49. "Abraham Panther"
“But O! How shall I relate the horred scene that followed?” –“Abraham Panther”
The traumatic event that Faludi has chiefly in mind is 9/11, the ultimate (and then relatively recent) failure of the homeland to protect itself. Faludi chronicles in minute detail the desperate attempts of the culture to spin false but reassuring narratives in the aftermath of the attack—turning firefighters into conquering heroes when, with their high death-to-rescue rate and their malfunctioning radios, they far more resembled additional victims; breathlessly recounting the “rescue” of soldier Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital when she was actually in no danger and the hospital was largely unguarded—as well as efforts to return women to a place of subservience. But as Faludi shows in the second half of her book, 9/11 was only the most recent instance of culture-makers calling on the security myth to reassert control after a failure-to-protect. Whether it’s the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the postbellum South (and again in the 1910s), casting itself as a band of white knights shielding the region’s womanhood from the alleged threat of Black men, or the Salem Witch trials of 1692 and 1693, which were partly a response to the uncertainty and violence of the ongoing King William’s War and other settler–indigenous conflicts, threats to the homeland by a non-white outsider have long been recast in ways that, in their desperate assertion of male control, only lead to more violence.
For Faludi, though, the ultimate source of the security myth is the captivity narrative, which she considers the “only genre indigenous to American literature.” Dating back to the late 17th century, when Mary Rowlandson’s best-selling Narrative became the genre’s first hit, the captivity narrative, and in particular, the Indian captivity narrative continued to enjoy popular success and capture the public imagination for centuries. (The popular telling of the Jessica Lynch story fits the archetype perfectly.) Detailing the experiences of (usually) women that were kidnapped and held by indigenous people, the form continued to evolve over the decades, moving from truthful-ish standalone narratives to sensationalist episodes in popular novels. But as Faludi notes, even in its earliest form, the genre “wasn’t merely a recording of [the woman’s] ordeal. It was the medium through which these haunting memories would be contained, reconstructed, and effectively repressed in the centuries to come.”
In its most basic formulation, the Indian captivity narrative involves the capture of an individual or family, almost always Europeans, by indigenous people in the present-day United States or Canada and, according to scholar Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, “its plot is most commonly resolved with the captive’s escape, ransom, transculturation, or death.” The genre is far-ranging and underwent many transformations over the years. The standard history of the form’s development tracks its evolution from religiously motivated accounts in the 17th century to more embellished and propaganda-oriented texts in the 18th century and on into outright fictions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Derounian-Stodola questions this too simplistic schema, noting that texts throughout the genre’s history have vacillated between more fact-based and more embellished accounts, although she acknowledges that the standard divisions do “indicate a trend.”
For Faludi, the evolution of the genre represents the culture’s attempts to rewrite history to adhere more and more to the security narrative. In this mythologization, independent-minded woman like Mary Rowlandson, who shrewdly manipulated her captors and eventually won her freedom thanks to the fund-raising efforts of a group of Boston women, were replaced with helpless, cowering girls who needed rescue from brave men. A people consumed with shame, constantly insecure about its ability to protect itself, and particularly its women, “white America restored its sense of national security through the creation of a compensatory gender narrative,” Faludi writes. “In the service of establishing a national story that would supplant intense humiliation with invincible invulnerability, the early captivity story would evolve through successive permutations, even into the twentieth century, where it would find expression in such iconic films as The Searchers.”
The adaptation of Cynthia Ann Parker’s story into Alan Le May’s 1954 novel, The Searchers, and, particularly, the classic 1956 film of the same name, is one of Faludi’s chief examples of the transformative power of the security myth, but her argument is weakened a bit by her lack of acknowledgment that Ford’s film is hardly the triumphalist celebration of masculine heroics that she takes it to be. (In this, she anticipates Teju Cole’s latest novel, Tremor, which discusses Faludi’s book and Indian captivity narratives at some length and whose characterization of The Searchers as a mere “John Wayne vehicle” that “presents [a story] of pure heroism,” took me out of the book for good.) Nonetheless, the true story of Parker, who was kidnapped by a group of Comanches from her Texas home in 1836, was subject to some rather significant transformations. Like Debbie in The Searchers, Parker became acculturated to Commanche life, in Parker’s case, marrying a chief and having three children with him, but there the differences end. The basis for the John Wayne character, Ethan Edwards, for example, was Cynthia’s ne’er-do-well uncle, James W. Parker, a proto-bounty hunter who led a venally-motivated and highly unsuccessful attempt to recapture his niece. Cynthia was eventually “rescued” by a band of Texas Rangers who slaughtered a group of Commanche women and children in the process. After returning to “civilization,” Cynthia repeatedly tried to return to the Comanches, self-mutilating in her despair, and eventually, after her daughter died, isolating herself and refusing to speak until she too passed on.
*****
If the Indian captivity narrative has often been used to reassert a framework of masculine control, it has also proved a diverse genre, not only stylistically but in terms of the authors’ perspectives. For example, Sarah F. Wakefield’s Six Weeks in the Sioux Tepees, published in 1864 in the middle of the Civil War and in the brutal aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862, offers an outright defense of the author’s Native captors and condemns the white American culture from which the author was taken. Wakefield, though, was writing with unusual freedom, as the majority of captivity narratives over the centuries were either written by men or subject to extensive male editorial oversight. In her anthology of women’s Indian captivity narratives, in fact, Derounian-Stodola acknowledges that, of the ten pieces in the collection, Wakefield’s is the only one that is seemingly written by a woman on her own terms.
Other texts, though, despite being the work of a male author or editor, still provide counternarratives to the damsel-in-distress story, sometimes revealing a tense interplay between writer and subject. This is the case in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, written by James E. Seaver in 1824. After being captured by a Shawnee and French raiding party and given to two Seneca women to replace a lost family member, Jemison eventually embraced her new culture, adopting the Seneca name Dehgewanus. As Derounian-Stodola explains in the introduction of her anthology, the Narrative contains an essential tension between “a white, male, establishment author who is loath to allow Mary Jemison, a fully transculturated woman, to prevail” and his subject. Yet, despite Seaver’s reticence, Jemison’s own voice and perspective come through in the text, leaving the reader with the “dominant image of Jemison… [as] a transculturated woman with far more freedoms in her adopted culture than in her culture of origin.”
*****
Derounian-Stodola ends her introduction by noting that “the background information contextualizing these ten captivity narratives [that she has just supplied] should not obscure the major reason for their enduring appeal: they are a good read,” and this is especially true of the so-called “Panther Captivity.” First published by an unknown author under the pseudonym Abraham Panther in Bickerstaff’s Almanac in 1787, the wholly fictional story was published over twenty times between then and 1814 in a number of different versions, most frequently appearing as a standalone pamphlet. The original story, only a few pages long, is written as a letter from Abraham Panther to a friend, describing a hunting trip Panther and another man named Isaac Camber took in 1786. During the trip, they encounter an unnamed woman living in a cave, who narrates the bulk of the story in her own voice and whose combination of vulnerability and forcefulness both excited contemporary readers and made them highly unconformable.
A tightly compressed but delirious genre mashup, the “Panther Captivity” is both an exciting tale and a testing ground for contemporary ideas about gender roles in the aftermath of the Revolution. As Derounian-Stodola writes, “because this brief fiction is a composite of several genres, including the adventure story, the captivity narrative, the sentimental novel, and the fertility myth, it has many different interpretations, but all of them recognize the power and threat of women in the new republic.” The narrative begins in Panther’s voice, as he describes how he and Camber set out to “penetrate the Western wilderness as far as prudence and safety would permit.” After thirteen days without anything notable happening, the pair hears a woman singing a mournful song from atop a hill. Climbing the hill, they encounter a “most beautiful young LADY” sitting near the mouth of a cave. She invites them into the cave, where she is living, offers them refreshments, and tells her story.
Here, the narrative shifts to the woman’s voice as she recounts her life to date. Coming from a wealthy Albany family, she fell in love with a young clerk living in her household when she was 15. As her father disapproved of the match, she left her family home with the clerk in tow, and the two ventured deeper and deeper into the wilderness to elude her father’s search party. Eventually, they were kidnapped by a group of Native Americans who dismembered the clerk before burning him alive. The woman escaped and, after 14 days of wandering, came across a giant man speaking a foreign language. Although he is not explicitly identified as a Native American, the giant, according to Derounian-Stodola, is intended to evoke an indigenous man, as he “speaks a different language, eats Indian cake, has bows and arrows in the cave, and lies down on animal skins.” At any event, the giant man leads the young woman to the cave where he lives, the cave where the woman is currently telling her story to Panther and Camber, and insisting that he sleep with her, binds her when she refuses. The woman escapes her bondage, kills and dismembers the giant, and takes up residence in his cave, where she has lived the past nine years. Here, the narrative returns to the framing story, as Panther and Camber prevail upon the woman to return to civilization. The woman reunites with her regretful father, now dying, who gifts her his “handsome fortune,” allowing her to continue to live independently.
As Derounian-Stodola notes, this brief but captivating narrative lends itself to a variety of interpretations, from the mythic/historical to the Freudian to the feminist. But despite the popularity of the story, its vision of a liberated, fend-for-herself woman, briefly permitted in the wake of the Revolution, would not last. “America did not seem to be ready for the figure of the white woman in the wilderness,” she writes, “so the hunter model—found most clearly in [John] Filson’s [1884] portrayal of Daniel Boone, which was almost certainly one of the ‘Panther Captivity’ ‘s sources—eventually prevailed.”
This contrast between the two texts—Filson’s Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, a supplement to a tract promoting Kentucky real-estate which turned a mediocre woodsman into a frontier hero and laid the foundation for the whole Boone mythos, and the “Panther Captivity”—is one taken up at some length by Faludi in a later chapter of The Terror Dream. For Faludi, the texts represent two possible ways forward that a new nation still sorting out societal roles might have taken. The woman of the “Captivity,” according to Faludi, “personified the Revolutionary charter: upending paternal tyranny, demanding liberty, insisting on equal and inalienable rights.” And, at first, it seemed like this vision of a woman as “self-reliant pioneer of the American frontier,” successfully navigating the balance between wilderness and civilization. might prevail. The immense popularity of the text offered hope that “the freedoms… [of] the mutable new nation might extend to its young citizens—its young women in particular.” But, in the end, it was not to be. The young nation, already looking to the West, needed stories that imposed order on the chaos it encountered. These stories needed to be reassuring and this meant the frontiersman protecting women from the horrors they would inevitably encounter. This meant Daniel Boone, reimagined as a superhero, and Natty Bumppo, half-civilized protector of women. It meant, as time went on, the rise of the Klan in the post-Civil War South and it meant soldiers “rescuing” Jessica Lynch and the media spinning her story into an unambiguously heroic narrative. Above all, it meant—and continues to mean—violence. As America falls back on reassuring myths to explain away its blood-soaked shame, it only serves to multiply the slaughter, a perpetual state of ongoing savagery from which we have stubbornly refuse to learn a thing.
Comments
Post a Comment