UBC: The Unredeemed Captive
Feb. 21st, 2009 01:36 pmDemos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
I'm in the middle of Christopher Browning's monumental Origins of the Final Solution (where by "middle" I mean I'm on page 133 and I'm less than a quarter of the way through the book), and I suddenly couldn't take the Nazis for one more second.
I picked up this book for two reasons.
1. John (Putnam) Demos, as the author of Entertaining Satan, has a great abundance of author points with me. I believe I actually said, "Ooh, John Demos!" when I found this book in the used bookstore.
2. I'm interested, partly sui generis and partly because of this crazy American fantasy that seems to think I'm going to write it, in the phenomenon of Indian captivity.
One of the things The Unredeemed Captive cemented for me is that my interest is in the phenomenon of Indian captivity, not the captivity narratives themselves. As conditions of their production, these narratives are written by Puritans who have rejected the alien culture (it's clear in The Unredeemed Captive just how alien the culture of the Kahnawake Indians1 was to the early eighteenth century Puritans they captured, and that, at least, I suspect generalizes across the experiences of Puritans taken captive by other tribes) they have been exposed to and as such, they are invested in demonizing Indians and extolling the virtues of Puritans and Puritan culture. Captivity narratives, in other words, are all about reinscribing the boundaries between cultures and reinscribing the hierarchical and moral judgments the Puritans made about cultures other than their own, and I find this project deeply, deeply unsympathetic. (Yes, this is my own twenty-first century hierarchical and moral judgment about a culture other than my own. But honestly. The Puritans just infuriate me and nowhere more so than in their conviction of their own rightness. Puritanism is a strange mixture of self-righteousness and self-condemnation, and both of these characteristics make it particularly blind to the possibility of other cultures having anything valuable to offer.)
This book is also, I think, an experiment, born out of John Demos's desire to rehabilitate narrative history. As he says in the first line of the book, "Most of all, I wanted to tell a story." By which he does not mean he wants to write a novel. He wants to tell a story--in this case, the story of Eunice Williams, later named Marguerite, A'ongote, and Gannenstenhawi, who was captured by the Kahnawake Indians at the age of seven and who chose to remain with them all her life, despite the quite extraordinary efforts of her family, birth culture, and even the government of Massachusetts to "redeem" her. (The title of the book is a play on The Captive Redeemed, her father John Williams' account of his own captivity.)
In fact, the story Demos tells is the story of the failure to "redeem" her, as his principal primary sources are the writings of her father and of her brother Stephen. He does his best to reconstruct the other side, but as a historian rather than a novelist, he is constrained by the circumstances of evidentiary survival. Not surprisingly, the two Puritan men (both ministers and therefore of high status in their society) both wrote more and had more of their writing preserved than either Puritan women or Indians of either sex. Only one document ascribed to Eunice2 remains, a letter to her brother, and since she could neither read, write, nor speak English as an adult, it is an intensely mediated document--and the fact that it is banal and personally unrevealing is really not surprising. Eunice Williams remains an absence at the center of the narrative.
There are several things I wish Demos had done more explicitly. One is to address the issue of the historical record, what it means that we have one letter from Eunice and four thousand pages of typescript of her brother Stephen's diary. Another is to talk at greater length and with great explicitness about the differences between Puritan and Kahnawake culture. (He points out, for instance, that while male captives would generally go to any lengths to return to New England, female captives were overwhelmingly likely to stay and become Kahnawake, and to stay despite the fervent appeals of their (male) kinfolk. And he addresses the surface issues of why that might be so. But he doesn't dig into it the way I wish he would have.) And the third is to stop and explicitly deconstruct the idea of "captivity." Because it's quite clear from what he writes that "captivity" is the wrong word. Eunice/Gannenstehawi refused to leave. She is adopted by the Kahnawake, converts to Catholicism, marries a Kahnawake man, lives and dies in Kahnawake, despite visits to Massachusetts and entreaties, blandishments, and actual bribes to remain. The fact that her (male) relatives and the rest of her birth culture persisted in framing and describing the experience as "captivity" is in itself a matter that cries out for careful exegesis.
In other words, I suppose, while I appreciate Demos' desire and efforts to tell a story, I would have liked those efforts to be balanced by equal efforts to unpack and unpick the terms of the story he wants to tell.
---
1Kahnawake was a settlement of converted Catholic Indians near to Montréal. They were mostly Iroquois, and their culture reflected a hybridization of Iroquois tradition and French influence.
2It's difficult to know how to refer to her. Demos calls her "Eunice" throughout, as her family did. Presumably, as an adult, she used either Marguerite (her French Catholic baptismal name) or Gannenstehawi (the name bestowed upon her as an adult Kahnawake), but which? Or both? And this letter to her brother is in fact signed, "Eunice Williams."
Her husband seems also to have had a shifting plethora of names; Demos refers to him as Arosen, (one of) his name(s) as an adult Kahnawake, rather than François Xavier, his French names. He was Indian by birth--but he wasn't native to Kahnawake any more than Eunice/Marguerite/Gannenstehawi was, and presumably Arosen was bestowed upon him as an adult just as Gannenstehawi was bestowed on her. That is, it would clearly be wrong to refer to him as François, but is it right to refer to her as Eunice?
It's a thorny issue, and I don't actually have a better answer than the one which Demos chose.
I'm in the middle of Christopher Browning's monumental Origins of the Final Solution (where by "middle" I mean I'm on page 133 and I'm less than a quarter of the way through the book), and I suddenly couldn't take the Nazis for one more second.
I picked up this book for two reasons.
1. John (Putnam) Demos, as the author of Entertaining Satan, has a great abundance of author points with me. I believe I actually said, "Ooh, John Demos!" when I found this book in the used bookstore.
2. I'm interested, partly sui generis and partly because of this crazy American fantasy that seems to think I'm going to write it, in the phenomenon of Indian captivity.
One of the things The Unredeemed Captive cemented for me is that my interest is in the phenomenon of Indian captivity, not the captivity narratives themselves. As conditions of their production, these narratives are written by Puritans who have rejected the alien culture (it's clear in The Unredeemed Captive just how alien the culture of the Kahnawake Indians1 was to the early eighteenth century Puritans they captured, and that, at least, I suspect generalizes across the experiences of Puritans taken captive by other tribes) they have been exposed to and as such, they are invested in demonizing Indians and extolling the virtues of Puritans and Puritan culture. Captivity narratives, in other words, are all about reinscribing the boundaries between cultures and reinscribing the hierarchical and moral judgments the Puritans made about cultures other than their own, and I find this project deeply, deeply unsympathetic. (Yes, this is my own twenty-first century hierarchical and moral judgment about a culture other than my own. But honestly. The Puritans just infuriate me and nowhere more so than in their conviction of their own rightness. Puritanism is a strange mixture of self-righteousness and self-condemnation, and both of these characteristics make it particularly blind to the possibility of other cultures having anything valuable to offer.)
This book is also, I think, an experiment, born out of John Demos's desire to rehabilitate narrative history. As he says in the first line of the book, "Most of all, I wanted to tell a story." By which he does not mean he wants to write a novel. He wants to tell a story--in this case, the story of Eunice Williams, later named Marguerite, A'ongote, and Gannenstenhawi, who was captured by the Kahnawake Indians at the age of seven and who chose to remain with them all her life, despite the quite extraordinary efforts of her family, birth culture, and even the government of Massachusetts to "redeem" her. (The title of the book is a play on The Captive Redeemed, her father John Williams' account of his own captivity.)
In fact, the story Demos tells is the story of the failure to "redeem" her, as his principal primary sources are the writings of her father and of her brother Stephen. He does his best to reconstruct the other side, but as a historian rather than a novelist, he is constrained by the circumstances of evidentiary survival. Not surprisingly, the two Puritan men (both ministers and therefore of high status in their society) both wrote more and had more of their writing preserved than either Puritan women or Indians of either sex. Only one document ascribed to Eunice2 remains, a letter to her brother, and since she could neither read, write, nor speak English as an adult, it is an intensely mediated document--and the fact that it is banal and personally unrevealing is really not surprising. Eunice Williams remains an absence at the center of the narrative.
There are several things I wish Demos had done more explicitly. One is to address the issue of the historical record, what it means that we have one letter from Eunice and four thousand pages of typescript of her brother Stephen's diary. Another is to talk at greater length and with great explicitness about the differences between Puritan and Kahnawake culture. (He points out, for instance, that while male captives would generally go to any lengths to return to New England, female captives were overwhelmingly likely to stay and become Kahnawake, and to stay despite the fervent appeals of their (male) kinfolk. And he addresses the surface issues of why that might be so. But he doesn't dig into it the way I wish he would have.) And the third is to stop and explicitly deconstruct the idea of "captivity." Because it's quite clear from what he writes that "captivity" is the wrong word. Eunice/Gannenstehawi refused to leave. She is adopted by the Kahnawake, converts to Catholicism, marries a Kahnawake man, lives and dies in Kahnawake, despite visits to Massachusetts and entreaties, blandishments, and actual bribes to remain. The fact that her (male) relatives and the rest of her birth culture persisted in framing and describing the experience as "captivity" is in itself a matter that cries out for careful exegesis.
In other words, I suppose, while I appreciate Demos' desire and efforts to tell a story, I would have liked those efforts to be balanced by equal efforts to unpack and unpick the terms of the story he wants to tell.
---
1Kahnawake was a settlement of converted Catholic Indians near to Montréal. They were mostly Iroquois, and their culture reflected a hybridization of Iroquois tradition and French influence.
2It's difficult to know how to refer to her. Demos calls her "Eunice" throughout, as her family did. Presumably, as an adult, she used either Marguerite (her French Catholic baptismal name) or Gannenstehawi (the name bestowed upon her as an adult Kahnawake), but which? Or both? And this letter to her brother is in fact signed, "Eunice Williams."
Her husband seems also to have had a shifting plethora of names; Demos refers to him as Arosen, (one of) his name(s) as an adult Kahnawake, rather than François Xavier, his French names. He was Indian by birth--but he wasn't native to Kahnawake any more than Eunice/Marguerite/Gannenstehawi was, and presumably Arosen was bestowed upon him as an adult just as Gannenstehawi was bestowed on her. That is, it would clearly be wrong to refer to him as François, but is it right to refer to her as Eunice?
It's a thorny issue, and I don't actually have a better answer than the one which Demos chose.