William Apess's manhood and native resistance in Jacksonian America. From: MELUS | Date: March 22, 2006| Author: Bayers, Peter L. | COPYRIGHT 2006 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

"I thought it was a very pretty notion to be a man .... "

--William Apess, A Son of the Forest (14)

In his "Masculinity and Self-Performance in the Life of Black Hawk," Timothy Sweet notes that critics such as Paula Gunn Allen have studied the ways in which Native women's roles were altered by European and Euro-American contact, but as he sensibly points out, "if [Native] femininity was altered, so was masculinity" (476). From the seventeenth to the nineteenth...