Pocahontas and John Smith

My American lit class engaged in an interesting activity today. We watched portions of some film versions of the John Smith-Pocahontas story to supplement the reading of Smith's journal, and then they had some group discussion on the significance of the enduring Pocahontas legend. I have some thoughts of my own.

The most interesting angle to me is that latter versions of the story (not Smith's own version) introduce the idea of a romantic relationship between Smith and Pocahontas. This fanciful, Hollywood spin on the legend in part simply makes for a better story, as it extends and complicates their entanglement, and it makes the story more enjoyable as a romantic encounter across language and cultural barriers. People love a good love story, and sex sells.

Still, it seems to me that it serves a larger, more metaphorical purpose. The idea that Smith's own story of Pocahontas saving him serves colonial ends in suggesting a peaceful coexistence between Natives and English is well established, but why eroticize the story? In oversimplified terms, the love story symbolizes the romance between England and the New World. Just as many English poets and early travel writers speak of the New World continents in terms that suggest the female body, so Pocahontas becomes a living, breathing representation of this female continent, willingly taken by the English male explorer. (In latter-day, postcolonial literature, this relationship would be likened more to rape.) It deepens and complicates the connections between England and the New World, just as John Smith and other early colonialists hoped to extend and deepend England's commitment to settling the New World.