"Hope Leslie"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews Catherine Maria Sedgwick's "Hope Leslie", an expansive work detailing with both sides of the conflict between the Puritans and the Native Americans in the Massachusetts Bay colony. It discusses how in order to create this rich and detailed story, Sedgwick presents a varied cast of characters and employs a number of literary techniques. One of the most prominent of these techniques is the use of letters that her characters write to each other. It analyzes these written letters and shows how Sedgwick uses this literary device to overcome the problem of omniscient narration, obtain more in-depth characterization, and better deal with the passage of time in the story.

From the Paper:

"Hope Leslie is written in the third person through the eyes of an all-knowing, all-seeing narrator. This allows the author to add a great deal of depth to the story by interjecting characters' thoughts and feelings, but it comes at a price: this style of storytelling is inherently difficult for readers to believe. Many critics describe third person narration as the "God's-eye view" because only a god could understand and explain the motivations and feelings of every character in the story at all times. Many readers do not find this to be a believable viewpoint. On the other hand, using first person narration would unduly limit the depth of a novel with as wide a scope as Hope Leslie by only allowing one character's thoughts to be explicitly defined."

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