively through performative identity. As K. Anthony Appiah puts it for the modern context, ‘Between the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line’ (163).
The metaphor of Monelia suggests that Rogers is to some degree aware of devaluatory metaphors being imposed around him in the service of colonialism. The particular metaphors that Rogers invokes in his play most consistently are those that render Indigenous men weak through a language of feminization or ignorant through a language of savagery, confirming the presumptive universal positive of Christian European masculinity. Judith Butler has argued in the specific terms of gender and sexuality that the distinctions between public and private or personal and political are socially functional fictions, constructed to substantiate the status quo, such that even the most ostensibly private and personal acts are scripted to some degree by compulsory ideology and social convention.46 She notes that ‘as an intentionally organized materiality, the body is always an embodying of possibilities both conditional and circumscribed by historical convention. In other words, the body is a historical situation, as Beauvior has claimed, and is a manner of doing, dramatizing, and reproducing a historical situation’ (521; original emphasis).
Rogers’ metaphors of race and nation in both Ponteach and Monelia function in much this way.47 To varying degrees among its representations of different characters, the play is one of perhaps only a few instances where the eastern North American Indigenous body of the eighteenth century can be understood as constituted by discourse and its performative embodiment: the audience of English readers and imagined viewers can be expected to have no first-hand knowledge of the identity represented on stage. Pontiac the man, of course, existed and struggled with social demand; Ponteach the character creates Pontiac as a linguistic construction. In Rogers’ mediated representation of recent history, the raced construction is often articulated in the language of European ideas of marginal femininity, such that the naturalized or unmarked qualities of the feminine inform disempowered difference. The character of Monelia suggests this relationship most specifically, but the texts’ links among the language of the feminine and the language of race are both articulated by and directly affect the other characters too, from Tenesco and The Wolf, to Ponteach, Philip, and Chekitan.
And as the near-rape and eventual murder of Monelia demonstrate, Ponteach is right to attempt to manage through both speech and action the metaphors of intercultural negotiation. Throughout the play, he attempts to force his conversations with the governors into metaphors of brotherhood, friendship, and even paternalism. Ponteach calls the English ‘Brothers,’ and pledges to treat them as ‘Friends and Brothers’ (I iv), but remembers with ironic fondness the French colonists who ‘Call’d us their Friends, nay, what is more, their Children, / And seem’d like Fathers anxious for our Welfare.’ And despite the mistreatment of his people, he is even willing to ‘call their King my Friend, / Yea, and honour and obey him as my Father … would he keep his own Sea, / And leave these distant Lakes and Streams to us’ (II ii). This might seem straightforward, even uncharacteristically submissive for Ponteach, but as Richard White documents, the balances of power implied by these relationships are not as direct as modern readers might assume. In many of the surviving historical documents, ‘the fictional identity of brothers was accepted by both sides, but the meaning of that identity, “the firmest bonds of Love and Friendship,” was an American, not Algonquian construction … For the Algonquians, fraternity was a more neutral relation than paternity … fraternal relations were relations of equality, but of all the kinship terms of Indian diplomacy, brother seems, except for cousin, the one least fraught with mutual obligation.’ Still, these questions of brother, father, uncle, or cousin are crucial, as ‘each side had to agree on its metaphorical identity, on the fictions that would govern negotiations. Once established, images became part of larger reality and certain images of the Other demanded certain responses regardless of what the Other actually said or what concessions the Other offered’ (‘Fictions’ 68–71). White cites speeches by Wyandot chief Tarhe to suggest the Indigenous metaphor of fatherhood (for which Ponteach is willing to settle in defeat) is ‘not a stern patriarch; a father was a generous friend’ (83). Still, the father can demand respect and deference. Ponteach reaches this point, however, only after he attempts to construct the relationship in terms of other metaphors such as the more equal and at times violent fraternity. For example, White notes that ‘the [next generation] Ottawa chief Aguishiway meant to elevate the Americans in standing when he told Anthony Wayne that he did not consider him a brother but rather a friend. Even as the Americans and confederated Indians killed each other, they addressed each other as brothers’ (69).
The familial metaphors that Rogers cites thus again both illuminate and problematize the types of relationships that might be possible. Rogers’ audience assumes that it knows what these metaphors imply, but the instability and unreliability of their presumptively universal knowledge of family ultimately affirms instead their cultural ignorance and the dangerous ramifications that assumed knowledge can have in culturally mediated conflict with those who are almost the same, but not quite. Much in the same way that White describes nineteenth-century diplomatic councils,
the middle ground was a realm of constant invention that once agreed upon by both sides, became convention. The central and defining aspect of the middle ground was a willingness, born of necessity, for one set of people to justify their actions in terms of what they perceived to be their partners’ cultural premises. In seeking to persuade others to act, they sought out congruences, either perceived or actual, between the two cultures. The congruences arrived at often seemed – and, indeed, were – results of misunderstandings or accidents. Indeed, the explanations offered by members of one society for the practices of another often were ludicrous. This, however, did not matter. Any congruence, no matter how tenuous, could be put to work and take
on a life of its own as long as it was accepted by both sides. (66)
This ongoing process of definition and self/other identification is always in masculine terms, ever attempting to redress the creep of devaluatory metaphors of feminization, because outside of those relationships one of the only two other options is to be womanly – like Monelia, obedient, threatened, nearly ruined by representatives of European Christianity, and finally, violently dead. Or they can become enemies, which is, of course, where the relationship ends up, leaving both the Mohawk king and Ponteach holding only the dead and dying bodies of their children and the future they are written explicitly to warn against.48
Ironically, though, not one is dead at the hand of the English: Monelia and her brother Torax are stabbed by Philip in the name of revenging himself on Chekitan, who discovers the murders, killing Philip and then himself in a telling rage:
There is no Kindred, Friendship, Faith, or Love
Among Mankind – Monelia’s dead – The World
Is all unhing’d – There’s universal War –
She was the Tie, the Centre of the Whole;
And she remov’d, all is one general Jar. (V iv)
After both fraternal and romantic affiliation have been destroyed, there is nothing left but a war that is pointless because it cannot serve kindred, friendship, faith, or love. The world as colonized by the English is so changed that the next generation of Ottawa and Mohawk leaders end in a cycle of self-destruction, overwhelmed by the example and control of the English into a dissipated identity.
As early as Act I, Ponteach eloquently summarizes the elements of the colonial relationship that will lead to the contamination of identity that constitutes the play’s tragic end:
Ponteach, or the Savages of America Page 7
