The Poor Indians. Laura M. Stevens
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will not be lost on many readers that this description of collectivity draws on the work of Benedict Anderson and others on nationalism. Anderson has outlined the ways in which novels and newspapers reconfigured the cognitive boundaries of their readers, prompting them to understand themselves as engaged in shared acts of readership and connected with distant horizons of activity.54 In the last decade much scholarship has charted a causal trajectory from discourse to discursive community, showing how the reading of new types of texts generated modern forms of social feeling. These sentiments crossed the gaps of geography and urban anonymity, affectively linking disparate people.55
Missionary writings served purposes similar to an effect often attributed to the newspaper, periodical, or novel: the enhancement of collective identities and norms of civility. Like newspapers (and, to some degree, novels), they conveyed a sense of things happening all over the world, at one time, which the reader could read about and imagine.56 Like essay periodicals and sentimental novels they presented various affective responses as signs of internal inclinations and beliefs, modeling reactions that their readers could imitate if they wanted to feel included in communities of the civilized or genteel. The contribution that missionary texts made to this process, though, was more complicated than those made by secular genres. For they helped construct a modern vision of civil society, of a nation, and sometimes of a supra-national collective by alluding to what we might consider one of the earliest geographically dispersed and imagined communities, the early Christian Church.57 As articulated in the New Testament, this community defined itself by a set of religious beliefs and in the enactment of a compassion most vividly expressed in efforts to expand the community’s membership through the propagation of its creed. The great differences between the early Christian Church and modern nations do not eclipse the consistent phenomenon of a group in which people are made to feel membership through shared emotions and beliefs that find expression through circulating texts.
Whether such rhetoric actually helped to create a transatlantic nationalism felt throughout Britain and the colonies is hard to say, but it is clear that such claims were used to develop transoceanic networks among members of the same religious communities, such as seventeenth-century Puritans and eighteenth-century evangelicals. The notion of a nation characterized by benevolent feeling certainly became a component of the ideology of both Britain and the United States, and arguably is still an important aspect of both nations’ self-images. Studying the ways in which these texts sought to expand their readers’ capacity for sympathetic engagement and charity, by triangulating pity for Indians with empathy for the Indians’ missionaries and British neighbors, helps us see how these texts provided a religious template for increasingly secular forms of collective sentiment. Linking group identity to emotion and emphasizing the ability of spectators to assist in distant work, these writings prompted their readers to see themselves not just as part of an imagined community but also as participants in a vicariously enacted one.58
“Poor Indians” and the Ethics of Emotion
As it influenced depictions of Indians, pity became a crucial component of the British people’s developing sense of themselves as a people whose boundaries would extend as far as their ability to feel sorrow for suffering did. It presented a simple way to govern ethical obligations amid enlarged webs of human relations, especially those resulting from colonialism, slavery, and intercontinental trade. It proved to be a problematic basis for moral judgment, however, so that in the late eighteenth century the philosopher Immanuel Kant excluded emotions from the arena of morality.59 While Indians offered useful occasions for the expression of pity, attempts to convert them compelled the British to contemplate the implications of equating pity with goodness. These writings thus provide a focal point for examining some of the questions and debates that developed around the use of emotion as a moral touchstone.
An immediate question was the trustworthiness of expressions of pity. One of the most obvious statements one can make about Europe’s colonial projects is that they often caused great suffering in the name of alleviating suffering. It is tempting to interpret this paradox entirely as the result of dishonesty. Conrad seemed to reach this conclusion when he wrote about Heart of Darkness, “All the bitterness of those days …—all my indignation at masquerading philanthropy—have been with me again, while I wrote…. I have divested myself of everything but pity—and some scorn—while putting down the insignificant events that bring on the catastrophe.”60 Conrad suggested that as he stripped a veneer of benevolence from the reality of imperial exploitation, he was motivated by pity. True sorrow at the sight of suffering prompted him to attack an insincere pity that caused suffering.
It is important, however, to see that pity can be morally problematic even when authentically felt. The moral implications of pity become especially complex when it is expressed as a desire to save another’s soul. As they elicited compassion arising less from sensory data than religious conviction, missionary writings encouraged readers to pity a people who did not necessarily feel that they were in pain. They prompted readers to feel compassion for another precisely because of his or her spiritual otherness. Yet they exhorted their readers to channel that emotion toward adopting that foreign other into their own religion. They enunciated the distance between self and other and then sought to bridge that distance through an intensive process of spiritual transformation and rigorous acculturation.
Because distance—both cultural and geographical—is such a prominent aspect of missionary writings, these texts provide a useful site for examining the ethical dilemmas that arose from the detachment inherent in texts evoking sympathy or pity. As Karen Halttunen has observed, “Although spectatorial sympathy claimed to demolish social distance, it actually rested on social distance—a distance reinforced, in sentimental art, by the interposition of written text, stage, or canvas between the virtuous spectator and the (imaginary) suffering victim.”61 This problem became prominent in the sentimental culture of the mid-eighteenth century. It was in this era that many literary texts were devoted to eliciting intense feeling for the sufferings of their main characters to convey moral lessons, but also to entertain. “The literary scenario of suffering, which made ethics a matter of viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive kind of voyeurism.”62 Pushed to its logical conclusion, this voyeurism led to the “pornography of pain” that Halttunen has analyzed in humanitarian, sensationalist, and erotic publications of the nineteenth century. Along with concerns about the inauthenticity of vicarious feeling, these worries about voyeurism also led to a pejorative connotation of “sentimentality” in the late eighteenth century.63 Whether it excited its viewers or not, the spectacle of pain could end up inspiring more emotion than action.
The complex role that pity played in missionary writings is suggested by the shifting meaning of the adjective missionaries most often used to describe Indians: “the poor Indians,” or sometimes “the poor heathens.”64 As Joseph Caryl wrote, “The poor, naked, ignorant Indians, who lately knew no civill Order, now beg to be brought into Church Order, to live under the Government, and enjoy the holy ordinances of our Lord Jesus Christ.”65 The word poor was used often in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to describe any figure worthy of pity. In Puritan context it also connoted a soul in need of salvation, but it appeared with unusual frequency in relation to Indians. In missionary writings the word poor conveys several meanings at once: it indicates material need, a lack of civilization, spiritual impoverishment, and brutal treatment by Catholic colonists. Central to missionary writings, the figure of the “poor Indian” also appeared in texts such as Pope’s Essay on Man:
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor’d mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv’n,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav’n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac’d,
Some happier island in the watry waste,
Where slaves once more their native lands behold,