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British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 2000 Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction Joe Snader Lincoln University Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Snader, Joe, "Caught between Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction" (2000). Literature in English, British Isles. 17. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/17 CAUGHT BETWEEN WoRLDS This page intentionally left blank AUGHT BE'IWEEN ORLDS British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction Joe Snader THE UNMRSITI PruESS OJF KENTUCKY Publication of this volume was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright© 2000 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Snader, Joe, 1964- Caught between worlds : British captivity narratives in fact and fiction I Joe Snader. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-2164-7 (alk. paper) l. English prose literature-18th century-History and criticism. 2. English prose literature-Early modern, 1500-1700-History and criti­ cism. 3. English fiction-18th century-History and criticism. 4. Captivity narratives-Great Britain. 5. American literature-English influences. 6. Narration (Rhetoric). I. Title PR769.S64 2000 828' .50809355-dc21 99-089786 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. For Fran, with love and thanks This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part 1: Narratives of Fact 1. Travel, Travail, and the British Captivity Tradition 13 2. The Captive as Hero 62 3. The Perils and the Powers of Cultural Conversion 94 Part 2: Narratives of Fiction 4. Mastering Captivity 127 5. Resisting Americans in British Novels of American Captivity 172 6. Utopian Captivities and other "African" Paradoxes 224 Conclusion 270 Notes 291 Primary Bibliography 308 Secondary Bibliography 320 Index 329 Illustrations Frontispiece to Okeley's Eben-ezer 36 Captain Robert Knox 45 Illustrations from Rare and Most VVonderfull Things 54 Torture scene from The Sufferings ofJohn Coustos 77 "Execution by an Elephant" 78 Robert Drury as a child captive 118 Robert Drury as a Malagasy 119 Frontispiece to Aubin's The N able Slaves 154 Frontispiece to Chetwood's Richard Falconer... 185 Frontispiece to Chetwood' s Robert Boyle 241 Acknowledgments I owe a debt of gratitude first to Vin Carretta, Paula McDowell, and Sue Lanser. The three made for an intriguing combination of divergent perspec­ tives and constructive advice. Also important were the helpful and encouraging contributions of Cal Winton and James F. Brooks. The feedback, insights, and suggestions of Sharon Groves, Eliza Child, and Nancy Shevlin in the early stages of this project helped form some of the deep bedrock within these chapters. An important moment in the evolution of this project was Laura Brown's positive and useful response to the earlier version of chapter 4 that appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Copy editor Noel Kinnamon worked hard and well on converting the notes to fit the chronological bibliography; for this and his other contributions to the project I am grateful. This page intentionally left blank Introduction The early modem era witnessed the birth, flowering, and metamorphosis of many Western literary genres. Among these is one that literary scholars have called the captivity narrative, the text devoted extensively or exclu­ sively to documenting a real experience of subjugation in a foreign land. Today, however, we do not think of the captivity narrative as an early mod­ em genre, but rather as an American one, largely because literary scholars have defined the captivity genre in terms of Anglo-American captives and Native American captors. But the captivity narrative, like the novel or the encyclopedia, is a genre whose roots stretch back to the European Middle Ages, and whose initial flowering belongs to the early modem vernacular press. The captivity narrative became a significant, popular, vernacular genre when European cultures began to explore the rest of the world with an eye to exploiting it. Texts documenting the experiences of British captives held by Native Americans formed one important strand within a larger Anglophone tradition of captivity narratives that began with the earliest British ventures into alien seas, during the late sixteenth century. Through­ out the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British press witnessed texts documenting personal experiences of captivity in a variety of lands, from America to Malaysia, from southern Africa to the steppes of Russia. During that era, as the British built two overseas empires and lost one of them, the English captivity narrative became increasingly long, increas­ ingly complex, and increasingly ambitious in its claim to document the dif- 2 CAUGHT BETWEEN WORLDS ferences between allegedly modem and allegedly uncivilized peoples. As the British narrative tradition reveals, the captivity genre, far from belong­ ing to any particular nation of origin, grew out of the tensions surrounding several early modem historical developments of global significance: not only the expansion of European colonialism and trade, but also the rise ofliberal individualism and the elaboration of the self-consciously modem intellec­ tual systems of enlightenment. The evolution and variety of this narrative tradition are the focus of this book. Literary scholarship has often investigated the captivity genre, but it has done so through an exclusive focus on American material. Centered espe­ cially on printings from the New England colonies and the fledgling United States, this scholarship has nearly always defined the captivity narrative as a genre whose unique origins were coeval with the supposedly unique origins of Anglo-American culture. In assessing the genre's relationship to Britain, and to the world more generally, scholars have imagined the export of an indigenous American product to an avid Old World readership, the sale within an international literary marketplace of a genre expressing a uniquely Ameri­ can experience or consciousness. In the introduction to a prominent anthol­ ogy of captivity texts, for example, Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark have described the captivity narrative as "one of America's oldest literary genres and its most unique," even while acknowledging that the earliest cap­ tivity texts with American settings first appeared in European presses.1 This is a position fostered by generations of American scholarship, especially as it has traced a foundational moment in the genre's emergence to the first ex­ tensive English narrative unified by an experience of captivity among Native Americans: Mary Rowlandson's Soveraignty & Goodness of God (1682).2 Under the force of Rowlandson's impressive example, one prominent pat­ tern of critical interpretation has defined the genre in terms of a single nar­ rative formula, built around several key events and characters: a Native American attack on a frontier settlement, the forced journey and consequent introspection of an isolated captive (most often a female), a faceless mass of alien captors, and a return to Anglo-American civilization. According to an­ other prominent pattern of critical interpretation, the captivity narrative fur­ nished uniquely American material for the development of the American novel, especially as represented in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, with its myth of cross-cultural brotherhood. Although scholars have undertaken extensive studies of the American captivity genre, they have not recognized the worldwide scope of British captivity narratives, their place in the English literary tradition, or their im­ pact on their American successors. Nor have scholars recognized the extent Introduction 3 to which early British fiction adapted the material of captivity or the varied contribution of the British captivity tradition to the generic evolution of the English novel as a whole. Long before Rowlandson, the British press pro­ .duced extensive, factual, separately published narratives that were unified by the theme of captivity under a foreign people. Long before Cooper, Brit­ ish novelists adapted and transformed captivity narratives from across the world, developing a broad array of imagined encounters between British characters and various dangerous,
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