Four
Rome and Her Indians

America's long and absorbed engagement with the threat and thematics of captivity—with real or imagined bondage to Indians, witches, slave-holders—shadowed the country's official vision of itself as the land of liberty. While political rhetoric enumerated the blessings of freedom, imaginative discourse was preoccupied with the often exoticized threat of confinement. By the mid-nineteenth century, middle-class audiences had become veritable connoisseurs of captivity, eager and practiced readers of its agonies, its mysteries, and its lessons. Hungry for the vicarious experience of confinement as an imaginative control of their turbulent democracy, antebellum Americans avidly read several versions of the captivity genre: anthologies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Indian captivity tales, a steady stream of slave and convent-escape narratives, and numerous popular novels including such best-sellers as George Lippard's Monks of Monk Hall (1844) and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), that righteously exposed the horrors of economic and racial captivity.

Two hundred years of literary treatment had produced an elaborate rhetorical edifice of confinement and escape initially founded upon a scriptural model, structured according to religious, racial, and sexual fears and mysteriously illuminated by the pleasures of torment and deliverance. In many respects, this American captivity tradition represented a domestication of the European and English Gothic. But conditions specific to America—the imperial conquest of indigenous peoples and the establishment of chattel slavery—uniquely shaped the genre of

the American Gothic. The essentially psychological focus of such Old World novels as The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and The Monk by M. G. Lewis was invested with imperial and racial conflicts specific to nineteenth-century America. Thus the "savage" and the "dark" were at once actual peoples stigmatized as impediments to Anglo-American settlement and forms of psychological being suppressed by the advent of modernization. American Gothic narratives functioned more directly in antebellum politics, capable not only of legitimating ongoing social oppressions but also, in particular instances, of inciting violence against them.^[1]

Roman Catholicism figured crucially in this American captivity tradition as a principal and historically resilient captor of the New World Protestant settler. Changing its guise in response to the psychosocial anxieties of successive generations of Protestants, the specter of Roman-ism played captor to each in turn, looming as menacing figure in the New England forests, the Southwest, and the Mississippi Valley region. The tradition of Protestant bondage to Roman evils originated with Luther's claim in 1520 that "the church has been taken prisoner" by a greedy and theologically misguided papacy.^[2] Lutherans and Calvinists thereafter characterized their reformation as not only a purification but also an escape from an outraged and sometimes pursuing Rome.

As the genre of Indian captivity narratives shows, the experience of "Roman" captivity was a highly self-conscious one in colonial America, a trauma of ethnic confrontation that attracted intense religious and aesthetic responses, which in turn produced highly popular narratives advertising the conflicted formation of national identity. Detailing the drama of white captivity in an Indian New World, many such narratives phrase the trauma of cultural and racial estrangement as a spiritual tribulation essential to the formation of an American selfhood. Such development involved an often protracted separation from forms of European worldliness that were at the same time claimed as critical to the success of white Christian civilization in the New World. Roman Catholicism played a crucial historical and symbolic role in this simultaneous extraction of the pure from the corruptions of Europe and assertion of European purity against the seductions of Indian America; profoundly familiar yet rendered foreign by the Reformation, Romanism was a force that threatened to disrupt the forming of the American self.

In writing the earliest New World Indian captivity narratives, Spanish and French Catholic authors had themselves suggested an essential, if violent, kinship between their Catholicism and that of their captors. Puritan and later Protestant captivity narratives agreed that such a kin-

ship did indeed exist between the Catholic European and the American Indian, only that kinship was a demonic, not a potentially sacramental, one. Endowed with a treacherous autonomy in Puritan narratives, Catholicism enjoyed a shifting power of personification, a wilderness enemy who conspired with the Indian to master the Protestant settler and, with the later Jacksonian "removal" of Indians, intrigued by itself for dominion over the Protestant body and soul.

In the century prior to English colonization, when Spanish explorers and priests knew America, a time that nineteenth-century Protestant historians and filiopietistic celebrants of America's pilgrim beginnings dissociated from the nation's official origin, the first recorded captivity occurred. In compensation for returning "naked" from the New World, a Spanish adventurer humbly offered his king a narrative of his experience. The Journey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Companions from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536 , published in 1555, recounts the Spaniards' eight-year captivity among North American Indians.^[3] Its stunning depiction of both the ambiguous interchange of authority between Spanish captive and Indian captor and the subtle, resilient sacerdotal power of Catholicism prefigures later Anglo-American ruminations upon a vagrant Spanish Catholicism circulating invisibly through antebellum America—a power whose apparent charisma attracted vehement nativist criticism for its "foreign" forms of authority and submission.

Núñez's narrative implicitly articulated a formative irony that characterized many Indian and, later, religious captivity tales—namely, that captivity, for all its coercion, deprivation, and suffering, covertly registered the benefits of imprisonment. The subversive note of voluntarism, if not complicity, so noticeable in antebellum fictions about Rome accompanied the captivity genre from its American beginnings. In a reportorial style noticeably alien to the later, melodramatic language of New England's Scripture-bound Puritans, Núñez described for his king an imprisonment fraught with skewed intentions and accidental exchanges of power; his documentary style only enhances the account of his evident awe before the marvels of ethnic estrangement and provisional assimilation. When his Florida exploration dwindled to baffled wandering, he finally and desperately gave himself over to the Indians, captivity his only way to survive. Half captives, half tagalongs, Núñez and his small group followed the famished tribes as they roamed in search

of roots—the only El Dorado in this New World landscape being rumored fields of prickly pears two days' march away.

In a remarkable interaction between the numinous influence of Núñez's white skin, his political acumen, and the famine and religious expectations of his tribal captors, the captive explorer soon claimed a charismatic authority born of his marginal ethnic status. Over the course of eight years, he walked from Florida to Mexico, accompanied by thousands of Indians who looked to their white god for healing, blessing, and guidance. That his divine status produced a new, more problematic, captivity was not lost on him; he confided to his king that "frequently we were accompanied by three or four thousand persons, and as we had to breathe upon and sanctify the food and drink for each, and give them permission to do the many things they would come to ask, it may be seen how great to us were the trouble and annoyance" (95).

If the assumption of the priestly role felt burdensome to the layman Núñez, his familiarity with its rituals proved immensely valuable. Curing and blessing as he proceeded, he negotiated his way from tribe to tribe, the worshiping horde increasing as the caravan moved west. Throughout this captivity-turned-journey he claimed that Spaniards and Indians communicated perfectly by gesture, the two cultures spontaneously sympathizing by means of the hybrid religious rituals created in their meeting—an achievement later Protestant captives neither desired nor could attain. By the time Núñez reached the Spanish settlements around the Gulf of California, his captivity had become a virtual anticaptivity; in a final reversal, he stepped forward as the protector of his Indian prisoners, warning them against the traitorous schemes of the Christians before embarking for Spain. As anticaptivity, the narrative signals the colonial moment only to deny it, offering a suspended pastoral before the work of colonization begins in earnest.

The captivity narrative of the famed Jesuit missionary Father Isaac Jogues, written a century after that of Alvar Núñez, is a second crucial antecedent to colonial English narratives, for as a document of missionary zeal rather than exploration, it displays the workings of a professional Catholicism in competitive conflict with Iroquois shamanism. Núñez became, as it were, a priest with little reference to his private piety, whereas Jogues the priest was stripped of all ritual until in his martyrdom he attained a radically autonomous piety perfectly independent of priestly accoutrements. Acutely sensitive to the potential spiritual benefit of captivity (specifically, martyrdom), Father Jogues wrote one of America's most powerful early narratives of Christian imprisonment in the "heathen" New World: The Captivity of Father Isaac Jogues, of the

Society of Jesus, among the Mohawks (1655). His narration of captivity, torture, eventual escape from, and final sacrificial return to the Iroquois records a martyrology at work in the New World that ardently transcends the polemics of Reformation and Counter-Reformation. If Jogues's physical heroism and eventual martyrdom figure importantly in Parkman's discreetly polemical Jesuits in North America as a compelling instance of an exemplary, even charismatic, masculinity, Jogues's account is uninterested either in such translations of religious force or in the apostolic management of the Canadian tribes. Rather his narration unfolds a contest between spiritual powers in which Catholicism triumphantly transcends all aspects of the material world—a sacral force that within fifty years would be inversely portrayed by New England Puritan captives as the primary power of deceit, corruption, and bondage in the New World.^[4]

In 1642, the Iroquois captured Father Jogues and his lay assistant, René Goupil, near Albany, New York. As Núñez had done more than a century before, Jogues, a man later characterized by Parkman as "indomitable and irrepressible," transformed his captivity into an anti-captivity through a language of ardent subjection in which power and liberty accrue in direct proportion to bodily helplessness.^[5] Jogues's white skin draws upon him all the ritual violence the Iroquois can bestow—a violence that lingered below the surface of the adulation Núñez engineered, one kept at bay by his passive mimicry of priestly functions and careful avoidance of any missionizing. In one of the most torture-ridden of American captivity narratives, Jogues wrote to his superior in 1643 of his agonies and, more important, of his repeated refusal to flee them, his missionary zeal aggressively transforming Iroquois rage into proof of sacred love. Enduring a year of captivity before being ransomed by the Dutch at Albany, Jogues, less ambivalently than later Puritan captives like Mary Rowlandson, embraced the European divinity he perceived at work in the New World. His Ignatian spirituality was entirely separate from its New World "theater," for he was intent upon martyrdom more than colonization; thus Jogues, as missionary, is always in motion even while bound to the stake, moving through the New World as fallen temporality rather than settling within it as colonist of the New Zion. Nonetheless Jogues, like the Puritan Rowlandson, anxiously pondered the possibility that Indian captivity spelled divine wrath or, worse, abandonment.^[6] When a savage mysteriously desists from cutting off his nose, a mutilation that by Iroquois custom would have necessitated his death, Jogues writes to his superior that that one restraint showed that "God watched over us, and was trying us rather than casting us off" (11).

Supported by the passionately inclusive discourse of martyrdom that swiftly positions any potentially deviant carnal detail in a proliferating series of indications of divine presence, Jogues compares his torture to the pains of childbirth, quoting the apostle John in explaining to his superior that "we were like to 'a woman in travail' [John 16:21]," the agony of torture preceding the joys of eternity as surely as labor precedes those of maternity. Vitalized by this procreative vision, the celibate Jogues denies that the Indians are agents of their own violence, insisting that their attack on him is actually his own ethnically and spiritually inviolate self-birthing. Powerfully engaging monastic traditions of asceticism and self-mortification, Jogues conceives of his torture as a masculine ascesis necessary to a feminine new birth, the sexually transgressive metaphor testifying to his creative powers of endurance and authorship. In asserting their connection, however, the metaphor promptly discloses the excruciated distance between tortured priest and laboring mother—a disclosure that recalls the distance between religious experience "then" and "now," a gap always apparent in the carnal deadness of language used to convey the living spirit.

Within a wilderness occult, Jogues improvises his own indigenous piety, carving the name of Jesus on the forest trees, seizing every opportunity to convert and to baptize, aggressively countering Mohawk violence with his sacred, the meaninglessness of pain with the inexorable significance of martyrdom. The teleology of martyrdom reveals that even his own seemingly anomalous behavior is part of a pilgrimage home that converts New World tortures into reenactments of the Jerusalem crucifixion. Thus Jogues, explaining to his superior why he did not flee his Iroquois torturers when the opportunity arose, voices a classic formulation of New World captivity as a voluntary exile necessary to regain one's spiritual home: "Although I could, in all probability, escape either through the Europeans or the savage nations around us, did I wish to fly, yet on this cross, to which our Lord has nailed me beside himself, am I resolved by his grace to live and die" (38).^[7]

Alternating between accounts of his torture and of his contemplative retreats from the "Babylon" of Indian villages into the forest, Jogues's narrative contrasts the apparently aimless wanderings of the Iroquois to the transcendent orderings of his Ignatian piety. Unless captured and reorganized by conversion and baptism, the Indians, from Jogues's perspective, are wandering, in soul as well as body, the violence they inflict on the missionary a sign not of cultural agency but of a randomness that signifies the confusion of the damned. But in the contrast lodges a spiritually revelatory identification, an exegesis made visible only

through the Indians' ostensibly random violence. For Jogues records a certain gruesome intimacy between torturer and victim (precisely the intimacy that Parkman so powerfully misappropriated), one that dimly but perceptibly reflects the transcendent bond between martyr and God: at one point, abruptly spared death, Jogues comments that the event has taught him that "I should not fear the face of a man when the Almighty was the protector of my life, without whose permission not a hair could fall from my head" (25). Not only does the excess of pain, in its uncontrollability, resemble the sublime powers of divinity, but its unspeak-ableness also urges the victim to rephrase it as divine speech. These two captivities, then, incite and sustain one another, the torture necessitating the descent of grace, the grace welcoming the further intrusions of torture: "But God justly ordained that the more I pleaded, the more tightly they drew my chains" (18).

This reciprocal dynamic effectively transforms the captivity from a demonic imitation of heavenly intimacies to their numinous enactment. Tied to a stake, Jogues experiences his bodily fixity as mobilized spiritual combat in which the terrors of cultural estrangement are contained within the theologically (and ethnically) familiar precinct of the satanic. The primitive, the savage, the demonic never attain to the status of the unknown, a rank Jogues carefully reserves for his God. Thus in Jogues's continuance of his crucifixional experience, sin and holiness, abandonment and grace reciprocally construct one another, creating a narrative (and theological) interdependence that skirts the heretical perception that God and Satan are one. That he is no longer on the cross at the time of writing his narrative emerges in his rhetorical efforts to continue upon it. While his narrative insists upon his continued nailed closeness to the cross, the writing of the narrative depends upon his escape from it.

In their production of grace, Jogues's afflictions yield as well astonishing narrative power. Markedly contrasting to the silences of Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener , to the unspoken recesses where agnostic sensibilities retreat when in pain, Jogues's torture generates an eloquent and disciplined articulateness precisely because his pain unleashes a specificity of meaning.^[8] The more he is tortured, the more invincible the author becomes, asserting an ever stronger verbal reprise of his agony. When his thumb is hacked off, he raises it up in thanks to the Lord that his writing hand has been preserved from mutilation. Paradoxically, Jogues uses the torture that is designed to enforce recognition of his captive status to empty that captivity of any political reality. No longer torture but crucifixion, Jogues's experience mirrors, but finally cannot

be, the desired captivity to Christ, a captivity that can be perfected only in death. Reduced to a simulacrum of an inaccessible communion, the torture, by destroying the body it works upon creates the conditions of its own temporal thwarting as well. De-realized into sacred metaphor, bodily experience functions as a necessarily partial conduit to the numinous; Indian unreality becomes a sign of Christ's living but still invisible presence. Yet Jogues's narrative reconstruction of this dynamic must retemporalize this crucifixional epiphany in order to publicize to Europeans the creative logic of New World captivity.

Forced in his wilderness exile to practice a Protestantized piety, Jogues explains to his superior how "passages which my memory had retained taught me how I should think of God in goodness, even though not upheld by sensible devotion" (30). Later Puritan captives showed little such flexibility, however, when confronted with the "sensible" accoutrements of Catholic piety. As pawns in the extended North American conflict between France and England, many New England colonists were kidnapped by Indians allied to Catholic France. Schooled in Reformation polemics, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England prisoners to Catholicized tribes interpreted rosary beads and crucifix, whether handled by missionary priest or "savage," as the insignia of a devilish Rome vengefully pursuing them in the New World.

The ambiguous relationship to captivity unfolded in the narratives of Núñez and Jogues also characterized the accounts of Puritan captives, for whom attack and kidnap heralded the presence of the divine. Impelled by Christian zeal, many cultivated, if they had not actively pursued, their captivities as instances of "merciful affliction" and hence divine attention. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New Englanders were especially adept at articulating the processes by which the trauma of abduction and often violent acculturation into Amerindian societies revitalized their European piety. The narration of kidnap into the wilderness could generate a radical spiritual excitement, for it made palpable the elusive paradox of New Testament Christianity: that life itself is a bondage and that liberty can be found only in entire dependence upon an unpredictable God. More precisely, the experience of captivity that apparently testified to God's potentially traumatic changeableness was revised to read as a primary index of his loving concern. Evangelical Christian subjectivity had long understood the unconverted state as one of radical captivity to the powers of Original Sin; in the words of one

seventeenth-century English Quaker, "Man is a captive, his understanding captive, his will captive, all his affections and nature in captivity."^[9] For American Puritans, an actual captivity to "savages" theatrically enacted this truth, confirming their Calvinist theology and controlling it by depositing it, at least temporarily, in the precincts of the foreign; Indian captivity, by externalizing their internal phenomenology of subjugation, afforded psychological, if not bodily, release from its pressures. In the abjection of forced surrender to heathens more depraved than themselves, Puritan captives partially escaped their own depravity; the burden of Indian violence additionally urged them to depend entirely on Christ, the real, yet merciful, captor.

This psychological and rhetorical understanding of Indian captivity as a New World stage for an Old World Christian pilgrimage was critical as well to the development of the Anglo-American national self, which sprang free of Europe by strenuously applying European Christianity to the American environment. The problem became how to preserve this new liberty once ransomed from captivity. If the providential reading of abduction and ransom depended on the victim's survival, his or her return to some psychological and literal place from which to formulate that reading also signaled a new distance between self and God's chastening afflictions—a distance in which the control over the past required to narrate it might issue in spiritual torpor, the loss of an ecstatic living in the Word.

Colonial Puritan acculturation to New Zion propelled New England saints against the twinned trials of "savagery" and "popery."^[10] Unlike Jesuit missionary perceptions of Protestant heretics as themselves in need of conversion and as ideologically adjacent to rather than commingled with the Indian, Puritan captives located French Catholicism, when they encountered it, at the heart of heathen America, inextricably fused with the savage. Thus positioned inside the often violent enterprise to establish Anglo-America, the Romanism emanating from France and its Indians demanded a concerted military and spiritual response to ward off the danger of spiritual backsliding or foreign imperial conquest.

But like the Indian and the wilderness itself, popery covertly served to incite piety, an integral (if more problematic) part of Puritan efforts to achieve a stark and ever-watchful gratitude toward God. When acting in concert, all three agents of the "demonic" verged upon the "gracious," for they produced in Puritan captives that vigilant dependence on God that was perhaps their most coveted subjective state. Like later antebellum nativists, Puritans exploited popery as catalyst and justification for their own spiritual and political vitality.

Because of its ideological utility in the mythology of Puritan captivity, popery developed a powerful literary presence: allied with the threatening but ultimately impotent forces of primitivism, Catholicism itself became a virtual character, one "who" dwelled within the charged but politically marginal domain of melodrama. Such a theatrical and instrumental personification would influence later antebellum attitudes toward Catholicism as a foreign, even "uncanny," agent, one both powerful and impotent, threatening yet farcical. Unlike Indian cultures, popery was ineradicable kin to the Puritan reformed consciousness, and hence helped translate the North American wilderness into a familiar psychological terrain of merciful, if not penitential, afflictions boldly designed for the spiritual betterment of Reformed Christians. Puritan astonishment at encountering the anomaly of Catholic Indians was rapidly grafted onto already conventionalized emotions of fascination and contempt toward the Mother Church, who, as cast-off parent, haunted her errant children. Guilty ambivalence over having broken the unity of the Christian family translated into suspicious avoidance of an angry Roman parent, unleashed in the wilderness and intent on recovering her flock—her vigilance matching that of the New England saints. Not surprisingly, then, the Roman church constructed by this theological family romance emanated a puzzling villainy in which forcible estrangements disguised profound recognitions. Catholicism's strangeness differed crucially from that of the Indian: it was "uncanny" rather than wholly new, tempting the Anglo-American Puritan with reacculturation to Europe rather than abandonment into wilderness ways. When Puritan captives confronted the convergence of these temptations in the figure of the Catholic Indian, they were forced to the disturbed acknowledgment that "home" had come with them into the wilderness.^[11]

With the onset of King Philip's War (1675-78), the violence of the Iroquois combined with the calculated efforts of missionary priests to form an enduring Protestant suspicion of popery's rival sacramental power as at once punitive and unpredictably seductive. The most influential Puritan account of subjection to this "Catholic" wilderness was John Williams's 1707 best-seller, The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion .^[12] Williams's narrative focuses recurrently on the strange anachronisms of his experience. Captured with most of his family and parishioners in 1704, Pastor Williams survived a forced winter march from Deerfield, Massachusetts, to Montreal. En route, he endured what seemed to him the bizarre tyranny of his Catholicized Indian master, who, like a New World inquisitor, forced his Congregational prisoner

to cross himself and to attend the "great confusion instead of gospel order" (185) of an Indian mass.

Captivity was at once a forced march into an anarchic wilderness and a weird regression into coercive Old World spiritual ritual. The combination of violence and mysterious ornamental behavior strangely recalled the ceremonialism and persecutions of Catholic monarchies. But Williams's narrative of "myself and so many of my children and friends in a popish captivity" finally focuses less on Indian and Roman violence than on missionary seduction. The true threat to this Deerfield minister emanated from the priests who split up Puritan families, luring or coercing the children into the worst captivity of all: conversion to Catholicism. Included in his captivity narrative is a lengthy epistle to his son Samuel on the follies of transubstantiation and purgatory that presumably persuaded the boy away from the foreign doctrine.

Williams's epistle to Samuel tellingly reveals how captivity already provided a compelling explanatory construct for Christian subjectivity, especially for Anglo-American Puritans, who anxiously insisted that their purified New England culture represented and further enabled the workings of a rigorously disembodied spirit. As Pastor Williams explained to his son, their Indian captivity logically derived from a generative captivity lodged at the heart of Catholic theology: the doctrine of transubstantiation, which profanely embodied and hence incarcerated God. "[It is] a blasphemy to pretend to a power of making God at their pleasure," Williams writes, "and then eat Him and give Him to others to be eaten or shut Him up in their altars, that they can utter the same words and make a God or not make a God according to their intention" (216). Thus Williams pictures the Eucharist as capture and cannibalism: a closeting of the Deity that, in permitting consumption, provokes a terrifying specter of God's instability and vulnerability: If God can be eaten, he can disappear. From this original act of confinement issue a proliferating series of enclosures by which Catholics, already expert cannibals of God, seek to trap (and, by implication, devour) their fellow humans. Purgatory is, Williams reminds Samuel, one such device, "a fatal snare to many souls who sin with hopes of easy getting priestly absolutions at death and buying off torments with their money" (217). The analogy between Catholicism's theology of captivity and the wilderness experience of the Williams family was conclusive: Catholicism and Indian captivity were not only synchronic representations of Original Sin, manifesting the universal phenomenon of bondage in a fallen world, but in diachronic relation as well, for Indian captivity emerged

from Roman Catholicism, its tyrannies and rituals those of popery. Such arguments convinced Samuel, for he returned to New England and the professed liberty of Congregationalism.

Ironically, Pastor Williams became famous not so much for this victory over popery as for his defeat. Struggling to retrieve two of his children from the dread fate of conversion, he recovered Samuel, but not Eunice; to the scandal of her Mather uncles and the grief of her father, Eunice chose to remain in captivity. Rebaptized a Catholic, she took the name Marguerite and, at age sixteen, married a Caughnawaga brave named François Xavier Arosen. From this traumatic childhood of abduction and coerced assimilation, Eunice later emerged as a steadfast Indian wife, mother, and Catholic, one of the earliest in a long and interesting line of American converts to Rome. Although her brother Stephen eventually persuaded her to visit Deerfield, she refused to move back, for fear, she said, of losing her soul.^[13]

Thus, as John Williams had learned too well, the freezing Canadian wilderness contained a seductive magic by which Indians cannibalized their slain enemies to ingest their strength and priests transubstantiated God to ingest his conversionary powers. Against such heretical incorporations of matter, Puritan captives shielded themselves as ascetically as they could. Another young captive, John Gyles, who suffered the (to him) dire fate of being purchased from the Indians by a Frenchman, responded in revealing fashion to a Jesuit priest's efforts to ransom him. "He gave me a biscuit," Gyles reports, "which I put into my pocket, and not daring to eat it, buried it under a log, fearing he had put something into it to make me love him."^[14] Gyles's fear of Catholic wizardry points to residual superstitions in Puritanism that erupted in the Salem witchcraft crisis. But his unease points as well to emergent anxieties in American Protestantism. If his hurried burial of the Jesuit menace shows his youth and historical era, his fear of contact with seductive Catholic matter would be shared by many later Americans. Indeed, many nine-teenth-century narratives of Protestant captivity to Catholicism would focus precisely on such dynamics of involuntary love.