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

Without question the word enigmaemerges from Ann M. Little's remarkable study, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, beginning with the portrait of Esther on the book's cover. Like many early modern portraits, Esther stares at us from across the centuries, her eyes mesmerizing but almost totally without expression, and it is only at the sight of her pursed lips that we can even begin to formulate questions: Are they expressing disapproval? Disdain? And if so, of what?

In the book's introduction, Little admits that Esther is an elusive and complex character. Born in Wells, Massachusetts, in 1696 and then captured in 1703 at the age of seven, she spent most of her life as a stranger, first among the Wabanaki and then at Quebec as an Ursuline student, nun, and mother superior. "Neither English nor French nor Native nor First Nations," writes Little, "her life confuses rather than clarifies" (3–4). Indeed, as this richly nuanced book clearly demonstrates, Esther's life raises many more questions than it answers.

Of course, Little is not the first to be drawn into the fascinating world of New England captives carried to Canada throughout the struggles between the British and the French in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America; nor, as she acknowledges, is she the first to broach the story of Esther Wheelwright. ¹However, Little is the first to reconstruct Esther's life story in such rich historical detail and to attempt to understand its complexities in terms of the lives and work of women in three different eighteenth-century colonial American communities—English, Wabanaki, and French—all within the wider framework of North American colonial history.

Little takes her readers through the fascinating upheavals of Esther's identity in transformation. She begins by carefully setting the wider context of Esther's life within the eighteenth-century borderland wars between the French, their Native allies, and the British, while deftly establishing the minute details of her New England childhood. Using clothing and names as focal points, Little sets the reader up for her exploration of Esther's many identities. In Wells her stays define her as Esther, a New England child and girl, just as bear grease and moose and deerskin garments will exemplify "Mali," the Wabanaki captive, and her religious habit among the Ursuline nuns will clothe Soeur Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant Jésus and then Mother Esther.

In 1703, Little recounts, Esther was taken captive by Wabanaki warriors and carried to the village of Narantsouak or Norridgewock on the Kennebec River, where she would remain for five years. Although by the early eighteenth century, taking captives for trade and supplies was an urgent and economically beneficial practice for the Wabanaki, her captors chose to adopt her, perhaps to replace a child who had died. She lived there for a formative five years, from the age of seven to the age of twelve. Little admits that she does not know why Esther left the Wabanaki village—or even whether her departure was forced or voluntary. What is certain is that in 1708 she arrived at the Château Saint Louis, located in Quebec, "North America's most impressively fortified city" (84), where she stayed willingly for the rest of her life.

The final four chapters focus on Esther in Quebec. Transported from a starving Wabanaki mission to a life of relative luxury among the French noblesse, the contrast could not be greater. Quickly shorn of her Wabanaki identity in an abrupt process of Frenchification—from mooseskins to petticoats, from starvation to "food security" (165)—she was initially enrolled as a student at the Ursuline convent. A dowry provided by Governor Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, enabled Esther to enter the Ursuline convent in 1713, at the age of seventeen, and this constituted another identity shift, this time into the role of an Ursuline novice and...