Who Narrates Captivity?

Abstract

Who Narrates Captivity? Rebecca Anne Goetz (bio) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Pocahontas and the English Boys: Caught between Cultures in Early Virginia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. xi + 233 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $75.00. Andrew Newman, Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacies and Indian Captivities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2019. xi + 211 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95. About sixty years before Mary Rowlandson wrote her famous book The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson (1682), Sarah Boyse also wrote a captivity narrative. Captured by Pamunkeys in March 1622, Boyse was sent home from captivity in 1623 "appareled like one of theire Quenes, wch they [the Pamunkeys] desired wee should take notice of." She observed her captors well: she "reporteth of a great deale of miserie that o[u]r People endure and not least Hunger in wch th'Indians also suffer extreame."1 The Pamunkeys held Sarah and eighteen other English women as captives, but the English were aware they were all alive because her husband John received "a letter from Boyse his wife."2 What information did she include in her letter? We do not know, because her letter does not survive. All that remains is a description of her clothing and her observations on the difficulties of life among the Pamunkeys. But I can begin to imagine what Sarah Boyse's letter might have told us. In addition to her descriptions of hardship and dearth, perhaps like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Sarah Boyse might have told present-day historians much about Pamunkey politics, about Opechancanough's struggles to hold his confederacy together in the face of unceasing English violence, and the threat of starvation. We might have glimpsed Boyse's piety too, but perhaps without the puritan overtones of Rowlandson's later narrative. The possibility of Sarah Boyse's narrative is one we can imprint with all the things we wish we knew about Indigenous and settler lives in the wake of Opechancanough's devastating attack on English settlements in 1622. [End Page 488] I am able to subject Sarah Boyse to such conjecture because she left only the barest trace in the archive of early Virginia. The Virginia Company did not deem her literacy and her ability to describe her captivity worthy of extensive record. No one archived her (probably handwritten) letter. The men of the Virginia Company happily ignored Boyse's literacy, and thus her narrative. If a woman writes a letter, and no one saves it, does its once-upon-a-time existence matter? Was Sarah Boyse's unloved and unarchived letter a literacy event? Andrew Newman describes literacy events as "the particular activities where reading and writing have a role" (p. 3). In his new book Allegories of Encounter, Andrew Newman delves into one of the most commonly taught and commonly read genres in early American literature: the captivity narrative. In his close reading of the writings of several well-known captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Reverend John Williams, and John Marrant, among others, Newman explores these tales as literacy events, arguing that "captives read and wrote with the presumption that their captors did not—or should not" (p. 7). He describes his approach as "admittedly Eurocentric," and primarily about the "subjective experience of the colonists" who found themselves in captivity, able to return to their colonial homes, and likewise, able to communicate their experience in writing (p. 7). This framing suggests a more limited analysis than the book generally employs, and perhaps does a disservice to Newman's many insightful readings. His focus on settler captives aptly reveals how they used literacy, books, and the written word to distinguish themselves from their Indigenous captors. Newman asks historians and literary scholars to think about the nature of captivity narratives as both primary sources (history) and as texts (literature). The result is a thoughtful meditation on the role of allegory in how settler captives understood their captivity, but also how their captivity narratives expose the "ethnohistorical basis for representations of cultural contact" (p. 16). Newman is...