The Courage of Sarah Noble

A third-person omniscient narrator tells the story, relating the thoughts and feelings of both Sarah and her father, John, which allows for a greater understanding of their characters. This perspective provides insight into John’s worries as well as Sarah’s doubts about her courage. Despite his constant reassurances to Sarah, John wonders, for example, “if he should have brought this child into the wilderness” (5), a worry that seems to bother him quite a bit because he does not sleep all night. Sarah trusts him deeply, knowing “that if she called to him he would wake” (2) immediately, and he does.

To allay Sarah’s concerns about the “wilderness,” John anthropomorphizes the animals they hear, and Sarah clutches her cloak often, which becomes a symbol of comfort, courage, and home. John gives the animals human qualities and characteristics so Sarah will not fear them. An owl, he says, “is telling [her] goodnight,” and a fox is just “calling to his mate” (2). John makes these animals seem friendly with his descriptions, knowing they pose no threat. In addition, Sarah’s cloak helps her to sleep both in the forest and Mistress Robinson’s house, not unlike a child’s security blanket, and she will not remove it inside the Robinsons’ home until her father comes inside. When she is trying to sleep by the fire, worrying about what Mistress Robinson’s children told her about the Indigenous people she may encounter, “she held the warm material of the cloak even more closely” (12). Thus, the cloak is symbolic of what is familiar to Sarah, and it reminds her to have courage whenever she is uncomfortable, sad, or fearful.

The contrast between the way John describes the Indigenous people of the area and Mistress Robinson highlights his values, as well as Dalgliesh’s. When Sarah expresses concern about the Indigenous peoples they might encounter, John is confident that “they will not harm [him and Sarah]” (18). However, he tells Sarah that Mistress Robinson ought to teach her children to be careful about what they say, and that she needs to exercise greater care in choosing her own words. John seems to equate Mistress Robinson with the people who do not want to “help others along the way” (18), insisting that he and Sarah will behave differently from the Robinsons.

John clearly values kindness and care, impressed that Sarah picked up on Mistress Robinson’s lack of compassion and ungenerous spirit. Sarah is keenly aware that Mistress Robinson’s “fussing” is unlike her own mother’s, as Mrs. Noble “fussed in a loving way” (10) compared to Mistress Robinson, who speaks sharply to her children. Before John and Sarah left home in the Massachusetts colony, Mrs. Noble tried to give her daughter courage, but when Sarah wants her cloak at bedtime, Mistress Robinson suggests that she is weak—with “thin” blood—and says, “So young, so young […]. A great pity” (11). She has, it seems, no concern about making Sarah feel fearful or not up to the life before her. Further, when Sarah and John knock on the Robinsons’ door, Mistress Robinson looks at them “without smiling” and says she feared they were “wandering Indians.” As John believes the relationship between the European colonizers and Indigenous peoples of the region to be “friendly,” Mistress Robinson’s concern seems unduly suspicious and needlessly fearful, highlighting John’s vastly different values and attitudes. Further, in making John Noble a likable character, Dalgliesh encourages readers to align their values and attitudes with his own. Mistress Robinson is characterized as such an unlikable person that readers are dissuaded from identifying with or sharing her views. The characterization of John Noble and Mistress Robinson helps to illuminate Dalgliesh’s goals for the text.

This section introduces the theme of The Coexistence of Courage and Fear by providing situations—both outdoors and indoors—that require Sarah to summon courage amid her fear. As she and her father journey to Connecticut, she is apprehensive about the animal noises she hears at night, but rather than allowing her fear to take over, she recalls her mother’s advice about courage and trusts in her father’s promised protection. Once at Mistress Robinson’s home, Sarah’s fears are stoked by her father’s absence and the Robinson children’s promise of terror from the Indigenous peoples. She finds the courage to overcome panic by drawing her cloak around her. In both cases, her courage is able to tamp down her fears, which establishes her strength and resilience early on.