The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright by Ann M. Little, and: In the Neighborhood: Women's Publication in Early America by Caroline Wigginton (review)

These two books may seem to have precious little in common: one is a biography of a Puritan girl who was taken captive in 1703 by Wabanaki Indians and who later became Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent in Québec. The other is an exploration of how the Creek diplomat Coosaponakeesa, Quaker Sarah Osborn, and Phillis Wheatley, among others, published their thoughts by navigating their neighborhoods and, in doing so, altered relationships as well as modes of exchange and representation. Both books share their most powerful and remarkable conclusions: contradicting earlier ideas of women as angels (locked) in the house, these books insist that women mattered and published through their mobility and that the (largely) female communities around them ensured that their thoughts and actions reached maximum effect.

Ann M. Little's biography of Esther Wheelwright excavates the fascinating life of a female child captive who refused to be returned to her family at the close of Queen Anne's War. A few other such cases are known, the most famous one being that of Eunice Williams, who was taken from Deerfield one year after Esther. Eunice, the subject of John Demos's 1994 National Book Award winner The Unredeemed Captive, was baptized Catholic, married a Mohawk man, and had three children, which is remarkable because other girls with her trajectory married French Canadian men. Esther Wheelwright, on the other hand, may have chosen to take sacramental vows to wrest herself definitively out from under her Puritan family's authority, being a devout Catholic at age fourteen already. Yet Little, as her title shows, interprets this choice as a continuation of Esther's successive captive identities: from a disciplined and restricted Puritan girl to a Wabanaki adoptee to a cloistered nun. Little argues that "there were more compelling similarities in women's lives across these borders than there were differences" (5). Surely such a weighing up is a matter of interpretation, and Little's claim about Esther's multiple captivities sometimes seems forced when considering a woman whose life crossed vast cultural divides and geographic distances in flexible and unexpected ways. But there is far more to commend than to critique about Little's work, which is a powerful, meticulously researched, even captivating—pardon the pun—account of colonial female communities.

By announcing her work as "methodologically innovative" (14), Little helpfully prepares her reader for a biography that is as anchored in Puritan material history, Native American oral history, and colonial religion as it is in archival written sources, of which only a disappointing few mention Esther Wheelwright. The book is thus largely about context—in what kind of societies Esther grew up—and sometimes speculative, although always in grounded, enlightening ways. For instance, when Little writes about girlhood in a New England frontier town, a vivid exploration of corset-like stays allows her to think about the intimate physical sensations of Puritan women that are not recorded anywhere. Although it is impossible to know whether such underwear, which looks restrictive to us, was perceived as such by Esther's contemporaries (who may have thought it necessary to achieve good posture, not unlike orthotics), Little easily segues from stays to the wooden palisade surrounding the settlement to the varying degrees of (un)freedom of the servants and slaves whom Esther would have known. All of these enclosures and strictures contribute to the book's larger sequence of captivities experienced by both Esther and those who surround her.

Impressionistic as such transitions may seem, Little actually anchors her observations in consistent themes in each cultural context: attire, food, naming (Esther, Mali, Sister Marie-Joseph de l'enfant Jésus), and female religious experience...