Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim (review)

As its title suggests, this ambitious book aims to tackle two subjects it sees as deeply intertwined: representations of childhood in early American writings, and cultural conflicts in antebellum America, including struggles over race relations, gender roles, and national identity. Duane, a literature scholar, focuses on how children and childhood are represented in the period's writings. Indeed, she often discusses texts where children only appear as metaphors for other values or ideas. Although she argues that the metaphors reflect historical reality to some degree, the book will appeal most to those interested in how adults thought and wrote about childhood—not in the experiences of actual children. Her goal is to identify patterns in the discourses about childhood and then to observe how those discourses were used by writers to address cultural problems.

Duane's discussions cover three centuries of American history and topics ranging from pregnancy to witchcraft to slavery. Yet the book is separated into only four large (and sometimes unwieldy) chapters. Each focuses on a particular type of cultural conflict and begins by exploring ideas and metaphors about children relevant to that context. She concludes each chapter by analyzing a related literary text.

The organizing principle behind this wide-ranging study is the rhetorical power of a particular figure: the suffering child. In her introduction, Duane explains that the trope of a suffering child appeared frequently especially at important points in early American history. These moments included seventeenth-century conflicts between English settlers and Native Americans, eighteenth-century struggles to define the place of Native Americans in white America, nineteenth-century slavery debates, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century arguments about women's roles. In each case, she claims, the figure of the suffering child helped writers work out their ideas about race, gender, and national identity. Over time, these uses changed the way people thought about childhood itself. How, she asks, does the child play a symbolic role in "mediating cultural and colonial violence" in these contexts? And how does this role, in turn, associate childhood itself with, in Duane's oft-repeated terms, "vulnerability, suffering, and victimhood"?

Her first chapter, "Captivity, Witch Trials, and the Dangerous Child," discusses descriptions of Pocahontas from the early 1600s, captivity narratives from the middle of the century, and the 1692-93 Salem witch trials. Duane discusses how each set of texts reflected the colonists' attitudes (and anxieties) about raising children in a cultural contact zone. She concludes by emphasizing the unusual degree of attention given to children's testimony at Salem and suggests that Indians' childrearing practices were beginning to influence colonists' behavior towards their own children.

Chapter two examines Enlightenment thought on Native Americans alongside portrayals of infanticide in captivity narratives. She begins by considering how philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau developed childrearing advice that reflected an admiration of Native American stoicism. Colonists could not continue to admire such stoicism, however, when eighteenth-century captivity narratives began to portray Native Americans as hard-hearted baby killers. In the conclusion of this chapter she analyzes the early nineteenth-century life narrative of the Native American minister William Apess, A Son of the Forest (1831). In her reading, Apess argues that children are not merely victims but are capable of instructing adults.

Not surprisingly, Duane finds depictions of pregnancy to be fertile ground for her analysis. In her third chapter, she turns to American seduction novels, focusing on Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) and Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791). In both novels, the deceived and seduced heroines become pregnant and ultimately die. Duane argues that the heroines' pregnancies make visible their errors, and as a result, their fetuses punish and take control of them for having sought to act in an independent manner. This process, she claims, "infantilizes" the women. At stake was whether women would be viewed as dependent children or as autonomous adults, and...