Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 4

[truepenny]

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.

Chapter 4: Israel in Babylon: The Archetype of the Captivity Narratives (1682-1700)

I have three things I want to say about this chapter.

1. If you need an example of unconscious male chauvinism at work, I have a beaut:

Mrs. Rowlandson's literary success during her lifetime and her more enduirng success as the originator of a major stream in the American mythology were not due to artistic skill. She was a sensitive woman, a careful observer of both external circumstances and conditions of the mind or soul, reasonably well read in Scripture, and capable of writing clear, vigorous, often moving narrative prose. But the power of her narrative to touch and illuminate the deeper structures of Puritan thought, feeling, and tradition is due less to conscious art than to the fact that her experience, training, and state of mind were accurate reflections of the experience and character of her culture as a whole. Her greater degree of natural sensitivity and her experience as a captive made her more capable than her fellows of discovering and revealing the character of her soul, but the soul she revealed mirrored the aspirations and anxieties of Puritan America.

[...] Unlike Mrs. Rowlandson, [Cotton] Mather was a conscious artist, careful in his selection of material and in his presentation of a consistent point of view. Whereas Mrs. Rowlandson was absorbed in her confession and her memory, Mather is detached, highly conscious of his audience and its reactions, and determined to illuminate fully the theological and historical character of the events he portrays.
(Slotkin 112-13)

I find this passage hilarious, most especially because he's picked Cotton Mather of all people as his exemplar of a "conscious artist." And it is an absolutely beautiful example of unconscious bias being made manifest. (I also like how he always calls Mary Rowlandson "Mrs. Rowlandson--it's better than calling her "Mary," but seriously, you can't just call her "Rowlandson" the way you call Cotton Mather "Mather"?)

2. What Slotkin is actually saying in this chapter, when he's not busy getting in his own way, is fascinating. He's talking about the Indian captivity narrative both as distinctly American and distinctly Puritan, demonstrating how the lens of the narrative is used to refract American Puritans' cultural anxieties about (of course) the salvation of their souls, but also about their choice to leave England, the generational conflict between the original emigrants and the first generation born in America, and about the Indians, both as threat and as a temptation to abandon the strict and rigorous course of an upright Puritan life.

It should be noted, although Slotkin doesn't, that many Puritan women did abandon the upright Puritan life in exchange for what their captors' culture offered them. He cites Eunice Williams (the subject of John Demos' excellent book, The Unredeemed Captive), but he doesn't show any real understanding that there's an alternative narrative going on behind the racist, patriarchal mythology he's interested in. As I've said before, he consistently offers a demonstration of the very phenomenon he's interested in describing.

He makes an excellent point that the wilderness in the captivity narratives is both an allegory of Hell and an allegory of the psychomachia of the Puritan soul, their psychological landscape. This means that, for Puritans, without the grace of God, the human mind is literally Hell. This explains so much about Calvinism. And his description of the protagonist at the beginning of the captivity narrative, before the Indian attack: "The world seems secure, but apocalypse lies just below the surface of the mind, the world" (104): reminds me strongly of John Clute's definition of horror, that the progress of the narrative (and I'm paraphrasing very loosely) is the revelation of the truth beneath the deceptive surface of the world.

3. Slotkin's argument would actually benefit substantially from feminist theory, because when he describes the cultural work of the Puritan captivity narrative, what he's very clearly describing, although he doesn't seem to recognize it, is rape fantasy. (Which I mean as something quite distinct from actual rape.) The captivity narrative, which is a type of the conversion narrative--he remarks of Rowlandson, "as a good Puritan she longs for some 'affliction' of God to be visited upon her, in order that her sinful will might be overborne by a stronger and purer force of holiness than her own" (103), and this is very clearly the same kind of longing at work in John Donne's "Batter my heart, three person'd God"). Rape fantasy, not real rape. But he also remarks that captivity is "the only acceptable way of acculturating, of being initiated into the life of the wilderness" (102), i.e., against the (feminized, because passive) protagonist's will, and I think an awareness of the subtext of rape fantasy at work in the conversion narratives on which the captivity narrative is patterned would have given him a much stronger and more incisive argument about the mythology that the captivity narrative creates.

Comments

[sovay]

Unlike Mrs. Rowlandson, [Cotton] Mather was a conscious artist, careful in his selection of material and in his presentation of a consistent point of view.

Haha yikes no.

captivity is "the only acceptable way of acculturating, of being initiated into the life of the wilderness"

If you have not already read it, you may enjoy Margot Mifflin's The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (2011), which is both a well-researched biography of its subject and a really commendable attempt to separate the provable facts about her time with the Mohave from the captivity narrative into which her experiences were rewritten and in which she actively participated after her unwilling return to white society. The timeline is much later than the Puritan captivity narratives—1851 to 1856 if speaking strictly of Oatman's time with the Tolkepayas and the Mohave, 1837 to 1903 if talking about her life—and Oatman came from a Mormon family, which is the one aspect of her background that may not get as much attention from the book as it could have. (She did not in any case acculturate back into Mormon life, but married an Episcopalian rancher and spent the rest of her life as a wealthy businessman's wife in Texas.) I read it last year and really liked it. The author is good about gender.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that between about 1800 and 1850 the autobiographical captivity narrative became a way to make a quick buck and raise funds for a ride back to "civilization," which you'd think would get them to hew closer and closer to the genre constraints as set by this Puritan period. But I find them hilariously all over the map, partly I think because they were being written faster, and sooner after the captivity, with less in the way of conscious religious modeling -- just using genre tools to try to drum up that emotional charge without connecting it to its source.

(Like hurt/comfort fanfic you write for a canon you've never actually consumed yourself, she says, perhaps unkindly, but with a chuckle too.)

Sarah Ann Horn in 1838, for example, is religious herself (also Mormon), but her narrative is all tragedy and no transfiguration. Her faith is never in question, only how much she'll have to suffer before she is freed, which scene itself comes as an anti-climax, since she's traded to Comancheros who then have to travel with her to Santa Fe, and then she has to travel again across the same territory of her captivity to get to Missouri. You'd think last that would be the opportunity for a dramatic recap of her emotional drama! It's taken care of in two bitter sentences.

But what her narrative does do is sell the exotica of Indians, with an afterword about their customs and a lot of emphasis throughout about their cruelty. It works as propaganda for Indian war, which was ongoing and hyperviolent in Texas at that time, even though I doubt that was her main intent in writing it. But it's very striking, comparing her to Rowlandson, how she fails to hit the beats Rowlandson does. Horn doesn't describe her own character having changed at all, just the catalogue of her suffering and how she's borne it.

(My favorite, though, is Nelson Lee's narrative, from 1858, which is not religious at all. He spends a lot of time describing his captor, Rolling Thunder, and the fact that he considers Lee's descriptions of trains, ships, gravity, the ocean -- glorious bullshit fabulated by a lesser mind. It's not at all a story about Lee's soul, or even his suffering, though he goes into that some; in some ways it reads much more like a slave narrative than a captivity narrative, down to the daring escape at the end.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Since you're clearly much better read in the genre than I am, do you notice any major differences between--I hesitate to say "male writers" and "female writers," because, as with other types of confessional narratives that became insanely popular in the 18th & 19th centuries, who the hell knows?--between the stories told by male narrators and female narrators?

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Bah, I'm not that well-read! In fact, my early far west specialization may screw up my understanding of the male/female dynamics, because of the gender-skew of white people who were even there. There was a point in the 1840s where Charlotte, a slave at Bent's Fort, described herself as "The only lady in the damn Indian country" (where "lady" meant white, and white, for the region's linguistic purposes, included black). And she wasn't exactly there of her own free will!

So I've read several male-protagonist Indian captivity stories, but they're usually embedded in memoirs about the protagonist's adventures, and the captivity ends with an adoption/marriage into a powerful Indian family. Because they're actually narratives describing a process of gaining trade alliances (whether the protagonist understands this or not), rather than "captivity narratives." Most of these memoirs are travelogues (pre-1850), and later on are meant to shore up the author's authority as an Expert (as early-far west wildcatters got into late middle age, and worked to re-brand their skills for the Oregon/California crowd after 1850). They're episodic, easily chapbook-ized, and profoundly areligious.

But that's also true of Susan Shelby Magoffin's memoir of the Santa Fe Trail (1846, no captivity story). So.

The memoirs of all genres are gendered by what they observe -- work, knowledge, the company they keep -- but I can't say from the small samples I've read that the choice of genre or narrative tools are profoundly different. Both Lee and Horn describe torture of some captives; both Lee and Horn describe other captives who have successfully transitioned into Indian life. Lee's narrative is much longer, and has some obvious traces of self-aggrandizement: he has to explain why he wasn't executed on the spot, as most male captives were by that time, and spins some bullshit about the Comanches being afraid/amazed by the alarm clock they find on his person, whereas you can tell after a little while that they find the clock hilarious, and when they sell him onward, it is as a freebie to go with the clock, not the other way around. Lee positions himself as active, as trying to escape, as finally successfully escaping; Horn never attempts escape, but then, she's also got young children, and is bitterly surprised that her sale/rescue requires her to leave them behind.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

That's very cool, and all stuff I didn't know. Thank you!

[lokifan]

What a fascinating definition of horror.

The rape fantasy point is also very interesting - and wow, the quote from p103 is so telling. I'm loving these posts - both for your analysis and for the insight into American culture. I had no idea captivity narratives about Natives kidnapping Puritans was a thing!