The Troubling Case of the Ideal Feminine in "Indian Woman's Death Song"

Throughout her works, and as the short biography in the anthology notes, Felicia Dorothea Hemans was a vocal proponent of the virtue of feminine domesticity. She viewed the home as the ideal place for women, somewhere they could escape public world meant for their husbands and accomplish meaningful tasks for their families. And hence she subscribes, possibly inadvertently, to the long-upheld tradition of women having partial agency, meaning they can make decisions only that effect their duties as a wife/mother not in regard to their public lives or status. The passivity forced by this pseudo-agency is seen at the forefront of "Indian Woman's Death Song" and even complicates the poem's subject.

In the piece, agency is given to three characters: the woman, the river, and the woman's husband. Yet, as may be imagined from my intro, these agencies are in no way equal. While the woman has no action but to sing and bear her child, the river is constantly called upon to act, "Roll on!" (20). And though this may be seen as a command, what it also highlights is the woman's powerlessness. She is at the hands of the "Father of ancient waters," which is coincidentally another man (17). Thus I believe that the woman is robbed of her most defining action, the suicide, because it is an action done by the river, not by her. We do not see her decide to place the canoe in the river, but only the canoe gliding at a "fearful" speed, or a speed which one cannot choose.

To bring this a step further, the woman defines herself in terms of her jilted love (24-31) instead of characteristics inherent to her. Yes, in the opening stanza she is defined as acting "proudly and dauntlessly" and that she looked "triumphantly" as her death approached, but these are all defining her attitude toward death, not her as a person apart from this action. There is no woman outside of her death and therefore there is no woman outside of her husband. In effect, Hemans creates a female character that is nothing but a shell through which to convey a suicide and thus the suicide in someway becomes general or dulled. The consequence of losing a life is diminished because the import of that life defined by Hemans (i.e. the woman's ability to be a good wife) is already determined.