Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) both present stories based on Pocahontas mythology, the former directly with its titular character and the latter less directly through its stand-in Magawisca. These works also offer some progressive ideas: independent, outspoken women protagonists, criticism of white attitudes and actions toward Native Americans, and a multicultural framing of colonial history are inherent to each, to different degrees and with varying flavors. The purposes of the creators had some overlap, as did the cultural work done upon the American societies of each century. However, the Magawisca story is one Disney’s Pocahontas could not fully express. Pocahontas, constrained by art form and associated ideological filters, cannot critique Christianity or its specific denominations. Sedgwick employs Magawisca to engage in such a critique, doing some cultural work quite different from that of Disney.
Pocahontas has little interest in the religion of the English. True, in its first song, “The Virginia Company,” a chorus sings, rather inaudibly, of sailing to the New World “for glory, God, and gold.”[1] “Say your prayers, lads!” shouts one sailor as a storm threatens to sink their ship. “Godspeed,” another says later. Most notably, the English refer to the Powhatans as “heathens” and “devils,” their skin a “hellish red.” Beyond this, however, Christianity remains invisible, with no discussion of the subject or religious imagery to be found. There are no priests, no prayers before battle, no crosses, no bibles. The staff in Theodoor Galle’s Allegory of America or the garb in Eugène Duflot de Mofras’ engraving of Padre Narciso Duran and the indigenous girl would have seemed as foreign to Disney’s areligious Englishmen as to Native Americans. The Jamestown settlers may not have been religious refugees, but they were religious people, most Anglican. The only religion the film considers is that of the Powhatans, animating animism (most notably the Grandmother Willow tree and the wind) and featuring much dialogue, spoken or sung, on spirits in nature. It is a rather lopsided presentation.
One might interpret this as the creators rejecting Christianity and pushing Native American spiritualism on young people, as some Christian conservatives did in the 1990s, but there exists a superior explanation, simple sanitization. Remember, Pocahontas is sympathetic toward the Powhatans. Governor Ratcliffe is the villain; the English are greedy for gold, quick to violence, and regard indigenous people as “savages,” “vermin” who are “barely even human”; whites lament “what you get when races are diverse” and openly admit they “invaded [Indian] land.” The Powhatans step toward violence rather reluctantly.[2] Pocahontas rejects it entirely; racism and imperialism, too: “You think you own whatever land you land on… You think the only people who are people / Are the people who look and think like you.” The cultural work of the text clearly frames the English arrival at what would become Jamestown as problematic, victimizing Native Americans — “This is their land!” John Smith, the transformed Englishman, bellows at Ratcliffe to drive the point home. But while the creators cared about multiculturalism and different historical perspectives, in 1995 there were still limits to who could be greedy, racist invaders. Whites clearly, but to frame Christians as such was far less likely. Anglican beliefs, practices, symbols, possessions, and so on — Christianity’s place in the story of 1607 — would be minimized or erased (“disarticulated”[3]), consciously or not, to align with and protect the dominant belief system of American audiences. In the same way even populist-leaning cultural productions often leave capitalism and consumerism unexamined, Christianity remains “uncontested,” even in a progressive text with much to say about race, gender, and imperialism.[4] Ratcliffe and his men would not be displaying crosses or holding bibles in between (or while) marching to war or singing “We’ll kill ourselves an Injun / Or maybe two or three.” This absence constructs, as John Storey of the University of Sunderland wrote when exploring theories of ideology, a “distorted image of reality,” or at least of history.[5]
Try to imagine a Disney movie critiquing Christianity in a serious, unambiguous way. It is difficult to do. Pocahontas can tell Smith about her faith — “I know every rock and tree and creature / Has a life, has a spirit, has a name” — but she cannot criticize his. In Hope Leslie, however, Magawisca is not so restrained. She tells Everell Fletcher, the character who parallels John Smith, about how colonists decapitated her brother. “You English tell us,” Magawisca says, “that the book of your law is better than that written on our hearts, for ye say it teaches mercy, compassion, forgiveness — if ye had such a law and believed it, would ye thus have treated a captive boy?”[6] The Puritans of 1640s Massachusetts were hypocrites, in other words, extolling the bible but not taking its edicts seriously. Everell has no response to this. Sedgwick, or the narrator, often as unsubtle as filmmakers 170 years hence, praises Magawisca’s “reflecting mind” for highlighting the “most serious obstacle to the progress of the christian religion.”[7] The contrast between the faith’s “divine principles and the conduct of its professors” made conversion of “heathen men” more difficult; Sedgwick criticizes the faith — or rather those, past or present, who ignore its edicts to address the “Indian problem” — without fully rejecting its aims.[8]
Magawisca, having observed Puritan violence and faith alike, resists the Fletchers’ attempts at conversion. On “principle,” “her eye is shut and her ear is closed” to Christianity.[9] Sedgwick again assigns Magawisca “rare gifts of mind,” stressing the intellectual and rational nature of her opposition to a religion overly violent and, further, fundamentalist.[10] For Magawisca is following the example of her mother, Monoca, who refused to convert, believing in the efficacy of all faiths: “all the children of the Great Spirit were equal objects of His favour,” and the bible was divinely “withheld” from Pequot culture because it was not “needful.”[11] The Fletchers are sympathetic toward this view, supposing they should not be narrow-minded and wondering if Monoca’s good deeds would be enough for salvation.[12] Here is a call for religious tolerance — Sedgwick may not fully reject conversion aims, but she does question them. It is difficult to envision the questioning of Christianity as the one true faith, or linkage of Christianity to hypocrisy and violence, in Pocahontas.
Why does a popular cultural artifact from 1827 seem more free to engage in religious criticism, even of long-faded sects, than one from 1995? True, different eras have different tolerances — at times the “pulse of the masses”[13] is counterintuitive and surprising — and varied creators have varied intentions. We cannot discount these things. It is insufficient to say that Hope Leslie is for adults and Pocahontas for children, as the latter has no problem marking whites and historically celebrated history as problematic — it simply will not do the same to a specific group. (Some cultural theorists describe popular culture as possessing an inherent clash and negotiation between ideologies of resistance and domination, between, in Gramsci’s terms, counter-hegemonic elements and hegemony, which may explain the allowance of some critiques and not others in any given work.[14])
Form is surely part of the answer. The writer is like a vigilante, with more freedom of expression. While still constrained, far fewer people stand between her unexpressed vision and the public consumption of her art, compared to film production. Less of Pierre Bourdieu’s “cultural capital” — required training, technology, access to institutions — stands in her way.[15] Ideas can more easily traverse from mind to page to publisher to printer to bookshop. Publishing houses are institutions, of course, but perhaps easier to get “authorization” (pace historian Holt N. Parker) from than film studios, given the scale of the endeavors and opportunities at small firms.[16] Perhaps more important is the potential societal response. Should the writer traffic in troubling or counter-hegemonic ideas, she can be waved away as a lone lunatic. Not unreasonably, the public places responsibility for a novel’s content on the author (the publishing institution usually avoids blame, though not always). Ruling classes may therefore be less concerned, creating opportunities.
A film is a bit different, with many more individuals involved in its creation, meaning more gatekeepers. Radical ideas can be better filtered out. The requirement of more cultural capital means those who produce such art are better aligned with elite interests or are among their number (in other words, hegemonic influence and cultural capital are tied together in a positive correlation, one rising with the other). Sizable, elite-owned institutions are, or were, generally necessary to create and distribute feature-length movies of acceptable quality, therefore individual troublemaking is less likely. Further, the institution may be held responsible for the content of this medium. Hope Leslie is a Sedgwick novel, while Pocahontas is a Disney film, not a Gabriel and Goldberg, or Binder, Grant, and LaZebnik, film.[17] This is to say that compared to lone wolf authors and their novels, more social pressure, and elite pressure, may exist for films to follow dominant ideologies, as it would not do for major institutions to endorse subversive ideas. Art’s form, its associated barriers to existence and post hoc legitimizations, affects what art can say. After all, is it not easier to imagine a novel from the 1990s criticizing past Christians, and harder to imagine an 1820s Broadway play (films did not exist) doing the same? (There are no absolutes, of course, only influences.)
Cultural theorists contend that texts “always present a particular image of the world” and “win people to particular ways of seeing” it.[18] Texts take sides, in other words.[19] Our two works took opposite positions on whether Christianity had much to do with the European incursion in North America. Pocahontas sees and hears nothing of Anglicanism, therefore she cannot comment upon it, while Magawisca exists in a thoroughly Puritan world and is free, or forced, to interact with it. Despite any similar cultural work these texts do, and without denying other divergences undiscussed, such a significant narrative and semiotic difference sends a rather different message to viewers and readers, which, while its impact may be impossible to measure, should not go unnoticed.
For more from the author, subscribe and follow or read his books.
[1] Pocahontas, directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg (1995; Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios).
[2] Of the Powhatans, only Kocoum seems eager to fight. Powhatan eventually feels he has no choice, but in the end rejects violence like his daughter.
[3] John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 10th ed. (Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2024), 11.
[4] LeRoy Ashby, “The Rising of Popular Culture: A Historiographical Sketch,” OAH Magazine of History 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 13. Often critique must stay within certain parameters, Ashby argues.
[5] Storey, Cultural Theory, 3.
[6] Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (New York, NY: Penguin, 1998), 52-53.
[7] Ibid., 53
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 32.
[10] Ibid., 33.
[11] Ibid., 21.
[12] Ibid., 21-22. It should also be noted that Hope stands up to Puritan authorities and extremism during the witch trial in chapters eight and nine, one of several criticisms of religion by white characters.
[13] Ashby, “Popular Culture,” 11-12.
[14] Storey, Cultural Theory, 10-11.
[15] Holt Parker, “Toward a Definition of Popular Culture,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (May 2011): 160-162.
[16] Ibid., 163-166.
[17] Directors, writers.
[18] Storey, Cultural Theory, 4.
[19] Ibid.
