Captive on the Literacy Frontier: Mary Rowlandson, James Smith, and Charles Johnston

I propose to conceptualize the setting for early American captivity narratives as the "literacy frontier": the area of contact between cultures with widespread literacy and those with little or no exposure to reading and writing. Unlike other partitive, thematic formulations of frontier, such as Kathleen Brown's "gender frontier," the "literacy frontier" is defined by an attribute that pertained with putative exclusivity to the colonizers—literacy as the sine qua non of Western civilization—and therefore suggests a one-sided perspective.¹ In this essay I am primarily concerned with the view from the Anglo-American side of the frontier, and with the represented perspectives of Anglo-Americans who cross it. I argue that for Anglo-Americans in contact with Indians, literacy occupied a privileged position as a marker of cultural self-definition, and that captivity can present an especially vivid instance of such use of literacy.

Literacy played a familiar role within the machine of territorial expansion, generating surveyors' reports, underwriting dubious land transfers, and filling out a self-serving ledger of transactions and conflicts. I am particularly interested, however, in the way the literacy frontier functions on a perceptual plane. It represents a spatial-epistemological delimitation, as figured here by Cooper:

"I have never heard of this spot before: it is not mentioned in the books."

"I never read a book in my life," said Leather-stocking; "and how should a man who has lived in towns and schools know any thing about the wonders of the woods!"

(293)

Most important for my readings, the literacy frontier stands for an abstract cultural boundary that existed in the imagination of some Anglo-Americans, who, in crossing it, felt compelled to invoke literacy as a primary symbol of their identity.

As discussed by Sandra Gustafson, early modern attitudes toward literacy and so-called orality can be mapped out along the axes of two sets of diametrical oppositions: between "stable text" and "demonic speech" and between "the living voice" and the "dead letter" (xv). I consider the literacy frontier partly in reference to two influential twentieth-century theoretical models that bear a suggestive correlation to Gustafson's binaries. The now-embattled "literacy thesis" that emerged during the 1960s clearly vaunts the "stable text": literacy was asserted to be the key, causal ingredient in Western Civilization, engendering a "great divide" between complex, cumulative, literate civilization and oral societies, which were considered to be incapable of rational thought and confined to a perpetual present.² On the other hand, the so-called postmodern anthropology exemplified by the collection edited by James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), is marked by an anxiety about the validity of textual representation, and seems to privilege the "living voice" heard in the field over the "dead letter" of the ethnographic text. In the three narratives I analyze, we can see the pendulum swing: from Mary Rowlandson's affronted insistence on the existence of a "great divide" to James Smith's conflicted uncertainty about the ascendancy of alphabetic literacy, and back again with Charles Johnston's monolithic assertion that his participation in print culture is evidence of unassailable cultural and racial superiority over his captors.

An Account of the Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel James Smith (1799) and A Narrative of the Incidents Attending the Capture, Detention, and Ransom of Charles Johnston (1827) make an excellent pairing, in part because both are set amongst the tribal melting pot of the eighteenth-century Ohio country, but most especially because both authors, exceptionally, kept journals during their captivities. However, because I wish for my elaboration of the literacy frontier to have bearing not only on such exemplary instances but on the captivity genre as a whole, and beyond that on the larger category of frontier literature, I find it helpful to begin with the inaugural captivity narrative, Mary Rowlandson's Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682).

Mary Rowlandson: Captivity as "Literacy Event"

While it may seem obvious that a narrative that presents an interpretation of the author's...