Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature (review)

In colonial America, particularly New England, published tales of settlers being captured by Indian war parties were a very popular genre. The 17th century saw a general proliferation of printing, and these captivity narratives were among the materials most frequently published. In these narratives, which typically gave graphic descriptions of their authors' suffering and brutal treatment in captivity, writers such as Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Dickinson, and John Williams combined images of exotic Indian customs and graphic violence with commentary on their spiritual fortitude and the religious significance of their tribulations and rescue. These firsthand accounts, along with similarly sensationalized reports of shipwrecks and incidences of witchcraft, were published ostensibly as proofs of God's hand in the affairs of human beings, which is why they were generically called "providence tales." But, while serving this pious purpose, they were also a kind of tabloid adventure writing for popular consumption.

The premise of Hartman's volume is that these subliterary productions constitute an important antecedent of American literature, providing distinct patterns for later writers, from James Fenimore Cooper to Herman Melville. He begins by tracing the origins of the captivity and supernatural narrative in British providence tales, and then exploring their transformation in their 17th-century colonial American setting. He makes a strong case for the view that the transformation was from a bipolar world of absolute good and evil to the morally more ambiguous one the colonists encountered in their new environment. He shows, for instance, that depictions of the Native American evolved from a completely negative portrayal, associating all Indians with Satan, to a more nuanced and humanized image that showed Indians in acts of kindness, helpfulness, and humor. In another section he explores the intellectual and cultural context of firsthand accounts of the supernatural, in particular the tension between the Puritans' religious perspective and the newly emerging scientific way of perceiving phenomena. In doing so he offers a provocative argument about their significance to the themes, atmosphere, moral imagination, and emerging realism of American literature.

While making these arguments, Hartman includes lengthy excerpts from his primary sources and paraphrases others in an engaging narrative style. This makes a somewhat ponderously argued volume a better read and gets across a sense of how compelling the genre must have been to its original popular audience. Here is a typical Hartman summation of one passage from Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World:

One story begins when an old woman, baby-sitting a child, angers the mother by breast feeding the child. The mother objects, the old woman curses her, and some fairly typical results ensue. A boy catches a toad, throws it in the fire where it explodes, while simultaneously, without her having been near the fire herself, the old baby-sitter is found to have been scorched herself, proving that the toad was her familiar spirit, or that her specter used and transported her body, in the form of its familiar spirit, a toad. [pp. 121-122]

Descriptions of Indian dress, ceremonies, music, food ways, and warrior customs are treated in a similar manner, either being quoted at length or paraphrased as full narrations. And, particularly for those readers who are interested in the ethnographic details of Native American life in the colonial era, these, too, make good reading. Overall, it is a well-written and thoroughly researched book that truly does, as its jacket declares, "offer a provocative reassessment of the origins of American literature." For this reason, and for the impressively broad knowledge of this large body of materials that Hartman brings to the work, literary scholars will find it an important and satisfying book.

Folklorists, however, will find it frustrating. Hartman completely misses the connection between his texts and the oral tradition that obviously (to folklorists, at least) preceded them. At several points, for example, he mentions the proliferation of broadside ballads in the colonial press, and even suggests that some of these may...