Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Philemon Isaiah Amos

ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology Fall 2012 Dr. Rebecca Harrison, Professor Department of English & Philosophy Printed on campus by UWG Publications and Printing. A Culture of Captivity: Subversive Femininity and Literary Landscapes Introduction 5 Dr. Rebecca L. Harrison I. Captive Women/Colonizing Texts “Heathenish, Indelicate and Indecent”: Male Authorship, 13 Narration, and the Transculturated, Mutable Female in James T. DeShields Cynthia Ann Parker, James Seaver’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, and Royal B. Stratton’s Captivity of the Oatman Girls Mary Catherine Lyons American Colonization and the Death of the Female 34 Captive Hannah Barnes Mitchell The Comfortable Captive: Applying Double-Voice 49 Discourse to Cotton Mather’s and John Greenleaf Whittier’s Depictions of Hannah Dustan’s Captivity to Ultimately Reveal Potential Female Agency Michelle Guinn II. Captive Others: Cutting through Sentimental Scripts “Lors, Chile! What’s You Crying ’Bout?”: Sympathy & Tears 62 in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Philemon Isaiah Amos The Absolutely Real Ramifications of a Full-Time Genocide: 79 Exploring Mary Rowlandson’s Role in Alexie’s “Captivity” and True Diary Gina Riccobono III. Generic Adaptations & Dislodging the Narrative Tradition Transgressing the “bloody old hag”: Gender in Nathaniel 93 Hawthorne’s “The Duston Family” Michele Drane Creating the Autonomous Early American Woman: Angela 112 Carter and Caroline Gordon (Re) Employ the Female Captivity Narrative Genre Wayne Bell Death Becomes Her: The American Female Victim-Hero 125 Legacy Wes Shelton IV. Crossing the Borders of Captivity Capturing Dorinda Oakley 143 Dorinda Purser Unknowable and Thereby Unconquerable: Examining Ada 157 McGrath’s Resistance in The Piano Brett Hill ‘Bonds of Land and Blood’: Communal Captivity and 171 Subversive Femininity in Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone Jason Cole Contributors 190 A Culture of Captivity: Subversive Femininity and Literary Landscapes Dr. Rebecca Harrison Captivity stories may have sustained their interest for . women readers through the connections they offer between the plight of the literal captive and less tangible forms of victimization and restriction experienced by their . female readers. Captivity thus gives symbolic form to the culturally unnameable: confinement within the home, enforced economic dependence, rape, compulsory heterosexuality, prescribed plots. —Christopher Castiglia from Bound and Determined he stories and subsequent representations of two prominent female Tcaptives—Hannah Dustan and Olive Oatman—occupy seemingly opposite ends on the spectrum of the captivity narrative and its cultural and political power. Like the stories of other captive women, Dustan and Oatman’s captivity narratives gained the status of national myths. They became a “usable” past for authors seeking to cement or undo various cultural and political agendas. Dustan’s uncanny ability to kill her Abenaki captors in a violent manner and escape with their scalps to collect the Massuchusetts Bay Colony’s bounty symbolically elevat- ed American women’s ability to defy encroachments and violations by the racial and cultural “Other” and defend white, Christian values by any means necessary. Oatman, on the other hand, received an indelible mark of her captivity through the highly visible tattoos inscribed on her chin by her Mohave captors. Her captivity, thus, represented the threat of transformation into—rather than resistance to—the “savage” Other and called for greater protection and vigilance against cultures and races on the margins of white, Anglo-American society. Yet the eager and anxious attempts of male editors, authors, journal- ists, and ministers to frame and control both women’s experiences and stories of their captivities underscore the subversive potential both held 5 Dr. Rebecca Harrison within their home culture. Racially and culturally, Dustan’s own descent into savagery suggested a dangerous and potentially essential closeness or even resemblance between white settlers living on the frontier and their Indian neighbors. Oatman’s tattoos and rumors of a marriage to and children with one of her Indian captors called into question the presumably ontological difference between “savage” and “civilized.” Her haunting post-captivity visage suggested that cultural and racial identity were only skin-deep, while the released captive’s subjectivity (as well as the account of her trials) was something more interior, more elusive, more troubling. Perhaps so many captivity accounts emphasized release as “redemption,” because the captors’ marks stamped upon the captives were evidence of a latent, pre-existing savagery that had to be, once more, buried under layers of clothing and civilization. Dustan and Oatman’s transformations through captivity certainly disturbed and even undermined prevailing gender scripts throughout American history. Both as victims and victors, captive women and their accounts brought into high relief the restrictive gender orders captivity experiences dislodged, often granting them opportunities for trans- gressive agency in their dealings with and survival among the Indians. Dustan’s bloody destruction of her captors clearly usurped white men’s monopolistic claim to violence, but even the proper dress Oatman donned in a widely circulated post-captivity photograph could not contain her Indian marks that hinted at a language, a potential, and even a hidden reservoir of impulses that eluded white, male interpretation and control. The malleable and contested tropes, sites, and discourses of the female captivity tradition burst to the fore in a recent (2011) painting by Kelly Reemtsen, entitled “Holding Your Attention” (cover art). Though not lit- erally taking up Indian captivity as its subject, Reemtsen’s painting plays with the multiple strains of female subversion that break forth through women’s captivity narratives. Most obviously, these narratives became early bestsellers because they held their audiences’ attention—through a forceful mix of suspense, exoticism, danger, and even sexual titillation. Just as tales of white women taken by swarthy savages both excited and frightened white (especially male) readers, Reemtsen’s ax-wielding woman clad in luxurious dress and jewelry simultaneous enthralls and threatens. While the woman’s formal, feminine dress locates her in times and situations of gendered, social control (perhaps the 1950s, judging by the design?), her assertive pose and threatening tool undo any contain- 6 Introduction ment or calculability. Portraying her without her head moves the woman in the painting to an uncannily universal level; captivity narratives, even in the eyes of their male editors/narrators, claimed a universal import of the subject’s particular experiences (e.g. the enduring faith in God’s redeeming power in Mary Rowlandson’s account), yet this portrayal, in text and art, of a potentially dangerous Everywoman mobilizes a variety of social, cultural, and political responses. Similarly, women’s Indian captivity narratives elicited multi-valent responses from a variety of readers, thus underscoring the ability of this genre to both uphold and undo dominant cultural models—from the idea of a white, patriarchal nation to visions of gentle and demure womanhood/motherhood. Throughout the semester, our course examined these tenets (and the many paradoxes) of the American female captivity narrative—a highly politicized genre that frequently tried to cement propagandistic, theo- logical, and racist agendas, and thus permeated the American cultural imaginary from the colonial era to the present day. Beginning with the foundational texts of early American contact with the cultural Other, texts dominated by the experiences of women as captives, writers, and readers, our course closely analyzed the characteristics, historical roots, and nationalist impulses of this distinct genre and its employment of the female body, along with its evolution in the American literary and cultural landscape. Our primary readings ranged from Mary Rowland- son’s foundational narrative and some direct, modern responses (Louise Erdrich’s “Captivity” and Sherman Alexie’s “Captivity), to Dustan’s cli- mactic exploits and various male attempts (Mather, Hawthorne, Whit- tier, Thoreau) to adumbrate its subversive potential, to early national and antebellum accounts that blended the factual with the fictive, to modern adaptations in literature and film that place captivity tropes on a wider, cultural platform (such as the captivity of the female artist in Jane Campion’s The Piano). In literary criticism, we intensively studied the seminal work by Christopher Castiglia (Bound and Determined) and Michelle Burnham (Captivity and Sentiment) in their entirety throughout the semester, applying key concepts to primary literature and examining more recent critical responses and paradigms. The eleven essays that make up this collection represent the fullness of this investigation. In the opening piece of the anthology, Mary Catherine Lyons tackles one of the most difficult problems in scholarship on the female captivity narrative—how to determine the relationship between male editorial involvement and the authenticity of the female captives’ voices. Lyons 7 Dr. Rebecca Harrison argues that the transculturation of the captives to their captors’ cultures countermanded the racist agendas of the male scribes or intermediar- ies who prepared the women’s accounts for publication. Examining

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