Sarah Josepha Hale Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Susan M. Griffin

Critical Essay by Susan M. Griffin

SOURCE: "'The Dark Stranger': Sensationalism and Anti-Catholicism in Sarah Josepha Hale's Traits of American Life," Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1997, pp. 13-24.

In the following excerpt. Griffin focuses on the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Hale's story "The Catholic Convert."

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...
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