Peregrinations

Walking in American Literature

Amy T Hamilton

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781943859658
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Peregrinate: To travel or wander around from place to place.The land of the United States is defined by vast distances encouraging human movement and migration on a grand scale. Consequently, American stories are filled with descriptions of human bodies walking through the land.In Peregrinations, Amy T. Hamilton examines stories told by and about Indigenous American, Euroamerican, and Mexican walkers. Walking as a central experience that ties these texts together—never simply a metaphor or allegory—offers storytellers and authors an elastic figure through which to engage diverse cultural practices and beliefs including Puritan and Catholic teachings, Diné and Anishinaabe oral traditions, Chicanx histories, and European literary traditions.Hamilton argues that walking bodies alert readers to the ways the physical world—more-than-human animals, trees, rocks, wind, sunlight, and human bodies—has a hand in creating experience and meaning. Through material ecocriticism, a reading practice attentive to historical and ongoing oppressions, exclusions, and displacements, she reveals complex layerings of narrative and materiality in stories of walking human bodies.This powerful and pioneering methodology for understanding place and identity, clarifies the wide variety of American stories about human relationships with the land and the ethical implications of the embeddedness of humans in the more-than-human world.

1

Paths in the Wilderness

Walking Bodies and Material Agency in Early American Indian Captivity Narratives

WHEN THE FIRST EUROPEAN immigrants set out on their voyage to North America, they did so with pen in hand, recording their experiences of travel and movement as they went. These first narratives were crafted by explorers such as Captain John Smith of Virginia and settlers such as William Bradford of Plymouth; men who were interested in promoting stories of male conquest of the physical and symbolic wilderness. Women’s stories were often minimized or left out entirely.¹ One place to uncover accounts of female movement across and engagement with the land that is now the United States is in the vast collection of “Indian captivity narratives” written by Euroamerican women.² On the surface, these narratives chronicle women’s victimization in the wilderness and thus maintain travel as a male pursuit; however, within the framework of their stories, Euroamerican women made a space to narrate their own adventures of physical movement in the American land.

Captivity narratives, whether “true” or fictionalized, fascinated Euroamerican audiences from the late seventeenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, a two-hundred-year period when they were the most popular genre in America. According to Gary Ebersole, “A modern checklist of American Indian captivity narratives compiled by the Newberry Library of items either based on fact or presented as factual accounts lists almost two thousand items published before 1880” (9).³ As the genre developed over time, the narratives began to assume a common outline: “The author or the protagonist is snatched from his or her home and forcibly carried off into an alien culture, into the world of the Other. There the captive undergoes a series of ordeals or adventures while living among the Indians and later escapes or is ransomed and returned to civilization” (Ebersole 10). Kathryn Derounian-Stodola and James Levernier assert that this basic outline is fleshed out with stereotypical scenes and characters, such as “a mother, at least one male Indian, and a child, usually held by the heels, whose brains (or head) are dashed against a tree” (148; emphasis in the original). These common elements contributed to the popularity of the genre that Billy Stratton explains was valued for its “inherent iterability” that allows for an “endlessly reproducible master narrativ[e]” (10–11).

By the nineteenth century, the motifs and outline of the captivity narrative had been retold hundreds of times and came to shape how Euroamericans experienced life on the frontier. Glenda Riley suggests that nineteenth-century women in particular “were so thoroughly convinced that they were about to come face to face with the fiendish visages of creatures who were little more than consorts of the devil that they transformed every sight and sound into an avenging native” (83). Indian captivity narratives with their stock scenes and characters offered a skewed and simplified vision of the complex and conflicted relationship among Euroamericans, Indigenous peoples, and the land. Yet the crush of formulaic scenes also allowed the writers an opportunity to express the multifaceted and contradictory experiences of captive movement.

Among the most compelling and elastic tropes that developed in Indian captivity narratives written by Euroamerican women are representations of the captives’ physical movement, especially walking. Former women captives frequently illustrate their experiences of forced walking through descriptions of their painful, blistered feet and their exhausted bodies. For example, in her narrative of captivity among the Dakota, Helen Tarble recalls that her “feet were torn and bleeding” and that she longed for “a pair of shoes badly, for my feet were in a terrible condition from bruises and thorns” (40, 36). Similarly, in a narrative recorded by the Reverend Royal B. Stratton, Olive Oatman relates the first night of her captivity among the Apache: “I had no strength to walk. . . . I crept, snail-like” (319).⁴ Later, when her Apache captors traded her to the Mohave, she recollects: “This trail to a second captivity was not improvement on the first. . . . Our feet soon became sore, and we were unable on the second day to keep up with their rapid pace” (329). Walking through pain and crawling when walking becomes impossible are tropes that appear repeatedly in Indian captivity narratives written by women.

These episodes complicate the division between the material and the metaphoric. Such descriptions record the very real pain women felt when forced to walk for long distances and across terrain for which their Euroamerican clothing and lifestyle had ill-prepared them, yet descriptions of painful walking also reflect the deep fear and emotional trauma the captives experienced as they moved away from their familiar homes into the wilderness known to them only through other narratives and stories. Further complicating these deceptively simple images is that even as captives locate their suffering in representations of forced walking, recording these moments also allows many formerly captive Euroamerican women to claim a degree of agency. Walking, whether coerced or voluntary, always requires the effort and agency of the walker. As opposed to a passive body carried away on horseback or in a wagon, the captive who walks is intensely aware of her embodiment, as she must purposefully place one painful step after another. In narratives written months and even years after their actual captivity, the writers use representations of themselves walking in captivity to express not only physical and emotional pain, but also a degree of agency and resilience. In captivity narratives, from Mary White Rowlandson’s 1682 account of her captivity with the Naragansetts and Wampanoags through Sarah Wakefield’s narrative of captivity among the Dakota in 1864, walking is so central to the experience of captivity that it even influences the form and structure of the narratives themselves, pairing physical movement with narrative movement.

Rowlandson’s and Wakefield’s narratives bookend the nearly two-hundred-year period when Indian captivity narratives enjoyed incredible popularity. Rowlandson’s narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, a text that Christopher Castiglia calls the “first distinctly American best-seller” (1), was an instant success, second in popularity among American readers only to the Bible (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 14).⁵ Her narrative helped shape the tropes and structure that Wakefield’s narrative, Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees, both adopts and resists. While Rowlandson links her walking to the larger Puritan “errand into the wilderness,”⁶ punctuating her narrative with biblical passages and pious observations, Wakefield ties her walking to nineteenth-century narratives of hunter heroes and explorers, even as she maintains a foothold in the usually sedentary story of the domestic sphere reflected and reinforced in nineteenth-century American domestic fiction.⁷ Alongside these cultural stories, Rowlandson and Wakefield also repeatedly describe the physical reality of walking and the material impact of the land on their bodies. In the introduction to Material Ecocriticism, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman write, “This world. . .is far from being ‘pure exterior.’. . . It is through all these natures, agencies, and bodies that ‘the world we inhabit,’ with all its stories, is ‘alive’” (1). The materiality of the world contains its own power and is not simply an inert background or setting upon which the action takes place. The stories that Rowlandson and Wakefield tell are actively informed and shaped by the stories of the world around them: the narratives and preconceptions the writers carry with them, the stories of the Indigenous peoples they walk with, and the stories created by interaction with the land itself. “Agency assumes many forms,” Iovino and Opperman argue, “all of which are characterized by an important feature: they are material, and the meanings they produce influence in various ways the existence of both human and non-human natures. . . . [R]eality emerges as an intertwined flux of material and discursive forces, rather than as [a] complex of hierarchically organized individual players” (3). Through their captivity narratives, Rowlandson and Wakefield claim a space in which to write their personal experiences as well as the complicated ways those experiences, and the narratives relating them, are influenced and formed by the stories of the people who have captured them and the land in which they move. They emphasize the materiality of their experiences even as they use them to structure and lend symbolic weight to their stories.

MARY WHITE ROWLANDSON’S PILGRIMAGE THROUGH CAPTIVITY

In the early morning hours of February 10, 1676, Mary White Rowlandson awoke to chaos when a group of allied Nipmucs, Wampanoags, and Narragansetts attacked the small Puritan settlement of Lancaster. Daughter of the town’s wealthiest citizen and wife of its resident minister, Rowlandson was taken captive along with her three children, including her mortally wounded six-year-old daughter, Sarah. Stumbling in terror, losing blood from a gunshot wound to her side, and separated from her two older children, Rowlandson carried Sarah for a week until the child died in her arms. For eleven weeks and five days, Rowlandson lived and traveled with a group of Narragansetts and Wampanoags before being redeemed for twenty pounds (Lang 18). Published six years after the events it chronicles, Rowlandson’s story of her captivity went on to be the most influential and widely read Indian captivity narrative of all time, shaping popular conceptions of Indians, wilderness, and captivity for generations of Euroamericans.

The attack on Lancaster was part of a larger conflict known as Metacom’s (or King Phillip’s) War. According to critic Neal Salisbury, in proportion to total population, Metacom’s War was the bloodiest and most destructive war in American history. The conflict, which lasted a little more than a year, took the lives of approximately five thousand Indians and twenty-five hundred settlers, roughly 40 and 5 percent, respectively, of the two area populations (Salisbury 1). Over the previous decades the Indigenous peoples in the Massachusetts area had established a strong trading relationship with the early colonists in Lancaster. The English demand for furs and the Native demand for English goods had led Indigenous and European trappers to procure as many pelts as possible, driving southern New England beaver, otter, marten, and mink populations to the brink of extinction (Salisbury 18). These decreases in fur-bearing species exacerbated fractures in trade relationships that were further compounded by European-introduced diseases and ever-increasing numbers of settler-colonists. The Wampanoag leader Metacom told Rhode Island governor John Eaton that English “cheating, discrimination, and pressures to sell land, submit to Plymouth colony’s authority, convert to Christianity, and consume alcohol had undermined a half-century of friendship and driven the Wampanoags of Pokanoket to the point of war” (Salisbury 19). Similar sentiments were expressed by the Narragansetts, Nianics, and Nipmucs.

Amid these growing tensions, the murder of John Sassamon in 1674 pushed the tenuous peace to a breaking point and precipitated violent confrontations (Lang 16). According to reports, Sassamon, a “praying Indian” (Christian convert), was acting as an informant for the English. When he was found murdered, the colonists assumed that his people had killed him after discovering his perfidy. Three Wampanoags were arrested and executed (Salisbury 21). Following the executions, Metacom led an attack on Swansea, Massachusetts, burning several houses on June 20, 1675. The English retaliated, and over the next six months hostilities continued to escalate. In November of that year, the United Colonies of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Plymouth, and Connecticut attacked and massacred an encampment of Narragansetts in their winter home in the swamps of central Rhode Island, killing an estimated six hundred Narragansett men, women, and children. The attack on Lancaster was part of a continuing Indigenous offensive started after this massacre. Of the thirty-seven people occupying the garrison in Lancaster that February morning, twelve were killed, one escaped, and twenty-four were taken captive, among them Mary White Rowlandson (Lang 17).

Apparently written around 1677, Rowlandson’s narrative attempts to erase the complicated colonial history surrounding her captivity in order to recast her experience as a pilgrim’s journey through a spiritual waste-land.⁸ As a result, Rowlandson’s captivity has most often been understood through the lens of the Puritan errand to the wilderness. Rowlandson and her family were among the thousands of Puritans who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century to settle in America. They understood themselves to be the spiritual successors of the biblical Hebrews with a special covenant with God, and they imagined their mission in the American wilderness mirrored and extended the exodus of Israel from Egypt. The Puritans believed their temporary exile from an idolatrous land (England) and the subsequent period of travail in the wilderness would purify their community and bring it to a more valid worship of God, just as it had for the Hebrews (Slotkin 37–42). Movement into and through the wilderness was vital to their sense of themselves as the chosen people, as it suggested a literal manifestation of their inner spiritual journey to closer communion with God. As David Jacobson contends, the Puritans saw themselves “journeying to the Promised Land, metaphorically, in the sense of some Edenic future. But that Edenic future is also located physically. . .where the future will be realized” (32). Wandering through the actual wilderness encouraged the Puritans to imagine themselves drawing closer to the nonmaterial Promised Land.

In this context, Rowlandson constructs her story to follow the traditional pilgrim’s journey, beginning with her separation from what is known and familiar, followed by a long journey filled with hardship, and culminating in an enlightened return.⁹ Cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Edith Turner define pilgrimage as a “rite de passage. . .marked by three phases: separation, limen or margin, and aggregation.” Following a detachment of the individual or group from a “relatively stable set of cultural conditions,” pilgrims pass through “a realm or dimension that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state” and seek to return to a classified and stable social life (2). Like a pilgrim, Rowlandson identifies the second phase, the journey, as the most important.

Although Rowlandson’s story is focused on her individual experience, in writing herself as a pilgrim she aligns herself with her community. Pilgrimage, Turner and Turner explain, is essentially about communion with similars. Pilgrimage—like all religious ritual—binds pilgrims together: “Likeness of lot and intention is converted into commonness of feeling, into ‘communitas’” (13). In Pilgrims to the Wild, John P. O’Grady writes that the word pilgrim is “[d]erived from an Indo-European root (ghedh-) meaning ‘to unite, join, fit,’ it flourishes in modern English as the words good, gad, gather, and together. . . . [T]hus even when conducted alone, pilgrimage always embodies the notion of the pilgrim’s community” (5). The Puritans’ conceptualization of their exile in the wilderness fits these parameters of pilgrimage as a sojourn, a temporary state of disconnection on the path to reintegration. Their errand to the wilderness was a vital mark of their difference from the European world they left behind and a central trope that bound them together as a community. Notably, within this structure Rowlandson’s fellow pilgrims are her fellow Euroamerican captives and her fellow Puritan settlers and emphatically not the Wampanoag and Narragansett people she walks alongside.

Within the Puritan errand, captive white women serve as examples to the larger Puritan community, exemplifying piety, patience, and subservience to God’s will. Sacvan Bercovitch contends that the Hebrews’ captivity in Babylon followed by their “flight from Babylon under Nehemiah” functioned as “one of the central motifs in early Protestant sermons.” “Spiritually,” Bercovitch argues, “it signifies Christ’s deliverance of his beloved from the bondage of sin” (58). Puritan clergy such as Cotton Mather recognized the force and implications of casting captive women as Judea Capta, “the image of Israel suffering in Babylonian captivity” (Kolodny, Land Before Her 19). Mather describes this figure on a Roman coin as “A Silent Woman sitting upon the Ground, leaning against a Palm-tree, with this inscription JUDAEA CAPTA” (qtd. in Kolodny, Land Before Her 21; emphasis in the original). The silent and passive body of the captive woman provided a space for performing the Puritan errand. As Rebecca Blevins Faery indicates, in “the war for territorial dominance. . .the captive woman was made into a metaphor: she was herself the emblematic territory for control of which the two sides fought” (41). The body of the captive white woman who waits patiently for rescue and redemption was a passive boundary between cultures and between male captors and male rescuers. Her physical body was remade as a symbol, which allowed Puritan leaders to imagine themselves as descendants of Nehemiah, redeeming the white woman and the land from captivity to the Indians.

Rowlandson’s identity as a Puritan woman, held captive in the threatening wilderness, waiting for redemption and rescue, is supported by many of the claims and statements in her narrative. For example, in recounting the harrowing death of her youngest daughter, Rowlandson remembers the nine days she “sat upon my knees with my babe in my lap. . .even ready to depart this sorrowful world.” Reflecting on this time, she emphasizes her passive waiting: “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me, in preserving me so in the use of my reason and senses in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life” (36). Later she writes that the “principal ground” for writing her narrative is to “declare the works of the Lord, and his wonderful power in carrying us along, preserving us in the Wilderness, while under the Enemies hand, and returning of us in safety again.” Shortly after this statement, she quotes from Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sate down, yea we wept when we remembered Zion,” directly linking her experience with Judea Capta (42; emphasis in the original). Rowlandson repeatedly and overtly underscores her adherence to God’s will, stating that she “was not willing to run away, but desired to wait God’s time, that I might go home quietly, and without fear” (61). Rowlandson strives to be the voice of the Puritan faithful, recognizing her subservience to God’s will and waiting for rescue, through policing herself to be both mentally patient and physically still.

As a devout Puritan, Rowlandson frequently turns to the Bible for ways of contextualizing and understanding her experience of captivity in the wilderness. Critic Dawn Henwood argues that scriptural passages “furnish Rowlandson with a public, liturgical language that centers her experience in the communal sphere of meaning” (171).¹⁰ Many of the biblical passages Rowlandson includes in her narrative explicitly tie her movement in captivity to symbolic walking in scripture. The first reference she makes to scriptural walking is with a passage from Psalm 81: “Oh that my people had hearkened to me, and Israel had walked in my ways, I should soon have subdued their Enemies, and turned my hand against their Adversaries” (40; emphasis in the original). Row...