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Reviews of Books
| The Captor's Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier. By William Henry Foster. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 205. $29.95.)
Reviewed by Teresa Toulouse
, Tulane University
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William Foster has written a historically suggestive book. If it sometimes falters at the level of interpretation, it raises new questions about early modern women in French Canada, about Anglo-American male and female captives controlled by French Canadian Catholic women, and about the ways in which these groups not only intersected but also understood and wrote about their interactions. |
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The book is organized by chapters titled for the spatial sites inhabited by women and their captives—farm, frontier, household, and so forth. Within and across chapters, Foster alternately separates and weaves together three strands. The first examines the lives and motivations of French Canadian Catholic women for buying and using Anglo-American captives during the colonial wars of the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century. Some lives considered here, like those of Marguerite Bourgeoys (founder of the originally lay women's community the Congrégation Notre-Dame de Montréal) and Agathe de Saint-Père (purported founder of the Canadian textile industry), are well known in Canadian scholarship. Foster usefully introduces them to U.S. scholars, among whom a focus on French Canada, colonial Catholicism, and Catholic women is receiving renewed attention. He takes his own slant on these women by placing their stories in the context of the need for captive labor in French Canada. But Foster does not rely on more visible, high-status figures; he reconstructs the lives of a variety of women both from fragments of the historical and genealogical record and from their very erasure or diminishment in Anglo-male captivity narratives. We learn of Marguerite and Louise Guyon, who came from the "middling sort" (p. 108) and made their lives precariously in French Acadia during "King Williams' War" of the 1690s. Though Marguerite appears only briefly in returned captive John Gyles's narrative, Foster constructs probable aspects of her life by comparing Gyles's claims to her family history. What Gyles often represents as his gentility or mastery vis-à-vis Marguerite Foster instead reads as Marguerite's own clever management of her captive. Foster similarly reconstructs aspects of the authority of Josette Lorrain, a low-status girl mentioned in the diaries of two Anglo prisoners held in Quebec in the 1740s. Describing the probable contexts of French Canadian prison life and the specific roles of the prisonkeeper and his family, Foster disputes male diarists' sentimentalized portrait of Josette as "an angel of mercy" (p. 159). |
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In addition to reconstructing different arenas in which these women exercised authority, Foster explores shifts in their motivations for using captives. Although nuns like Marguerite Bourgeoys might have justified their need for workers by linking their obedient service to God with their power to coerce service from male captives, high-status Catholic laywomen like Agathe de Saint-Père felt no such need to defend their entrepreneurial interests or coercive activities. Even Josette Lorrain, viewing herself as the state's agent, presumably did not see her treatment of Anglo-American prisoners as possessing any religious valence. By the mid-eighteenth century, there remains little sense of the potent intersection of faith, gender, status, and politics that Foster finds fifty years earlier. |
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