Reviewed by Tiffany Potter | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3

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Reviewed by Tiffany Potter | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Tiffany Potter, University of British Columbia

The Captive's Position: Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England. By Teresa A. Toulouse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 233 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
Increase and Cotton Mather frequently used tragedy, war, and captive women and children as fodder for sermons and communications in service of their own religious, intellectual, and political interests. Rather like the Mathers, Teresa A. Toulouse's new book uses the sexier subject of female captivity narratives as an entry point for what is often more significant as a meticulous and critically astute analysis of the internal debates of New England Protestantism and their relationship to the tangle of charters and governors that left the colony in such relative flux, particularly around the time of England's Glorious Revolution. Toulouse uses captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams, "explicitly appropriated, supported, or written by Increase and Cotton Mather" (132) from 1682 to 1707 as the starting point less for a "new reading of the captivity narrative" (coverleaf) than for an intriguing discussion of generational tensions, both political and ideological, within colonial New England. The captive women themselves are for the most part as peripheral to this discussion as they were to the religious politics of the Mathers; in fact, the first discussion of a specific captivity narrative begins 55 pages into the 160 pages of text.	1
The process and form of the captivity narratives' publication, in the context of three generations of New England's religious leadership, their struggle for authority, and their ambivalence about each generation's ideological connection to both English and Calvinist "fathers," links captivity and religious politics. Toulouse presses the link for this case by arguing that because the female captive is taken "against her will to another place, she may claim her orthodoxy, but in spite of her loyalty, she is nonetheless compelled to experience a changed cultural condition. In representing a state in which the captive appears simultaneously loyal and border-crossing, the very structure of female captivity inscribes a form of ambivalence" (47). So the occasional self-contradictions in Rowlandson's narrative, for example, and its depiction of her developing relationships with her captors are used to demonstrate this ambivalence of male intergenerational conflict: "Revealing their confrontation, avoidance, and refusal of their inevitable and uncontrollable difference from the first-generation fathers, Mary Rowlandson's narrative offers profound insight into the mixed desires marking and sustaining such men's identities" (72). Though she may struggle actively (or even violently, in the case of Dustan), the woman must learn through her captivity obedient acceptance of passivity and submission to the will of God, read by Toulouse as a way for certain second- and third-generation ministers "to try on various ways of understanding the interrelation of authority and historical change" (168). These narratives "represent their own ultimate loyalty to the 'fathers' in the face of physical, spiritual, and cultural dislocations . . . [the female captive] is also often represented as either experiencing for the first time or as renewing very passionately a personal and communal covenant with the God of the 'fathers' who, as a result, redeems both the captive and the entire community" (166) with religious and political implications. Like Toulouse's important earlier book, The Art of Prophesying, this one offers some marvelous insights into the gnarled roots of religious and political doctrine and dispute in New England.¹	. . .

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