The Captive's Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England

The Captive’s Position

The Captive’s Position

Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England

Teresa A. Toulouse

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Copyright© 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Toulouse, Teresa.

The captive’s position : female narrative, male identity, and royal authority in colonial New England / Teresa A. Toulouse.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13:978-0-8122-3958-4

ISBN-10:0-8122-3958-X (alk. paper)

1. Indian captivities—New England—History. 2. Women—New England—History—17th century—Sources. 3. Women in literature—History and criticism. 4. Indians in literature—History and criticism. 5. Sex role in literature—History and criticism. 6. Indians of North America—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. 7. New England—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600–1775. I. Title.

E85.T682006

For Michael

Contents

1 Female Captivity, Royal Authority, and Male Identity in Colonial New England, 1682–1707

2 The Sovereignty and Goodness of God in 1682: Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative and the Fathers’ Defense

3 Deference and Difference: Female Captivity and Male Ambivalence

4 The Uses of Female Humiliation: Judea Capta, Hannah Dustan, and Hannah Swarton in the 1690s

5 Hannah Dustan’s Bodies: Domestic Violence and Third-Generation Male Identity in Cotton Mather’s Decennium Luctuosum

6 Returning to Zion: Cultural Competition and John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive

7 The Seduction of the Father(s)

Coda: Dux Faemina Facta/Dux Faemina Facti

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1

Female Captivity, Royal Authority, and Male Identity in Colonial New England, 1682–1707

This study begins with a historical question: why do narratives of Indian captivity appear in New England between 1682 and 1707? During this period a new kind of narrative emerged about colonial women who had been ripped from their families by savage men and forced to undergo extraordinary physical and spiritual trials in the wilderness. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and Spanish and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies of survival among the Indians and self-promotion in the mother country. In contrast, the New English texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family, but manifested culturally valorized qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was redeemed eventually to her local colonial community. Most strikingly, these narratives were eagerly supported, disseminated, prefaced, and even written by American-born New English ministerial elites.¹

Dominant second- and third-generation ministers like Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams appropriated women’s narratives during the same period when the traditional political and religious authority of their English-born fathers and grandfathers became newly threatened from abroad as well as from within. Many historical studies of these narratives have traced their transformation from religious to political texts, from theological to sentimental and sensational uses, and from high cultural to popular cultural dominance.² Still others have examined such broad transformations in the light of questions about female authorship and agency.³ Most neglect, however, to explore captivity narratives in their relation to shifts in political and religious authority occurring in this particular period. Thus, although this study draws on earlier work, it places the captivities within that specific historical frame in order to open up the question of the uses which the captivity structure and the representation of the woman captive served for powerful ministerial elites.

What was at stake—personally as well as socially, politically as well as religiously—in prominent New English ministers’ appropriation of the position of the female captive at this particular moment? This project argues that a popular literary form, developed from stories about orthodox New English women’s captivity among Indians, helped dominant male colonials to address and to negotiate profound transformations in their own sense of personal and cultural identity during a crucial transitional period at the end of the seventeenth century. Exploring how and why religious narratives of women’s captivity came so powerfully to represent a distinctive identity position for powerful second- and third-generation colonial men is the burden of this project.

The Political Contexts of Captivity

Several political contexts surround the writing and publishing of captivity narratives, contexts that intersect with, but are not entirely limited to, the literal Indian/colonial conflicts in whose terms they are often understood. Well-known to political historians, such contexts have not been examined in more than a passing way by most literary or cultural historians, yet as this study will show, they cast illuminating light on the growth, development, and uses of women’s captivity narratives.⁴

Between the publication of the first text considered here (Mary White Rowlandson’s narrative of 1682) to the last (John Williams’s narrative of 1707), seven changes in government occurred in Massachusetts alone. Internal changes intersected with international conflicts in Europe that deeply resonated at the local colonial level. Four larger political events are especially influential not only for their obvious effects on Massachusetts governmental structure and practice, but also for their effects on the decision of certain second- and third-generation New English ministers to support and to use women’s captivity writings. The first event is the threat to and then the loss of the original Massachusetts charter in 1685. Responses to threats to the charter begin as early as the Restoration of 1660 and come to a head during the entire period under discussion. The second event involves the effects of the so-called Glorious Revolution in England of 1688, in which William, the Protestant Dutch Prince of Orange, successfully seizes the English throne from his father-in-law, the Catholic James Stuart (James II). The Glorious Revolution is used by some colonials to justify the 1689 overthrow of the first royal governor of the Dominion of New England, Edmond Andros, and his colonial political supporters, but reactions to it also inform the new Massachusetts charter negotiated with King William by Increase Mather (1691–92), color the regime of William Phips, Increase Mather’s choice for the first royal governor under the new charter, and affect the regimes that follow Phips. Continuing conflicts surrounding the charter and the Glorious Revolution in turn intersect with two imperial wars—the War of the League of Augsburg in 1689 and the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702—which spill over into Massachusetts in English terms—as King William’s and Queen Anne’s Wars. These wars, the third and fourth events that orient this study, exacerbate continuing issues over legitimate European succession, rights of possession, and expansion that are experienced in New England as boundary and trade wars that equally involve shifting Indian allies.⁵ Joint Indian and New French alliances lead to numerous assaults on historically contested New English borders to the north and especially to the east that result in the seizing of a large number of New English captives. A recent study suggests that between 1675 and 1713 (the Peace of Utrecht) up to seven hundred such captives were taken.⁶

Colonial interactions with England and other European rivals indicate how this political context necessarily implicates a religious context. Like the rhetoric informing the charter negotiations and the colonial response to the Glorious Revolution, King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War are framed by ongoing rhetorical attempts to link religious affiliation to emergent national definitions and identifications. As the French and their allies become negatively typed as overwhelmingly Catholic, so the English become defined as broadly Protestant.⁷ Traditional colonial New English religious elites like Increase and Cotton Mather, who, as theocrats, directly relate their religious legitimacy and authority to the colony’s political legitimacy and authority, react to these changes in a variety of ways. As historians have shown, after halting and then open opposition to royalist intervention in New England in the mid-1680s, such leaders come to rally around William as Englishmen after the Glorious Revolution, and deploy a new Whiggish rhetoric of political rights and religious toleration. They do so, however, to protect certain traditional New English charter and church privileges which deny rights and toleration to those who dissent from them politically or religiously. While claiming their identification with a newly defined Protestant political/religious culture in post-Restoration England, they thus at the same time, out of a competing identification with their own first-generation fathers and grandfathers, persist in beliefs and behaviors that draw these new affiliations into doubt.⁸

Three broad local complications arise from the attempt of ministers like Increase Mather and his supporters to construct themselves at once as tolerant Protestant Englishman of the new kind and as the loyal sons of New English nonseparating Congregationalists. An early and ardent member of a self-proclaimed traditionalist faction before the abrogation of the old charter in 1685, Increase Mather becomes the negotiator of a new charter in the late 1680s, first with James II and then with William III. Almost immediately upon Mather’s return from London in 1692, he is emphatically denounced by those who, in his absence, have construed themselves as the true defenders of traditional New English political and religious orthodoxy against outside English intervention. If traditionalists of both generations violently attack Increase Mather because he has, for them, bent too far to accommodate English political demands, other second- and third-generation moderates, attracted to newer English forms of church practice and polity, begin to suggest that cultural changes should accompany political changes in New England. Encouraged by the current rhetorical emphasis on religious toleration in New England, an important competitor of Mather’s own generation, Solomon Stoddard, begins even more openly to publish work begun before Mather’s departure which directly undermines the traditional covenantal basis of New English church structure from within rather than without.⁹

Each of these groups threatens the balancing acts that Increase Mather, his son Cotton, and their allies come to see themselves as performing and reperforming over the Massachusetts charter. If the first, nonyielding position lays the colony open to royal charges of insubordination or treason, the second and third positions, whether through an overattraction to an unfamiliar and condescending Williamite England or through a more local dismissal of traditional New English ways of understanding legitimacy and authority, seem to betray the identification with the first-generation fathers that, for Increase and Cotton Mather and their supporters, grants them a more broadly cultural as well as a political and religious influence.¹⁰

Thus, while the spillover of imperial European conflicts to the colonies during this period apparently eventuates in a new rhetoric of a shared English Protestant position, especially but not only against the French, it also aggravates and helps to precipitate conflicts within Massachusetts involving those who claim adherence to a particular version of the authority of the first generation and those supporting varying degrees of cultural as well as political change. Whereas each of the captivity narratives considered in this project can therefore be read as a reaction to external threats, whether Indian, European, or both, each ought also to be read in terms of internal conflicts and competitions within New England, specifically within Massachusetts itself. Although captivity narratives can be argued to play a part in an ongoing construction of Englishness, as a number of scholars have suggested, this construction surely must be analyzed in terms of its conflicted intersection with competing colonial understandings of New Englishness as well. Insofar as issues of Indianization obviously inflect captivity narratives, they, too, should be considered in relation to, not as separate from, period constructions of what is English and New English. In addition to expressing a range of complicated attitudes toward real Indians, representations of native peoples during the entire colonial period also express overt or covert interpretations of both European and internal colonial relations in need of further exploration.¹¹

Extending and nuancing suggestions made by Roy Harvey Pearce in 1947, literary scholars have argued for a broadly Puritan base to early colonial captivity narratives, a base that becomes increasingly less religious.¹² While this scholarship has opened up important dimensions of these popular texts’ uses and transformations of more general Puritan doctrinal or literary assumptions—European-derived notions of providence and typology, for example—it has not, as a rule, recognized how particular features of narratives representing women in Indian captivity significantly link these texts to fears, beliefs, and positions espoused by colonial male elites whose dominance is threatened during a specific historical period. Unexplored is the intersection of the publication and republication of four major captivities with different moments of political conflict in Massachusetts, an intersection that points to the personal as well as the religious influence that Increase and Cotton Mather clearly exert on the appearance of these texts.

Mary White Rowlandson underwent captivity in 1676, during the second year of King Philip’s War of 1675–76, but her narrative of her experience is not published until 1682, in a climate when renewed charter threats are emerging. Possibly prefaced, certainly supported, by Increase Mather, the Rowlandson captivity concludes with the final jeremiad of her husband, Joseph Rowlandson, a supporter of Increase and a mediator in the bitter separation of Boston’s Third Church from the First Church over the Halfway Covenant. (The Third Church accepted the covenant, while the First Church did not.)¹³ Cotton Mather uses the sensational story of Hannah Dustan of Haverhill, taken captive in 1697 during the last year of King William’s War, in three different venues at three different moments of political transition in Massachusetts. The first is appended to a fast sermon delivered in 1697, three years after the ignominious fall and death of William Phips, the Mather-supported royal governor, and just before the expected announcement of a new royal governor. The second appears in Decennium Luctuosum of 1699, Cotton Mather’s history of the Indian wars of the past decade, prefaced and concluded by comments to Lord Bellomont, the latest royal governor. The third use of Dustan’s narrative appears in Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which, written sporadically from around 1693 onward, is finally published in 1702, thus coinciding with the appointment of Joseph Dudley, son of the Massachusetts colony’s second colonial governor, to the royal governorship. The narrative of Hannah Swarton of Casco, Maine, whose captivity occurs in 1690, during instabilities occasioned by Andros’s removal, appears in 1697, appended to the sermon in which Cotton Mather first tells Hannah Dustan’s story and defends Governor Phips. Finally, the narrative of John Williams, in which the story of the male minister significantly replaces that of the female captive, appears in 1707, soon after Cotton Mather publishes two virulent treatises attacking the royal governorship of the New English–born Joseph Dudley. John Williams, minister of the frontier town of Deerfield, was the husband of Eunice Mather Williams—Cotton Mather’s cousin and Increase Mather’s niece.

Connections like these prove useful for isolating the four texts considered here and for asserting the need to read Indian captivities as cultural products that involve colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. This inquiry draws on the contexts sketched above to argue that each of these narratives performs a role in local conflicts over colonial legitimacy and authority aroused by new imperial interventions in New England. At the same time, however, simply linking these four captivities to political or religious positions espoused by Increase or Cotton Mather neither fully explains ministerial support for them nor accounts for the complexity of the ways in which early captivities intersect with internal and external controversies. This linkage cannot, in itself, entirely account for the reasons why conflicts over legitimacy and authority become related to the range of meanings these powerful men ascribed to the position of the female captive and the narrative structure in which she was represented.

The Question of the Female Captive

Why and how did colonial elites like Increase and Cotton Mather turn particularly to stories of female captivity to represent reactions to internal and external threats to colonial male power and legitimacy? Three possibilities immediately present themselves. The first is that the experiences of adult colonial women provided the predominant pool out of which captivities, whether written by or about them, would come. The second is the fact, just noted, that Mary Rowlandson and John Williams had personal connections to the Mather family. A third reason—especially in the 1690s—involved ministerial desire to counter stories about captive women’s conversions and French or Indian marriages in Canada. But other reasons linking understandings of the domestic realm to broader religious and political conflicts over authority become evident once one considers general features of the role played by gender in Puritan social thought and theology.

Edmund Morgan long ago remarked upon the analogical potential of a colonial Puritan social structure grounded on gender hierarchies assumed to be divinely mandated. This mandate not only ordered that woman be subservient to man within the marriage covenant; it also dictated that the marriage covenant itself be used as the basis for explaining and justifying all other social covenants.¹⁴ Although studies of actual gendered practices might belie such assumptions, especially toward the end of the seventeenth century, they nonetheless play an important role in ministerial deployments of captivity narratives in which representations of women are so central. Scholars have shown that colonial ministers were aware of the possible contradictions involved in allowing women, whose culturally prescribed duty it was to remain private, subordinate, and silent, to write or even to be represented as characters in public, heroic narratives. But the narratives’ perceived usefulness in justifying and persuading their readers of certain political and religious beliefs, especially after the popularity of the Rowlandson narrative, clearly outweighed hesitations about their publication.¹⁵

Given the New English Puritan reliance on typological exegesis, ministers could point to the representative quality of the woman captive’s experience; she did not stand for women’s experience alone, but, viewed in scriptural terms, for the experience of the entire colony.¹⁶ Similarly, as Ivy Schweitzer, Amanda Porterfield, and others have more recently argued, ministers could further draw on the rhetoric of Puritan theology to argue that all elect believers in fact inhabited the woman’s position in the spiritual realm. While the secular social realm might be hierarchical by its nature, the spiritual realm allowed for an equality based on men’s inhabiting the passive, obedient, and humbled position before God that they ideally assigned to women before them in the secular realm.¹⁷ Noteworthy in the case of captivity narratives is how this feminized, spiritual position becomes so strongly read and promoted as a political position as well. In times of political stress, especially during or just after wars, male conflicts often are played out through attempts to stabilize the meanings of women’s position.¹⁸ Such was literally the case in the period at hand, which saw not only the writing of the female captivity narratives considered here, but also the Salem witch trials and the increased executions for infanticide of female fornicators.

Historians have read the witchcraft outbreak and the ensuing trials at Salem Village in 1692 as responses to the political loss of the original Massachusetts charter and to wide social controversy and unrest about the colony’s future.¹⁹ Carol Karlsen has both nuanced and challenged this claim by arguing that the trials arose out of a related confusion and anger about the rising social power and position of some women under new economic conditions stemming from renewed English contacts.²⁰ Karlsen also links the trials to another related social change occurring in the 1690s: the increasing number of executions of women for an infanticide linked to fornication. Whereas both men and women had been held equally culpable of such sins in the preceding decades, the 1690s exhibit a markedly punitive focus on women. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, a variety of scholars have argued that female fornicators are executed only in part because of their personal or even their theological guilt; more important are their transgressions of religious and social boundaries that are felt to threaten the community as a whole.²¹ In another turn of this argument, however, the transgressing woman becomes a more representative figure, whose breaking of communal covenants more specifically mirrors the shared guilt, not the vulnerability, of the entire community. As a representative figure, she becomes less an inside threat to the community than its scapegoat, her death necessary to cleanse all the Land, as John Williams put it, of its shared pollutions.²²

Another meaning implicit in the notion of the woman as scapegoat complicates reading the fornicator’s death simply as a means of restoring community purity. Frank Shuffelton has called attention to the breakdown in the eighteenth century of traditional community measures for supporting as well as exposing those community members, especially the poor and single women, who were in social or religious straits.²³ Examining the late seventeenth-century beginnings of such breakdowns, Laura Henigman has recently explored the dearth of community involvement in a number of pregnancies occurring out of wedlock in the 1690s and the concomitant colonial reliance on recent and rigid infanticide laws to punish women offenders after a child’s death.²⁴ These analyses again suggest that instead of restoring community boundaries, the scapegoating of witches and fornicators at this time indicates the community’s complicity in such women’s boundary-crossing desires and its awareness that the community supposedly cleansed and restored by their deaths has in fact already broken down and been transformed irremediably, both by contacts with different cultural groups, whether Indian or European, and by the desire for land and for goods aroused by these contacts and conflicts. Such readings of the witch and the fornicator point us toward different uses of the woman captive’s position from those suggested so far.

Like the witch and the fornicator, the woman captive crosses boundaries, in her case cultural as well as literal. Unlike them, however, this figure is represented as submissive, obedient, and loyal to the tradition of the New English fathers and their God. Her forced crossing of boundaries is constructed not only as an affliction for her sins, but also as an opportunity to demonstrate her appropriate repentance and belief that God alone can physically and spiritually redeem her. Ministers involved in the publication or editing of the captivities considered here seem to have recognized and stressed clear textual as well as thematic distinctions between their representations of the captive woman and female offenders like the witch and the fornicator. Supporting, editing, and even writing narratives for captive women, they wrote blistering execution sermons for female fornicators.

John Williams’s first published text, for example, is the sermon he preaches at the execution of one Sarah Smith in 1699.²⁵ Several years before improving and editing the narratives of Hannah Dustan and Hannah Swarton, Cotton Mather preaches a similar execution sermon for Elizabeth Emerson, Hannah Dustan’s own sister, and his initial publication of the Dustan/Swarton stories is followed by a collection of execution sermons, Pillars of Salt of 1699.²⁶ Joseph Rowlandson preaches no published execution sermon for a woman, but Lancaster town records do reveal a particularly nasty confrontation with a local woman, Mary Gates, who disputes his ministerial authority and is duly chastised for it, while his final jeremiad, appended to his wife’s narrative, draws pointedly on the figure of the adulteress.²⁷ On the surface at least, the border-crossing position of the captive woman presents a marked contrast to these transgressors of legitimate community boundaries, these treasonous repudiators of traditional ministerial authority and, given the political crises surrounding these events, of state authority as well.

Or does it? Such attempts to distinguish the captive’s position from those of the witch and the fornicator only provoke other questions about what is at stake in ministerial support for this figure. While the captive woman, in contrast to these other figures, is represented as a submissive victim who is taken unwillingly, might she also have been interpreted as actively using her passivity to realize desires for other and different kinds of cultural and political connections and identifications? Could the community’s approbation for this figure be based on desires that not only uphold, but also transgress its own boundaries? Although she is represented as claiming a lack of agency, could it be precisely the culturally valorized passive position of the woman that allows her to cross a variety of cultural, political, and religious norms?

The tempting alternative of captive women’s resistance rather than their orthodoxy has been variously considered in a range of studies.²⁸ In its reversal of expectations—that is, simply replacing orthodoxy with some form of resistance to it—this approach to women’s captivity narratives cannot sufficiently address the complexity of representations of the woman captive’s position during this time period. Too often assuming that the female captive alone occupies a position resistant to orthodoxy as a result of her experience, her gender position, or some combination of the two, however, this argument overlooks the possibility of men’s identification with the representation. Those claiming that female captivity invariably belies orthodoxy ignore the fact that there are equally strong and important aims involved both in these texts’ identification with orthodoxy and in the kinds of identificatory positions they assume toward the nonorthodox, whether this concept is used to construct other colonials, other English Protestants, French Catholics, or a variety of Indian others. In order to understand the variety and significance of the identity positions that religious women’s captivities represent for threatened colonial men, other theoretical approaches to these narratives need to be engaged.

Ambivalence and/as Colonial Exceptionalism

While a number of feminist critics have analyzed individual women’s agency in captivity narratives, particularly their resistance to orthodox men’s discursive attempts to control their experience, another group has built on these insights in order to explore questions about broader cultural work performed by women’s texts. Tara Fitzpatrick, for example, has moved the question of women’s captivities’ resistance to ministerial control to the context of older discussions of American exceptionalism and national identity. Revising frontier theory, Fitzpatrick links the domestic to the national by arguing that colonial women’s captivity represents an initial moment in the forging of an American identity made exceptional by captive women’s spiritual and literal experience with the wilderness and its peoples.²⁹ Scholars like Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have read both the resistance and exceptionalism represented in captivity narratives quite differently. They argue that printed representations of a captive colonial woman’s voice, in expressing her loyal resistance to assimilation to her captors, mark a moment in the creation of a distinctly English bourgeois identity.³⁰ A further line of the scholarship on exceptionalism, represented most currently by the work of Michele Burnham, draws on the work of postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha to argue that the captive’s liminal position encourages a sentimental response by readers that dissolves boundaries between captives and captors as well as those between nations. In this reading, it is the ambivalence of women’s captivity narratives which resurfaces as a defining feature that invariably undermines exceptional identity, whether American colonial or English.³¹

Sharing an interest in American exceptionalism with Fitzpatrick, this study, too, seeks to explore a specifically colonial exceptionalism, but only by redefining it. Rather than reading the female captive’s experience in the wilderness as engendering a resistance that rewrites Puritan communalism as American individualism, however, this argument considers late seventeenth-century attitudes toward the English-born fathers and toward Europe resonant in the representations of captivity and wilderness used by American-born ministers. In this reading, far from being simply or only figured as a site of an individual female captive’s physical testing and conversion, the wilderness often renews or re/constructs associations with the moral and psychological Babylon of Catholic Europe and post-Restoration England, on the one hand, and with the questionable spiritual status of colonials considered disloyal to the traditions of the founders, on the other.

Like the work of Armstrong and Tennenhouse, this inquiry, too, poses the broader question of the roles played by printed representations of women’s captivity in figuring a collective, public identity. But a concern with the ways in which (usually) American-born colonials on the margins differentially use women’s captivities to imagine their relations to a shifting English center leads to questions about the identifications of certain colonial New Englishmen rather than about a broadly English identity. Finally, like Burnham’s work, this study draws broadly on the psychological concept of ambivalence to dispute the claim that some ultimate single identification, some stable identity, is finally expressed or achieved within these texts. But the reading of the ramifications of the ambivalence expressed in these texts differs from Burnham’s conclusions. A historically framed reading of these narratives draws into question the assumption that ambivalence necessarily or always undermines any concept whatsoever of colonial exceptionalism.

The term ambivalence has most generally been used to refer to the actions and conflicts resulting from a defensive conflict in which incompatible motives are involved.³² Recent scholars of ambivalence point out that such a broad interpretation of ambivalence has weakened the precision of the concept as it was first understood. J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis maintain that if ambivalence is to continue to possess any distinctive analytical rigor, the concept should be construed more narrowly as referring to "specific conflicts in which the positive and negative components of the emotional attitude are simultaneously in evidence and inseparable, where they constitute