"As Dying, Yet Behold We Live": Catastrophe and Interiority in Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation

For it is found in experience that change of air, famine or unwholesome food, much drinking of water, sorrows and troubles, etc., all of them are enemies to health, causes of many diseases, consumers of natural vigour and the bodies of men, and shorteners of life. And yet of all these things they had a large part and suffered deeply in the same. . . . What was it then that upheld them? . . . He that upheld the Apostle upheld them. . . . "As unknown, and yet known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and yet not killed."

—William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation

What returns to haunt the victim, these stories tell us, is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known.

—Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

One of the most contested sites in early American studies is also one of the broadest: the space of colonial identity itself. Searching for the story of just how early modern English people became what we call early Americans, scholars of divergent academic persuasions have reperiodized, respatialized, and retheorized the span of nearly two centuries between the first stakes planted in North American English settlements and the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War.¹ Whether their arguments have rested on exceptionalism or continuity, creolization or interculturalism, ideology or materiality, establishments or borderlands, most have posited a linear design of transformation, one in which "the colonial" stretches out as a long evolutionary course between an English "before" and an American "after." The tipping point is hard to find. The titles of some recent studies—with phrases like "Becoming Colonial," "Becoming America," "Finding Colonial Americas," "Through a Glass Darkly"—indicate that this diachronic search is very much alive, even as the methods and aims of its practitioners grow increasingly complex.

Lately, questions about the body have emerged as a critical crux in this debate. For example, in their current work Karen Kupperman, Jim Egan, and Joyce Chaplin each put forward a distinctive claim that to understand how colonial identities were formed, we must first understand how English peoples conceptualized and represented life in the colonies as a bodily experience. In each of these works, the body appears as a primary conveyance through which protracted negotiations between English and colonial life were conducted. Kupperman describes how, in the earliest years of English settlement on Indian land, complex assessments took place across cultural lines as questions of food, labor, disease, and the daily sustenance of life exerted their urgency. Confident and abstract binaries separating "civilized" from "savage" had little place in this world, she reminds us; instead, "the processes of defining self and other went forward together and were mutually reinforcing" (1). Egan uses the formulation of "the experienced colonial body" to posit the development of a new, and specifically colonial, rhetoric of authority based on experience rather than ideology (44). In order to insert themselves into the social and political hierarchies of colonialism without disrupting its goals, he argues, colonial writers formulated a model of civic authority that allowed them to revise the figure of the body politic while bolstering their status as English subjects. And Chaplin looks at how English settlers came to be convinced of their entitlement to Indian land by gradually translating the fact of Indian susceptibility to European diseases into an idiom of English racial superiority. The linked processes of "demystifying nature, displaying bodily strength, and using technology all became measures of colonial power," she asserts, as the settlers' confidence in the prevailing powers of their English bodies came to colonize other possibilities for the colonial encounter (15).

Each of these studies tends carefully to the cultural vectors through which bodiliness was understood, and to the ways in which inherited discursive patterns were repatterned over decades of colonial writing. Thus, they refigure the space of colonial time stretched out between an English past and an American future as a space of colonial experience negotiating between Old World forms and New World matter. However, there persists...