“As
he wounded me with one hand, so he healed me with the other”: The Dual
and Dueling
Narrative Voices in The
Sovereignty and Goodness of God and The
Narrative of Robert Adams
By
Brandon Weaver, University
of Washington, Seattle
The
genre of the captivity narrative, through the 17th and 18th centuries,
covered
an expansive geo-cultural area and throughout that time, developed
several
interesting conventions. One of the most intriguing of these
conventions is the
tendency of many narratives to exhibit multiple voices within a single
work.
While the specific significance of this multiplicity varies from text
to text,
the dual (and dueling) voices are consistently indicative of a desire
to
propagate “the captives’ histories for didactic purposes of their own.”[1]
Though written nearly 150 years apart, this
dual presence of authorship is evident in both Mary Rowlandson’s The
sovereignty and goodness of God and Robert Adam’s The narrative of
Robert Adams.[2]
Both narratives were sponsored by a dominant group who then manipulated
the
text to serve their own interests. Ultimately, the shift in the aim of
these
interests signifies a shift in geo-political policy, consistently
promoting
increasingly imperialistic ideologies.
While it is unclear exactly how much authorial control Mary Rowlandson had over her narrative, it is clear that there are two main voices. The dominant voice, potentially penned by the Mathers who sponsored the narratives’ publication, represented the Puritan community, utilizing scripture and giving the events of the narrative meaning in relationship to the word and will of God. The second voice is that Rowlandson herself and represents a profound “emphasis on personal agency,” in both physical needs and “in the workings of salvation.”[3] The conflict of narrative’s subtext is carefully, though not entirely subtly, situated on the fault line between these two voices, each one vying for a claim on the reader’s interpretation.
Since the text was written for an entirely Puritan audience, it is not surprising that the scriptural voice would have a dominant presence in the narrative. In fact, the scripture in The sovereignty and goodness of God is nearly ubiquitous, highlighting the events of the narrative through reflection and instruction. Outside of the narrative, for the Puritan reader, the scripture held three functions. First, through sheer number, the scripture demonstrates that the hand of God is in everything. As Rowlandson crosses a river, she quotes, “When thou passeth through the waters, I will be with thee.”[4] Later she generalizes this sentiment, citing “Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?” demonstrating that that God is ultimately in control, even of evil, and therefore scripture can be applied at any moment.[5] It is important for the scriptural voice to reinforce this point, as one of the explicit purposes of the narrative as a whole is to explicate Rowlandson’s captivity in terms of God’s Will.
Secondly,
the scripture demonstrates the healing power of the Bible and to this
end
Rowlandson references many Psalms, which often have to do with
suffering and
are meant to uplift. Thirdly and most importantly, the scripture serves
to
legitimize the narrative as a rebuke by giving it God’s authority
rather than relying
on that of human’s. In this way, the narrative functions as a Jeremiad,
which
“accused New England of backsliding from the high ideals and noble
achievements
of the founders, of God’s evident or impending wrath, and of the need
for
immediate and thorough reformation.”[6]
To this end, Rowlandson writes “I saw how in
my walk with God, I had been a careless creature,” citing the verse
“Father I
have sinned against heaven and in thy sight,” in order to draw a
parallel
between her plight and spiritual shortcoming, which by association,
asserts her
community’s spiritual shortcoming.[7]
Ultimately, the effect of all three of these
functions is to demonstrate the benefit of immersing oneself in the
awareness
of God and thereby to warn the community of the dangers from straying
from the
‘hedge’ both physically and spiritually. In this sense, the
documentation of
affliction was to meant to “call [the Mathers’] congregations and the
entire
community back to the founding covenant.”[8]
This covenant “depended on the entire
company’s adherence to the community.[9]
In this formulation, a single member’s error
was cause for punishment of the entire colony. The scriptural voice of
the
narrative emphasizes this with the first sentence of ‘The First
Remove,’
reading “now away we
must go with those barbarous
creatures.”[10]
Here, the ‘we’ of the sentence serves to
include the Puritan reader in the sense of affliction and thereby
promote and
maintain the corporate covenant. Effectively, the to the Puritans,
their
community represented a sort of New-Israel, as God’s chosen people and
underlying this belief was the doctrine of corporate covenant, that
“God…would
protect and prosper His newly chosen people—if they
remained true to His laws and steadfast in their faith.”[11]
To this end, the Mathers would instruct those who left the ‘hedge’ of
the
“horrors they might encounter as punishment for their restlessness and
inconsistency.”[12]
Mary
Rowlandson being taken prisoner. From A Narrative of the Captivity,
Sufferings, and Removes, of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Boston:
Thomas and Fleet, 1791), 1.
Image Source: Internet Archive
It is in this instruction that the duel of the voices is centered. While the most obvious ‘other’ in the narrative is the ‘heathen’ Native Americans, Fitzpatrick notes that Rowlandson “relied on two such “others”.” [13] In opposition to the Mathers’ attempts to “enforce boundaries,” Rowlandson “came instead to explode them, to sanction the venture of the individual into the wilderness.” [14] Ironically, the very detachment from the ‘hedge’ allowed her to be tested and reassure herself of her salvation, providing a level of experience of the ‘sovereignty and goodness of God’ that the community could not equal. Rowlandson’s depiction of the wilderness as a catalyst for individual redemption, then, embodied the heart of the narrative’s subversive implications.
It is probable that the Mathers were aware of this conflict as they attempted to address it, “at once decrying the sinfulness of the generation that had tempted God’s fury by straying from the ‘hedge’ of the covenanted community and then extolling the enlightenment accessible only to those whom God had chosen to try by fire in the wilderness.” [15] The scriptural voice attempts to resolve this conflict as Rowlandson writes that, though she deserved worse punishment, “the Lord showed mercy to me and upheld me, as He wounded me with one hand, so He healed me with the other.” [16] The Mathers, however, never moved any further than this vague ambivalence and any sense of resolution fades alongside Rowlandson’s sensational acts of individualism.
Rowlandson’s very survival depended in large part, on her ability to make clothes, which not only made her worth keeping to the natives, but also allowed her to barter for food. This coupled with other sensational individual acts like stealing food from a child to avoid starvation, represented a radical departure from the communal structure of the Puritan congregation. Furthermore, regardless of the degree, the fact that Rowlandson is the first person narrator the story challenges the “traditionally masculine authority and authorship central to Puritan sexual order.” [17] Rowlandson’s womanhood was a threat to both the gendered hierarchy of the Puritan society and the gendered rhetoric of a ‘virgin’ forest; “the atomizing tendencies of the women’s narratives had challenged the theological unity of the community.” [18] In danger of losing control as the rudder of Puritan theology, Cotton Mather responded to these threats by revising “the national covenant so as to de-emphasize the collective meaning of personal affliction and to stress instead its importance in the individual drama of redemption or in the national drama of self preservation.” [19]
Thus, the dual voices of Mathers and Rowlandson represent a conflict of dueling soteriological philosophies. On one hand, the Mathers’ dominant and explicit ideology of corporate covenant, as symbolized by the ‘hedge’ of the church, was challenged on the other hand, by a subversive and implicit ideology of individual, unmediated salvation found in the wilderness. In order to maintain control of the Puritan community, the Mathers reconfigured the role of the wilderness and expanded the scope of the dominant voice in the narratives, ultimately prefiguring the trend of national discourse about international conflict that pervaded future captivity narratives.
This international discourse is evidenced by the fact that “at the time of the war for in independence,” obviously a time of international conflict, “colonists increasingly viewed themselves as captives to a tyrannical king…and Indian captivity narratives…enjoyed a renewed readership.” [20] Alongside this new reading of the narrative, the Barbary captivity displayed international tension and “invoked public subscriptions for ransom funds, forced the government to pay humiliating tributes in cash and military arms to African rulers…and brought about the first postrevolutionary [U.S.] war.” [21] In this sense, they were truly international accounts and The narrative of Robert Adams is no exception. While within the plot of the narrative Adams was neither “held hostage by a nation seeking tribute,” nor concerned with national profit himself, the national interest disseminated from the sponsors of the narrative, the London based African Company [22] who wished to gather information about the fabled city of wealth, ‘Tombuctoo,’ to which Adams had traveled. [23]
“Adams is
discovered in the Tent with Isha,” from Charles Ellms,
Robinson Crusoe's own book; or, The voice of adventure, from the
civilized man cut off from his fellows, by force, accident, or
inclination, and from the wanderer in strange seas and lands
(Boston: J.V. Pierce, 1843), 425.
Image
Source: Google Books
It is to this economic end that narrative is directed, rather than spiritual, as the complete absence of scripture highlights the largest difference between the later Barbary narrative and the earlier captivity narratives. Although Adams refuses to renounce his religion for that of the ‘Mahometan’, unlike the other ‘white’ captives, Williams and Davidson, this decision is more akin to individualism and aversion to the ‘other’ rather than devout faith. [24] Joseph Dupuis, the author of footnotes of the narrative, admits that he “had difficulty at first believing [Adams] a Christian.” [25] In fact, Adams hardly practices his religion, described as “a Christian, who never prayed,” and much more than that, one who had affairs with married women as the “narrative strongly implies that he seduced his master’s wife.” [26] Instead of relying on scripture as a justification for the text, “the message of this Barbary captivity story is subsumed by the recorder’s devotion not to Adams’ personal experience as a captive but to the recorder’s concern for accurate information about Timbuktu.” [27] In this way, without a scriptural backbone driving the dominant voice of the text, Robert Adams’ narrative becomes a piece of imperial propaganda promoting the search, and presumably occupation, of African countries for wealth.
Though Adams’ narrative was the only Barbary captivity narrated by and African-American, this is only barely true, as the story is heavily mediated and told in the third person through a white member of the African Company. It is in this narrative conquest that the dual and dueling voices become apparent. Baepler summarizes the conflict of the two narrative implications, writing, “while eventually presented as the ostensible memoir of an American in Africa, the narrative actually stages a larger drama about racial struggle.” [28] In this sense, replacing the scriptural dominant voice, is an imperial dominant voice with the events of Adams’ actual captivity assuming the role of the subversive implicit narrative. The subversive content is held in the fact that Adams’ narrative ultimately confounds any assumption about race. His mother was ‘mulatto,’ so Adams’ skin was certainly darker than most Americans, and he was indeed labeled African-American and yet when Joseph Dupuis first saw Adams he noted “the appearance, features and dress of this man upon his arrival at Mogadore, so perfectly resembled those of an Arab.”[29] Furthermore, when the people of Timbuktu take Adams captive, he notes that he “could not hear that any white man but themselves had ever been seen in the place.”[30]
In the mid-nineteenth century, while the United States was in a bitter debate about the question of black slavery, “white intellectuals also battled over the concept of ‘race’ as a significant category.”[31] Adams’ narrative then, in which he is at once represented as Black, White and Arab, presented a problematic situation for those who held that “race was a biological determinant,” and instead strongly suggests that race is “a rhetorical ordering principle imposed on people to make sense on the economic and political hierarchies.”[32] It is out of an ideology derived from these hierarchies that the African Company’s economic desires, as many imperial projects, were instigated. The problem is that the representation of the Africans as barbarous assumes that they are biologically inferior to the English. To admit, as Adams’ shifting racial identity seems to suggest, that race is an imposed category is to admit that England is the imposer, destroying the possibility for their imperial pursuits to be in any way just.
In order to avoid this conflict, the imperial narrative subjects Adams’ to a sort of narrative captivity in order to disregard the contradictions implicit in England’s ideology. Commonly, in order to justify imperial acts, the assailing nation will depict the opposite people as subhuman or barbarous. For this reason, “Adams’ editor writes the account in the third person” so that “his thoughts and feelings are absent” thereby dehumanizing him and disallowing the typical narrative “plea for empathetic readerly response.”[33] His dehumanization takes on racial connotations in light of the fact that, though Adams notes that he “never saw the Negroes find any gold,” and that the city was not the glistening capital of riches as was commonly held, this fact was not accepted until a white explorer confirmed it years later.[34]
Once he no longer held authorial status, “Adams’ account was carefully sandwiched between the editor’s justificatory preface and an overwhelming sheaf of endnotes” because “white authentication was more important than black story telling, so that the ‘black message was sealed within a white envelope’.”[35] Effectively captured, the preface justifies the narrative by appealing to the “hope that, the man [Adams] might be rendered useful to the government in the exploratory expedition then on its way to Africa.”[36] Though England had already outlawed de facto slavery, there is a no apparent aversion to use Adams for its own profit. Despite the fact that Adams desperately wanted to return to America from England, as the two were about to go to war, the African Company “recommended [the editor] to omit no practicable means of securing the residence of Adams” in England.[37] The term “practicable” here is hazy at best as it assumes a certain morality, which implodes through the immorality of the act of narration. According to Edward Said, “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging is very important to the culture of imperialism.”[38] Thus, by subjugating Adams’ to narrative slavery, blocking the narrative of race as a construction as opposed to biological inferiority from forming or emerging, England instigated and reinforced their imperial assumption of dominance through narrative.
It to this end, the movement toward the construction of imperial justifications, that the captivity narratives progressed. Interestingly, the dual voices of the narratives document, not only a physical captivity, but also a socio-political or socio-cultural captivity as well. In this sense, the narratives become vessels of the ideologies of their time, enacting rigorous and profound, though subtle, cultural work on the society in which it was disseminated and thereby reinforcing the dominant ideology. Although Rowlandson initially attempted to subvert the dueling master/slave duality implicit in the narrative by praising an individualism set apart from the constraints of the dominant ideology, her narrative ultimately failed to dissemble the gender based power hierarchy. Instead, the captivity narrative alternately challenged and reinforced the dominant ideologies, leading to the explicitly imperial narrative of Robert Adams, causing socio-political actors to consistently expand their sphere of influence in order to maintain power, thereby leading toward a culture of imperialism.
Brandon
Weaver is a senior at the University of Washington in
English and the
Comparative History of Ideas program. He is broadly interested in the
social
function of narrative and is currently working on his undergraduate
thesis
concerning literature of the Roma. He was recently awarded the Eilert
Anderson
Scholarship by the English Department.
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Endnotes
[1] Tara Fitzpatrick. “The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of the Puritan Captivity Narrative,” American Literary History 4, no.1 (1991): 2.
[2] Mary Rowlandson, “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God,” in Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, Puritans among the Indians: accounts of captivity and redemption, 1676-1724, eds. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark , John Harvard library (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1981), 31-78; Robert Adams, “The Narrative of Robert Adams,” in White slaves, African masters: an anthology of American barbary captivity narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 205-246.
[3] Ibid., 3.
[4] Rowlandson, 43.
[5] Ibid., 58.
[6] Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, “Cups of Common Calamity: Puritan Captivity Narratives as Literature and History,” in Puritans among the Indians: accounts of captivity and redemption, 1676-1724, John Harvard library, eds. Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1981), 7.
[7] Rowlandson, 56.
[8] Fitzpatrick, 4.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Rowlandson, 35. Emphasis mine.
[11] Vaughan and Clark, 8.
[12] Fitzpatrick, 13.
[13] Ibid., 3.
[14] Ibid., 21
[15] Ibid., 9.
[16] Rowlandson, 38.
[17] Fitzpatrick, 5.
[18] Ibid., 19.
[19] Ibid., 18.
[20] Paul Michel Baepler, “Introduction,” in White slaves, African masters: an anthology of American barbary captivity narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 24.
[21] Ibid., 2.
[22] Also called the African Association. See Baepler, 20.
[23] Ibid., 20
[24] Adams, 241.
[25] Ibid., 211, fn.
[26] Ibid., 237. See also Baepler, 17.
[27] Baepler, 21.
[28] Ibid., 26.
[29] Adams, 213, 211.
[30] Ibid., 229. Emphasis mine.
[31] Baepler, 26.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., 21.
[34] Adams, 229. See also Baepler, 20.
[35] Baepler, 20.
[36] Adams, 208.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Baepler, 32.