Female captivity and the deployment of race in three early American
texts

Female captivity and the deployment of race in three early American
texts
Papers on Language and Literature; Edwardsville; Spring 1996; Woodard, Maureen L

Volume:
32
Issue:
2
Start Page:
115
ISSN:
00311294
Subject Terms:
Women
Native Americans
Literary criticism
Kidnapping
History
Colonialism
Personal Names:
Rowson, Susanna
Rowlandson, Mary White
Brown, Charles Brockden

Abstract:
Focusing mostly on female victims, captivity stories in early US literature addressed the
fears of colonists who felt threatened by the power of the wilderness and its indigenous
population. Woodard examines how three works by Mary Rowlandson, Susanna Rowson
and Charles Brockden Brown invoke the images of female entrapment and
transformation.

Full Text:
Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Spring 1996

In any discussion of early American literature, the captivity narrative stands out as
one of the most interesting, and often troubling, forms of Puritan writing. While
these tales of Indian attack and entrapment were often embedded in the rhetoric
of Protestant spirituality, their graphic language and images invoked both terror
and titillation in at least two centuries of readers. Focusing most often on female
victims, captivity stories directly addressed he fears of colonists who felt
threatened by the power of the vast American wilderness and its indigenous
population. Of these, The True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs.
Mary Rowlandson (1682) provides one of the best expressions of the type of
emotions and tensions early European settlers experienced in confrontations with
dark "others" in the New World. Through her tale of captivity with a band of
Indians, along with the transformation she seems to experience as a result,
Rowlandson's text reflects the anxieties of an entire community. Her use of
racialized language or distinctions also demonstrates one of the ways that these
narratives sought to control or interpret the threats to social order implied by the
protagonists' experiences. Even as the wilderness gave way to white "civilization,"
and real encounters with the Indians declined, these narratives and the
constructions of race they employed continued to have a powerful influence on
growing American fiction. Those texts that chose an urban, instead of a
wilderness, setting still often invoked elements of the captivity theme along with
the dangers of transformation and confrontation it involved. This continuous
popularity suggests one of the ways that anxieties about the influence of dark
"otherness," and the captivating or transformative power it represented for the
developing society, remained a part of the American imagination and literature
long after Rowlandson.

Two early American novels that illustrate this continued use of the captivity theme
and the fears or anxieties it explores are Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple
and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland; or the Transformation.(1) Published over
100 years after Rowlandson, both works invoke the image of female entrapment
and transformation. Susanna Rowson, for example, explores the plight of a young
girl held physically and emotionally captive by her seduction at the hands of a
young British officer. Brown's Wieland also explores the power of psychological
captivity through his story of a family destroyed by an outsider's deception. In both
works, a young heroine confronts dark others who are distinguished through
racialized language as foreign, dangerous, and even demonic. The similarities
between these later representations of dark villains, and Rowlandson's
construction of her Indian captors suggests that all share a common symbolic role
in relation to the traditional form of the captivity narrative. The urban settings of
Rowson's and Brown's texts further demonstrate that the uncertainty and danger
early colonists experienced in New England did not disappear simply because the
literal wilderness no longer existed. The uncivilized chaos and brutality the Indians
seemed to embody for Rowlandson and her readers continued to be attributed to
any figure of dark otherness that remained (most notably African slaves, and all
those who did not fit the white European Protestant norm). However, the
ambiguous and often contradictory messages found in the later texts also begin to
imply that these threats to social order are inherent in the dominant white culture
as it attempts to define itself against the various marginalized or "othered" groups
in its midst.

In order to examine the construction of captivity and the representations and fears
surrounding the dark others in each of these texts, my analysis focuses on not
only the historical situation that influenced these authors, but also on the cultural
work performed by these representations. While the racial or ethnic identities of
the dark tormentors vary, their intended symbolic role as representatives of the
forces of evil or danger remains identical. At the same time, however, the
language of each text appears to escape the author's direct control, and provides
a challenge to the Manichean split between good and evil, us and them.(2)
Through their depictions of captivity and transformation, the writings of
Rowlandson, Rowson, and Brown all introduce the possibility that this division is
permeable, if not completely fictional. The image of the captive female who
encounters and becomes a part of the world of the other in each of these texts
provides the center around which a dominant white identity is both constructed
and deconstructed. The range of genres and historical periods represented here
suggests not only how racialized discourse in American literature has been used
to separate and codify a white national identity, but that the meaning of this
discourse has always proven difficult to regulate.

Theoretical discussions by Dana Nelson and others provide a helpful framework
for assessing the use and construction of race in early American literature. In The
Word in Black and White, for example, Nelson claims that "race' can be viewed in
a literary sense as a viable, active metaphor that serves to inscribe and naturalize
(as well as to subvert) power relationships ... reproduced in cultural texts as well
as in human relationships" (Nelson ix). By identifying race as a metaphor, Nelson
points out not only the symbolic power of racial distinctions, but also that these
distinctions are not necessarily tied to any transcendent reality. Instead she shows
that race is a "flexible formation" that has "respond

ed

to

the

various urgent needs of the Anglo-American majority for centuries" (Nelson viii).
These needs have included the early colonists' desire to control or isolate the
potential forces of chaos found in the New World. By using racial difference to
indicate the moral or cultural inferiority of people other than themselves, these
primarily Puritan settlers were able to reinforce their own sense of self, safety and
superiority. Furthermore, as Andrew Delbanco suggests, the Puritans were
"pressed into comradeship by their sense of difference in England, their spirit was
born in a minority experience" (Delbanco 356). In order to maintain this sense of
community, they "needed opposition" and they found it in the faces of the Indians,
the French, and other non-Puritans. This use of racialized discourse to "organiz

e

, separat

e

, and consolidat

e

identity along culturally valuable lines of interest" (Morrison 39) continued even
after the decline of Puritanism and the creation of the new American republic.

Mary Rowlandson's method of constructing herself and her experiences in her
captivity narrative reflects this type of racial differentiation. While Rowlandson's
tale is an exciting and detailed account of her adventures in the wilderness, at its
heart it is a Puritan text steeped in Biblical allusions and interpretations. As such,
her writing reflects conventional Puritan ideals and beliefs about good vs. evil and
the proper role of women, while it uses racialized language to construct a sense of
self and morality opposed to her Indian captors. For example, the introduction,
presumably written by Increase Mather, insists that it is only through the coercion
of her friends that Rowlandson has allowed her narrative to be "thrust ... into the
Press" so that "God might have his due glory, and others benefit by it as well as
her selfe" (Rowlandson 29). Rowlandson herself further asserts her conformity to
Puritan ideals of submission and obedience through her refusal to fight or run
from her Indian captors. Instead she "desired to wait God's time, that I might go
home quietly, and without fear" (61). Submitting herself to God's will also entails
submission to the Indians who abduct her. As Margaret Davis has suggested,
Rowlandson "maintain

s

the stance of bride-like submission required of women, subjecting herself first to
God as ultimate authority and then to males as his earthly representations" (Davis
50).

Rowlandson's conformity to Puritan beliefs and values is further demonstrated
through her descriptions of the Indians. From the moment that the Indians attack
and she and her family are "butchered ... standing amazed, with the Blood
running down to our heels" (Rowlandson 32), through her journeys with them into
the "vast and howling Wilderness" (41), even until her release, Rowlandson
associates the Indians with the devil or the forces of Satan. Amy Shrager Lang
has pointed out that "there is nothing extraordinary in Rowlandson's
representation of the Indians. If anything she is in perfect accord with the major
spokesmen of the New England colonies" (Andrews et. al. 13). Her descriptions
not only reflect the real Puritan fear of Indian attack during King Philip's War, but
also the symbolic meaning they attributed to these attacks. These Indians are not
just a hostile people, but representatives of Satan who threatened the Puritan's
hopes to establish a new kingdom of God in North America.(3) Because of these
associations, Rowlandson becomes a representative or exemplum of all Puritans
who are tested by God to ensure that their faith is strong.(4) Rowlandson's
acknowledgment of the spiritual meaning of her journey for both herself and her
readers strengthens the orthodox message this text attempts to provide.(5)

But despite this apparently conservative message or reading of Rowlandson's
narrative, the language and potential meanings of her text appear to escape even
her own control. At the same time that she insists on her conformity to Puritan
orthodoxy, the conventional representations of both the Indian tormentors and her
Puritan identity are undermined by the language she uses and the experiences
she relates. Many critics have pointed out these subversive counter messages in
Rowlandson's narrative, evidenced through her ability to survive, adapt, and even
trade within the Indian community despite her stated fear and hatred for her
captors.(6) Other aspects of her narrative that seem to undermine the Puritan
worldview include her willingness to see many of the Indians as individuals, her
grudging acknowledgment of the kindness she received from some, and even her
obvious curiosity at their customs and behavior.(7) But perhaps the strongest, and
most dangerous, challenge to her Puritan roots and community is the
transformation Rowlandson undergoes while with the Indians. This transformation
proves so subversive because it challenges the very notion of identity promoted
by the Puritan community by blurring the line between self and other. While
Rowlandson may attempt to emphasize the difference between her own reliance
on the Bible and Puritan beliefs and the Indians' heathen ways and assumed
association with the devil, as she moves away from her community and into the
world of the Indian, these differences begin to disappear.

The most vivid, and even shocking, illustration of her changed nature occurs
during the eighteenth remove. Up to this point, Rowlandson had already
demonstrated her ability to fend for herself among the Indians by exchanging her
sewing skills for food and other commodities. Yet the ability to trade within this
culture alone does not indicate a true transformation on her part. When she takes
food from an English child, however, she appears to turn away from a sense of
unity with the English, and mirrors the behavior of her Indian captors. She
explains that she had gone to a wigwam where there was a squaw and two
English children. When the squaw gives both she and an English child a part of a
horse's foot Rowlandson eats hers quickly and then "took it (the foot) of the Child,
and eat it myself; and savoury it was to my taste" (52). This action is not only
surprising for its lack of concern and remorse, but because it parallels the Indians'
practice of stealing food from Rowlandson. Whenever she obtains food in her
narrative, she seems concerned to hide it or eat it quickly lest someone should
take it from her. By mimicking the behavior of the Indians she demonstrates the
extent to which she has adopted their identity as a part of her own. Mitchell
Breitweiser suggests that through this experience she discovers "what is called
the Indian at the heart of herself" (Breitweiser 141). Although Breitweiser finds in
this incident an example of a self that "exults in the amoral purity of its survival"
(142), given the importance of negative identification against the Indians, as well
as Rowlandson's sense of her Christian commitment, this dramatic transformation
into the "other" also challenges the very core of her being. She is so influenced by
this incursion into the world of the Indian that she continues to be affected by this
experience even after she returns.

Rowlandson's transformation not only challenges the cultural or racial differences
that support Puritan identity, but also problematizes the Puritan ideal of feminine
nature or behavior she seems to embody. First, the fact that this transformation is
a direct result of her obedience and submission to authority highlights the
problems associated with this norm. Furthermore, as Breitweiser points out,
Rowlandson's experience demonstrates "the thesis that a white woman is much
more like an Indian than is a white man" (141). He explains that her adoption of
the Indians' "savage" behavior plays upon Puritan assumptions about the "craven
souls of Indians and women" (141). Although Puritan doctrine insisted on the
equality of all humans in the eyes of God, the belief that women had a closer
affinity to nature than men also implied that women were perhaps closer to the
wilderness or heathen culture of the Indians. Rowlandson's transformation takes
this assumed affinity to its extreme manifestation by demonstrating how a woman
may easily cross over and literally become a part of the forest.(8) She thus
reinforces these assumptions about feminine nature, which ironically serve to
undermine her assumed role or identity as the virtuous wife of a Puritan
minister.(9) The narrative seems to suggest that if even orthodox women like
Rowlandson are able to enter into and become a part of the world of the other,
the strict racial distinctions asserted by the Puritan community are permeable and
perhaps illusory. Because she is an exemplum for all Puritans, Rowlandson's
transformation has significance not just for women, but for men as well. As an
ambassador into the world of otherness, Rowlandson's transformation
undermines the colonists' attempts to "seize ... on the difference of the natives in
order to establish firmly their positional superiority" (Nelson 6).

Rowlandson, however, is not the only figure who changes throughout her
narrative, for the Indian captors she describes also seem to undergo a similar
transformation. Like Rowlandson who takes on characteristics of Indian behavior,
the Indians' identities come to resemble and bleed into English culture and further
challenge the strict division between self and other provided by the deployment of
race. One of the clearest moments of this breakdown of racial distinctions occurs
when Rowlandson mistakes a band of Indians for Englishmen. As she watches the
group of 30 approach, her "heart skipt within

her

, thinking they had been English-men ... for they were dressed in English Apparel,
with Hats, white Neckcloths, and Sashes about their waists, and Ribbons upon
their shoulders" (Rowlandson 52). Although she quickly adds that there is a "vast
difference between the lovely Faces of Christians, and the foul looks of those
Heathens," her initial confusion provides a moment of radical cultural intersection
(52). The assumed differences between Indians and English asserted by both
Rowlandson and her Puritan community are here exposed as both unstable and
perhaps purely cosmetic. The Indians in her narrative are free to enter the realm
of the English, if only momentarily. Although the narrative ends with the apparent
restoration of order through Rowlandson's return to her family and civilization, her
account opens the possibility for cultural confusion, creating an uncertainty that
would have been mainly frightening to this Puritan woman and her readers.
Whether or not Rowlandson or her audience recognized the potential threats of
her narrative, its language does serve to undermine the very boundaries it seeks
to uphold. Racial discourse proves an imperfect tool for this white author's search
to contain the perceived dangers of the wilderness. The numerous publications of
Rowlandson's narrative insured that its tensions and ambiguities could play upon
the imaginations of several generations.

With the changing makeup of New England society and politics over the next 100
years, the immediate threat of Indian attack and influence faded into the West.
Urban centers continued to develop and replaced the "howling wilderness" and
the dark chaos it represented. Nevertheless, the literature of this period often
evoked the themes and concerns of captivity narratives like Rowlandson's. Many
novels, for example, went so far as to include fictional accounts of Indian captivity
in their tales of the American wilderness. These works, which illustrate direct links
with the early captivity stories, still explored the mysteries of the American frontier
and the dangerous selves and others encountered there.(10) Yet, several authors
who chose American towns or cities as the settings for their novels also appear to
follow this tradition. While their plots may not deal directly with the threats posed
by the Indian or the forest, many still employed the theme of female captivity and
thereby introduced the potential ambiguities or subversive meanings it makes
possible. Some of these urban treatments of captivity and the confrontation with
otherness can even be found in the sentimental romances popular in America
during this period.

Although originally developed and perfected in Britain, the decreased control and
influence of Puritanism allowed the sentimental novel to flourish in the new world
as well (Fiedler 47). In fact, the first best-selling novel in America after the
Revolution was Charlotte Temple (available in America in 1792), a sentimental
novel that sees its heroine travel from her home in Britain to America. Its author,
Susanna Rowson, experienced a similar journey, leaving America once with her
loyalist family, only to return again as an actress, writer, and eventual school
mistress (Davidson xix-xxv). Because of Rowson's late emigration to America,
there is some question about whether or not Charlotte Temple should be
considered an American text. Yet its immense popularity in the US, along with its
narrative connections to American society and politics, suggest that it is indeed a
part of the American body of literature. Furthermore, as Leslie Fiedler points out,
"where for the English Susanna Rowson is a minor figure ... for us

Americans

she is a pioneer]" (55). Cathy Davidson has commented that "one might even ask
if Charlotte Temple is the same book after a transatlantic crossing" (297). In
addition, the potential connections between Rowson's sentimental story of female
captivity and transformation and Rowlandson's realistic one further illustrates the
place of Charlotte Temple in the American literary tradition. While Rowson may
not have intentionally followed the pattern of the early Indian captivity narrative,
the parallel concerns with female captivity and the potential tensions or
ambiguities it creates suggest that both played upon American imaginations and
anxieties in much the same way.(11)

Like Rowlandson's account of her survival with the Indians, Rowson's text reflects
several societal concerns. As a potential political allegory, for example, Charlotte
Temple dramatizes the situation of the new American nation, still reeling and
confused from its rebellion against the king.(12) Politics are not its only focus,
however, as the novel also deals with the social significance of proper feminine
behavior. In her Preface, Rowson claims that she intends her novel for "the
perusal of the young and though less of the fair sex" so that she may "be of
service to some who are so unfortunate as to have neither friends to advise, or
understanding to direct them" (5). Like Rowlandson's self-constructed piety,
Charlotte (and her mother) provide a conventional model of feminine virtue and
goodness. Charlotte's fall into the hands of Montraville and Belcour is a result of
her failure to follow this proper code of female conduct. She, too, demonstrates
the need to submit to proper authority figures, as well as the dangers to women
who fail to do so. But despite her example of virtue fallen through seduction and
sexuality, she is still a figure of goodness that will not be destroyed as the result of
one careless mistake. Her final tearful reunion with her father, the survival of her
child who resembles her, and the remorse of her seducers all assert a reassuring
moral message for readers that goodness will overcome evil. That her triumph is
partially due to her ability to resist the sexual advances of Belcour provides a
reminder of the dangers of promiscuity. Like Rowlandson, then, Charlotte acts as
an exemplum of the triumph of morality and proper femininity for the whole
community of her readers.

Also like Mary Rowlandson's narrative, Rowson's novel demonstrates the use of
racialized language to portray the struggle between good and evil, or light and
dark. Here, however, the dark others that become Charlotte's tormentors are
related to the French rather than Indian culture. This reading of "otherness" in
Rowson's novel is informed by Toni Morrison's analysis of the Africanist presence
found in the work of several white American authors. Morrison suggests that this
presence is not always synonymous with a literal African American character.
Instead, she speaks of a "non white, Africanlike ... presence or persona," a
"denotative and connotative blackness" that serves as a trope for inscribing
difference (6). While the French in America were never the objects of the same
type of racist differentiation or stereotyping that accompanied the sociopolitical
marginalization of Indians, African slaves, and other non-Europeans, the
similarities between Rowlandson's construction of difference and that found in
Rowson's text suggest that the metaphor of racial difference is indeed at work in
Charlotte Temple. If we recall that many captivity narratives, including
Rowlandson's, associated the French with the Indians and their barbarous deeds,
it seems possible that Rowson's readers would not be surprised by continued
connections between France and images of cruelty and moral degeneracy. Thus
the images and language that Rowlandson uses to create a division between
civilization and savagery, self and other, Indian and English, seem to provide a
linguistic blueprint for difference that can be applied to the French, or any other
dangerous "outsider" in the new American society. Although France had assisted
the colonies in their war against England, the association of France with political
and social chaos in the latter half of the 1790s, along with the anti-French
sentiment promoted by the Federalists, provide further suggestions that the
language of racial difference applied to this particular ethnic group would have
appealed to Rowson's American readership during this time.(13)

Furthermore, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, the America of the 1790s
was still very much concerned with the nature of the "American subject." While
Rowlandson attempts to create a distinctly Puritan identity through negative
association with the Indians, the new American "self" of the late 18th century had
a multitude of others against or with which to identify (Smith-Rosenberg 485). In
Charlotte Temple, it is primarily white European (specifically English) moral
superiority that Rowson seems to uphold. She invites her American readers to
identify themselves with this group through her emphasis on assumed French
depravity.(14) The most obvious example of this association of French characters
with the forces of evil or darkness is found in the figure of Mlle La Rue. Initially, in
fact, her very identity is represented through her ethnicity alone as she is referred
to simply as the "French teacher" who is willing to risk Charlotte's honor for the
five guineas Montraville slips into her hand (Rowson 11). The novel later
describes her as a woman "possessed too much of the spirit of intrigue" who
"added to a pleasing person and insinuating address, a liberal education and the
manners of a gentlewoman" (27, 26). Mlle La Rue demonstrates the art of
duplicity in all her dealings with Charlotte in England as well as with her new
husband, Colonel Crayton. Although readers know she has some experience with
traditional morality, as she had initially escaped a Catholic convent, her refusal to
concern herself at all with Charlotte's fate aligns her with the forces of evil or
Satan as opposed to the values of Christianity. This sense is further magnified by
the assertion that she has a "diabolical spirit of envy" and takes a "malignant
pleasure" in Charlotte's fall (32).

La Rue's liberal sexuality and refusal to conform to any moral code leads to
Charlotte's momentary lapse and subsequent journey away from the safety of her
parents in England. Even Charlotte's other tormentors, Montraville and Belcour,
are linked to La Rue's duplicity through their French-sounding names. Their
concern for immediate gratification at the cost of Charlotte's honor aligns them
with La Rue's dangerous licentiousness despite their British background. Although
readers are assured that La Rue's countrywoman, the school matron Madame Du
Pont, has an upstanding character, she too shares the failings of her kinswoman,
as she has hired assistants with less than ideal qualities. Being of French origin,
then, seems to be enough to indicate a questionable or depraved character in this
novel.(15)

Yet despite these clear distinctions between French and British character and the
obvious moral message these distinctions allow, there are several elements of this
text that serve to undermine its conservative stance, as well as its racialized
construction of difference. Through the voice of her narrator, Rowson herself
appears to embrace some of these subversive elements, specifically where they
relate to assumptions about proper femininity. Cathy Davidson has pointed out
several of these challenges to the patriarchal society that insists on a young
women's obedience and innocence. For example, by addressing herself to her
young female readers, Rowson invests them with an importance not generally
accorded in society. As Davidson states, "not often in American culture is the
young woman privileged with such concern and attention from an authority figure,
from an author" (xvii). She endows her young readers with both dignity and
intelligence, while she mocks her critics and the concerned matrons who misread
her text. Even Rowson's acknowledgment that young girls do and should read her
book flies in the face of the public opinion that novel reading was dangerous and
inappropriate for women (Davidson xvi). Although her statement that as "a novel
writer ...

she

stands but a poor chance for fame" (Rowson 6) indicates an awareness of this
opinion, her tale insists that it is better to be exposed to immorality in a book, if it
can help one avoid it in life. In addition, Charlotte's inability to reverse her situation
once she has made her fatal mistake can be read as an indictment of a society in
which women are at the mercy of men and a double standard excuses the
immorality of their seducers.

These potential challenges to conservative constructions of femininity suggest
some of the ways in which Rowson's text subverts the very standards and codes it
purports to uphold. However, as in Rowlandson's captivity narrative, the greatest
disruption of the novel's apparent intentions can be found in the figure of the
captive Charlotte and the implicit meaning of her experience. When the novel
begins, Charlotte is an ideal example of youth and beauty coupled with Christian
morality. Although she agrees to go along with Mlle La Rue and accepts letters
from Montraville, she knows she is transgressing the boundaries of propriety and
several times suggests confiding in Madame Du Pont. As she is drawn deeper into
the web of intrigue created by La Rue, her will fails her and she begins her
downward spiral. The loss of her virginity and her later "captivity" in Montraville's
house not only destroys her spirit, but transforms her appearance and health as
well.(16) On the boat, for example, her illness produces a "languor ...

that

spread over her delicate features" (Rowson 59) and ironically attracts the
attention of Belcour. When left by Montraville, Charlotte becomes a woman of
sorrow and the "real anguish of heart ... in a great measure fade

s

her charms, her cheeks

become

pale from want of rest, and her eyes ... sunk and heavy" (95). Her looks are so
altered, in fact, that she is no longer attractive to Belcour and instead her
"emaciated appearance disgust

s

him" (98). She is transformed into such a figure of poverty and despair that even
her friend, Mrs. Beuchamp, fails to recognize the dying Charlotte.

This physical transformation illustrates the extent to which Charlotte has become
an "other" to the world of virtuous womanhood through her captivity to the
persuasiveness of Montraville and Belcour. She recognizes that "no woman of
character will appear in

her

company" (65) once she has become Montraville's mistress. She has no choice
but to remain trapped in the house he provides for her, for within the polite society
she has known, she is now an outcast or enemy. She is reminded of her status
again when Belcour offers to take her to New York and introduce her to his
friends. She claims that "the virtuous part of my sex will scorn me, and I will never
associate with infamy" (96). The only friends she can hope to make are those
who, like herself, have fallen in the eyes of society. Although she refuses to meet
any other woman who has cast aside her chastity, she acknowledges her affinity
to them. She has entered into the world of these others to such an extent that
even her coarse landlady is free to insult her as a "nasty, impudent hussy" (103).
While the novel attempts to illustrate a sharp distinction between pure English girls
like Charlotte and immoral French women like La Rue, Charlotte's entrance into
La Rue's world of depravity and licentiousness breaks down this strict division.
Interestingly, whereas Rowlandson's transformation is a result of an extended and
dramatic incursion into the realm of the other, it is enough for Charlotte to have
fallen once for her to enter this world in the eyes of her society. This difference
suggests that perhaps the potential blurring of such boundaries, already present
in Rowlandson's captivity novel, becomes more, rather than less, pronounced as
writers and readers move further from the "chaos" of the wilderness and into that
of the new and increasingly diverse American cities.

At the same time that Charlotte Temple illustrates its heroine's fall, however,
Rowson also insists that Charlotte is not changed; she is still the same virtuous girl
who walked home with her school mates from church at the beginning of the
novel. Her internal goodness is upheld regardless of the fact that she has lost her
virginity and given birth to Montraville's child. Mrs. Beauchamp, who defies public
opinion to become Charlotte's only friend, testifies to Charlotte's character despite
her apparently immoral behavior. Even before she knows her, she exclaims
"surely her mind is not depraved. The goodness of her heart is depicted in her
ingenuous countenance" (62). Charlotte's own anguish at her situation, her
penitence, followed by that of Montraville and La Rue, also demonstrate that she
is only guilty of temporary weakness rather than a moral failure. Although
Charlotte appears to have entered into the world of sin and depravity, the novel
continues to show that appearances are misleading. This disruption of clear moral
codes and signals again challenges the cultural distinctions between good and
evil, virtuous self and dissipated other, that the conclusion of this text seems to
want to uphold. Charlotte's example raises questions about all seemingly immoral
persons who, as Rowson suggests, "would gladly return to virtue, was any
generous friend to endeavor to raise and re-assure

them

" (68). While this message of Christian charity seems hardly revolutionary, in a
society like the new United States, where chaos and uncertainty already prevailed,
the suggestion that appearances are no longer valid indicators of the truth opens
the door to further confusion.

The success of La Rue throughout the novel provides an excellent illustration of
this potential. Although the text identifies her as a dangerous other, she is able to
fool those she encounters and prospers despite her flagrant defiance of moral
conventions. Having entered Charlotte's school, she easily influences her and
convinces her that they are friends. Charlotte herself admits that it is this pretense
of friendship that is most to blame for her willingness to follow La Rue's
suggestions. She writes to her parents that she would not have joined Montraville
"had I not been encouraged, nay urged ... by one of my own sex ... under the
mask of friendship" (80). La Rue is also able to enchant Colonel Crayton enough
that he agrees to marry her, allowing her to enjoy his fortune while Charlotte
suffers in poverty. Although Rowson claims that this is simply an example of how
"the endeavours of the wicked are often suffered to prosper," (99) La Rue's ability
to fool almost everyone until the end demonstrates the extent to which marks of
difference (racial, or in this case, ethnic) can prove to be ineffective methods for
differentiating outsiders from insiders. This encroachment of the dangerous and
foreign other into the pure and civilized world of the novel is reminiscent of the
incursion of the Indians in Rowlandson's text into the realm of the Puritans. But
while the Indians only temporarily seem to resemble the New England society, La
Rue is able to completely and easily infiltrate Charlotte's world. The suggestions
that La Rue was once herself virtuous further weakens any assumed difference
between she and Charlotte. Rowson explains that "once a woman has stifled the
sense of shame in her own bosom ... she grows hardened in guilt" (32). Although
this is not Charlotte's fate, she is a potential La Rue, just as La Rue was perhaps
once a potential Charlotte. Here, again, it is female characters who appear to be
most closely linked with otherness; while at the same time they allow for the break
down or blurring of such distinctions.

These potentially subversive messages found in Rowson's sentimental tale of
captivity and transformation, along with its parallels to Rowlandson's earlier text,
suggest one method of locating the presence and construction of dark others in
urban-centered novels of this period. In Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland or
The Transformation, published in 1798, we can find a similar invocation and
subversion of the metaphor of racial difference.(17) Although Wieland does not
appear to draw on the captivity tradition as explicitly as some of Brown's other
novels, its exploration of the theme of female captivity and confrontations with
dark otherness shares the concerns of texts such as Rowlandson's. Like both
Rowson's and Rowlandson's narratives, Wieland focuses on the plight of an
idealized female character who becomes the captive of a stranger marked
through the language of racial difference as dangerous and morally degenerate.
That this captivity is more psychological than physical suggests that, as American
society moves further away from the external chaos of the frontier, the
corresponding threats one encounters tend to move inwards.(18) Unlike
Rowlandson's or Rowson's writing, however, Brown's novel explicitly and openly
explores these threats and the potentially subversive messages they entail. While
he seems to intend his work to provide moral, social, and political messages for its
readers, he achieves his goals by admitting to the complexities of the American
condition, rather than proposing a solid or dogmatic solution.(19)

The similarities surrounding the image of female captivity in Wieland, and those
found in Charlotte Temple and The Captivity of Mary Rowlandson include a
concern with social and political tensions. Like Charlotte Temple, Brown's novel is
set in New England prior to the American revolution yet clearly deals with the
anxieties and confusion of post-Revolutionary America.(20) As Emory Elliott points
out, "the America of Wieland is a nation of recently uprooted, insecure families
held together by the fragile ties of their former European connections" (xviii). The
Wieland family themselves become representatives of this new and fragile society,
despite Pleyel's ironic complaint that "to make the picture of a single family a
model from which to sketch the condition of a nation

is

absurd" (Brown 34).At the same time, Brown also explores the tension between
reason and religion, liberty and authority, that existed during this period
(Fliegelman vii, viii). But instead of suggesting to his readers the superiority of one
principle over another, Brown attacks all equally to convey the message that no
ideal is without danger. While Rowson and Rowlandson appear to consciously
promote a clear moral or social message, which nonetheless gets undermined by
the language of their texts, Brown is either unwilling or unable to fix on a stable
answer to the questions that plague his society.(21)

The construction of proper femininity and the challenge to this norm found in
Wieland provide a further connection between Brown's work and these other two
narratives. Positioning Clara as the narrator and primary survivor of the novel is
only one way that Brown explores issues of femininity and the special tensions
created by female captivity. For example, it is Clara's apparent conformity to the
conventions of ideal womanhood that initially leads Carwin to test her. Like Mary
Rowlandson or Charlotte Temple before her seduction, Clara provides a model of
the ideal woman of her age. Although Clara is far more independent and
educated than Charlotte Temple, and is a follower of Enlightenment reason
instead of Puritan piety, Carwin's and Pleyel's idealization of her does suggest that
she shares many qualities with these more traditional women. As Andrew
Scheiber has pointed out, "Pleyel's view of Clara simply reinstates the traditional
role of the woman as symbol of virtue, purity, and propriety" (178). As a traditional
woman, Clara demonstrates the same type of submissiveness as these other
female captives. While she longs to begin a romance with Pleyel, she knows she
"must not speak" (Brown 90). She cannot be the aggressor, but must wait
patiently and "play on the intricate codes which signify female virtue and propriety"
(Sheiber 179). When Pleyel later accuses her of engaging in an illicit affair with
Carwin, she almost silently accepts his judgment of her. She believes that it is her
"province to be passive and silent" (Brown 121) and to "peaceably submit to be
driven by its

the storm's

fury" (153). This passivity, despite her knowledge of her own innocence, is again
reminiscent of the passive acceptance and compliance of both Mary Rowlandson
and Charlotte Temple.

While Pleyel appears to be Clara's tormentor in these scenes, it is really Carwin
whom she blames for the terror and destruction that afflicts her family. He is the
enemy who holds her captive and destroys their peace through his ability to
imitate others' voices. Like Rowson, Brown distinguishes this threat to the calm
society of the Wielands through the language of racialized difference associated
with the Indians in Rowlandson's text. As in Charlotte TemPle, Carwin's otherness
is aligned with a perceived ethnic difference rather than literal racial difference.
Although he is American-born, his earlier transformation into a Spaniard
associates him with this European country and the mysteries of Catholicism.(22)
Wieland seems to draw on the language of otherness and "race" to set Carwin
apart from the rest of the novel's characters in much the same way as Rowson
and Rowlandson. Clara describes him as having "coarse straggling hairs, his teeth
large and irregular, though sound and brilliantly white, and his chin discoloured by
a tetter" (60-61). His face and appearance are physically unattractive and in
retrospect "

her

blood congealed; and

her

fingers are palsied when

she

call

s

up his image" (56). As Elliott points out, Carwin's strange appearance is only one
way Brown illustrates his "marked differences from the German, Protestant,
privileged Wielands" which distinguish him as both a social outsider and racial
other (xxvii). The language Pleyel uses to describe his behavior further recalls
Rowlandson's construction of the Indians. In recounting what he has learned
about Carwin, Pleyel claims that there is "doubt whether he be not in league with
some infernal spirit ... that he wages a perpetual war against the happiness of
mankind" (149). Like Rowlandson's Indians and Rowson's French, Carwin's
otherness indicates moral inferiority or degradation.(23) Carwin's additional
association with dangerous sexuality is indicated through his confrontation with
Clara in her bedroom, his admission that he intended to rape her, and even her
own strong reactions to him. Combined, these elements align Carwin with other
racialized enemies to security and order despite the fact that he is also identified
as a fellow American.

Carwin's entrance into the Wieland family society sparks a series of
transformations that destroy the happiness, the sanity, and even the lives of most
of its members. While Wieland's decline into a violently misguided killer is perhaps
the most dramatic of these changes, Clara, as narrator and sole surviving
member of her family, provides an even more interesting example of the
alterations caused by Carwin's influence. Similar to the experiences of Mary
Rowlandson and Charlotte Temple, Clara's transformation involves a symbolic
entrance into Carwin's world, the world of the other. The first suggestion that
Clara will be influenced by Carwin appears to be the strong attraction and mild
obsession she forms after he visits her house. When she hears him utter the
words "for charity's sweet sake," she "drop

s

the cloth that

she

held in

her

hand" and begins to cry (59).Although she admits that he is not physically
attractive, she feels drawn to him, and gazes all day at the sketch she has made
of him. This attraction hints at the sexuality Carwin embodies and Clara's
susceptibility to this element of his character.

After overhearing the voices in her room and near the stream, she experiences a
further change to her usually calm demeanor. She claims that she "was pushed
from

her

immovable and lofty station, and cast upon a sea of troubles" (80). She begins to
enter the strange world of fear and mystery that Carwin conjures up through his
voices and feels "visited by dread of unknown dangers" (79). When she learns
that Pleyel believes she is carrying on a secret romance with Carwin, however,
she comes face to face with the changed self or identity Carwin has plotted to
create. Although she has done nothing to deserve Pleyel's disgust, she is
devastated "to be stigmatized with the names of wanton and profligate" (119).
That she envisions her transformation from virtue to depravity to be more than in
name alone is clear in her claim that an "entire and mournful change has been
effected in a few hours. The gulf that separates man from insects is not wider than
that which severs the polluted from the chaste among women" (129). Carwin has
succeeded in drawing her into his sexually charged world, and she feels more
than symbolically altered by Pleyel's belief in her guilt. While it may seem absurd
that she can be affected by Pleyel's accusations alone, her grief at his charges
suggests that the mere imputation of wrong-doing is indeed enough for her to be
considered fallen by a society that requires such pure virtue from its women.

Once she experiences this change in the eyes of Pleyel and even her brother,
Clara's transformation becomes far more dramatic. Her "mind seemed to be split
into separate parts, and these parts to have entered into furious and implacable
contention" (159). This splitting of her intellect suggests the psychological
breakdown Clara experiences and the loss of reason or control introduced by
Carwin's tricks. She finds that "the milkiness of (her) nature was curdled into
hatred and rancour" (247). She becomes a part of the violence that Carwin has
created, and longs to see him dead. In fact, her reversal is so great that she even
considers murdering her brother. Her aggressive impulses seem to mirror
Carwin's, and parallel Rowlandson's incursion into the realm of the other through
her theft of food from a starving child.

The complexity of Wieland, however, prevents Clara's transformation from being
simply a transformation into Carwin's world. For while he is the most obvious
embodiment of danger and intrigue in the novel, the murderous nature that her
brother Wieland displays suggests that perhaps Clara is also entering into a realm
of death and violence inherent within the novel's closed circle of insiders. On the
one hand, Wieland's violence appears to be as much an effect of Carwin's
influence as Clara's transformation. He claims to hear a voice, which he takes for
God's, directing him to murder his wife, children, and sister. Given Carwin's
admission that he has been the source of other voices, it seems likely that
Wieland's actions are also suggested by Carwin. Yet Carwin's unwillingness to
confess to this crime, despite his candor about his other actions, creates

window of doubt and implies that Wieland acted on his own accord or had himself
imagined the voices. As Fliegelman points out "the question of culpability remains
unresolved" (ix). The violent death of the elder Wieland and his own sense of
having failed to complete some divine mission, further implies that his son's
actions are a manifestation of some deeper tension, rather than an
uncharacteristic madness created by an outsider. Thus Clara's alteration can also
be linked to this perhaps larger problem.

As in the reading of otherness in Charlotte Temple, Morrison's Playing in the Dark
provides a useful paradigm for exploring Clara's experience along with these
larger tensions. In the Preface to her book, Morrison recounts Marie Cardinal's
description of her own breakdown while listening to a Louis Armstrong
concert.(24) Cardinal describes this event as the moment at which she realized
that she was on the verge of mental disintegration. As Morrison points out, it is a
confrontation with blackness or otherness, and the various "cultural associations
of jazz" that lead Cardinal into "her strong apprehension of death ... of physical
power out of control ... as well as

her

curious flight from the genius of improvisation, sublime order, poise, and the
illusion of permanence" (vii). Faced with a powerful Africanist presence, along with
the fragmentation and layering of jazz composition, Cardinal's own sense of
stability and order fall apart. Morrison uses Cardinal's experience as a vivid
illustration of the catalytic role of the Africanist presence in literature by white
American authors. Clara's breakdown, like Cardinal's, clearly follows this pattern.
Her confrontation with Carwin, the sexually-charged and racially-identified other,
leads not only to an alteration of her identity in relation to Pleyel and Wieland, but
to a disruption of her own sense of a unified self. As she is identified in this novel
as an insider, a white subject distinguished from any racially-identified others, her
breakdown challenges this identity as well. Although she does eventually return to
a sense of calm and happiness, her claim that "it is true that I am now changed,"
(269) suggests that this transformation is in some degree permanent. As in
Rowlandson's or Rowson's texts, Clara's confrontation with otherness provides a
significant rift in the novel that undermines the use of racialized language as a
means to consolidate a stable white identity.

The danger in Brown's novel then can not be reduced to that of a distinguishable
"racialized" outsider. Clara is not held captive by Carwin alone, but by the system
of difference and exclusion on which the Wieland's have constructed their closed
community. This system proves to be both illusory and potentially dangerous, as
is breakdown threatens the sense of self on which these characters rely. As with
Marie Cardinal's mental breakdown, the presence of the other in Wieland acts as
a catalyst for this inherent, transformative potential. Additionally, if the Wielands
are representatives of the new American nation, Brown's novel seems to carry an
implicit warning about the construction of a "normative" white national identity.
Carwin's ability to infiltrate the Wieland family further amplifies this sense.

Like the Indians in Rowlandson text that seem to become British, or La Rue in
Charlotte Temple, Carwin is able to mirror the behavior and conversation of Clara
and her friends to such an extent that they fail to recognize the danger he poses
until it is too late. Carwin appears to fit into the Wieland family as he, too, is a
master of rhetoric, and his "narratives

are

constructed with ... much skill, and rehearsed with ... much energy" (Brown 85).
He feigns friendship to all the inhabitants at Mettingen, while at the same time he
plots and acts to deceive them. Although Pleyel's experience with Carwin in Spain
makes him familiar with Carwin's ability to disguise himself, this knowledge does
not warn the Wielands away. Like La Rue, Carwin's involvement in the intrigue of
the novel is allowed to flourish. But whereas La Rue is eventually left to die in
poverty, Carwin retires peacefully to the country. The evil and violence he seems
to represent go unpunished and he becomes for all intents and purposes a
peaceful member of his new society, an unquestioned "insider."

This continued prosperity, along with Clara's eventual assumption of guilt, further
illustrate the highly subversive and dangerous messages of Brown's text. The
distinctions between threatening outsider and civilized insider that are challenged
and overturned in this captivity story fail to be restored by the novel's conclusion.
While Wieland shares many of the same concerns as Rowlandson's and
Rowson's writing, these unresolved tensions distinguish this novel of psychological
captivity. Unlike Rowlandson or Rowson, who assert a restoration of the status
quo at the end of their texts despite the obvious incursions of the other into white
society, Brown is willing to leave his novel open-ended. In fact, Clara's language
throughout the novel tends to highlight, rather than hide, the breakdown between
self and other (or outsider and insider) implied in her experience of captivity.
Furthermore, although the novel takes place within the presumably civilized and
closed family circle of the Wielands, this fails to prevent disaster. Instead the
transformative powers found in Rowlandson's wilderness experience are only
intensified by the family's apparent security. In this small community of insiders,
the incursion of the other sparks violence against the community and the self.
Brown's novel then emphasizes the sense that, as American culture became
increasingly urban and diverse, a stable Euro-American identity constructed
through the language of racial difference became more, rather than less,
problematic.

Nonetheless, links between Brown's text and other narratives of female captivity
help to suggest how the fears and anxieties that plagued Americans in the 17th
century continued to be expressed in the 18th. Although neither Brown nor
Rowson appears to have consciously followed the tradition set by Rowlandson,
the similarities between these works point to the pervasiveness of the tension
surrounding the image of the captive female. The similarities between Rowson's
and Brown's deployment of race, and Rowlandson's earlier use of these
distinctions, suggests that while the faces of these others may change, the need
to maintain a sense of difference remains. Dangerous outsiders, be they Indians
or Europeans, are demonized in all three stories of entrapment. Yet even in texts
that seem most reliant on these distinctions, female captives often become
mediators into the realm of the other. Their experiences challenge the boundaries
set up by the language and images in each of these captivity narratives. Whether
women's mediating ability is a result of an assumed affinity to nature, sexuality, or
some other "feminine" trait, these characters demonstrate the links between
constructions of gender and race often found within texts attempting to
consolidate a white national identity. In turn, these narratives also disrupt
accepted norms of white female behavior, often allowing entrapped characters
and/or authors to venture into traditionally male realms. Even texts such as
Rowlandson's and Rowson's, which seem to uphold conservative constructions of
race or gender, ultimately undermine the distinctions on which they rely.

Finally, an examination of not only the language of racial difference, but on the
various socio-political needs this language is allowed to serve, illustrates Toni
Morrison's assertion that "the subject of the dream is the dreamer" (Morrison 17).
Although the threats of the other in each of these narratives reflect historical racial
or ethnic tensions, they also provide white authors a means of exploring the
anxieties of a developing and differentiated society. Using the language of racial
difference, these writers were able to begin to construct a sense of national
identity (and an illusion of social control) based on the exclusion of groups
associated with the dangers and chaos of the wilderness. As the makeup of
American society changed through increasing immigration and urbanization, this
racialized discourse, as a metaphor of difference and exclusion, continued to
serve as a primary tool for consolidating an American identity that was primarily
white European (even if some Europeans were occasionally excluded). However,
as these works suggest, such a construction of an individual and national self is
intrinsically fraught with contradiction. Instead, it requires a symbolic, and often
real, violence to maintain. This violence, however, only serves to further
demonstrate that such a system is inevitably untenable.

1 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has explored the similarities between texts by
Rowlandson, Rowson, and Brown in "Subject Female: Authorizing American
Identity." Her analysis focuses on the role of white women as authors and readers
in the development of American subjectivity. In order to authorize themselves as
political subjects, Smith-Rosenberg finds that female writers such as Rowlandson
and Rowson often repeated the racist discourse of their male counterparts. Yet
these texts, and even some male-centered and -authored novels such as Brown's
Edgar Huntley: ironically construct a "Euro-American subject/narrator ...

who is

decentered and self-contradictory ..." (491). The wilderness stories she examines
seem to prohibit a stable and closed construction of white subjectivity. While my
analysis also deals with these authors, I focus on two different texts to explore
how the language of "otherness" or racial difference is incorporated into
urban-centered novels by both Rowson and Brown. Within the "civilized" settings
of Wieland and Charlotte Temple, the image of the captive female continues to
evoke the challenges to a stable Euro-American selfhood defined by difference.

2 Abdul JanMohammed describes the "manichean allegory" of race as an
"economy ... based on a transformation of racial difference into moral and even
metaphysical difference" (80).This "central feature of the colonialist cognitive
framework and ... literary representation" provides "a field of diverse yet
interchangeable oppositions between white and black, good and evil, superiority
and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intelligence and emotion, rationality and
sensuality, self and Other, subject and object" (82).

3 Derounian-Stodola and Levernier explain that because the "Puritans hoped to
establish a theocracy, the Indian and Indian culture came to be associated with
the devil" (61 ). Of course, the Indians were not the only ones who were viewed as
a threat to the Puritan mission. The French (and Catholicism) posed an equally
dangerous opposition to Puritan orthodoxy. Many captivity narratives, in fact,
show the French in collusion with the Indians and thereby suggest that the
characteristics of the two are closely aligned. Even Rowlandson's narrative hints
at the dangers of the French when she claims that it "might have been worse with
him (her son), had he been sold to the French, than it proved to be in his
remaining with the Indians" (48). Given the brutality Rowlandson associates with
the Indians, her statement here illustrates a dramatic fear of French influence.

4 In his discussion of the power of the Puritan system of exemplification, Mitchell
Robert Breitweiser explains how this rhetorical strategy enabled Puritan ministers,
readers, and writers to "negat(e) the specific significances of its objects in order to
absorb them in transumptive representation ..."(53). Thus, while the historical
situation Rowlandson's narrative portrays may have had significance for her first
readers, the spiritual message of her experience would be timeless and have an
equally powerful significance for years after.

5 It should be noted that while this ability to act as an exemplum for the whole
community appears to assert women's equality with men and to undermine the
submissive role Rowlandson tends to embrace, hers is a spiritual rather than a
social equality.

6 See for example Tara Fitzpatrick "The Figure of Captivity: The Cultural Work of
the Puritan Captivity Narrative." American Literary History 3 (Spring 1991): 1-28
and Amy Shrager Lang's introduction to A True History of the Captivity and
Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson in Journeys in New Worlds, Andrews, et.
al., eds.

7 See, for example, Schrager Lang or Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her.

8 Annette Kolodny points out the symbolic links between the feminine and the
wilderness that colored early representations of the New World. Images of the
land were couched in the language of erotic fantasy, thus excluding women from
the myth of male conquest. Although Kolodny finds that women sought other
methods of figuring their place within America, this imagery also demonstrates the
assumed affinity between women's nature and the forest (1-13).

9 Although Rowlandson's tale denies any confrontation with sexuality the links
between chaos, paganism, and unrestrained sexuality in the Puritan mind meant
that sexuality is also potentially implied in her narrative (Verduin 230). The fact
that she needed to address this issue by pointing out that the Indians never
offered her "the least abuse or unchastity," (Rowlandson 61) shows her
awareness of her audience's bias and assumptions.

10 David Mogen, Scott Sanders and Joanne Karpinski point out that the terror of
the wilderness is also the terror of a self transformed "by forces from without that
may after all be projected from within" (22).

11 In "The American Origins of the English Novel," Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse illustrate the links between the American captivity narrative and the
development of the sentimental novel in England. In particular, they point out how
Rowlandson's popular story of captivity can be considered a female Robinson
Crusoe, whose popularity in England predated Defoe's text by approximately 30
years. Richardson, in turn, "capitalized on the popular appetite for such narratives
when he separated Pamela from her parents, a separation that fills Pamela with a
single-minded desire to return" (396). While this essay does not mention
Rowson's novel directly, Armstrong's and Tennenhouse's analysis provides
further evidence for the close ties between Rowlandson and Rowson.

12 Fiedler explains that British sentimental fiction can be seen as reflective of the
class struggle between the British nobility and bourgeoisie (40). Although the
American sentimental romance does not necessarily invoke similar tensions,
novels like Charlotte Temple still carry potential political messages. As Davidson
suggests "Charlotte's fall could easily be read as an allegory of changing political
and social conditions in early America" (xi).

13 The significant role of France in the American Revolution, along with the
Anglo-French alliance of WWI, has "helped to perpetuate the myth of a
traditionally close political association between France and the United States"
(Blumenthal 3). In fact, from the early colonial period, relations between English
and French settlers, and later America and France, have been characterized by
extremes of both friendship and enmity. In the 1790s, when Rowson's novel
became available, attitudes in America towards France and the French were
mixed. Jefferson and the Republicans tended to favor the French Revolution and
French amity, while Federalists were decidedly anti-French and pro-British.
Although the French were considered to be among the various white Europeans
who made up the new American character, their inferiority to Anglo-Europeans
was often highlighted. As Winthrop Jordan points out, in the 1790s "Federalists
frequently discoursed on their nation's essential Englishness, but Republicans,
significantly, did not think to reply by acclaiming French influence in America or by
extolling the melting pot" (340). The excesses of the French Revolution and
near-war with France later in this decade did nothing to improve these attitudes.
Thus during this volatile period of new nationalism the French were often
identified as a negative or dangerous influence on American society.

14 Rowson's own British heritage, along with her family's persecution as loyalists
during the Revolution, may partly have accounted for Rowson's desire to assert
the moral and cultural superiority of the English over the French during a period in
which there continued to be a high-level of anti-British sentiment among segments
of the population (see Davidson on Rowson's biography).

15 Fiedler points out that it is La Rue "who persuades (Charlotte) to elope with her
lover and actually runs away to America with her." She thus "projects all the
American fear of Latin perfidy" (71).

16 Of course Charlotte is not a literal "captive" in America. In theory, she is free to
leave at any time. However, her lack of financial resources, her fear that her
parents will not receive her, and her eventual pregnancy and illness make any
real choice impossible. She is effectively trapped in the house outside New York
and must rely on others to communicate for her with the rest of the world.

17 Although this novel did not receive the kind of popular attention Charlotte
TemPle enjoyed, Brown's writing was highly regarded by literary critics in both
Britain and America (Elliott x, xi) . It is also important to examine Brown's work in
any discussion of an American literary tradition, as he was one of the earliest
authors to write consciously as an "American" author.

18 Critics such as Mona Sheurman find that this "psychological slant in the novel
in America" was present "long before we would generally expect it" (105). She
explains that in Charlotte Temple, for example, the action and conflict deal more
with the mind and emotions, than with actual, physical trauma. Her analysis thus
points to yet another link between Rowson's and Brown's approach to the captivity
theme.

19 The very form this novel takes adds to our sense that Wieland is based more
on ambiguity than certainty. Treading the line between the real and the fanciful,
the sentimental and the gothic, Brown's novel does not fit solidly into any one
tradition or genre.

20 Brown's desire to influence his own society is highlighted by the fact that he
sent President Jefferson a copy of this novel (Fliegelman xxxvii).

21 Wieland also directly explores the problems of authorship and the danger of
reading and writing in the new America. While both Rowlandson and Rowson
consciously acknowledge the threat of their writing to their reputations as women,
as well as the potential influence of their works, Brockden Brown seems even
more engaged with this issue, and includes it as theme in his novel. Brown himself
sensed that "the role of the writer is 'to enchain the attention and ravish the soul of
those who study and reflect'" (Fliegelman xx). Through the character of Carwin he
explores the danger of irresponsible authorship or rhetoric. Yet Clara, as author of
her own story, also suggests some of the positive and therapeutic aspects of
writing. Like his other themes, this tension remains unresolved, but further
illustrates the social commentary present in this book (Fussell 172).

22 Although Carwin is American, his earlier "transformation" into a Spaniard also
aligns him with this European country and the mysteries of Catholicism like the
French in some captivity narratives and in Charlotte Temple.

23 The French-American tensions of the early 1790s that may have encouraged
Anglo-American authors to vilify the French through racialized language
reminiscent of Rowlandson's treatment of the Indians were only intensified by the
time Wieland was published. Napoleonic aggression during this period and the
XYZ Affair in 1797 served to strengthen anti-French sentiment in the US. The
election of 1800, in which the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson was
elected, elicited fears in some that a "'Jacobin phrenzy' would debauch all the
wives and daughters of the land ..." (Riegel and Long 139). The slave rebellion in
French Haiti also provided opportunity to associate France with violent revolutions
of dark others (155-156). Although Carwin is associated with Spain rather than
France, the political and religious links between these countries hint at the
dangerous nature of his "otherness." In fact, Wieland, and Carwin in particular,
can be read as a fictional reminder of Washington's 1796 warning "against 'the
insidious wiles of foreign influence'" (qtd. in Blumenthal 14).

24 Cardinal claims: "My heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than
the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so the air could
no longer enter them. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying here in the middle of
spasms, stomping feet and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone
possessed" (qtd. in Morrison vii).

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. "The American Origins of the
English Novel." American Literary History 4 (Fall 1992): 386-410.

Blumenthal, Henry. France and the United States: Their Diplomatic Relation
1789-1914. New York: Norton, 1970.

Breitwieser, Mitchell Robert. American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning:
Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1990.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland and Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. Jay
Fliegelman, intro and ed. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Davis, Margaret. "Mary White Rowlandson's Self-Fashioning as Puritan
Goodwife." Early American Literature 27 (1992): 49-60.

Delbanco, Andrew. "The Puritan Errand Re-Viewed." Journal of American Studies
18 (1984): 343-360.

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