The Power of the Archive: Writing Religion and Race in Early America

Among the many portraits of severe Protestant men hanging in the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society is one of an equally stern Catholic nun. Esther Wheelwright was a famous, even infamous, woman in eighteenth-century New England. Born within a prominent and somewhat prosperous Puritan family, she was captured during a Wabanaki raid at the age of seven and eventually became the mother superior of an Ursuline convent in Quebec.

Esther Wheelwright's fame was fleeting, however. Despite the portrait, which she probably commissioned and had sent to Boston, later generations of historians forgot her. She left behind few writings, and as a Catholic woman religious, born in New England but living in Quebec, she fit uneasily within narratives dominated by the men who surround her at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

At least Esther Wheelwright left behind a painting and some documents. Whether Catholic or Protestant, whether native or European, whether indentured or enslaved or free, whether male or female, most humans in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world created nothing retained by later generations of archivists. In particular, women, natives, servants, slaves, and indigenous persons are absent from such records, especially in their own voices. Unlike Esther Wheelwright, they were never famous.

Ann M. Little and Heather Miyano Kopelson refuse to accept what the former terms "the politics of literacy in early America" and the latter labels "the cultural power in the formation of the archive" (p. 10; p. 273). In The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, Little reconstructs the communities of women in which her subject lived. In Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic, Kopelson analyzes the changing intersection of religious and racial identities in puritan New England and Bermuda. Little stresses the shared experiences of Wabanaki, French, and English women, whereas Kopelson concludes that local circumstances influenced the ways that different groups of English colonists thought about the body of Christ and the body politic.

In As You Like It, William Shakespeare commented that "men and women [are] merely players," assuming different roles as they move through the "ages" of their lives. Esther Wheelwright's life unfolded on several different stages, all but one not of her own choosing. As Little's title suggests, Wheelwright's life consisted of "many captivities." As Esther, she lived her first seven years in the Massachusetts (present-day Maine) town of Wells, laced into a "stay," kept behind her town's palisades, and busy with the work shared, albeit unequally, among female servants, slaves, and siblings. After her capture during a Wabanaki raid on Wells, she went through rituals "designed to turn outsiders' bodies into insiders' bodies" (p. 62). As Mali (the Wabanaki pronunciation of Marie), she lived in a mission town under the influence of Jesuit priests, especially the brothers Jacques and Vincent Bigot. Five years later, one of those priests took her to Quebec, where she lived in the home of the Marquis de Vaudreuil, governor general of New France. Her name, hygiene, food, and clothing changed again. Marie, or Esther Anglaise as she was often known, attended school at the Ursuline convent where she took her vows at the age of sixteen. This time, Marie-Joseph de l'Enfant Jesus voluntarily chose to embrace a new identity, one that again came with distinctive clothing and rituals.

Whether as Esther, Mali, or Marie, Wheelwright left behind few extant writings. While other sources, such as the sermon at her vêture (the ceremony in which she took the white veil that marked her as a nun) delivered by Vincent Bigot, much of her life is undocumented. We do not know what Wheelwright thought about her capture, or how she felt about having to leave her Wabanaki family. In particular, we do not...