Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman (review)

Captivity narratives present analysts with considerable difficulties given the multidimensional complexities of the genre. The works are grounded in historical events usually narrated and written by the victims who survived intensely violent abductions followed by traumatic initiations that often resulted in varying degrees of acculturation—the entire rearranging of their mentalities and, at times, even their physical appearance. An attempt to deconstruct their textual record, normally written when the captive again traversed the cultural threshold to return home, thus requires the scholar to don a multitude of hats including, to name a few, historian, psychologist, cultural linguist, and literary theorist. Andrew Newman, an English literary scholar, attempts to straddle these disciplines while remaining grounded to his comfort zone of literary criticism to render Allegories of Encounter, a type of literary historicism that posits "for captive authors, captivity as a whole was a literacy event" (8). The author explains that certain North American colonists such as the Puritan Mary Rowlandson or the French Jesuit priest, Père Isaac Jogues, used biblical allegories to comprehend their very personal ordeals and, with this common frame of reference for so many colonists of various European origins, created a narrative that can be understood in terms of the historical event as well as the discourse that allows for cultural interpretation (9). Furthermore, literacy was used to distinguish colonial culture from that of the captors and provided a means to resist acculturation. Newman surmises that his methods outlined in Allegories will reveal that "the extreme circumstances and pressures of Indian captivity reveal as much about settler-colonial literacy and discursive practices as vice-versa" (194).

Historiographically, Allegories of Encounter joins a growing body of interpretive literature aimed at mining captivity narratives for their rich veins of historical, cultural, ethnical, and literary value. Newman is one of many scholars who attempt to synthesize these narratives as a genre to demonstrate how they mirrored contemporary cultural sensibilities by evoking religious imagery that informed and molded communal identities. One of the first to make a similar argument was Richard Slotkin, who convincingly argued that North American captivity tales formed the nucleus of a mythology that helped define a common identity for English settlers and the country they forged (Regeneration through Violence, 1973). Newman's thesis, although grounded in literary theory, is most related to historian Gary Ebersoles's study that, through a comparative reading of nearly 300 captivity narratives, demonstrated the stereotypical religious imagery that informed the English narrative and reading practices used to personally understand, cope, and convey the captivity experience (Captured by Texts: Puritan to Post-modern Images of Indian Captivity, 1995). Given this close correlation, Allegories of Encounter surprisingly lacks any reference to Ebersole's method that could have provided the historical underpinning seemingly vital to Newman's literary analysis. Some nod is given to Lisa Voigt, who authored a comparative historical study of English, Portuguese, and Spanish captivity narratives in Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (2009), to demonstrate the value of literature in historical analysis.

Rather than pinning his thesis entirely to recent scholarship, Newman instead applies aspects of narrative and film theory to various primary captivity stories to demonstrate that the English Bible was as much a part of the captivity event as were the captives and their captors (9). Newman argues that his methodology, although similar, is not entirely literary historicism as this connotes an attempt to understand intellectual and cultural history through literature. Because the "captives practiced literacy under radically contingent historical circumstances" that were "largely shaped by the native captors," the narratives represent an altogether unique subgenre of literature within the larger colonial literary world (10). When the captives returned home and penned their tales, the biblical allegories prompted the colonial readers, like the captives themselves, to understand the ordeals...