Hope Leslie: Metaphors 5 key examples

Magawisca is sad not just because she misses her own family, but also because she knows that the Fletchers are about to be attacked. Mrs. Fletcher doesn't want Magawisca to give her life for the family; she only wants her to cheer up and help prepare for Mr. Fletcher's arrival home. Magawisca's solemnity is a harbinger of what's to come. Although she fails to save Mrs. Fletcher, she eventually makes good on her promise by sacrificing part of her body to save Everell.

Magawisca goes on, during the raid, to beg her father to spare Mrs. Fletcher and the children. Her plea involves a metaphor that further foreshadows what will happen to her arm:

[T]he mother—the children—oh they are all good—take vengeance on your enemies—but spare—spare our friends—our benefactors—I bleed when they are struck—oh command them to stop!

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Magawisca's claim that "I bleed when they are struck" is a metaphor in this instance. She feels emotionally wounded when the Fletchers are struck. However, the metaphor also foreshadows the fact that when Mononotto goes to execute Everell, the strike of his hatchet will literally make Magawisca bleed. In fact, her metaphor turns out to be all too true: Magawisca's disability comes to represent the lasting pain of the conflict between these two families. Her body takes the damage Mononotto means to inflict on his enemies.

When Mononotto refuses to stop the raid on his daughter's behalf, she uses her body to shield Mrs. Fletcher from an attacking warrior. Her body is not enough to stop another warrior from attacking Mrs. Fletcher, but Everell intercedes by shooting this second warrior in the arm, stopping his hatchet before it strikes. This mutilation of an arm to stay an execution even more specifically foreshadows the way Magawisca loses her arm. Significantly, although Everell and Magawisca both watch their mother and siblings die because of interracial violence, Everell never has to sacrifice part of his own body to call a ceasefire. Magawisca's claim that "I bleed when they are struck" calls attention to the way violence goes both ways but always seems to fall more heavily on American Indians than European settlers.

"Woof" is a term related to the art of weaving. When a weaver makes fabric, they start with a bunch of threads stretched lengthwise over a loom, running parallel to one another. These threads are called the "warp." The weaver then weaves more threads through the warp to create the fabric. The threads in the second set are called the "woof" or "weft." They also run parallel to one another, and they are most often woven through perpendicular to the warp. Before any of this can happen, the threads themselves must be spun from raw fibers. For instance, a spinner can use a spindle to turn sheep's wool into thread.

In this metaphor, the narrative about Hope is the thread that eventually turns into the "woof of her destiny." The metaphor is complex and has several implicit as well as explicit parts. First of all, the narrative itself is neither warp nor woof, but rather thread: it is the raw material that is going to form the woof. Importantly, the narrator does not suggest that the narrative is the raw material for the warp: the warp, in this metaphor, seems to be strung onto the loom already, waiting for the narrative to be woven into it. The first several pages of the chapter have been taken up by what the narrator calls a "long skipping-place." It is a general description of the way the Puritans treated the Sabbath. No narrative events actually happen here, but the historical description seems to function like threads stretched out across a loom so that narrative might be woven in. If narrative is the woof of Hope's destiny, history seems to be the warp.

The narrator or "historian" is clearly the one operating the loom in this metaphor, but she gives herself a passive role by personifying the "eight days" that have passed as though they are the spinner who has "glided away without supplying" any threads appropriate to the woof of Hope's destiny. This instance of personification allows the narrator to play with the boundary between history and fiction: Hope is a fictional character, and yet there is a sense here that the narrator's creative power is limited. Only events that fit into the warp of history can be woven in.

The sense that the narrator is part of an assembly line of history and storytelling is also connected to capitalism and industrialization. By the time Sedgwick was writing, industrial machines had made it possible to automate the process of fabric-making. Automation and division of labor had both made it far less common than it had been before for one person to make fabric from start to finish. Sedgwick is suggesting here that writing a historical romance is similar. She boosts her credibility as a "historian" by suggesting that she is not making all this up from scratch, but rather that she is handling the small task of weaving Hope's preexisting story into a preexisting history. All the materials were there, and Sedgwick simply helps turn them from disparate parts into fabric.

As the conversation continues, Hope is shocked to learn that Faith has married Oneco:

“My sister married to an Indian!”

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"[...]Think ye that your blood will be corrupted by mingling with this stream?"

Magawisca first compares Faith herself to a stream that has "mingled with other waters." She later clarifies that she does not just mean that Faith and Oneco are different people who have mingled, but rather that their marriage stands to mix "your blood" (Hope and Faith's) with "Indian" blood. The idea of two streams coming together suggests the image of irrevocably mixed water (or blood). There is no separating water that has homogenized. Even if the streams are separated once more, each will contain some of each original stream. Oneco and Faith have come together to create a stream that is now and forever both white and American Indian.

What Magawisca is getting at is not just Oneco and Faith's irreversible marriage. Hope does not immediately say anything about the children Faith and Oneco might have, but Magawisca defensively interprets her shock as revulsion at the idea of mixed-race children. Especially by the 19th century, when Sedgwick was writing, "miscegenation" (having children of mixed race) was considered taboo and even criminal by European Americans. During the colonial period, people of European descent created racial categories to classify different types of humans. Racial categories were never stable, but mixed-race children were seen as a threat to the imagined boundaries between categories. If the boundaries crumbled, there could be no rationale for white supremacy because there would be no difference between white people and people of color. By asking Magawisca if Hope thinks her blood "will be corrupted by mingling with [Oneco and Magawisca's] stream," she is challenging Hope to either be upfront about her racist beliefs or to abandon the idea of racial hierarchy altogether.

Rosa's experience of unrequited love is a painful reinforcement that she is unloveable and alone in the world. She describes wishing she were dead because of Sir Philip's treatment of her, but she nonetheless remains committed to him because of the promise that he might love her. Rosa's metaphor comparing herself to a baby and Sir Philip to an assassin illuminates how helpless she feels. Sir Philip exploits and abuses that helplessness. Ironically, it is this treatment that eventually leads Rosa to assassinate Sir Philip and kill herself in the process. Sir Philip's abusive treatment begets a final, violent seizure of power on Rosa's part.

By contrast, Esther is treated with kid gloves regarding her unrequited love for Everell. Everell tells her that he does not want to marry her, but he and Hope Leslie go to great lengths to make sure Esther does not feel rejected out of hand. Because Esther's feelings are treated with respect, she gracefully steps aside in the end to let Everell and Hope Leslie marry one another. Her choice to go back to England and live an unmarried life is its own kind of claim to power, but it does not hurt anyone the way Rosa's claim to power does. As foils, Rosa and Esther support the novel's underlying claim that poor treatment can drive people (large groups and individuals alike) to violent revenge.

Mononotto is depicted from the beginning of the novel as a man on the edge of being driven entirely out of his senses by righteous anger at the colonists. For instance, during the raid at Bethel, he behaves with extreme brutality until eye contact with a baby brings him back to his senses. The "cup of bitterness" Mononotto is drinking from is a kind of emotional poison that stands to drive him fully over the edge he has been teetering on.

Sedgwick's point here is an attempt at pushing back against a certain kind of virulent racism that was popular in the 19th century, but her point is also racist in a different way. James Fenimore Cooper and many of Sedgwick's other contemporaries wrote about American Indian people as if they were barely human and as if they relished in committing senseless violence against white settlers. Sedgwick suggests that Mononotto is innately human, but that colonists have given him a "cup of bitterness" with drop after drop designed to take away that humanity and drive him to monstrous acts.

While Sedgwick is right that the colonists' violence drives Mononotto to bitterness and anger that motivate him to commit violence in his own right, the novel regards his resulting instability as far more threatening than, for instance, Mr. Fletcher's instability. Mr. Fletcher and Mononotto have each endured "far worse than [...] the severest tortures ever devised by human cruelty," remaining physically unharmed while their families are killed and kidnapped all around them. But Sedgwick does not seem nearly as concerned that Mr. Fletcher, a white man, will hit a tipping point where he loses all reason and begins brutally killing everyone in his path. Sedgwick advocates more sympathy for American Indian people than many other white writers and politicians were willing to offer, but she nonetheless appears to do so out of the racist fear that they are only tenuously human and that they might threaten colonial power if they snap.