Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (review)

The recent special joint issue of Early American Literature and American Literary History offers a glimpse of not only how the field of early American literature sees itself but also how it might reconfigure its relations to American studies and American literary history writ large. As editors Sandra Gustafson and Gordon Hutner assert in the introduction, the mission of their joint venture is not ". . . merely to observe the great changes that the field of early American studies has undergone in the last twenty years." Rather, the aims of the project are stated in strikingly pedagogical terms: ". . . Americanists of all specialties need to know more about the work done in the early period since we felt sure it could and ought to stimulate their understanding of the field as a whole, just as early Americanists need to see their work as also contributing to a reintegration of American literary studies" (Early American Literature 45.2 [2010], 211-16). Yet the question of pedagogy, or, more forcefully, its most powerful trope— the figure of the child—is mostly absent from the call-and-response short essay format that marks this foray into disciplinary self-consciousness. Here and there, however, the figure of the child, as both a literal being and as a metaphor, leaves its traces in these accounts of early American studies: the eleven-year-old "Barbary captive" (Gordon Sayre, "Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies, 325-38: 331) or Margaret Fuller's claim that periodicals are "'the only efficient instrument for the general education of the people,'" an assertion that posits "the people" as a group who, like the young, are in need of "general education" (Frances Smith Foster, "Genealogies of Our Concerns, Early [African] American Print Culture, and Transcending Tough Times," 347-59: 357). Even the fascinating suggestion that "Judith Sargent Murray's writings on republican motherhood and childrearing . . . are of course about gender but might also be considered as a major formulation of republican thought" seems to elide the extent to which conceptions of childhood might also be at the center of "the political sensibilities" of the Revolutionary "moment" (Ed White and Michael Drexler, "The Theory Gap," 469-84: 480-81).

As Anna Mae Duane's deeply nuanced study suggests, children were everywhere in early America: as the "'fatherlesse children'" (22) whom John Smith hopes will people the colonies; as Natives, including Pocahontas, whose "youth, [and] her ability to move between cultures . . . demonstrates the importance of children to the colonial enterprise" (26); as captives, apprentices, or others who were caught up in "an economy of child exchange" (19); as African children who suffered through the middle passage or were subsequently born into slavery (141-42). For Duane, children are present in metaphorical and symbolic language as well. They appear as symbols of servitude for the generation that first emigrated to the New World from Europe; after the era of immediate contact, they become "the colonial child"—a being "whose ability to move deftly between English and Indian cultures functioned as both threat and promise" (15). Duane analyzes other metaphorical children, including "the revolutionary child," those Sons of Liberty who legitimately rebel against Thomas Paine's monstrous mother England (127), "a child not limited to the United States, but rather a symbol circulated throughout the Atlantic during the Age of Revolution" (17). As an early Americanist whose peers span the disciplines of English and history (the book is blurbed by two professors of English and one professor of history), Duane is a self-conscious theorist of her own reliance on metaphorical and symbolic language; in her own words, she is "asserting that metaphor, far from being divorced from historical reality . . . emanates from the very meanings history makes available to the speaker or writer" (9). The symbol that she focuses on with the most sustained attention, as her title suggests, is that of the "suffering" child. Introducing her book with...