The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little (review)

Esther Wheelwright, whose name and identity transformed many times during the course of her tumultuous life (1696-1780), experienced eras of great change for English and French colonial societies of North America, as well as times of pervasive dislocation and adaptation for Native American communities laboring to endure in their traditional homelands. This seven-chapter biography tracks this sometimes enigmatic figure through successive contexts, focusing on the "communities of women" that surrounded her at every turn, providing many continuities despite outward appearances of ruptures in her life. Working in English- and French-language sources from an array of U.S. and Canadian archives, Little pieces together the often fragmentary outlines of Esther's peripatetic life. Born into an English household in Wells, Maine, then the northeastern "frontier" of New England, Esther descended from the lineage of John Wheelwright, (in)famously exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century for heterodox religious views. His heirs prospered modestly, but experienced devastating loss on August 10, 1703 when a Wabanaki raiding party descended on her community and took captive seven-year-old Esther. The girl spent a critical period of her childhood and early adolescence living among Wabanaki families who struggled for survival during an age of perpetual warfare. Moving strategically between villages and a series of French Catholic missions along the Saint Lawrence River, Esther—perhaps called "Mali" (Marie) during this period—shed the trappings of her Protestant upbringing in favor of a Catholicized but likely also syncretic or hybridized Wabanaki lifestyle.

Her life took another turn in 1708 when she was taken in among New France noblesse, and eventually enrolled for religious training among the Québec Ursulines. There she spent the rest of her long life as a nun, enmeshed in daily devotional activities of this Catholic order, while also acting as an eyewitness to the British conquest of New France during the Seven Years' War, and the attempted American invasion during the American Revolution. Esther maintained contacts with her New England relations over the decades, even receiving her nephew Nathaniel Wheelwright as a visitor to the convent in 1754. Yet Little explains why Esther maintained a steadfast desire to remain in New France as a Catholic devotee, rather than return "home" to a community that increasingly seemed distant. By the time of her death, "Mother Esther" had ascended through the Ursuline ranks (despite her "foreigner" status) and evidently found peace. Paradoxically, she may have perceived the secluded, constrained dynamics of life among the Ursulines to be a welcome kind of structure, Little argues, given how many upheavals shaped her earlier upbringing.

The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright is strongly grounded in women's history and gender studies, leading the author to challenge dominant history narratives (especially those of the highly salable "Founding Fathers" genre) that focus on elite Euro-American men and relegate women as well as people of color to the margins. Little creatively foregrounds the multitudes of female blood relations, adoptive kin, religious sisters, and others who by and large constituted Esther's worlds. The chapters compellingly reconstruct the textures of her lived experiences, bringing to life the strenuous domestic labors and institutional routines that shaped nearly every hour: washing and mending clothes, preparing food, caregiving. This work—ceaseless yet often unacknowledged by conventional histories—was essential, Little rightly notes, to the continuance and in some cases explosive growth of these communities; without such efforts, empires, overseas colonies, and revolutionary societies would not have functioned.

While Little's analysis is persuasive for the New England and New France sections of the book, it is weaker in its treatment of Wabanaki histories and contexts. It is especially sparse in accounting for traditional Wabanaki spiritual beliefs and practices, which long preceded contacts with French and English missionaries, and remained powerfully present in major and minor ways even as selected Indigenous individuals and groups chose to affiliate with Christianity. The text gives little sense of finely grained Wabanaki...