A LEXANDER S TARRE Wilderness Woes: Negotiating Discourse and Environment in Early American Captivity Narratives 1 Introduction 1 In 2002, the critic Michael Branch complained that current ecocriticism has voluntarily and unnecessarily limited its focus. He detected a drift in the pertinent academic literature toward “the nonfiction personal essay that sympathetically describes nature” (“Saving” 5) and warned that disregarding authors “because their understanding of the natural world is predicated upon ideological or aesthetic assumptions different from our own” would prove detrimental to the young critical approach (“Saving” 6). 2 Branch’s complaint might have already been obsolete at the time of its publication. In the past years, anthologies and essay collections in the field have assembled an impressive array of material on all kinds of authors and texts. 3 It seems as if the classical writers of the American ‘environmental imagination’ like Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman find themselves in an ever-enlarging community. This may be an indicator that ecocriticism is still in a phase of expansion after having gained a strong foothold thanks to the work of critics like Lawrence Buell, who recently diagnosed: “Right now, as I see it, environmental criticism is in the tense but enviable position of being a wide-open movement still sorting out its premises and its powers” (Future 28). The following reflects this expansion in a two-fold manner. I will focus on texts that have rarely been discussed in an ecocritical framework and that are often associated with a generally hostile ideological perspective on the environment. Furthermore, my area of inquiry provides a historical dimension to the current study of conceptualizations of natural space. I will mainly be concerned with two Puritan captivity narratives, namely The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc. (1736) by John Gyles. These writers were captured during a period of warfare that lasted from the late 17th until the early 18th century - most notably King Philip’s War from 1675-76. 4 1 I would like to thank Daniel Stein and Kirsten Sandrock for comments and suggestions. 2 See also Branch, “Before”, in which he outlines the same problem and provides ecocritical readings of William Wood and Cotton Mather. 3 The very volumes in which Branch’s essays were published fulfill his call for an extended focus. See Rosendale; Armbruster and Wallace. 4 The brutality and the horrific death toll of King Philip's War have been thoroughly studied. For the sake of overcoming a purely anthropocentric view of this time of war, I A LEXANDER S TARRE 274 Mary Rowlandson spent eleven weeks in captivity in 1676; John Gyles was abducted from his home in Maine in 1689 during what came to be called King Williams War. He was not able to return until 1698. These two authors were situated at different points in the social sphere of colonial New England. As the wife of a Puritan minister in the frontier town of Lancaster, Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson stands in sharp contrast to the simple farmer’s son John Gyles, who spent almost ten years in Indian 5 captivity as a young boy. Readings of these texts thus promise to reflect the captivity experience from different authorial standpoints and to yield insights into their respective perspectives on nature and space. In a first step, I will examine the Puritan wilderness discourse and the rhetorical negotiations that occur when this discourse is brought “to the touchstone of nature,” to borrow a phrase by Thomas Paine (26). The second section contains analyses of the rhetorical strategies of drawing the border between civilization and wilderness. The last part of this paper examines exemplary traces the New England environment left in the narratives. Throughout these exploratory remarks I will indicate how the study of Early American captivity narratives may benefit from a critical approach which has absorbed some of the tenets of ecocriticism - most notably by critically engaging with what Buell has called “the environmental embeddedness of human being and history” (Buell, “Green” 46). In Rowlandson’s and Gyles’s narrative accounts of captivity, we perceive the outcome of a clash between two spheres that form the central components of ecocritical exploration: human discourse and the empirical world, or - to phrase it in terms more appropriate to cultural theory - text and context. It is my contention that the New England environment shaped the captives’ narratives in multiple ways and at least to the same extent as their transcultural interaction with the Indian tribes did. While the latter topic has been amply discussed, the former is still a lacuna in scholarship with regard to captivity narratives. 2 The Puritan Wilderness Discourse Their direct relation to the place that was conceptualized in Puritan 6 intellectual discourse as the ‘wilderness’ sets the representations of natural envimostly disregard the human tragedies connected with it. An insightful account of the war's cultural roots and repercussions can be found in Lepore. 5 For the remainder of the paper, members of the Native American tribes that lived in the area of today’s New England states and Southern Canada will be called ‘Indians.’ This terminology is in keeping with the historical sources as well as with most studies of captivity narratives. 6 The term ‘Puritan’ itself has come under scrutiny in American Studies. To stress the numerous internal differences and schisms within the New England religious community, scholars have proposed alternatives such as ‘godly’ or ‘post-Puritan’ (Herget 34-35). Since the term ‘Puritan’ still dominates scholarly discourse, this paper will follow the majority usage. Wilderness Woes 275 ronments in Rowlandson’s and Gyles’s captivity narratives apart from other writings of the colonial period, such as sermons, memoirs, and poetry. Furthermore, captivity narratives were immensely popular with the yet small English-speaking American readership. 7 In New Historicist terms, it is fair to assume that due to their wide circulation, the ‘cultural work’ of these texts significantly influenced late-18th-century New Englanders’ ideas about and practices toward their environment. In order to make their narratives resonate with a reading public that was used to a highly theological rhetoric, the former captives had to come to terms with a nature discourse that was centered on a biblical concept of the wilderness. According to Leo Marx, two competing ideas of American nature coexisted in 17th-century England: “[T]he hideous wilderness appears at one end and the garden at the other” (42). The latter image is connected to the pastoral tradition and does not figure strongly in captivity narratives. The romantic literary vision of a pastoral lifestyle served the needs of British society at the time, which faced an enormous population growth while its landscapes became increasingly cultivated. This vision did not translate well to the American colonies, where settlers encountered nature as a dangerous adversary. One of the key claims that scholarship on Early America has made is that the Puritan settlers had a clear idea of what they would find in the ‘New World’ before they even embarked on their voyage there: “Derived largely from Biblical metaphors, these concepts provided New Englanders with elaborate rhetorical devices with which they could judge their own experiences” (Carroll 2). Therefore, the first settlers who had neither seen the American continent nor heard exact descriptions of the conditions in New England nevertheless had very detailed expectations based on their readings of the Bible. Through their interpretation of the Old Testament and fueled by the exegetical doctrine of Typology, Puritans found North American landscapes pre-figured in the Bible: “In this sense the colonists’ conception of the wilderness was more a product of the Old World than of the New” (Nash 35). The “Biblical metaphors” mentioned by Carroll derive from the usage of the term ‘wilderness’ in the English translation of the Bible. From the 14 th century on, the term was here used for “the uninhabited, arid land of the Near East in which so much of the action of the Testaments occurred” (Nash 2-3). 8 The Israelites’ Exodus out of Egypt under the guidance of Moses (Exodus 13-19) is one of the important wilderness-passages of the Bible; within the interpretive system of typology it forms an Old Testament type for which the real American environment could be construed as the anti-type. In the 7 Soon after its publication, Rowlandson’s book was the second most popular book in America, surpassed only by the Bible (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 14). 8 Nash holds that the early Germanic meaning of the term designated uncultivated, woody Northern European landscapes. This interpretation still affects today’s German usage of the term. The use of ‘wilderness’ to describe the deserts of the Bible therefore appears to be a thorough re-interpretation of the term (cf. Nash 1-4). A LEXANDER S TARRE 276 book of Deuteronomy, the Israelites are admonished not to forget this Exodus and to honor “the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; / Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were 9 fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water” (Deut 8: 15). 10 The Biblical wilderness we perceive in these lines appears as essentially empty, except for some wild animals. There is no civilization and no water, and consequently no vegetation. The empty wilderness is a topos that recurs in a number of Puritan texts. Significantly, this topos does not only serve illustrative and imaginative purposes, it also provides a (legal) rationale for the appropriation of the land. A classic example is John Cotton’s lay sermon “God’s Promise to His Plantations” from 1630 in which he describes what the settlers will find on the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean. His central point is that the settlers can declare the land as their own because it is uncultivated. The image of the empty wilderness makes a return here: “in a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is […]. If therefore any sonne of Adam come and finde a place empty, he hath liberty to come, and fill, and subdue the earth there” (67). The ethnocentric European view expressed here does not allow for a system of social organization in which individual land ownership is either not known at all or organized according to different standards. In the English settlers’ view the Indians had forfeited their right to the land by not cultivating it. 11 This biblical concept of ‘wilderness as desert’ could of course not be fully applied to the densely forested landscapes of New England. This discrepancy between a biblical concept and empirical landscapes is already obvious in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, written in the 1620s. When the narrator of Bradford’s account surveys the coast from the ship, he describes the reaction of his group: “Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, fall [sic] of wild beasts and wild men […]” (70). This short excerpt contains a paradoxical construction which pervades Bradford’s text. The word “desolate,” meaning ‘barren’ or ‘deserted,’ refers to the biblical desert, but the New England wilderness is full of humans and animals. Furthermore, it is full of trees: “[…] the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue” (Bradford 70). The evidence of fertility does not keep the narrator from quoting a biblical Psalm in which the arid desert is mentioned: “When they wandered in the desert wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in, both hungry and thirsty, their soul 9 The use of italics in this paper follows the source texts from which quotations were taken. This holds especially for Rowlandson, whose narrative contains a large amount of italicized passages. 10 For discussions of the Exodus in connection with the Puritans see Carroll 61-126, Herget 39-43. 11 Cf. Herget 42. Wilderness Woes 277 was overwhelmed in them” (Bradford 71). 12 Reconciling the biblical deserts of the Middle East with the flourishing New England landscape was almost impossible - yet the comparisons lingered within Puritan wilderness discourse. The general Puritan attitude towards the unsettled areas of America was thus a negative one: “[T]heir Bibles contained all they needed to know in order to hate wilderness. Contact with the North American wilderness only supplemented what the Puritans already believed” (Nash 35). The Puritan understanding of wilderness, however, encompassed other interpretations as well: “For some, New England signified the New Canaan; others anticipated a barren wasteland; some regarded America as a land of spiritual darkness; and an important segment of the ministry lauded the New World as a refuge” (Carroll 8). A spiritual interpretation of the American wilderness, which disregarded physical reality, was also popular. In this view, the wild country was the abode of the devil; it was a place that had not yet been reached by the word of God and was therefore in a fallen state: “To many, the savage state of the wilderness signified Satanic power; they were convinced that America, the land of spiritual darkness, was the realm of the Antichrist” (Carroll 11). This interpretation had the advantage of providing a symbolic place for the Indians who did not figure strongly in the wilderness-as-desert topos: in the “spiritual darkness” the Indians were construed as accomplices of the devil. 13 Part of the Puritan mission was therefore to convert the Indians to Christianity. The wilderness topos was flexible enough to be used for positive commentary as well. After all, the barren landscapes through which Moses and his compatriots had to march had also been a place of supreme revelation. The hardships of the barren land were seen as tests for their faith; by enduring these tests the Israelites strengthened their commitment to God. Hence, the symbolic wilderness not only figured as a detestable place, it also held an inherent promise. While the confrontation with the American wilderness was felt most intensely by the first settlers, the sharp increase in Anglo-American population over the course of the 17 th century transformed New England into a society increasingly occupied with commercial and regulatory concerns. At midcentury, Edward Johnson turned his eyes away from the wilderness and focused on the achievements of the English communities: [The] remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness […] now through the mercy of Christ becom [sic] a second England for fertilness in so short a space, that it is indeed the wonder of the world […]. 12 Psalm 107: 4-5 13 Cf. Carroll 11, 76-79, 123-24; Nash 36-37. A LEXANDER S TARRE 278 Further, the Lord hath been pleased to turn all the wigwams, huts, and hovels the English dwelt in at their first coming, into orderly, fair, and well-built houses, well furnished many of them, together with Orchards filled with goodly fruit trees, and gardens with variety of flowers […]. (210-11) During this relatively peaceful time, Johnson sees a vanishing wilderness and sketches a pastoral vision of New England. In 1670, however, Samuel Danforth’s jeremiad sermon “A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness” marks the return of the wilderness topos to the realm of public discourse. The strong conviction that the people of New England had strayed from the path started by the Pilgrim Fathers and had fallen into a state of declension prompted ministers like Danforth to use the wilderness as a threatening motif in their speeches. An increase in natural disasters supposedly showed God’s displeasure: “Why hath the Lord smitten us with […] severe Drought, […] great Tempests, Floods, and sweeping Rains, that leave no food behind them? ” (Danforth 168). On the other hand, Danforth emphasizes that the settlers left their “pleasant Cities and Habitations” to “enjoy the pure Worship of God in a Wilderness” (155). He condemns the pursuit of worldly goods and holds that the wild American environment is the proper cure for any civilized vanities. The Indians do not figure in Danforth’s sermon, possibly due to the (relatively) peaceful relations at this point in history. While the first-generation towns had been built along the coast, by the 1970s white settlers had ventured deeper inland to establish communities in the midst of the wilderness. Settlements like Rowlandson’s hometown Lancaster lay far away from the centers of New England society such as Boston or Salem. However, with the outbreak of King Philip’s War in 1675, the fragile state of white civilization became apparent: “As the Indians rampaged through the countryside and destroyed numerous towns, the immense dangers of the war reminded second-generation New Englanders that the wilderness continued to be a hostile environment” (Carroll 206). In this context, the first captivity narratives were written. In the form of the well-established wilderness discourse of the preceding decades a whole theological lexicon for the description of nature lay at their disposal. The Puritan wilderness discourse thus contains a multitude of possible connotations. ‘Wild’ areas were seen as being in a fallen state, yet they also were an appealing location for testing one’s faith; physical aspects intermingled with spiritual ones. For the literary scholar, the testimonies of Puritan captives are a treasure chest of references to both cultural concepts and natural spaces. 3 Are We There Yet? While academics commonly approach the dichotomy of nature and culture as a social construct, this distinction nevertheless influences how humans con- Wilderness Woes 279 ceptualize themselves and their environment. The imagined spatial boundaries of the environment determine how societies use, preserve, or destroy the empirical signified of their discursive signifiers. Reading captivity narratives, one immediately becomes aware of the stark contrasts between the places which the captives call home and the territory into which they are forced. In Rowlandson’s story, this difference overshadows the initial moments of her captivity. The narration begins, quite typically, in medias res 14 : “On the tenth of February 1675, came the Indians with great numbers upon Lancaster […]” (68). The narrator provides no introduction about her life prior to the gruesome events, nor does she introduce herself at all. 15 The scene she unfolds in the first paragraph is one of gore and murder. She mentions eight individual inhabitants of Lancaster who, in one way or another, fall victims to the raiding Indians. The description of this scene is saturated with gruesome details, which sets the gloomy tone for the narrative (re-)creation of an imaginary space in the ensuing chapters. The first place which carries figurative meaning is the Rowlandsons’ house: “At length they came and beset our own house, and quickly it was the dolefullest day that ever mine eyes saw. The House stood upon the edge of the hill; some of the Indians got behind the hill, others into the Barn, and others behind any thing that could shelter them […]” (ibid.). The focus here shifts to Rowlandson as the protagonist of the story. In little snapshots, the beginning foreshadows the fate that now seems to await the narrator. The description of the house, however, deserves a closer look. As a young frontier town, Lancaster lacked fortifications, so the Indians did not have to fight to get inside the village. Instead, each individual house served both as home and as protection for the inhabitants. Accordingly, Rowlandson describes how the people fled from the Indians to their houses. The location of the Rowlandson house, even more than the others, is presented as a liminal space. It was erected close to the surrounding woods, and is situated “upon the edge of a hill” (68). Within Rowlandson’s plot, the house appears as the last resort of civilization against the forces of nature. Its physical location prefigures its precarious state in confrontation with the enemy. Moreover, the hill is an elevated area, which can be read as a statement on the moral standing of the community. The higher altitude reminiscent of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” - reflects the high degree of culture; to be taken captive by the Indians means to go down from that hill into the lower regions. It is furthermore remarkable that the family chooses to fight for the house instead of running away into the woods in order to flee the Indians. The struggle of the inhabitants of Lancaster appears to be as 14 Cf. Derounian-Stodola and Levernier: “Indeed, this method of beginning in the midst of the action became typical of the form, especially in its shorter versions” (96). 15 “The Preface to the Reader,” most likely written by Increase Mather, precedes the original and most subsequent editions. It introduces Rowlandson, provides a short sketch of the events which led to the attack on Lancaster, and explicitly presents the text as an example of God’s workings. A LEXANDER S TARRE 280 much a struggle for a physical place as it is a symbolic struggle for social and moral order. At the end of this introductory passage, the narrator states: “and that I may better declare what happened to me during that grievous Captivity, I shall particularly speak of the severall Removes we had up and down the Wilderness” (70). This is the first instance in which the narrator uses the word “wilderness”; and even more interestingly she automatically qualifies this space as having a concrete measure. By stating that one can travel “up and down” the wilderness, the narrator demonstrates that for her, wilderness - at least in this instance - is decidedly not a spiritual or biblical category but a territory in New England. Virtually all studies of Rowlandson associate her notion of wilderness with her Puritan beliefs and interpret it as an imagined biblical terrain which was not actually there. While these readings have done much to illuminate the mindset of Rowlandson and other Puritan captives, one has to take a step back and fully appreciate that the narrator also explicitly refers to a specific physical space. The second important word in this passage is “removes”; the narrator neither talks of ‘marches,’ nor of ‘travels,’ nor of ‘voyages.’ By using the term ‘remove,’ Rowlandson implicitly creates a spatial location of belonging - her home. The word implies a move away from something: being ‘removed’ is being absent from a specific place. The OED shows that the noun ‘remove’ in the sense of “[t]he […] act of changing one’s place […]; departure to another place” (“Remove,” def. 5a) was commonly used from the beginning of the 17th to the middle of the 18th century and then became less and less common. A second meaning of the word was “[t]he space or interval by which one person or thing is remote from another, in time, place, condition, etc.; distance” (“Remove,” def. 6a). In both variants, the term functions like a deictic expression, placing the subject at a distance from a known location. Rowlandson thereby establishes a linguistic point of origin in Lancaster from which she strays further away with each remove. The term bears an important religious significance as well: Readers familiar with Puritan rhetoric would have been primed to also hear the deeper sense of removal in Mary’s text - God’s affection had been removed or withdrawn. The growing sense of distance - both spatial and spiritual - the captive had experienced with each successive remove would also have been felt by the reader through the act of reading. (Ebersole 21) By no means should the spiritual aspect of the narrator’s rhetoric be neglected. However, an exclusive focus on this religious subtext tilts the meanings the text tries to convey heavily towards the intangible realm. It cannot suffice to assert that the text has both concrete and spiritual meaning, and then ignore the concrete part, as Ebersole mostly does. One has to remember that while The Sovereignty and Goodness of God might be read as a parable, it is first and foremost the testimony of one woman at one point in time and in a specific place. Wilderness Woes 281 Interestingly enough, the first remove does not lead the narrator directly into the wilderness. Although she states, “Now away we must go […]” (70), the first leg of the journey only takes the company of Indians and captives to a “hill within sight of the Town” (70). For Rowlandson it is especially torturing to be in sight of what she views as civilization, while already having entered the wilderness. During the first night with the Indians, she longs to keep up the appearance of her regular life and sleep in a house: “There was hard by a vacant house (deserted by the English before, for fear of the Indians). I asked them whither I might not lodge in the house that night to which they answered, what will you love English men still? ” (71). The Indians’ deliberate misunderstanding shows the different spatial value systems of the two cultures. The Indians do not seem to understand that a house can have an intrinsic worth. The narrator obviously longed for the shelter of the house, but the Indian captors surmise that she misses the English people. In the chapter about the first remove, the narrator momentarily halts the plot and switches to a reflective mode. She enumerates everything she has lost during the raid: “All was gone, my Husband gone […] my children gone, my Relations and Friends gone, our House and home and all our comforts within door and, without, all was gone (except my life), and I knew not but the next moment that might go too” (71). On a more abstract level, Rowlandson bemoans the loss of place 16 ; she has become place-less. One aspect that feeds her anxiety about the wilderness is therefore her lack of any attachment to it. She defines herself as member of her community, as her husband’s wife, as her children’s mother, and as the owner of certain “comforts.” 17 Outside of this context, however, she loses her identity. The reason for her plight at this stage is not so much what her new environment is, but much more what it is not. The second remove then takes the narrator into a new space for good: “But now, the next morning, I must turn my back upon the Town, and travel with them into the vast and desolate Wilderness, I knew not whither” (71). “Vast and desolate” are terms taken straight from the Bible. The narrator employs the topos of the empty, deserted wilderness when calling it “desolate,” the term meaning a place that is “in ruinous state or neglected condition” or “without sign of life, bare of trees or herbage, barren” (“Desolate,” def. 5a and b). By employing the orthodox Puritan wilderness discourse, she attaches negative meaning to a space that she has not yet described in detail. The narrator’s introductory sentence contains a paradoxical construction: although Rowlandson does not know where they are traveling to, she is nevertheless sure that it is going to be a bad place. While the reader has not had a 16 Cf. Lawrence Buell’s definition of ‘place’ as “space that is bounded and marked as humanly meaningful through personal attachment, social relations, and physiographic distinctiveness” (Future 145). See also his chapter on the “Five Dimensions of Place- Connectedness” (Writing 64-74). 17 In the field of autobiography studies, this presentation of the self has been termed “relational autobiography.” See Eakin, especially chapter 2. A LEXANDER S TARRE 282 complete rendering of her impressions of nature at this point of the plot, Rowlandson assigns a negative value to the sites she will be describing in subsequent chapters. The reader is supposed to imagine an implied author who records the events as they unfold, not somebody who chronicles her experiences years later. Later in the narrative, when Lancaster is finally out of sight and the narrator spends her first night in cold snow on the bare ground, Rowlandson has left one space and entered another. Her barrier between wilderness and civilization is therefore firmly tied to visual impressions: as long as she can still see (white) civilization, she is not in nature. Only when she loses sight of it has she entered a new realm. Rowlandson’s construction of an imaginary boundary seems intricate enough. However, there is more than one borderline of the wilderness in her story. While being in natural surroundings, the narrator even distinguishes different degrees of wilderness: But to return to my own Journey, we travelled about half a day or little more and came to a desolate place in the Wilderness where there were no Wigwams or Inhabitants before; we came about the middle of the afternoon to this place; cold and wet, and snowy, and hungry, and weary, and no refreshing, for man, but the cold ground to sit on […]. (78) This episode occurs during the fourth remove, i.e. at a point in the story when Rowlandson has already been immersed in the wilderness. In reverse, her statement implies that up to this point she has not been in a true wilderness since it had still been populated and that only now she has entered a truly untouched part of the land. She also associates the Indians and their wigwams with the wilderness. This “desolate place” would then be a more natural wilderness, while the land that had already been shaped by the Indians was a somewhat more cultured wilderness. During the sixth remove, the narrator states: “I went along that day mourning and lamenting, leaving farther my own Country, and travelling into the vast and howling Wilderness, and I understood something of Lot’s Wife’s Temptation, when she looked back […]” (80). Again, the construction of space here seems paradoxical, or at least incoherent, since the narrator has already described the departure from Lancaster as a step into another locale. Even while positing a clear boundary between town and country, between culture and wilderness, Rowlandson blurs the categories that she has been trying to establish before. On the whole, the narrator of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God attempts to create a clear border between wilderness and civilization, often employing biblical allegories. However, in the specific description of this border region, the dividing line between the two blurs as the narrator depicts individual places within the wilderness. This results in intricate and sometimes paradoxical negotiations between a binary, biblical discourse of wilderness and the more complicated actual New England environment. Wilderness Woes 283 A close look at John Gyles’s Memoirs reveals significant divergences from the rhetorical strategies employed by Rowlandson. Gyles’s story starts with an introduction, in which he sketches a short history of his family. Chapter I begins in a generic manner with the attack of Indians, in this case at the settlement of Pemaquid in Maine. Since Gyles and his parents lived on a farm, the location of his home was not firmly anchored in that village community. Gyles’s captivity starts out in the open, and he is subsequently marched to the town itself and has to watch the Indians’ attack: The Indians led us, their captives, on the east side of the river toward the fort, and, when we came within a mile and [a] half of the fort and town and could see the fort, we saw firing and smoke on all sides. Here we made a short stop and then moved within or near the distance of three-quarters of a mile from the fort into a thick swamp. (98) While this scene resembles that of Rowlandson’s first remove, these lines do not set up a spatial contrast. Gyles even withholds possible value judgments concerning the swamp, an oft-used trope in captivity and war narratives from the colonial period. Usually, swamps are described as hiding places for wolves or Indians, both potentially threatening white travelers or soldiers. 18 In Gyles’s narrative, however, the swamp appears as a safe haven. In a later episode, he is attacked by a group of Micmac Indians who torture him in a cruel dance ceremony. His Indian master, whom the narrator presents in a rather sympathetic light, urges him to hide in a swamp to escape further torture: “My Indian master and his squaw bid me run as for my life into a swamp and hide and not to discover myself unless they both came to me…. I ran to the swamp and hid in the thickest place that I could find” (107). Obviously, the swamp could serve as “the best cover of all” (Lepore 85), not only for Indians, but also for whites. The thick bushes keep the hostile Indian party from finding Gyles in the swamp, which lends the place the positive quality of a shelter. Gyles’s first excursions with the Indians lead him through English towns to Indian villages. He resists constructing a border between the English settlements and the wilderness. In a rather simple, unadorned manner, he records the passage from one town to another and treats the Indian settlements and the woods and rivers in between as if they were one unified space: After the Indians had thus laid Waste Pemaquid, they moved us all to New Harbor. […] That night we tarried at New Harbor, and the next day went in their canoes for Penobscot. […] The next day we went up that eastern branch of Penobscot River many leagues, carried over land to a large pond, and from one pond to another till in a few days we went down a river which vents itself into St. John’s River (99-100). 18 Cf. Breitwieser 83, Cronon 133. A LEXANDER S TARRE 284 In fact, the only appearance of the word ‘wilderness’ in Gyles’s text is attributed to his mother: “Then she said, ‘Poor babe! […] We are going into the wilderness, the Lord knows where’” (99). Yet for the narrator, this word does not fit the territory he encounters. A strong sense of belonging to a settlement obviously encourages the narrative impulse to create robust spatial and evaluative boundaries between the home and the forest. For that reason, the narrator’s familial bonds to Lancaster make the transition to a new territory appear like a sharp contrast in Rowlandson’s narrative. For John Gyles’s narrator, the looser attachment to a town as well as his upbringing as a farmer’s son eradicate the need to envision a wilderness. 4 Traces of the Environment My last point concerns the interrelation between the specific environment the two exemplary captives encountered and the image of nature presented in their narratives. Within the confines of this paper, a brief sketch of how we have to envision the New England environment at the end of the 17th century will have to suffice. As a matter of necessity, this entails briefly leaving the literary domain. Very useful in its wide range of source material and its narrow historical focus is William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. According to Cronon, colonial New England was by no means one ecosystem or even one unified vegetation zone. If anything, the common characteristic of these areas was immense diversity. The landscape contained formations such as open forests, patchy swamps, as well as sandy areas (26-33). These features of the country reveal that if there was wilderness in New England, it was not one wilderness but a multitude of different wildernesses. This explains why Mary Rowlandson perceives different degrees of wilderness; in her marches through New England territory she most likely passed through a number of different vegetational and geological formations and saw different examples of Indian influence on the land. But the variety of the landscape did not only occur in space, it is also bound to a temporal dimension. The seasonal cycles in New England actually similar to the ones in ‘old’ England made the land appear very different depending on the time of the year. Cronon holds that one reason why new settlers were often disappointed by what they found in America was their reliance on promotional tracts and exploratory essays: “Most early descriptions were written by spring and summer visitors, who naturally saw only the times when fish, fruit and fowl were all too numerous to count” (35). Naturally, most explorers never spent the winter in New England since they were only there to survey, record, and then sail back home. Thus, the impressions that Europeans - and consequently also the English Puritans - had Wilderness Woes 285 prior to their journey were heavily tilted toward an ideal picture of everlasting “strawberry time” (Krech 75) in the colonies. A further problematic notion of the Puritan wilderness discourse is the belief that the New England landscape was uncultivated and untouched by human influence. Some studies of colonial literature still follow this reasoning by neglecting the Indians’ influence on the New England environment. However, especially the Indians in southern New England used the mild summer seasons to plant, raise, and harvest crops such as beans and corn (Cronon 42-48). In fact, archeological evidence shows that the Indians tended to deplete resources in certain areas so much that they often had to abandon habitations due to the infertility of the soil (Krech 76). Consequently, the ecosystem of New England was altered by the Indians - though in a way which did not reveal itself easily to European eyes. This diverse ecosystem left a multitude of traces in the captivity narratives. The importance of food for the captives illustrates some of the effects very well. The Indians dealt with the changing availability of food differently than white settlers. They expected a certain part of the year to be starving time. Consequently, Rowlandson calls her diet during her captivity “filthy trash” (79). A large part of the captives’ experience of the wilderness consisted in the complete reversal of eating practices. 19 Towards the end of her narrative, Rowlandson’s narrator includes a small section on this topic: Though many times they would eat that, that a Hog or a Dog would hardly touch; yet by that God strengthened them to be a scourge to His People. The chief and commonest food was Ground-nuts: They eat also Nuts and Acorns; Harty-choaks, Lilly roots, Ground-beans, and several other weeds and roots, that I know not. […] They would eat Horses guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild Birds which they could catch: also Bear, Venison, Beaver, Tortoise, Frogs, Squirrels, Dogs, Skunks, Rattle-snakes; yea, the very Bark of Trees […]. (106) This list of different foods is certainly intended to set the Indians apart from the white settlers; Rowlandson associates them with animals, holding that they are even lower than dogs because they eat things that dogs would not. Moreover, all the things she mentions are ‘wild,’ i.e. the plants were not planted and the animals were not raised by humans. 20 Consequently, the narrator makes the Indians appear as a merely reactive part of an ecosystem and negates their cultivating activities. She disregards practices that she herself included in her narratives, for example the large-scale planting of corn and the organized hunting expeditions of the Indian men. In Rowlandson’s 19 For an overview of the colonial American diet see Oliver. An excellent description of pre-revolutionary New England dishes and eating habits can be found on pages 150-58. To complete the picture, see the comprehensive account of Indian food in Berzok. 20 The strangeness of Indian food became a favorite topic in later captivity narratives. Especially in the 19th century, authors included “supposedly authentic Indian recipes, often as a sales gimmick” (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 108). A LEXANDER S TARRE 286 mind, wild nature supplies all the nourishment that the Indians need to survive. Furthermore, one should not forget two factors that tilted Rowlandson’s picture of the Indian food customs. First, the Narragansetts who captured her were - just like the English - engaged in warfare, which must have disrupted the regular routines of food production and storage. Secondly, her captivity lasted from late February to early May, encompassing a precarious seasonal period in terms of food supply. By this time, Indian food supplies were usually dwindling and newly planted corn was not yet ripe. Both factors most likely combined to make the winter of 1676 a highly irregular one in terms of food supply; the Indians probably had to resort to famine food in order to survive. 21 During her time of captivity, Rowlandson’s opinion of Indian food seems to change. The hurry of the flight away from English settlements usually prevented the captives from eating a lot during the first days of their journey. Her narrator remembers: The first week of my being among them, I hardly ate any thing; the second week, I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash: but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste. (79) Derounian-Stodola and Levernier interpret passages like this as an indication of a “growing preference” (92) for Indian food and even as a “subconscious identification with her captors” (93). It is more fitting, however, to look at Rowlandson’s dietary preferences from a different point of view: the more refined a certain meal becomes and the more she can compare it to an English meal, the better Rowlandson likes it. Accordingly, the typical edible plants of New England that Rowlandson has to gather at different points of the story to keep from starving are mentioned without any sensory information: “… but going out to see what I could find, and walking among the Trees, I found six Acorns, and two Chesnuts, which were some refreshment to me” (86). Although the acorns and chestnuts keep her alive, there is no pleasure in eating them. The more the Indians prepare the food and refine it, though, the more Rowlandson likes it. In the memorable scene of her first meeting with King Philip, the Indian chief provides her with food: “I went, and he gave me a Pancake, about as big as two fingers; it was made of parched wheat, beaten, and fryed in Bears grease, but I thought I never tasted pleasanter meat in my life” (83). Here, she describes food preparation extensively. In fact, there are different stages of refinement King Philip’s edible gift: first, the harvested wheat was dried, then beaten or ground into a sort of flour, and lastly shaped into a round form and 21 Even though severe famines were rare among the Northeast Indians, the tribes usually had firm eating rules in place for cases of extreme famine. Cf. Berzok 193-97. Wilderness Woes 287 fried in grease. This process appears to be so familiar that Rowlandson associates an English food with this meal and calls it a “Pancake.” In the following nostalgic passage, Rowlandson tries to retain the natureculture dichotomy: I remembered how on the night before & after the Sabbath, when my Family was about me, and Relations and Neighbours with us, we could pray and sing, and then refresh our bodies with the good creatures of God; and then have a comfortable Bed to ly down on: but in stead of all this, I had only a little Swill for the body, and then like a Swine, must ly down on the ground. (90) Inherent in this passage is a deep conviction that the civilized status of human beings is intricately tied to their diet and place: if one has a house and good food, there is no need to worry; if one has to sleep outdoors and live on a measly diet, one is no better than a pig. The phrase “good creatures of God” refers to the domesticated animals the settlers kept around their homes and consumed during weekends. 22 In reverse, animals that inhabit the forest are not ‘good’ and eating them might be harmful. In these abstract musings, Rowlandson has no problem delineating a rift between the spheres of nature and culture. However, when recounting specific events of the plot, the clear boundary between civilized and natural food disappears with each meal Rowlandson describes. She often mentions Indian “cake” (96; 92) and “broth” (95; 87), thus blurring the distinction between the food that she is used to and the food of the other. Another important aspect of the description of the procurement and consumption of food is the foregrounding of biological needs. The sensation of real, desperate hunger is portrayed as something new: “I cannot but think what a Wolvish appetite persons have in a starving condition […]. And after I was thoroughly hungry, I was never again satisfied. For though sometimes it fell out, that I got enough, and did eat till I could eat no more, yet I was as unsatisfied as I was when I began” (93). Derounian-Stodola and Levernier interpret this passage as metaphorical and equate physical with spiritual hunger (107). While this obvious reading is valid, one should be cautious not to take the second step - stylistic interpretation - before the first one. The reader should be fully aware that the type of hunger Rowlandson describes here is of a different quality than the simple appetite for food that everybody knows from daily life. Rowlandson describes a condition that brings the body to the brink of dying. Consider a passage from the very beginning: “It may be easily judged what a poor feeble condition we were in, there being not the least crumb of refreshing that came within either of our mouths, from Wednesday night to Saturday night, except only a little cold water” (Rowlandson 74). Walking for three full days under extremely arduous conditions - both mentally because of the traumatic scenes she witnesses, and physically because of the winter cold - without eating anything brings 22 The phrase ‘good creature’ stems from biblical usage (cf. 1 Tim. 4) and applies to “food and other things which minister to the material comfort of man” (“Creature,” def. 1c). A LEXANDER S TARRE 288 her body into a state that she cannot ignore: “My head was light and dizzy (either through hunger or hard lodging, or trouble or all together), my knees feeble” (78). Through this experience, she experiences her own body in a new way; she can no longer ignore the natural urges that arise from extreme hunger, threatening to keep her from walking any further and confusing her senses. Rowlandson comes to acknowledge the radical naturalness of her existence. Her starving body seems in danger of merging with the wilderness. In this way, persistent hunger after having eaten, aside from being a biblical metaphor, can also be read as a return of instinct: in a situation where one cannot be sure whether the next day will bring an ample supply of food, one is better off eating as much as possible while food is available. These observations can be utilized to reinterpret Rowlandson’s general preoccupation with food. It is not enough to view the multitude of foodrelated incidents in The Sovereignty and Goodness of God simply as an “image cluster” and treat her descriptions as an example of her “skill as a stylist” (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 107). More is at stake here: the experience of extreme hunger overshadows Rowlandson’s whole narrative style. Instead of describing the pain the Indians inflicted on her, Rowlandson’s plot reflects what really mattered in captivity. The recurring images of daily worries about provisions prove that during the times when captives were not in physical danger this meant first and foremost the procurement of food. John Gyles presents a more intricate account of the role of food. What sets his story apart is the length of his captivity and accordingly the greater details he can provide about Indian dietary practices. What appears in Rowlandson as a disordered, haphazard way of gathering food, Gyles presents as regular, planned agricultural and hunting practices that vary according to the season: There we planted corn and, after planting, went a-fishing and to look for and dig roots till the corn was fit to weed. And after weeding, [we] took a second tour on the same errand and returned to hill our corn. And after hilling, we went some distance from the fort and field up the river to take salmon and other fish and dry them for food till corn was filled with the milk, some of which we dried then, the other as it ripened. And when we had gathered our corn and dried it, we put some Indian barns, i.e., holes in the ground lined and covered with bark and then with dirt. The rest we carried up the river upon our next winter hunting. (105) This rendering of Indian eating habits differs vastly from Rowlandson’s notion of getting by “from hand to mouth” (106). It also shows a wealth of food which Rowlandson could not witness because of the short duration of her captivity and the heightened intensity of fighting. While Gyles had to go through intense torture during his captivity, most of the times he seems to have been treated like a member of the tribe. Although Rowlandson’s canon- Wilderness Woes 289 ized captivity narrative provides a different picture, this practice was the rule rather than the exception. 23 Where Rowlandson associates the Indians with wilderness to demean them, Gyles appears intent on benefiting from their knowledge of the local fauna: I was once traveling a little way behind several Indians and heard them laughing very merrily. When I came to them, they showed me the track of a moose and how a wolverine had climbed a tree, [it] had broke the wolverine’s hold and torn him off, and by his track in the snow he went off another way with short steps, as if he had been stunned with the blow. The Indians who impute such accidents to the cunning of the creature were wonderfully pleased that the moose should thus outwit the mischievous wolverine. (118) While the white colonists often attributed their sense of civilized superiority to their mastery of written language, this episode turns the familiar framework of oral and written culture around. The English narrator is the one who cannot make sense of a given set of signs while the Indians can easily read a whole adventure story from a number of tracks in the snow. Gyles shows the Indians as much more connected to nature than his own culture. The Indians’ skill of reading tracks enriches his own experience of the New England environment and provides him with material for his chapter on the most common animals of the region. Gyles’s narrative is unique in its treatment of wildlife. Rowlandson only mentions wild animals as potential food, while Gyles has a whole chapter on animal life around the St. John’s River. It contains short reports on beavers, wolverines, hedgehogs, tortoises, and salmon (116-20). Although the main selection principle here is the value of these animals as food, Gyles treats each of these species with an uncommon precision, observing and chronicling their appearance, mating habits, etc. Take the following description of hatching tortoises: I have observed a difference as to the length of time which they are hatching, which is between twenty and thirty days, some sooner than others. […] As soon as they were hatched, they broke through the sand and betook themselves to the water, as far as I could discover, without any further care or help of the old ones. (119) Gyles’s text possesses an uncommon degree of hybridity, containing features of the captivity narrative and providing a natural history at the same time. After having returned to white society he in fact became a true frontiersman, serving as an interpreter for Indians and a surveyor of land. In their differing degrees of adherence to clerically accepted notions of the wilderness, these two narratives generally appear as a site of conflict and reconciliation between abstract notions and concrete occurrences. Instead of being the supreme guiding principle in the construction of nature, however, 23 Most captives were in fact adopted into the tribes to fill the void left by Indians lost to war and diseases (Derounian-Stodola and Levernier 5). A LEXANDER S TARRE 290 religion turns out to be only one aspect among many. Personal attachment to certain places, the degree of social immersion, as well as the seasonal varieties and the geographical setup of each captivity also figure strongly. 5 Conclusion In conclusion, we may ask what we can gather from this survey of two Puritan narratives that can be considered relevant in the context of 21st-century challenges of urbanity and ecology. First of all, we may perceive the tension between a discourse of nature and empirical nature itself - a tension which accompanies any type of writing concerned with the environment. The constructional character of this opposition is as strong as ever today. In comparison to the colonial wilderness discourse, the current mainstream conception of wild nature in the Western world seems much friendlier. However, the belief that the environment must be green and woody in order to qualify for care and conservation can lead to questionable consequences - for example, when this green Western ideology collides with an empirical Middle-Eastern desert. As such, the creation of sprawling parks with lush greenery in a transcultural metropolis like Dubai shows how discourses can shape the environment in a frighteningly non-sustainable manner. Such constellations of spaces and ideas will likely grow in number in an increasingly globalized society. Ecocritical scholarship can show the ways in which cultures have tried to make sense of spaces in their narratives - now and in the past. It is easy to read Puritan texts with a skeptical eye and dismiss their content as theologically biased against the environment. However, we tend to underestimate the flexibility of the captivity genre. It has become commonplace to associate the genre with Mary Rowlandson. Survey courses on the history American literature often leave little room for a more in-depth study of early captivity narratives. Furthermore, critical accounts of the significance of the environment in American literary history tend to typify the Puritan wilderness as the dark counterpart to 19th century sublime nature. The unfortunate effect is that the genre has not appeared attractive enough for environmentally interested scholars. Recent ecocritical essays call the environment in captivity tales “New England landscapes of terror” (Neubauer 350) or “the hiding place of the plotting and scheming devil” (Peprnik 339). These sweeping generalizations disregard diversity within the captivity genre. I do not intent to deny the tremendous cultural reverberations of Rowlandson’s popular narrative. It did go a long way to further the ideology of cultivation and to associate the Indians with wildness. This fed into such seemingly positive, yet inherently patronizing stereotypes as the “ecological Indian.” 24 Rowlandson’s view of the wilderness informs the spatial poetics of later rewritings of colonial stories, for example Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales 24 Cf. Berkhofer, Krech. Wilderness Woes 291 (1837). It certainly had an impact on the visual aesthetics of American landscape painting, where dark forests often yield to the light of colonizing civilization. Take the overly allegorical painting American Progress (1872) by John Gast, which shows a radiant Columbia carrying light - and a telegraph wire - into the dark abodes of the Western wilderness. However, the roots of a different discourse appear in narratives such as John Gyles’s. The environmental criticism of the 21st century is strongest when it can reposition certain texts according to their relation to the natural world and thus shed light on commonly disregarded aspects of composition and sense-making. As Greg Garrard points out: “The challenge for ecocritics is to keep one eye on the ways in which ‘nature’ is always in some ways culturally constructed and the other on the fact that nature really exists” (10). While this method of observation will at times require turning a blind eye to some ingrained academic practices, it certainly has the potential to enlarge our field of vision with regard to representations of natural spaces. 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