Jodi Schorb
Forced captivity was a way of life in early America: millions of Africans and Caribbean and Indigenous peoples were seized in the transatlantic slave trade; tens of thousands of Euro‐American explorers, settlers, and servants were captured by American Indians; thousands of sailors and soldiers were held in military warfare and trade skirmishes from the colonies to the Barbary coast of North Africa. As nations vied for land, resources, and control of the Americas, the captivity narrative developed alongside and as a direct response to the history of colonization and empire. The real and imagined experiences and exploits of men, women, and children held against their will were eagerly taken up by a print network that fashioned – and refashioned – the meaning of captivity for transatlantic readers. From the first accounts subsumed in larger travel journals, diaries, and reports, to the emergence of a stand‐alone genre in the late seventeenth century, to its rapid expansion across the eighteenth century, the captivity narrative flourished as former captives, ministers, editors, printers, and propagandists perceived its utility for documenting encounters with Otherness and drawing meaning – religious, social, cultural – from these forced encounters. Set amid the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution, the Barbary Wars of the early national era, the expansion of chattel slavery and of the western US territories, tales of captivity were repeatedly revised and recast to entertain audiences, feed curiosity about other cultures, and give voice to the age’s most pressing social issues and geopolitical realities, including purported threats to an emerging Republic, the role of women, and the ethics of enslavement. Thus, captivity was not only a lived reality in the contested territory of the Americas, it was among the most potent symbolic terrains for making meaning – individual and communal – out of the material and imaginative conditions of exploration, settlement, and empire building.
While New England Puritans were quick to seize on captivity as a potent trope for the plight of the saint in the howling wilderness, the genre proved flexible, proliferating in form and audience. By the mid‐eighteenth century, the captivity narrative deemphasized Puritan theological rhetoric, embraced a blend of fiction and fact that persisted across the centuries, and deployed a robust symbolism and rhetoric that could readily adapt the agent of captivity from Indians to other threats: French depredations, English tyranny in the colonies, Barbarian cruelty, American injustice against African Americans, and even the horrific conditions in the nation’s new penitentiary system. By the early nineteenth century, the captivity narrative was fully integrated into early national literature, infusing accounts of western expansion, providing dominant plots and motifs of early novels, and, importantly, used by abolitionists, reformers, and the oppressed to protest American hypocrisy. The multiform shape, transatlantic iterations, and diverse contributors of the genre demand that we revise common definitions of “captivity narratives,” dethrone “Indian Captivity” as the privileged iteration of the genre, and rethink some of the central premises of captivity scholarship, including the oft‐asserted claim that the captivity narrative is a uniquely American form.
Prior to 1749, the dozen or so captivity accounts published in British North America were fairly narrow, dominated by religious texts that show how readily Puritans and Quakers adapted biblical typology – Judea capta, Babylonian captivity, Daniel in the lion’s den – to frame and interpret conflict with New England Native communities. The first stand‐alone captivity narrative published in British North America, Mary Rowlandson’s Sovereignty & Goodness of God (1682), posits Rowlandson as a Puritan goodwife whose 13 weeks among the Narragansett and Nipmuc become the story of New English Canaan writ large, remaking the captive’s ordeal into a spiritual autobiography documenting God’s providence and mercy. Likewise, John Williams’s The Redeemed Captive, Returning to Zion (1707) provides an account of the Puritan minister’s captivity by French and Indian allies in the Deerfield raid, while Elizabeth Hanson’s God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty (1728) interprets Hanson’s captivity through her Quaker faith. By viewing the captive’s experience through the lens of providential history and redemptive suffering, these early accounts employ the familiar generic pattern of the providence tale, which persisted across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, fueled by repeated tides of religious revivalism and an ever‐expanding transatlantic, evangelical print sphere.
Despite their compatibility with New England Puritan culture, some early captivity accounts eschewed typological interpretations of captivity, embracing another aspect of the genre. For example, in Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances (1736), John Gyles frames his experience less through biblical antecedents than through the perspective of a former child captive turned ethnographer and cultural mediator. Recounting his nine years of Maliseet then French captivity, Gyles divides his narrative into sections that translate his “odd adventures” to English‐speaking audiences: “Two Indian Fables,” “Of the Beaver,” “Of the Hedgehog or Urchin,” “A Digression Containing an Account of a Rape Committed by a Demon.” Although Gyles offers a nod to “the goodness of God” and “the infinite merits of Jesus Christ” in his narrative’s conclusion, the account eschews the conventional structure of Puritan spiritual autobiography, producing what scholars call “one of the most diverse accounts of New England captivity” (Gyles 1981: 131, 131, 94). Such claims to ethnography persist in many captivity accounts published in the French and Indian wars (1754–1763), such as Thomas Brown’s A Plain Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Remarkable Deliverance (1760). French and Indian captivity accounts like Brown’s advanced the cause of British expansion against the French and their Indian allies while feeding the hunger for information about the land, people, and resources in the North American territories.
Thus, even among the earliest British North American accounts, the genre fluidly recast Indian captivity to document other forms of bondage. Williams’s The Redeemed Captive embraced the possibilities for merging Calvinist theology with anti‐Catholic sentiment and enjoyed a “dual career as captivity narrative and political pamphlet” (Haefeli and Sweeney 2006: 91), demonstrating the genre’s long‐standing utility as political and propaganda tool, here used to decry Papist depredations. Cotton Mather (1699), whose symbolic readings of Indian atrocities heavily influenced the interpretation and literary reception of Indian captivity accounts, asserted the typological significance of Anglo‐British captives held in North Africa, noting that “God hath given up several of our Sons, into the Hands of the Fierce Monsters of Africa. Mahometan Turks and Moors, and Devils, are this Day oppressing many of our Sons, with a Slavery, wherein they Wish for Death, and cannot find it” (231–232). With a much longer tradition of British captivity accounts preceding it, the American captivity narrative was always already “beyond” Indian captivity, readily pitting its protagonists against a shifting target of racial and cultural others in response to perceived cultural and religious threats. Meditating on how British influence shaped the American literary tradition, Linda Colley (2004) observes that the
400,000 or so men and women […] who crossed the Atlantic in the course of the seventeenth century, almost certainly took with them […] a knowledge of the kinds of stories related by and about those of their countrymen who were captured by the powers of Barbary and Islam. These stories of capture by the forces of the Crescent were then adapted to a new American environment and to very different dangers. (140)
Thus, while the early Boston reprinting of Francis Brooks’s Barbarian Cruelty (1700) may first appear as an anomaly – an account of captivity set in North Africa among the first generation of Indian captivity narratives – it instead extends a literary tradition well underway by the time the fledgling American genre developed.
Black authors also adapted the genre during the eighteenth century, forcing us to rethink the genre’s too‐easy association with white subject‐formation, as well as the slave narrative’s privileged status as the earliest form for launching black subjects into print. One of the first stand‐alone African American narratives, Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Suprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), was not a slave narrative, but instead an account of the black castaway’s Indian captivity. Observes John Sekora (1993), “if the story of a black man or women was to be told at all, that story would necessarily be shaped into a popular form. No form was more popular than the captivity, and no figure loomed larger in the colonial imagination than the Native American” (94). Responding to the cultural malaise of the 1760s (economic devastation, the long toll of the French and Indian wars), Boston printers saw in Hammon another “marginal figure whose social consequence has increased because of the war” (Sekora 1993: 102), publishing and promoting his narrative in the wake of the success of soldier‐turned‐captive Thomas Brown’s aforementioned 1760 captivity account.
Black authors capitalized on the popularity of the genre to adapt its parameters into new plots and possibilities, including a critique of racial injustice. For example, John Marrant’s powerful providential tale of religious conversion, wilderness wandering, and brief (and ambiguous) captivity by Cherokees allowed Marrant to emphasize God’s providential role in his life and his destiny as a leader to his people. A fourth London edition of Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black (1785), printed with Marrant’s explicit oversight, included an extended section on his role teaching black slave children to read on the Jenkins plantation in Cumbee, South Carolina, until the slave mistress “became acquainted with our proceedings, and was full of rage at it, and determined to put a stop to it”; when the slave mistress demanded that the children reveal who taught them to read, Marrant claims that they identified the culprit as “the free Carpenter,” cementing his special status as Christ‐like deliverer. When it “pleased God to lay his hand upon their Mistress” shortly thereafter, Marrant asserts God’s providential hand in his ultimate triumph, much like his earlier description of escaping death among the Cherokee (Marrant 1996: 123–124). Marrant and Hammon, like other early writers of the black Atlantic, used their captivities to make their complex lives legible to eighteenth‐century readers, crafting tales that emphasized their own exceptionalism and capacity for reinvention, while also highlighting the Atlantic as a space of both black mobility and displacement.
Together, eighteenth‐century narratives complicate the argument that the captivity genre shifted from a religious phase to a sensational phase: the Great Awakening and the religious revivalism of the later eighteenth century ensured that, just as the first Indian captivity accounts were highly sensational and propagandistic, eighteenth‐century narratives often maintained a spiritual and providential frame, in part because they were actively solicited and promoted by an ever‐expanding evangelical and transatlantic print culture.
After the Great Awakening and the French and Indian Wars, captivity narratives readily readapted to the “new American environment,” and the experience of captivity became a potent tool to advocate for political rebellion and to imagine America’s place on a global‐political stage (Colley 2004: 140). In Boston, a “captive city” occupied by British forces since 1768, Puritan‐era captivity accounts surged in popularity; the revived interest in captivity accounts conveyed the colonists’ “growing sense of themselves as a people held captive,” evidenced by a resurgent interest in and recasting of Mary Rowlandson’s account (Sieminski 1990: 37, 43). Reprinted a half dozen times between 1770 and 1773, Rowlandson’s narrative now featured an imaginative woodcut depicting her as bold defender of her home, toting a musket and facing down a mob of Indian attackers in British garb. Celebrating faith and endurance while under siege, earlier New England Indian captivity accounts experienced a publishing revival during the Revolutionary and early Republican eras, including Williams’s Redeemed Captive (1773, 1774, 1776), Hanson’s God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty (1780, 1787), and Jonathan Dickinson’s God’s Protecting Providence (1790, 1791, 1792). Meanwhile, newer accounts of Indian captivity altered their depictions to emphasize Britain’s nefarious influence. A Narrative of the Capture and Treatment of John Dodge, by the English at Detroit (1779), which recounts the trader’s captivity by Indian allies of Britain, reserves its most scathing critiques for the “British barbarians” who incited Indian attacks by offering the astonishing sum of $20 per scalp, wreaking havoc on the hapless colonists (14). Further sensationalizing the theme of British responsibility for Indian attacks, Dodge’s narrative was reissued the following year under the title An Entertaining Narrative Of the cruel and barbarous Treatment and extreme Sufferings of Mr. John Dodge during his captivity of many months among the British, at Detroit (1780). The “Tawny Salvage” of Puritan yore morphed into oppressive Brits, goaded by nefarious King George III and his Indian minions (Mather 1699: 220). Beyond Dodge, other captives recounted their ordeals on British prison ships, including Captain Ethan Allen, who published one of the first and most popular prisoner‐of‐war accounts, based on his three years’ captivity by the British after his capture in Quebec. Allen’s account was wildly popular, with over 20 000 copies sold the first year, giving voice to a “collective captivity” experience whose climax was political rather than religious regeneration: celebrating Allen’s release from British control, his narrative suggests that out of the redemptive suffering of captivity, “the rising States of America” will emerge triumphant (Sieminski 1990: 51).
As the new nation grappled to define itself and its place in the world, the Barbary captivity narrative, accounts of those held captive in North Africa, experienced a sustained American revival, flourishing in the decades after the American Revolution. With its revived plots of (white) virtue under duress, a slew of accounts flooded the market from publishers eager to sate curiosity about African people, customs, and geography, including Islamic and Jewish life, co‐opting a genre that had emerged in Britain as early as 1563 (Ratcliffe 2007: 207). While many of the accounts designed to capitalize on the Barbary tensions were fictional, including The Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Mary Velnet, Who was Seven Years a Slave in Tripoli (1800) and History of the captivity and sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (1806), the threat of North African capture was very real. As merchants and traders sought to reestablish commerce without the protection of the British navy, numerous vessels were shipwrecked off the North African coast and seized by Algerian privateers. The nation grappled with its own powerlessness in the face of these Mediterranean incursions: strained for cash, limited in its powers of diplomacy, without a powerful navy, the government struggled to secure the release of captives. On the cultural effects of Barbary captivity, Paul Baepler (1999) observes that “the story of Barbary captivity became a common tale that […] invoked public subscriptions for ransom funds, forced the government to pay humiliating tributes in cash and military arms to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought about the first postrevolutionary war” (2). Published accounts such as John Foss’s A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss; several years a prisoner in Algiers (1798) helped raise needed funds and awareness for the plight of captives, urging sympathy for “the hardships and sufferings of [our] unfortunate fellow countrymen,” who were forced to endure “the horrors of unspeakable slavery […] persecuted by the hands of merciless Mahometans” (Baepler 1999: 73, 95). Barbary accounts adopted similar rhetorical patterns to Indian accounts, depicting sympathetic white, Christian protagonists enduring corrupt Arab masters and brutish black captors. By drawing from a long tradition of eroticized discourse about the Orient, which encouraged protagonists to resist Arab opulence as well as Muslim cruelty, the specific strain of American Orientalism that emerged in the early Republic sought to define the new nation against not just the Islamic African world, but also British North America’s European rivals, urging readers to resist the trappings of luxury and decadence, whether Arab or European (Edwards 2010: 363).
Among the most popular Barbary accounts was James Riley’s Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce (1817), reprinted over 20 times by 1859, which became a quintessential master plot of American fortitude overcoming obstacles (Ratcliffe 2007: 207). The narrative recounted Riley’s shipwreck off Morocco, his capture by Berber tribesmen, his miraculous preservation across the Saharan desert, his sale to an Arab trader, and his arduous journey to freedom. Riley’s fame was cemented not just by his narrative, but the rising tide of independent newspapers up and down the seaboard, which had already familiarized audiences with his exploits before his account went to press. Likewise, his subsequent career as a popular print subject was sustained across the nineteenth century through condensed versions in anthologies of seafaring and shipwreck tales such as The Mariners Library or Voyager’s Companion, and later by a rising children’s book industry. Riley’s popularity demonstrates how the “communications revolution” of independent newspapers up and down the seaboard and transforming print sphere made celebrities of captives as well as adapted their accounts to new print forms (Ratcliffe 2007: 202). James Fenimore Cooper referenced Riley in his novel Homeward Bound (1838), as did Henry David Thoreau in Cape Cod (1864), and Abraham Lincoln considered Riley’s Authentic Narrative particularly influential (Ratcliffe 2007: 183, 178). Riley’s popularity also spawned numerous copycat narratives, including the fictional Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of Mrs. Eliza Bradley (1820), which plagiarizes whole paragraphs from Riley’s account (Ratcliffe 2007: 206). Such republication was common in an era before robust copyright law and demonstrates the role that ambitious printers played in capitalizing on the popularity of the genre.
Beyond imagining the growth of national empire while developing an enduring discourse of American fortitude, Barbary narratives shaped impressions of Africa and slavery “at a time when the issue of chattel slavery in the United States increasingly divided the country” (Baepler 1999: 2). Accounts of whites held captive in North Africa depicted their protagonists as sympathetic victims of cruel enslavement, drawing on the emerging culture of sentiment to invert the familiar trope of white masters/black slaves. Many Barbary accounts encouraged readers to draw comparisons between slavery in North Africa and slavery in America as their protagonists endured slave markets, forced labor, inhumane conditions, and separation from family. For example, the abolitionist poem “The American in Algiers, or the Patriot of Seventy‐Six in Captivity” (1797) juxtaposes, in two cantos, the heart‐wrenching agony of its two speakers. The first tells the story of a Boston‐born merchant, a “free‐born son” who left his well‐heeled life to serve his country, only to lose his property while away defending his country (Basker 2005: 251). Propelled to sea to support his family, he falls captive in Algiers in a piratical raid by “unfeeling butchers,” and is made a slave by a “pious Musselmen” when he refuses to convert to Islam: “So was Columbia’s son to market bro’t / And by a Moor at public auction bought” (Basker 2005: 257, 257, 260). Employing familiar tropes of Barbary captivity (backbreaking labor; beheadings, bastinados, and impalements; forced religious conversion), the narrative maximizes the sensational shock of white slavery. Less galled by the physical hardship than by the mental struggle, the speaker emphasizes his outrage at having his rights, freedoms, and privileges (the “birthright of Columbia’s sons”) stripped away and dramatizes the patriot’s reversal of fortune: “I serv’d my country eight long years / To end my days in slavery in Algiers” (Basker 2005: 252, 255). After demonstrating little interest in the humanity or motivations of the Africans, the poem takes an unexpected turn in the second canto, shifting from the plight of the “free‐born son” to the plight of black slaves in America. The speaker of canto two is a (fictitious) “sable bard” who makes plain his goal: to call out American hypocrisy (Basker 2005: 262). The poet holds a mirror to the forces of empire and what Malini Schueller (1998) has called US claims to “moral meritocracy” (61), as the poem proposes to “Turn to Columbia – cross the western waves, / And view her wide spread empire throng’d with slaves” (Basker 2005: 262). The shift is startling, especially because it contrasts sharply with the empire‐justifying rhetoric of the first canto. Ultimately the poem works to undermine the special claims of freedom of America’s “free‐born son[s]” and argues for a more expansive view of human rights and dignity. Published in New York amid efforts by benevolence groups to raise funds for American captives in Algiers, The American in Algiers shines a critical light on how Europe and America “sluic’d the veins of half the human race” (Basker 2005: 263). This technique became commonplace in abolitionist satire; for example, Ben Franklin adopts the persona of an Algerian officer who mouths back proslavery rhetoric in “On the Slave Trade” (1790), a parody of a Congressional proslavery speech.
Playwrights and fiction writers also embraced this strategy, using Barbary as a space to project and to critique American claims to equality and democracy; the imaginative literature that emerged from this era demonstrates how the Barbary captivity narrative infused the Republican imaginary and its representations of national identity, especially by suggesting unsettling parallels between Algeria and the United States. Susanna Rowson’s farcical drama, Slaves in Algiers; or, A Struggle for Freedom (1794) uses the remote setting of Barbary to wryly advocate for women’s public role in the new American Republic, drawing on contradictory tropes of Barbary savagery, Muslim decadence, and American exceptionalism in order to posit Republican Motherhood’s efficacy in the service of liberty at home and empire abroad. After a traumatic family separation (another popular theme in the early Republic), matriarch Rebecca Constant finds herself captive in Algeria, held by a deceptive Jew (Ben Hassan) and a tyrannical Dey (Mulley Moloc). Yet her Algerian captivity fortuitously allows her to spread American influence abroad, a theme most clearly expressed in the relationship between Rebecca and Fetnah, the ambiguously raced, English‐born daughter of a Jewish convert to Islam. Attending the captive Rebecca, who taught her that “woman was never formed to be the abject slave of man,” Fetnah transforms under Rebecca’s gentle influence, her mind “nourished” by love of liberty and fever dreams of women’s equality (Rowson 2000:16). The Palace of the Dey becomes a testing ground for American virtue, as well as a topsy‐turvy space of ethnic caricature, mistaken identity, cross‐dressing, phallic jokes, and white virginity under threat. The displaced setting also gives Rowson rhetorical cover to criticize American shortcomings, as audiences wryly intuit the limits of Fetnah’s rosy image of America, “a dear delightful country, where women do just what they please” (39). In the end, captive Rebecca convinces the Dey to stop being a tyrant; inspires her young son to patriotism; rescues from forced concubinage her daughter Olivia; heals the rift separating Britain and America by reuniting with her British husband; and triumphs over Old World values embodied in backward Spaniards, tyrannous Muslims, greedy Jews, and corruptly opulent Arabs. Most potently, she gently inspires, through “silken chains,” despotic men to eschew their tyrannical ways, here troped as a form of slavery to “rude ungoverned passion; to pride, to avarice and lawless love” (77, 64). The drama’s critique of American slavery is made most directly at the climax of the drama, as Rebecca proclaims, “Let us not throw on another’s neck, the chains we scorn to wear” (73). In the end, the virtuous whites secure liberty and passage to America and all the non‐white, non‐Christian characters conveniently elect to remain in Algeria, including would‐be American Fetnah; nevertheless, the drama does leave audiences pondering the uncertain fate of American women and black slaves. Meditating on America’s as‐yet‐unrealized potential, the drama is “particularly fascinating in its attempt to negotiate an emancipatory feminist discourse through the possibilities of the Algerian Orient while simultaneously striving to keep the discourse hierarchically raced” (Schueller 1998: 61).
Other important Barbary fictions structure themselves on comparative captivities to more ambiguous and complex affect. Of these, satirist Royall Tyler’s 1797 novel The Algerine Captive stands out for its shifting reception. Divided into two halves, the first is a picaresque of Updike Underhill, a comic antihero in search of a place in the new nation, whose classical education renders him an object of mockery as he travels north to south. By the end of part one, Underhill, a self‐proclaimed antislavery advocate, has transformed into a surgeon on a slave ship bound for Barbados and Africa. In part two, Underhill falls captive to Algeria, where he documents its (often alluring) culture and institutions, ultimately sublimating his fervent commitment to antislavery with a plea for federal unity. In its day, Tyler’s novel was excoriated for embracing cultural relativism and for presenting Islam in a positive light. More recent criticism explores Tyler’s use of Barbary to articulate his conservatism, including his skepticism about how to best manage a heterogeneous US population (Larkin 2010: 515) and his wariness of sentimental arguments against slavery (White 2010: 9). Notes Ed Larkin (2010):
Read as a matching pair, volume 1 depicts the US as an excessively decentralized and therefore incoherent state, and volume 2 presents Algiers as an overly centralized and therefore despotic state. The one commonality these representations of the US and Algiers share is that neither produces long‐term stability for its citizenry. In light of this binary, the novel implies that the ideal state would be one that balanced these two poles. (516)
Barbary is less America’s “Other” than a means for Tyler to imagine a dystopian Federalism, at once seductive and fearsome.
Captivity, enslavement, seduction: these themes interlink, driving the plots and tensions of early American novels. From Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1794), whose protagonist swoons into the arms of a British soldier and soon after finds herself pregnant and abandoned in America, to Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797), whose vibrant young protagonist withers away under the influence of a seductive rake, to Hilliard‐d’Auberteuil’s Miss McCrea: A Novel of the American Revolution (1784), whose credulous protagonist forsakes the wisdom of her patriot father for an eloquent British captain who declares to Jane that he has come to America “to conquer your country and you” (Sayre 2000: 369), early American seduction novels warn against gallantry, good breeding, and dexterous deceptiveness. Emphasizing Samuel Richardson’s role in bringing “the Puritan ethos of plain‐spoken virtue” into the novel of sentiment, most notably through its condemnation of “morally suspect eloquence,” Ezra Tawil (2016) traces how transatlantic influences (here, on the aesthetics of persuasion) shaped the development of the sentimental novel in America, building on earlier work by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse on the importance of the captivity narrative to the development of the novel in England and America (265). Observing how captivity narratives fold into the early American novel, Tawil argues:
In the earlier narratives by English settlers about their Indian captivities, the prime danger was that of losing one’s Englishness by being separated from one’s culture of origin. But in the post‐Revolutionary rewriting of captivity as seduction, the more damaging source of pollution is Britishness itself: no longer is the central threat that of an Anglo‐American settler “going native,” but instead that of an American protagonist “going British,” so to speak. (275)
The seduction‐as‐captivity trope also makes explicit how concerns over female sexuality continued to drive captivity narrative plots and themes in the early national era. While early accounts, like Rowlandson’s, explored the possibilities of its female protagonists “going native,” with all its sexual and transcultural connotations, eighteenth‐century accounts aggregate this familiar cultural anxiety with emergent themes about what role women might play in the new nation, the impact of miscegenation, and how American influence might reproduce itself abroad. The fascination with protagonists who “cross over,” which was propelled by an expanding culture of sentiment and the long‐standing metaphoric link of female body as national body (itself an enduring trope of empire), ensured a steady stream of female captivity narratives, fictive and factive, far disproportionate to the numbers of eighteenth‐century American women taken captive, both in the United States and abroad. Slaves in Algiers dramatized women’s private and public capacity for inspiring authoritarian men to be less tyrannical, deploying a Republican Mother to persuade an Algerian tyrant to abandon his scheme to forcibly marry her white, Christian daughter. Meanwhile, popular accounts like the fictitious Abraham Panther’s A Surprising Account of the Discovery of a Lady Who Was Taken by the Indians (1787) explored not only the potential for white women to withstand sexual threats and to live independently, but whether virtuous domesticity could be sustained as settler‐colonialism expanded outward into new territories.
By making the plight of its female protagonists so central, the imperialist and national impulses of the genre overlap with its feminist appeal. Christopher Castiglia (1996) argues that accounts of female captivity had the progressive goal of exploring “connections […] between the plight of the literal captive and the less tangible forms of victimization and restriction experienced by their white, female readers” (4); many others have argued similarly, focusing on the versatile representation of white captive, from sympathetic and suffering victim, to resourceful survivor, to transculturated figures in tales of what Michelle Burnham (1997) labels “transgressive mobility” (43). For Burnham,
Narratives and novels of captivity demonstrate that crossing transcultural borders exposes the captive to physical hardship and psychological trauma. But they also reveal that such crossings expose the captive and her readers to the alternative cultural paradigms of her captors. In collision with other, more dominant paradigms, these emergent hybrid formations can generate forms of critical and subversive agency. (3)
Nevertheless, the sentimental impulses and other generic conventions that encourage readers to sympathize with the plight of the captive have another powerful effect: eliding the tremendous violence against Indigenous peoples under a “blinding veil cast by tears” (Burnham 1997: 9). Any rendering of female agency, then, must be interpreted through the genre’s colonialist contexts, staying mindful of the genre’s long history of aiding the cause of Indian removal, including facilitating the violence and erasure of Indigenous women.
Early American novelists also explored the gothic potential of captivity narratives, including the genre’s fascination with liminal states of consciousness. Charles Brockden Brown’s frontier gothic Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep‐Walker (1799) explores the overlap between seduction and captivity with dizzying depth. Many, from Richard Slotkin (1973) forward, have noted Brown’s reliance on the captivity narrative, most explicit in Edgar’s transmutation from proclaimed pacifist to ruthless Indian killer, in which he sleepwalks, awakes in a cave, gorges on panther blood, and rescues an unnamed white girl held captive by Indians. But critics are divided over the meaning of Edgar’s transformation: does Edgar Huntly ultimately endorse and justify the violent extermination of Indians, reinscribing racial hierarchies that separated unfeeling savage from properly feeling republican? Or does the novel offer a gothic critique of white colonialist violence, where the displaced Natives (through the figure of Old Deb) fight back, and where the white male body and its Others (Indians, the Irish) double and collapse into each other, best captured by the scenes where Edgar’s insensible body lies stuck in the gore of his Indian victim, or where Edgar doubles with Irish outcast Clithero? More recently, Emily Ogden (2013) observes Edgar’s similarity to the swooning, receptive, gullible protagonists of the seduction novel, in whose typical trajectory “credulity leads to the loss of consciousness, virtue, and worldly fortune” (423). By having Edgar mimic the female protagonists of the eighteenth‐century seduction novel, Brown intervenes in eighteenth‐century debates over the alleged dangers of insensibility (and novel reading), making a case for the insensible state’s productive, generative, and aesthetic powers. Merging the captivity narrative with eighteenth‐century medical knowledge and debates over moral sensibility, Brown “interprets insensibility – primarily sleepwalking – as a state potentially generative of both knowledge and experience” – much like novel‐writing itself” (Ogden 2013: 420).
By looking beyond captivity narratives as registers of cultural fear – fear of going Native, going British, of giving into Oriental excess, of women going over the hedge – and by viewing the genre as a literary form that probes a range of pressing issues, from the aesthetics of seduction, to the possibilities of plurality and heterogeneity, to bare life in the violent contact zones of empire – we can best comprehend how the print genre was diversely deployed and revise limiting definitions of the genre. For example, formative scholarship argued that the genre was foundational not only to American literature but to the meaning of “Americanness” itself. Yet various turns – in method, in the texts that comprise the genre – have unbound the meaning and legacies of captivity narrative from this exceptionalist framework. This recasting ultimately asks us to reconsider the cultural work of the American captivity narrative.
In his formative work on the genre, Roy Harvey Pearce (1947) sought to formally recast the way earlier scholars read the genre, which primarily valued captivity narratives for historical facts or ethnographic data. By contrast, Pearce historicized the historians, observing that their emphasis on the captivity narrative as history was itself a historical development that emerged in the nineteenth century, when editors and publishers needed a new justification for publishing texts filled with shopworn, clichéd sensationalism and Indian hating. Pearce’s thesis, now overlooked, is that the genre is adaptable, “a popular form which shapes and reshapes itself according to varying immediate cultural ‘needs,’” and that the genre’s purpose as propaganda, “a vehicle of Indian‐hatred,” competes from the very beginning with the genre’s capacity to render with fresh detail and emotional intensity the captive’s plight and experience (1, 4).
Thus, even as early as 1947, a scholarly crack emerged between more mythic approaches to the genre and those more attentive to the historical underpinnings of what Gordon Sayre (2010a) has called the genre’s “exceptionalist genealogies” (348). In the conventional frame, captivity was synonymous with Indian captivity, and Indian captivity necessary to the birth of a national mythic consciousness. The confining and limiting definitions of this frame are evident in Slotkin’s influential definition of the genre. For Slotkin (1973), the captivity narrative flourished because it embodies the “archetype of the American experience” (98):
In [the archetypal captivity narrative] a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society; […] To partake of the Indian’s love or of his equivalent of bread and wine was to debase, to un‐English the very soul […] Through the captive’s proxy, the promise of a similar salvation could be offered to the faithful among the reading public, while the captive’s torments remained to harrow the hearts of those not yet awakened to their fallen nature. (94–95)
While useful for capturing the terror of Mather’s howling jeremiads and some of the tensions of Mary Rowlandson’s account (with its rich texture of spiritual struggle, sustained liminality, and elusive restoration), this definition propagates a Puritan origins mythology that elides the transatlantic roots of the genre and its prominence and propagation outside of Puritan New England.
By contrast, more recent scholarship emphasizes the genre’s transatlantic and global iterations. Linda Colley (2000) offers a definition that also calls attention to the captive’s liminal journey, but recasts its nationalist roots into a more flexible paradigm: “Captivity narratives […] offer access to people suddenly reduced to a state of liminality, taken away from their normal position in life, stripped of customary marks of status and identity […] So positioned, men and women could be led to re‐examine issues of national, religious and racial belonging, who and what they were, and how far this mattered” (187). Colley traces how captivity narratives accompanied British empire‐formation on a global scale, from India, to British North America, to the Mediterranean, to Afghanistan. Notes Colley (2004) in her study of the British captivity tradition, “Indian captivities are still overwhelmingly scanned for the light they can throw on the evolution of American national identities and cultures, while the narratives produced by one‐time captive whites are still normally approached as a uniquely American mode of writing. It should now be clear that they were not” (140). In another productive recasting, Gordon Sayre (2000) grounds his revised definition in the dialectical and two‐way process of cultural encounter and exchange:
The captivity phenomenon arises out of encounters between unfamiliar peoples, generally as a result of European imperialism in the Americas and Africa. The two cultures brought into conflict are so foreign to one another that an individual forced into the midst of the other community regards the new life as a kind of imprisonment, a deprivation of all the familiar patterns of his or her native surroundings. This “otherness” may be portrayed as racial, religious, or broadly cultural, but in any case it is profound enough that each side regards its own ways as superior to the other’s, and captivity forces this prejudice to the surface, either to be defended or abandoned. Most captives yearn to return home, and some die in the attempt, but a few embrace their new lives. Generally only those who survive and return are able to record their experiences in a published captivity narrative. (4–5)
Emphasizing the dynamism, fluidity, and mutual impact of the contact zone of empire, Sayre’s definition decenters the mythic master plot favored by an earlier generation of scholars. His definition also carves space for the muted but provocative place of renegades, transculturated captives who elected not to return, including Eunice Williams, Frances Slocum, Mary Jemison, John Tanner, and other “renegados,” that is, Europeans captured in North Africa who renounced Christianity and converted to Islam. In his anthology American Captivity Narratives (2000), Sayre puts this expanded definition to use, integrating captivity accounts set in the hemispheric Americas, including French and Spanish accounts; captive Indian accounts, including Geronimo’s Story of His Life (1906); as well as excerpts from a foundational slave narrative, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789). While the captivity genre was more fully developed by the time the slave narrative developed in the late 1700s, the two genres share many structural similarities: dramatic descriptions of horrific confinements and families torn asunder, complex renderings of grief and suffering, an emphasis on self‐transformation, a heavy grounding in sentimental rhetorics, and a vexed relationship to audiences that demanded veracity as well as conformity to convention (Sayre 2010b: 179–182). Equiano’s first encounters with whites in Africa and aboard the slave ship productively illustrate the overlap, as he describes his shock at his white captors’ vulgarity and savagery, but the divergent intents of each genre and the black slave’s vexed power relationship to white audiences made their rhetorical stance and use of sentiment far more complex (Sayre 2010b: 182; Zafar 1992: 19–20); moreover, the ex‐slave’s freedoms were particularly dubious, with families permanently ruptured, hostile and racist environments in free territories, and legal and economic realities that made the captive’s “return” and “restoration” elusive at best. Thus, even Sayre’s expanded definition, with its focus on the captive’s process of embracing or discarding cultural prejudices, does not adequately encompass the slave narrative’s loftier projects of legal, moral, economic, and social enfranchisement of blacks and of challenging white readers to confront their destructive racial prejudice and take concrete action on behalf of those in bondage.
In conclusion, our understanding of the shape and function of the captivity narrative has shifted from its ethnographic and mythic scholarly beginnings, particularly by the “trend towards Atlantic World studies,” which dethroned Indian captivity as its primary site, decoupled the genre from its narrow national‐mythic frame, and foregrounded its transhemispheric and transatlantic origins, applications, and innovations (Sayre 2010a: 349). While revised definitions have opened a space for a wider range of narratives, other genres, particularly criminal confession narratives and prisoner exposés, have rarely been theorized as captivity narratives, yet they also productively extend our thinking about the reach and significance of the genre. Crucially, one of the main ways that everyday men and women came to press in eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century American print culture was through not just Indian, Barbary, or British captivity, or the extensive institution of slavery, but through its literature of the gallows, jails, and prisons.
Like their Indian captivity counterparts, the earliest criminal confession literature of New England imagined the condemned as a symbolic figure representing the communal body: a common sinner, enslaved to sin and in need of salvation, similar to the white captive’s redemption from Indian captivity, whose execution provides occasion to meditate upon God’s power to redeem the lapsed community from captivity (Halttunen 1998: 25). Thus, in dozens of gallows accounts published across the eighteenth century, condemned captives frequently described their fall into crime as a form of captivity, and their incarceration – and even execution – as subsequent liberation. For example, Patience Boston, a Native American servant from Cape Cod who was executed in 1735 for murdering her master’s grandson, proclaimed that her “Chains of Iron” (i.e. the shackles she wore as a prisoner) were “more comfortable than I could have been with a Chain of Gold, in my former imprisoned State of Soul” (Williams 1993: 131). Likewise, during the Revolutionary era, Levi Ames, an imprisoned burglar who was eventually executed, testified to the transformative power of his jailhouse captivity in his Last Words and Dying Speech (1773): having once entertained “secret hopes of escape” from prison and imagined being dragged kicking and screaming to the gallows “like a bullock to the slaughter,” the captive was now changed as a result of his experience and looking forward to his restoration (upon death), when he hoped to experience the “infinitely free rich grace and mercy of God” (Williams 1993: 182, 182, 185). While prisoners never expressed quite the same level of enthusiasm for freedom through death as Indian captives did for their literal freedom (an understandable gap), their confessions illuminate how tightly the narrative structure of conversion and captivity were overlaid, giving society’s most marginalized members a narrative pattern to document their life histories of neglect, suffering, and poverty as a form of relentless earthly suffering, and their deaths as a form of spiritual freedom.
By contrast, later eighteenth‐century criminal captivity narratives shed the explicitly religious frame and explicitly dramatized life behind bars as an intolerable captivity. Gallows accounts such as A Brief Account of the Life, and Abominable Thefts, of the Notorious Isaac Frasier (1768) dramatized and celebrated the condemned protagonists’ attempts to escape their jailhouse captors and secure their freedom. In the early national era, convict authors began using the American print sphere to dramatize their suffering behind bars, and to document with careful eye the practices, policies, and culture of the prison for unfamiliar readers. A new generation of convict authors protested the inhumane conditions of the first American penitentiaries, which prison defenders heralded as models of humanitarian reform and benevolent approaches to punishment after the decline of public execution in the 1790s, first at Walnut Street prison in Philadelphia in the 1790s, then in Auburn, New York and Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1820s and 1830s (Schorb 2014). For example, Patrick Lyon, a skilled mechanic incarcerated at Walnut prison while awaiting trial on suspicion of bank robbery, published a detailed account of his confinement, The Narrative of Patrick Lyon, who suffered three months severe imprisonment in Philadelphia gaol, on merely a vague suspicion … with his remarks therein (1799). In the pamphlet, Lyon directly challenged the rhetoric of reformers and exposed the inhumane conditions inside the “too much boasted of Philadelphia prison” (73), a tactic later deployed in The History of the Celebrated Mrs. Ann Carson,: … and of her Sufferings in the Several Prisons in that State (1822). One of the most engaging and sustained of these narratives, Inside Out; or, An Interior View of the New‐York State Prison … Together with the Biographical Sketches of the Lives of Several of the Convicts … By One Who Knows (1823) sought to correct public preconceptions, challenge official accounts, and position the inmate as the most reliable voice of authenticity about what went on behind bars (Schorb 2014: 139–142). Portions of Inside Out were read aloud by an assemblyman to New York state legislators, who tried to shut down the reading, noting that the words of a convict had no bearing in a state assembly; newspapers reported on the legislative debates over Inside Out, and copies of the exposé were smuggled into the State Prison at Greenwich, inspiring at least one other prisoner, John Maroney, to pen his own memoir (Schorb 2014: 170, 179). Other narratives soon followed, including Levi Burr’s A Voice from Sing Sing (1833), Horace Lane’s Five Years in State’s Prison (1835), and the unpublished manuscript of black convict Austin Reed, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (c. 1858), which recounted and reimagined Reed’s experience across three decades of imprisonment. The convict accounts that emerged out of these allegedly reformed and humanitarian spaces were captivity narratives of another era and kind – social justice narratives tapping into the emerging spirit of reform, exposés of brutality and corruption that called upon the public to demand action. These early narratives took grit and determination to get into press, but their cause was eventually picked up by reform‐minded societies and presses, which resulted, in one case, in the printing of the pioneering prison poetry anthology Voices from Prison: Being a Selection of Poetry from Various Prisoners, Written within the Cell (Boston, 1847), published by Charles Spear (Schorb 2014: 137). By mid‐century, reformers would begin to solicit and publish convict writing, promoting prison reform alongside abolition and women’s rights.
Thus, while the scholarly and archival turns traced in this chapter worked to decouple the captivity narrative from its too‐easy association with American identity, there is at least one good reason not to lose sight of the “American” persistence of captivity accounts: they highlight our national love affair with that other “peculiar institution,” the prison, which, after our unique model of government, was the second‐most influential cultural export of the early national era, directly influencing prison design and punishment practices across the globe, from England, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, to Central and South America, to Japan (Johnston 2004: 31S–33S). For those who see some useful explanatory power in the exceptionalist framework for understanding captivity – that is, that captivity narratives reveal something about us as Americans – considering prison narratives as part of the genre’s development in the long eighteenth century helps illuminate the nation’s enduring penchant for the carceral. By elevating America’s distinct role of developing, piloting, and exporting the prison in the nineteenth century, cultural histories of the captivity narrative can productively emphasize our transformation into the country that imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world.
See also: chapter 6 (captivity); chapter 7 (africans in early america); chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 15 (writing lives); chapter 17 (gender, sex, and seduction in early american literature); chapter 20 (the first black atlantic); chapter 26 (performance, theatricality, and early american drama); chapter 27 (charles brockden brown and the novel in the 1790s).