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1 Chapter I Introduction This Dissertation Seeks to Understand 1 Chapter I Introduction This dissertation seeks to understand the ways that being a captive permitted and prompted autobiographical writing by ex-captives, and the ways that their representations of confinement constituted them as unique and empowered American subjects. Based on my examination of captivity narratives published from 1816-1861, I argue that captivity has been the historical context, literal condition, and authoritative figure of expression for a wide range of American autobiographers. By captivity narratives, I mean accounts that recount an experience of confinement by or bondage to members of a seemingly antagonistic or rival group, such as North American Indians, North African Arabs or even Anglo-American Southerners or agents of the state. Frequently, by captivity narratives, most scholars have only meant stories of white captivity by Northeastern and American Indians, not stories, for example, of African American slavery, North African captivity, or state imprisonment. Of course, for good reasons of disciplinary integrity and conceptual clarity (among others), these categories have been employed; as in reserving “prison narratives” for writings about state incarceration, for instance, and “slave narratives” for accounts of African American bondage in the South. But such strict regimentation occludes the ways that these accounts speak to and through each other, often employing similar tropes in their writing and emerging out of connected historical circumstances. 2 More importantly, even if critics maintain different names for these traditions, this should not mean a continued disavowal of their interconnectedness. Towards this end, I analyze four types of pre-Civil War captivity writing that are often read independently of each other: North African captivity narratives, Indian captivity narratives, slave narratives, and narratives of state imprisonment.1 Considered as a whole, they flesh out the details and implications of bondage’s relation to antebellum autobiography and American identity. In particular, I look at Mary Jemison’s Indian captivity narrative, Narrative of the Life Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824); Henry Bibb’s slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1849); Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1859); Robert Adams’s North African captivity narrative, The Narrative of Robert Adams (1816); and George Thompson’s, Alanson Work’s and James Burr’s prison narrative, Prison Life and Reflections (1847). Along with suggesting a larger body of captivity writing, these accounts underscore the complex ways bondage has structured the terms and conditions of captives’ authority. Their power – simply defined as the ability to effect action – manifests itself in relation to texts, themselves, and other subjects in a number of interconnected ways. Firstly, captives’ authority means their ability to produce and shape autobiographical writing. In the context of the African American slave narrative, Robert Stepto defines authority as the capacity of “begetting, beginning, continuing, and controlling a written text” (485). In Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiograhy, Thomas G. Couser contends that the source of this authority has been one of the enduring questions of American autobiographical studies. Couser asks, who owns it? where does it come from? 3 how does it circulate? where does it reside? (12) For a wide range of texts, I argue that these questions can be addressed, though not completely resolved, by reference to the author’s experience and the narrator’s remembering of captivity. Hence, having an experience of bondage makes one eligible to produce and control a written text of one’s life. Furthermore, within the context of such begetting, one’s captivity also lends one a claim about how to continue that text. Within the notion of autobiographical authority, finer distinctions exist within the categories of authorship and autobiography. By authorship, I mean the capacity to influence the written production of a text, even if it is mediated by or done with others. Of the six specific texts I address here, two employ amanuensis editors, and one of those two accounts actually employs the biographical “he,” denying any suggestion that the captive has written the narrative in a traditional sense. One narrative, The Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, employs the autobiographical “I” but, is in fact, technically written by its editor, James Seaver. Furthermore, five of the six narratives are collaboratively written, either with other ex-captives (as is the case with Prison Life) or with outside editors. Hence, the majority of the narratives considered here, and, just as importantly, the larger body of narratives which they represent rely on non-captives for their writing. As a result, any credit for their autobiographical authorship must be distributed through this network of subjects, languages, and institutions. By autobiographical authorship, I mean a kind of text in which the subject who informs the production of the narrative is the subject of that narration. Quite a range of represented subjects exist within this category. The subject may take center stage and reflect the “individual as a unique and original entity,” as Stephen Carl Arch notes more 4 generally of early nineteenth-century autobiography (xi). Or, the narrated subject may be broadly drawn and be merely representative of others. In this sense, the life narrative would be a form of what Arch terms the “depersonalized” and “unselfed” form of “self- biography,” which is exemplified in conversion narratives, confessions, and memoirs (xi). Or to use James Cox’s language, these accounts are narratives by “naïve autobiographers,” those who find order and solace in the conventions of the autobiographic tradition, as opposed to those who self-consciously seek to rewrite them (127). But whether sitting at center stage or acting as the stage for others, the ex- captive’s life is the overwhelming focus of the narrative and is its fundamental claim to autobiographical status. Within this context, all six of the ex-captives authored autobiographically. That is, they decisively informed the shaping of narratives largely about themselves. They did so by providing oral accounts that formed the basis or conditioned the production of written accounts; by making editorial decisions or having editorial input on the content and form of their written lives; and inserting actual words, phrases and literary figures within their accounts. While not as glorious as the Romantic-inspired picture of the author that was popular throughout much of the nineteenth century, this model reflects the ways that the autobiographical and authorship were dispersed through a number of subjects, relationships, and institutions. So, though often through and with intermediaries, ex-captives both “begot” and “controlled” their written texts. Secondly, as an extension of the aforementioned authority of captives, by captives’ authority, I also mean their power within those narratives to render themselves and be rendered as rhetorically persuasive and culturally empowered in both personal and 5 political contexts. Mark Patterson explains in Authority, Autonomy and Representation, 1776-1865 that “the problem for one seeking authority is to find the proper form of address and expression by which the subordinate will recognize the authority’s position and sympathize with his or her intention” (xxvii).2 Patterson goes on to explain that there was a vacuum for literary and political authority in antebellum America that left readers “suspicious of both political and literary plots” and further “led some writers to find safety in conventional forms [. .] ” (xxiv). Slightly differently, I contend that in the American nineteenth century it is precisely by presenting one’s self as subordinate that one could obtain another subject’s sympathy. I understand captivity narratives as one of those “conventional forms” that spoke powerfully in the nineteenth century as a “proper form of address.” As subjects who had been involuntarily and often violently removed from mainstream society, their addresses were often aimed at regaining or claiming social, cultural, and national status. And this is perhaps one of the most striking features of the captives’ authority within their texts. Those narratives frame affiliation with the national and other desirable identities not only against or despite the representation of their confinements, but through them. They deliberately intensify or, just as often, the conventions of their narratives rehearse the conditions of their captivity, lending them a social status that is sometimes equal to and even greater than their non-captive readers. In this sense, captives’ authority is about access to literary citizenship, one’s representation in writing as a worthy and vested national subject. This membership is also local and personal. Their written captivities present them to their readers and themselves as worthy of a number of rights, a host of liberties in 6 relation to their more immediate and specific historical location, such as rights to positions within their families, particular communities, or local organizations. In other words, while the title of American citizen might have been important, in a local context the status of member of a benevolent society, for example, was just as if not more significant. What is more, captives’ authority also
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