Rhetorical Drag

Gender Impersonation, Captivity, and the Writing of History

Lorrayne Carroll

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010323
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

An innovative discussion of this unique genre of American literature

In this fresh examination of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century American captivity narratives, author Lorrayne Carroll argues that male editors and composers impersonated the women presumed to be authors of these documents. This "gender impersonation" significantly shaped the authorial voice and complicated the use of these texts as examples of historical writing and as women's literature. Carroll contends that gender impersonation was pervasive and that not enough critical attention has been paid to male intervention in female accounts.

Rhetorical Drag examines the familiar territory of captivity narratives, including versions of Hannah Duston's captivity, and widens it by analyzing numerous examples, placing each in a deeply historicized context. For example, Mary Rowlandson's The Soveraignty and Goodness of God is viewed as a template against which later authors might differentiate their works rather than as a model. In this vein, Carroll looks at how Cotton Mather shaped the narrative of Hannah Swarton in light of Rowlandson's text (itself thought to have been edited by his father) and according to the ideals of female behavior outlined in his conduct book for women, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion. A chapter on Quaker captivities illuminates the practices of censorship among Friends.

Furthermore, Carroll does original archival work on the provenance of Susannah Johnson's narrative and makes some interesting discoveries about the practices of gender impersonation and collaborative composition that produced Johnson's text. Using this narrative, which appeared in the late eighteenth century, Carroll discusses the shift and evolution of gender norms in the representation of women's voices and embodied experience.

Those interested in early American literary studies and historiography as well as women's and gender studies will find Rhetorical Drag a fascinating and important addition to the literature.

CHAPTER 1

“Being Read with a Greedy Attention”

Mather in Drag

Indeed, there are more women than men in the Church and the more virtuous they prove, the more worthy will the Church be to be figured, by a woman that fears the Lord.

—Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion

Cotton Mather’s 1692 treatise on “the character and happiness of a virtuous woman” reveals the moral power vested in representations of Puritan women.¹ For Mather, virtuous women not only constitute the majority of church membership, but they in fact embody the virtues he exhorts his entire congregation to practice. The preeminent value of God-fearing women in the church derives from their figuration: they are models to be observed and copied. As such, they have social value as exemplars but no personally vested power as historical agents because, as observed figures, they cannot, in Mather’s formulation, interpret their own behaviors to others, to the observers. That interpretive power belongs to male writers like Mather who use the model of a virtuous woman for their political, social, and religious interests.

Virtuous or not, women could not be ministers, and only in rare cases had they access to publication.² They practice virtue but do not preach it. Anne Hutchinson’s case is the most noteworthy evidence of this phenomenon among the Puritans, but the unseemly sight of a woman preaching informs the Puritan disapprobation of Quaker practices as well. Excluded from pulpit and press, the conventional conduits of moral instruction in Puritan New England, women were instructed to lead virtuous lives, which might then be rendered into a suitable representation of virtue, most often by male preachers and authors such as Cotton Mather.³

Mather predominates among male interpreters of female piety, but he is by no means the only one to recognize the didactic potential in the figure of the virtuous woman.⁴ His Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion became a popular conduct book for later generations of pious women, and the text offers various roles for women to play within Puritan culture, including the role of author.⁵ However, the focus of Ornaments is the goodwife figure, whose sphere is family and congregation, a woman laboring in the home and quietly proclaiming God’s grace through her faith. This prevailing image of women as quintessentially familial and bound by church community recurs throughout Puritan literature, in texts both about women and supposedly written by them. Mather’s concern in Ornaments is with the salvational possibilities in representations of women: how can he render their figures for the improvement of the entire church? Yet his use of the female image exceeds the purposes of religious instruction and demonstrates the broader social and political aims of Mather’s historiographical project.

By producing a woman’s figure in print, bringing her experiences and expression into the public realm, Mather mirrors the central act of Puritan life: public confession of the personal experience of justification in the church. When the circumstances of a Puritan’s conversion experience were spectacular, purported transcriptions of those oral recountings were often published as appendixes to sermons. Mather’s Warnings from the Dead, for example, was printed with “a pathetical Instrument, in Writing” “obtained” from Elizabeth Emerson shortly before her execution for infanticide.⁶ Elizabeth Emerson’s “writing” warranted publication because of her notorious reputation as the murderer of her own infants and because she apparently (according to the “Instrument”) accepted the full weight of spiritual and civil retribution for the murders. Thus, the conventional Puritan proscription against a woman speaking in public was superseded by the powerful instructional potential of her recorded voice. The dispensation accorded Mary Rowlandson to publish her captivity narrative relied on this same exemplary function, although Rowlandson stood in good repute. The rarity of a publication by a woman enhanced the value of the lesson she proclaimed; Rowlandson became the unique case that demanded attention. However, representations of singular or unconventional women necessitated complex rhetorical constructions to refashion images of these women as both spiritually excellent yet socially transgressive. A woman presuming to teach or lead by invoking her own experiences became a woman out of bounds.

Female public expression embodied this tension between exceptionalism and transgression, and the notoriety attendant upon a woman’s publication under her name imputed to authorship both conditions. Authorship of printed matter thrust at least the figure of the author into the public domain, to be considered as part of the text, the name on the title page. Michel Foucault’s discussion of the role of the author’s name in ascribing to “its” text a “certain mode” and a “certain status” suggests this linkage (107). Women’s authorship not only classified the text as exceptional in seventeenth-century Puritan discourse, but it also affiliated the work with historical images of femaleness. “Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description” (105). This descriptive attribute conferred on the female author an array of characteristics derived from cultural representations of women. Historical precedent—in the case of Puritan discourse this is often construed as biblical reference—and the personal reputation of the writing woman shaped the text’s production and interpretation of gender roles. Specifically, in the culture of Puritan New England, the woman’s reputation had to adhere to strict models derived from biblical types or emblems. The virtue of the female author manifested in her good reputation, and ministers molded her reputation, recasting it for the lessons at hand.

Texts attributed to female authors in this period often explicitly express anxiety concerning the tension between sanctioned publication and suspect personal exhibition occasioned by Puritan gender regimes. These texts repeatedly stage the problem of offering to the public a spiritually conducive text that simultaneously displays the female self. Yet this tension also provides the space for inscription, a compositional gap that can be filled with language that generates both the text itself and the figure of the woman writing it. Puritan texts ascribed to women, such as Anne Bradstreet’s poetry or Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, illustrate the social utility of that space for advancing Puritan beliefs and practices.⁷ They draw on the exceptionalism/transgression of the first-person female voice, with its emphasis on the woman’s reputation, and, in the case of captivity narratives, they invoke the singularity of the dislocated and spiritually stranded captive.

This singularity is grounded in the captive’s experience. Again, Egan’s point is crucial here: scholars must attend to the “writing that made experience an important category and a source of rhetorical as well as political authority” (Egan 12). When Increase and Cotton Mather produce women’s captivity narratives, they do just that: by reproducing the women’s captive experiences in the women’s first-person voices, they mobilize a powerful rhetorical effect to underwrite, literally, their cultural and political authority as interpreters of providential history.

To understand the rhetorical potential of the captive woman’s first-person voice, I examine Cotton Mather’s long treatise on proper female conduct. In Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, the most prolific writer of the period fashions a historical and religious overview of women’s roles and the value of reputation. This consideration of women, especially women as authors, provides an insight into the provenance of one woman’s captivity tale, “A Narrative of Hannah Swarton.” In the Swarton text, Mather mobilizes seventeenth-century Puritan views of female public expression to serve some of his culture’s dominant ideologies and to advance his own historiographical project. He accomplishes this by appropriating Swarton’s voice as well as her experience. Elaborating on rhetorical elements found in the Rowlandson text, he produces the perfect captivity narrative, one that accords with his version of the Puritan errand in New England. Hannah Swarton’s story begins, then, within Mather’s vision of righteous women and goes on to develop tropes and figures found in the Rowlandson narrative. This combination presents us with a unique opportunity to interrogate the representation of female experience and its public expression in authorship within New England Puritan contexts. As well, by attending to the Swarton narrative’s structure and figuration, we discover that, for Mather, not only the church, but also providential history, should be “figured … by a woman that fears the Lord.”

“Wise unto Salvation”

Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion offers several roles for women in Puritan society, including authorship. Mather argues that “our God has employ’d many women to write for the Church, and inspir’d some of them for the writing of Scripture” (3). Considering European and North American women writers, he asserts, “for even the Books publish’d by that Sex were enough to make a library far from contemptible, nor has even the New English part of the American Strand been without Authoresses that would challenge a Room in such a Library” (3–4). Mather cites Anna Maria von Schurman, a Dutch pietist, and he implicitly refers to Anne Bradstreet, the most familiar “authoress” of Puritan New England.⁸ In fact, at several points, Ornaments argues persuasively that women should write and presumably publish their compositions, and Mather admonishes those who would deny women the intellectual, but more importantly the moral, authority to write: “a Privilege not far from the second Advancement of that Sex may be Esteemed, that share which it has had in writing those Oracles which make us Wise unto Salvation. As one woman was the Mother of Him who is the Essential Word of God, so divers women have been the writers of his Declarative Word” (3).⁹ For Mather, women’s writing is analogous to motherhood, specifically to the divine motherhood represented by Mary. The simile that links maternity with the process of writing allows Mather to promote an identity of “female” with “mother” in order to illustrate the generative parallels. Women’s experiences of maternity thus sanction their participation in cultural reproduction, permitting them to reproduce their experiences in their own voices.

Mather’s identification of women writers as mothers is metaphorical in this instance, but contemporary seventeenth-century texts published with attributions of female authorship often emphasized the author’s actual maternal role. In some cases, the texts were published specifically as artifacts for the spiritual consumption of the author’s family. For example, Sarah Goodhue’s 1681 letter, a publication allegedly composed in the Goodhue home and “found after her decease,” is “directed to her husband and children with other near relations and friends,”¹⁰ a small audience indeed.

Goodhue’s text begins “Dear and loving Husband” then addresses the children for five of its twenty paragraphs. Following Anne Bradstreet’s model, the text includes a poem that names each child in a couplet. The children are admonished to “be ruled by him [their father]” and to “Endeavour to learn to write your father’s hand, that you may read over those precious sermons, that he hath taken pains to write and keep from the mouths of God’s lively messengers” (521). Curiously, the charge is “to learn to write” that they may read, rather than to compose their own meditations or take notes on the lessons from the pulpit. For the children, writing therefore becomes a tool of secondary import, an instrument toward the greater end of reading their father’s notes on homilies. Part of Sarah Goodhue’s maternal concern is to reinforce the power of the father. Although the letter contains many passages advising the children on proper conduct, its central image is “a tender-hearted, affectionate and entire loving husband” (522). Sarah Goodhue’s role as spiritual advisor to her children is everywhere surpassed by the representation of her husband as teacher. As the mother is to the children, so the husband is to the wife.¹¹ It is he who writes, she who reads and hears, the sermons she now misses due to illness: “Was it not to this end that the Lord was pleased to enable thee and give thee in heart to take (as an instrument) so much pains for his glory and my eternal good, and that it might be thy comfort: As all thy reading of scriptures and writing of sermons, and repeating of them over to me, that although I was necessarily often absent from the publick worship of God, yet by thy pains and care to the good of my soul, it was brought home unto me” (523). Joseph Goodhue thus carries the public word, “an instrument” for domestic dissemination of the ordinances, back to the privacy of his home for his wife and children to study.

Consistent with the figure of the writer as an instrument of God, Sarah Goodhue’s husband is the conduit of spiritual teaching: his is the primary writing in the text. Thus the presumed author attributes her spiritual progress to the man who writes for her to read. The figure of Joseph Goodhue as father and teacher dominates the text: Sarah Goodhue’s own writing acts as a testament to her husband’s writing and to its value for her children. Within the house, Joseph Goodhue reports the teachings of the ministers and thereby reenacts the scene of public worship, with the gendered hierarchies intact.

Goodhue’s letter displays some characteristics recurrent in the early Puritan texts attributed to female authors: the author’s husband plays a prominent role in the text,¹² and it contains an apology justifying the writing.¹³ Its title page, emphasizing that it is the dying testament of a wife and mother, presents the Puritan woman as a hinge figure within the home. Although subject to her husband’s authority (even the apparently benign authoritarian practice of Joseph Goodhue), at the same time she represents an authority figure for her children. Moreover, by the sheer act of writing she assumes an authoritative position even while proclaiming her submissiveness. The textual representation of an eminently virtuous Sarah Goodhue, who writes about her familial and spiritual experience within her home, conforms to Cotton Mather’s statement in Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion that the church is worthy to be “figured by” such a woman.

Sarah Goodhue’s figure of piety and obedience thus grounds and makes possible the publication of this text. The letter attributed to her reinforces the public teachings about private familial relations, and, by portraying a Puritan family in which authority operates along properly hierarchical—and gendered—lines, the Goodhue text uses the wife/mother image to bring the private into the public, published realm as an intact representation of the orderly Puritan household. This articulating wife/mother figure illustrates power relations flowing through a single subject who both receives and delivers the homiletic instruction and interpretation that Harry S. Stout characterizes as “the central ritual of social order and control” (3), the nexus of Puritan cultural power.

Because she both learned from her husband (himself an instrument of the ministers) and taught her own children, Sarah Goodhue represented a proper example of a female writer. Her social value, even in death, derived from her good reputation as a dutiful wife and mother. Motherhood, however, was not a prerequisite for all women authors, as is evident in Mather’s Ornaments. Exemplified by the unmarried Pietist Schurman, many of these were impossible models for religious and social practice in the daily conditions of New England society. Furthermore, in his second Conclusion, Mather provided a catalog of heroic women, from Thomyris, “that could lead an Army against the Persians, and Zenobia that could head an Army against the Romans,” to Queen Elizabeth. These women, virtuous and wise public agents (warriors and rulers), join “the Daughter of Pythagoras who made Comments on her Father’s Books,” Hypatia, and “the Empress Eudocia, who composed Poetical Paraphrases on divers parts of the Bible” (36). Amazons and intellectuals, historical women represented courage, wisdom, and usefulness, either as military leaders or scholars, but these roles simply were not available to the goodwives of Boston. This array of notab...