Identifying the Criminal in Charlotte Lennox's The Life of Harriot Stuart

Identifying the Criminal in Charlotte Lennox's The Life of Harriot Stuart Susan K. Howard Charlotte Lennox's The Life of Harriot Stuart, Written by Herself (1751) has been read primarily for its autobiographical and historical significance: it is one of the few British novels of the period set in America, at least partially; and throughout her life Lennox allowed people to assume that many aspects of her heroine's life were details from her own life.1 But Lennox's first novel also deserves attention as perhaps the earliest novel, in either America or Britain, to employ the Indian captivity narrative as a literary convention. Lennox expects that her audience will be familiar with this popular genre through 1 Studies of Lennox's American connections include Gustavus Maynadier's The First American Novelist? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1940) and Philippe Séjourné's The Mystery of Charlotte Lennox (Aix-en-Provence: Publications des annales de la faculté des lettres, n.s. 62, 1967). Neither work considers Lennox's adoption of the form of the captivity narrative in her first novel. For a brief discussion of the autobiographical aspects of Harriot Stuart, see Joyce Horner's The English Women Novelists and Their Connection with the FeministMovement 16881797 , Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 1 1 (October 1929-April 1930); Margaret Anne Doody's "Shakespeare's Novels: Charlotte Lennox Illustrated" in Studies in the Novel 19 (1987), 296-310; Miriam Rossiter Small's Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth-Century Lady ofLetters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935; Archon, 1969); and Dale Spender's Mothers ofthe Novel (London and New York: Pandora, 1986). Such contemporary sources as the Gentleman's Magazine, the Edinburgh Weekly Magazine, and the Monthly Review refer to information in the novel as autobiographical. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 5, Number 2, January 1993 138 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION such works as The Soveraignty and Goodness of God ... Being a Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, published in Boston in 1682 and reissued frequently in America and England throughout the eighteenth century.2 Similarly, her inclusion of nautical villainy assumes her audience's knowledge of popular works such as A General History of the Pyrates (1724, 1728, attributed to Defoe), which "created the modern conception of pirates,"3 or John Exquemelin's History ofthe Buccaniers ofAmerica (published in Dutch, 1678; translated into English, 1684). She might also have assumed that the dangers posed by Indians and pirates or privateers would be real for those who, like herself , had made sea voyages and travelled in America or knew someone who had. But Lennox is quick to frustrate her readers' expectations, for once introduced, the Indian and die pirate/privateer—stereotypes of criminality and violence—are displaced by less exotic, more domestic, figures of violence and cruelty who, because they seem less threatening, are actually more dangerous, especially to a woman alone in die world. In Harriot Stuart, Lennox capitalizes on the very familiarity of these stock figures to give her readers, like her heroine, a false sense of security. Lennox's use of the captivity narrative at once looks back to the earlier colonial stereotyping of the Indian as savage and violent, and anticipates the late eighteenth-century romanticizing of the Indian.4 To understand what she does with die opposition between Indian and white settler in the captivity narrative, we need to examine the shape this opposition took in history as well as its traditional manifestation in the genre of die captivity narrative. Throughout the seventeentii and early eighteenth centuries, English set2 Lawrence Wroth, in An American Bookshelf, 1755 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934), notes that on the average mid-eighteenth-century American bookshelf, one would have found "works of history, accounts of travel and captivity, Indian treaties, and narrative poems" (p. 85). One may therefore assume that during the five years or so that she lived in America, Charlotte Lennox read captivity narratives and such popular works as Cadwallader Colden's 77i« History ofthe Five Nations (1726). 3 P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, The Canonization ofDaniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 101. Furbank and Owens, in questioning Defoe's authorship ofA General...