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"The Dark Stranger": Sensationalism and Anti-Catholicism in Sarah Josepha Hale's Traits of American Life
In "The Romance of Travelling," one of the sketches collected in Sarah Josepha Hale's 1835 Traits of American Life, Hale focuses on Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, as a typical American landscape, which "gives to the heart a sensation like that of suddenly meeting the smiling face of a friend" (195). Hale follows the landscape tradition of focussing on the reflective and imaginative qualities that water lends to landscape (195; Novak 40-41). Conventional, too, is Hale's discovery of a ruined habitation in the landscape, a site that marks time's passing and signals historical depth. Yet the "remembrance connected with the lake" and its ruin which provides the material for Hale's story is hardly a conventionally poetic one. For Lake Sunapee was once, Hale tells her audience, the source of a whirlwind that devastated a local farming family. The parents escaped unharmed, but their home became the ruin and their infant, Mary, disappeared -- only her gown was recovered. "Whether her little form was reduced to atoms by the grinding storm, or thrown by the wind into the lake, or carried into the wilderness, is a secret the last trumpet only can reveal," intones Hale (207). As if this grisly speculation were not enough, Hale ends the story by encouraging her readers to journey from the scene of devastation to the Ohio River, where they will find the resettled farmer, who will explain that he has relocated because he "could not bear to eat the fish of the lake, for fear they might have been fattening on the flesh of his child" (208)!
The shining surface of Lake Sunapee that so resembles a smiling familiar friend contains and conceals a narrative of horrors. Hale's writing, usually characterized as "early realism" or "domestic fiction," participates in what nineteenth-century readers would come to recognize as the sensational: the interpenetration of the familiar and the shocking. Indeed, the sensational was repeatedly attacked precisely because it blurred boundaries, because it showed a middle-class respectability infected by crime and sin. David S. Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, describes in detail the influence that such popular literature had on the canonical authors of the period. In both earlier...