Chapter Eight
Why Categories Thrive

No doubt I made a strange sight in a dark coat, borrowed from the captain, over sailor's pantaloons and apeskin sandals. Did they think of me as Cruso's wife, or had tales already reached them—sailor's haunts are full of gossip—of the Englishwoman from Bahia marooned in the Atlantic by Portuguese mutineers? Do you think of me, Mr Foe, as Mrs Cruso or as a bold adventuress? Think what you may, it was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes, as it is I who have disposal of all that Cruso leaves behind, which is the story of his island.
J. M. Coetzee, Foe

Each chapter of this book has converged on the question raised by the tautology that it takes an author to create an author. How, then, did the author first come into being? Literary historians generally agree that the rise of the English novel has everything to do with the rise of the modern middle class and thus with the onset of modernity. Our final chapter will reconsider the rise both of that class and of its favorite genre. We will try to imagine the conditions for the emergence of the kind of writing subject that Richardson created when he made a novel by stringing together personal letters supposedly written by an abducted servant girl. By questioning the origins of the English novel, we want to challenge the tendency among scholars and critics to assume that modern fiction has to originate in some earlier European genre. To think about the origins of the English novel, we will try out a narrative more like one that might be used to describe the emergence of new cultures on this side of the Atlantic. We want to think of England as part of a larger nation whose boundaries extended overseas to North America. In order for this nation to exist on both sides of the Atlantic, as a number of scholars have recently noted, the English developed print technologies which in turn played a crucial role in the formation of a culture peculiar to the colonies.^[1] In time, Benedict Anderson has suggested, writing and

ultimately print replaced other agents of government.^[2] In time, he has speculated further, writing and especially print displaced the kinds of speech communities that could be overseen by the monarchs of early modern Europe. In this way, the technologies of power that had developed in order to extend England into the New World began to exercise a kind of power in their own right.

To this point in our argument, we could perhaps be charged with swapping a Eurocentric narrative of lineal descent for what might loosely be termed American exceptionalism. Indeed, we are suggesting that the English novel constituted itself as an exception to the European tradition of letters, much as American culture did. If exceptionalism is used to rethink the traditional accounts of English modernity, however, and if this same fantasy of self-origination took hold in Europe and propelled the sort of changes now identified with modern cultures, then exceptionalism can no longer be considered the exception.^[3] One has to regard it as some new and highly infectious rule. Nor, from the perspective we are taking, was the novel first and foremost a European genre, but rather one that simultaneously recorded and recoded the colonial experience. With this in mind, we want to imagine what happened to the print culture that bound early modern English people on one side of the Atlantic to those who had ventured to the other. As it underwent the strange mutation that created a new basis for English identity in the colonies, this culture had to have a profound effect upon European Englishmen as well. But while any number of scholars have shown how English culture changed in the colonial setting, few if any have bothered to consider what happened when colonial writing flowed back across the Atlantic to England.

We like to think this way of reconceptualizing the problem of cultural origins has a midwestern origin. One September night in 1988, our first in Minneapolis to be exact, we happened to tune in a public television show that documented how one Minnesotan decided to spend the last years of a life sadly foreshortened by leukemia. Knowing his days were limited, this man marshaled most of his family's resources—not only its savings but time and devotion as well—to build a replica of a Viking ship capable of sailing from Duluth, through the Great Lakes, up the St. Lawrence, and across the Atlantic to a small town on the western coast of Norway. Bent on demonstrating that Minnesota had been visited if not in fact settled by Norsemen four to five hundred years before Columbus's first voyage, the ailing patriarch passed away before the boat could make its maiden voyage. As the dream of return was taken up by

his children, however, it became the basis for a more complex and ambitious theory of origins.

They imported a crew from Norway to rebuild the vessel and to navigate it through the treacherous waters of Lake Superior. Somewhere in the process, someone, perhaps only in jest, raised the possibility that certain towns on the western coast of modern Norway might have been founded by an expedition of North American settlers intent on returning home. Even the Norwegians involved in the project were captivated by this possibility. They assured the makers of the documentary that Lake Superior was by far the roughest part of the entire journey and agreed with their American counterparts that "anyone who could make it through Superior could make it all the way to Norway." Two months later, when the boat bearing its binational crew made land on the Norwegian coast, communities on both sides of the Atlantic regarded the success of the venture as proof positive that each could well have been the forebear of the other. Our purpose for drawing this parallel between the origin of the English novel and that of Norwegian Americans is not only to cast the whole project of discovering cultural origins in a slightly ridiculous light but also to consider the historical consequences of understanding ourselves and our novels in that way.

The eighteenth-century English novel might be called the perfect creole. Novels characteristically claim to have begun as another kind of writing, as a diary, a journalistic account, a handbook for letter writing, a travel narrative, a criminal confession, a romance, or just plain history. Yet each English novel also insists it was the product of England alone, the record of a true-born speaker of the mother tongue. And critical tradition has respected this claim. In the past few years, among the most influential studies of the eighteenth-century English novel, one finds several new attempts to locate the origins of that genre in texts written and published in England before there was anything like the novels that would eventually be canonized.^[4] Yet in order to disagree over which genre provided the prototype of the English novel, all the authors of these studies assumed that it sprang from a strictly English past. Because they understood that past in modern terms, as an England confined to the British Isles, these scholars failed to consider the events that produced the modern nation. None of their historical accounts factored the rise of the novel into the process that identified the English nation with the print vernacular. We will use Samuel Richardson's first novel, Pamela, to argue that no such product of modern English culture can be explained by events occurring strictly within English culture if we restrict our definition

of England to modern England alone.^[5] To discover precisely where the printed word first began not only to refer back to a source in an epistolary heroine but also to derive extraordinary authority from qualities that supposedly inhered in that individual alone, one has to go to British America. One has to go to America, in other words, to understand where novels come from.

Published in 1740 and generally considered the first domestic novel, Pamela recounts a scandal which takes us right to the heart of our argument. The heroine, a poor but honest serving girl, is held captive on a country estate. In order to have his way with her, the master of the estate dresses up as a drunken maid and pretends to doze off in Pamela's bedchamber. After a housekeeper, who takes part in the conspiracy, has wedged herself in bed next to the naked heroine, Mr. B. slips out of his disguise and joins them, pinning Pamela's free arm beneath him. Except for her mouth, she is completely immobilized. She screams, she pleads, and then she faints. The sequence of events promises almost certain rape. Merely by shifting from excessive speech to silence, however, Pamela keeps her virtue magically intact; and, by thus refusing to give her consent, she continues to occupy the role of heroine. In a letter written to her parents upon regaining consciousness, she reports the effectiveness of so withholding herself from a libertine master: "This, O my dear parents! was a most dreadful trial.... I hope, as [Mr. B.] assures me, he was not guilty of indecency; ... God, ... by disabling me in my faculties, empowered me to preserve my innocence" (214).

What does it mean that Mr. B. cannot possess her simply because she refuses to give her consent? A case might be made that by withholding consent she has succeeded in redefining her body and her labor as hers alone to exchange or to withhold. But to make this case would be to suggest that Richardson was claiming for women much the same rights to labor and property that Locke had claimed for certain men. We prefer to argue that Richardson has Mr. B. plot so many assaults on Pamela's body in order to prove that she does not have a body—at least, not a body that can serve as the object of libertine desire. During the course of the novel, as in the scene above, the repeated assaults upon Pamela's chastity cause her body to disappear along with her status as servant. She stops working and does nothing but write personal letters. As she does so, she ceases to exist as a sexually desirable woman and becomes a unique source of written speech. The transformation proves curiously self-empowering. It is arguably the first time in English literature that readers were asked to care about the personal happiness of a servant and

to believe that her chances for happiness depended upon her maintaining her virginity.^[6] And care they did, so much so that in 1740 Richardson's Pamela launched the tradition of the novel. In subsequent novels by both male and female authors, the future of the ruling class—their suitability for rule—would continue to hinge on their adherence to courtship procedures that demonstrated extraordinary concern for the feelings of otherwise quite ordinary women. Fiction established a new standard for membership in the ruling class.

A great deal thus hinges on the question of the origin of the English novel: Where did the power to define a class of people come from? What could possibly make the body of an ordinary woman matter so much to a readership? Even granted that she was rather well educated for someone in her position and that her parents were once substantially better off, why should educated readers care about the feelings of this housemaid, a ditch digger's daughter? There was nothing in previous fiction to suggest that a woman's ability to write letters was alone sufficient compensation for what she lacked in wealth and position. Nor was there any precedent to suggest that Richardson's readers would have been shocked either at the idea of several people sharing the same bed or at the idea of a wealthy landowner having his way with a servant.^[7] They might have found it strange that such a man could fail despite the artfulness of his attempts at seduction. And they would probably have been scandalized to learn that the same man was willing to marry that woman. Richardson anticipated such responses. When her tormentor hesitates to force himself upon Pamela out of respect for her sentiments, his collaborator, Mrs. Jewkes, regards such hesitation with a mixture of contempt and incredulity: "And will you, sir, ... for a fit or two, give up such an opportunity as this?" (213). Knowing full well that common sense was against him, Richardson was nevertheless intent on overthrowing the housekeeper's sense of propriety and her master's sexual prerogative. Richardson wrote two extremely popular novels that set the hymen of a nonaristocratic woman above the wishes of a gentleman.^[8]

Many literary historians regard Daniel Defoe as the father of the English novel. Robinson Crusoe appeared around 1719, some twenty years before Pamela, and there are important similarities between the two works of fiction. Richardson, one could argue, simply replaces Crusoe's island in the New World with the interior spaces of the household, the female body, and the private world of the emotions as revealed in Pamela's letters to her parents. But it is one thing for a community to reclaim an individual who has undergone a personal transformation in

captivity; it is another thing to reabsorb an individual who has elsewhere grown politically powerful and self-aware. Unlike Pamela, Crusoe comes back as the exception rather than the rule of European culture, and he remains on its periphery at the conclusion of the novel.

The difference between Defoe's narratives and the domestic fiction that flourished later in the century boils down to a difference in their use of gender. When Defoe used female narrators, they were always entrepreneurs, excellent businesswomen who actually made a go of it in the colonies.^[9] These women did not win readers' admiration by warding off seducers. Defoe obviously entertained his readership by showing just how far his women got by giving in. As a result, the story of Moll Flanders was excluded from the canon long after Robinson Crusoe was taken in, even though Defoe withdrew this heroine from the marketplace at the end of the story and gave her all the respectability of marriage. Crusoe was Defoe's only novel to be listed among the books appropriate for nineteenth-century women and children to read, no doubt because Crusoe was the only one of Defoe's protagonists to conduct himself in the manner of a Richardsonian heroine. Crusoe single-mindedly preserves intact the magical boundary defined by his skin from any and all invaders. He rings himself round with ditches, fences, fields, and walls, creating a domain as internally compartmentalized and temporally ordered as the household Pamela describes in the tediously protracted conclusion to her narrative. Faced with threats to his body, however imagined or real, he takes the girl's option where Moll Flanders throws in her lot with the boys.^[10] Where he goes domestic, she goes native and becomes a whore among whores, a thief among thieves. Would Defoe have switched the sexes of his two most memorable protagonists had he known that eighteenth-century readers were going to identify their interests with the perpetuation of a household that in turn depended on a woman's sexual purity? Hard to say. We can only speculate that he did not know how the gender game would be played out in fiction and that by the time Richardson was writing Pamela, the rules were absolutely clear.

The notable success of Defoe's domestic hero invites us to consider what gender had to do with the political change taking place in eighteenth-century England. Recent controversy over the origins of the novel (which is also a controversy over the origins of middle-class culture) has not come up with a theory that is significantly better than those of Ian Watt and the preceding generation of critics as to why an assault on the body of a common Englishwoman should carry such a political and emotional charge.^[11] In an effort to identify the source of fiction's ob-

sessive concern with the potentially deleterious effects of low-life figures and their criminal behavior, Lennard Davis offers criminal confessions as a possible prototype for the novel. But while such writing may account for the non-elite features of the novel, it cannot explain why narratives of courtship should acquire such enormous appeal. Michael McKeon's admirably exhaustive account of the origins of the English novel encourages us to understand Pamela as "a progressive specification of romance to the conditions of eighteenth-century domestic service" (370). Although he identifies this aspect of Pamela with the counterfeiting of letters of reference and the crisis in domestic service that marked the period, his theory does not shed much light on the question of why sexual assault proved so meaningful to an eighteenth-century readership. In suggesting a panoply of other sources, J. Paul Hunter forces one to consider how Anglocentric the search for the origins of the English novel has always been.^[12] Although Armstrong's book on the political history of the English novel focuses on gender, she too confines herself to English materials when she locates the prototype for domestic fiction in female conduct books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Desire and Domestic Fiction does explain why the hero of eighteenth-century fiction is usually and most powerfully a heroine. It is certainly important to see how novels used a female narrator to open a discursive space for the writing subject. It is equally important to see that the bourgeois subject began not only as a female subject but also as a writing subject. But it is perhaps even more important to understand why gender's power as a historical category cannot be understood within the tradition of English letters, as that tradition is currently defined.

Created in part by the extraordinary popularity of domestic fiction, a revolution in reading habits during the eighteenth century changed the notion of what it meant to be English, at least among the literate classes. Novel readers were not asked to locate England's strength and their own security exclusively within the health and well-being of the English aristocracy. Instead, the survival of respectable people and the perpetuation of their domestic way of life began to matter.^[13] To understand where Pamela's hermetically sealed body might have acquired its unprecedented ideological charge, one must determine where two discursive phenomena converge. Where, if anywhere prior to Pamela, did Englishness come to be embodied in a nonaristocratic female? And where, if anywhere prior to Pamela, was the female in question a virtually inexhaustible source of English prose? Certainly not in England. But such a woman does appear

in captivity narratives written in the North American colonies during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Among the earliest accounts of encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Americas are those of Cabeza de Vaca (1542) and Juan Ortiz (1557), Johann von Staden's Warhaftige Historia (1557), and Job Hortop's The Travailes of an Englishman (1591).^[14] These accounts are curiosities. They never became an important genre in and of themselves, although they were certainly familiar enough to the reading public and could appear as interpolated tales, as "The Captive's Tale" does in Don Quixote . Reading through collections of captivity narratives into the late seventeenth century, one can observe the genre proliferating and subdividing, though not exactly along national lines. Among the Indian captivity narratives, one kind in particular begins to reshape and dominate the genre. Of primary importance is the fact that this kind of captivity narrative was not produced by emissaries of church or state. It differs in this respect both from John smith's account of his three weeks in captivity in Virginia and from the grisly accounts of the physical torture experienced by the Jesuit Fathers Jogues, Bressani, Garnier, Chaumont, and Hennepin.^[15] In the captivity narrative that we will identify with the English novel, the captives tend to be European settlers from rather ordinary backgrounds who wanted to establish a home in North America.

One version of this type of narrative combines a modern authorial consciousness with early modern Protestant hagiography to produce a distinctively English experience and testimony. Always present in these accounts is the possibility of going native. We will not discuss such accounts as those of John Marrant or Mary Jemison, in which the captive becomes assimilated to another culture. But we do want to note that during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, these stories existed as a kind of anti-tale within the hagiographical narrative. The reader of captivity narratives was always aware of the story that would have to be told were the captive to lose her English character, just as later readers were aware of the pornographic narrative that would at once develop were Pamela to let her guard down and fall prey to Mr. B.'s seduction.^[16]

Throughout the eighteenth century, one of the most popular captivity narratives on both sides of the Atlantic was Mary Rowlandson's account. Within the year of its publication, 1682, it went through three editions and several printings in British America.^[17] That same year a fourth edition was published in England, and by 1720 a fifth edition appeared there in print.^[18] Encapsulated versions of the same story appeared in published

sermons, in publishers' reports, and as advertisements included on the back pages of other books.^[19] A late-seventeenth- or early-eighteenthcentury reader could see Rowlandson's name and fill in the substance of her testimony without actually having to read the words in which she told it. Once created, furthermore, the appetite for narratives of this kind never diminished with the rising popularity of fiction on both sides of the Atlantic.^[20] By the end of the eighteenth century, almost thirty editions of Rowlandson's account had appeared, most in the last thirty years of the century, which certainly suggests that her story continued to be well received even after English readers had developed their prodigious appetite for novels. Along with Rowlandson's account, a number of other captivity narratives went through several printings on both sides of the Atlantic. If first editions of many of these accounts are extremely rare or even nonexistent today (as in the case of Mary Rowlandson's), it is no doubt because they passed through so many hands; one can assume that the readership was even larger than the publication history indicates.

Mary Rowlandson anticipated Crusoe in representing the English in the New World as an abducted body. When captivity narratives began to be published on both sides of the Atlantic, however, the bodies so endangered were usually—though not always—female bodies.^[21] Even when the storytellers were men, these men wrote of their experience as Englishmen enslaved by Indians.^[22] Captive men owned neither their labor nor their bodies, according to legal theory of the period, and under such conditions there is reason to think that an eighteenth-century readership would not have considered them men. It can be argued that Englishmen in captivity wrote from a position akin to that of women and children. Scholars have pored over these late-seventeenth-century accounts for information about colonial life and the cultures of the indigenous peoples. But the most obvious fact that leaps off the page is that these narratives required readers to change the way they imagined being English, because they had to imagine being English in America.^[23] The exemplary captive existed for the early eighteenth-century reader as a kind of epistolary heroine, whose ability to read and write, more than anything else, distinguished her from her Indian captors.^[24] Moreover, in later captivity narratives, literacy also distinguished the English individual from men and women of European birth. The French—and during the revolutionary period, the English—posed a threat to the English character. The temptations of religious conversion, in the first case, and of treason, in the second, could sever the individual's connection to home and community just as permanently as going native.^[25]

To describe Pamela as a captivity narrative is, by implication, to construct a theoretical link between Benedict Anderson's account of New World nationalism and Foucault's account of European modernity. As we explained in chapter 6, Anderson believes the journey to the New World set in motion a process which transformed the basis on which certain Englishmen understood their relationship both to England and to one another. As the print vernacular circulated among them, they began to imagine themselves as a nation made up of people who read and wrote in vernacular English. But Anderson's narrative never takes one back to Europe, even though the formation of New World nationalism took place at the very time when the modern English state was emerging out of an earlier form of monarchy, and despite the fact that the print vernacular gained unprecedented importance during the same period. Foucault, on the other hand, does not consider how information from the colonies might have triggered the massive project of reclassification that he identifies with the emergence of a modern institutional culture. Indeed, he deliberately avoids the whole question of causality. He describes the so-called rise of the middle classes as a process whereby writing gained supremacy over a field of discursive practices in which it had formerly played a minor role. His account of the transformation of early modern into modern Europe is Eurocentric; the process is entirely self-enclosed. Mary Rowlandson's narrative allows us to connect the historical narratives of Anderson and Foucault, both of whom neglect the impact of gender and of fiction.

A closer look at Rowlandson's account of her captivity will indicate what advantages might have accrued to writing that appeared to have a female source. In contrast with Robinson Crusoe, Mary Rowlandson could be incorporated within an English (albeit colonial) community after enduring captivity and exile among the Indians. The female Crusoe could return without overturning the status quo. Yet, in doing so, she brought a new and distinctively modern basis for political identity into the mainstream of European thinking. It is true that she made a difference between Englishmen in England and in the colonies, when she made writing the means of maintaining an English identity overseas. But, as Pamela leads us to believe, literacy established a new basis for identity back in England as well.

The captivity narrative described an experience that people of "the middling sort" in England could not have imagined were it not for the colonial venture; it asked its readers to imagine being English in America. Although it is an ordinary voice—and most often a female voice at that—

the voice of someone captured by Indians speaks with authority because it speaks out in isolation and testifies to the individual's single-minded desire to return home. Such a voice predisposes us not to think of the English as intruders who were decimating the native population and driving them from their homeland.^[26] Indeed, Rowlandson frequently describes the indigenous population as if it were the invader of an English land. On one occasion, she recalls how "the Indians quickly spread themselves over the deserted English fields, gleaning what they could find."^[27] A landscape from which the signs of English life have vanished is a setting where the solitary body of the Englishwoman exists in imminent peril—more so in Rowlandson's America than on Defoe's uninhabited island. Rowlandson recounts, for example, "the hideous insulting and triumphing that there was [among the Indians] over some Englishman's scalps they had taken (as their manner is)" (330). In later captivity narratives, even other Europeans can resemble savages in their barbarous treatment of English women. Hannah Swarton is but one example of a captive who suffered much the same kind of anxiety at the hands of the French as other English women did when held captive by North American Indians. "Yea, sometimes the papists, because I would not turn to them, threatened to send me to France," she explains, "and there I should be burned because I would not turn to them."^[28]

But despite repeated allusion to such atrocities (which could include even cannibalism), the captivity narrative does not make us care so much about the body of an English woman as about what Rowlandson calls the English "heart," which introduces some of the language of later Gothic romance into the puritan narrative:

Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures, with our bodies wounded and bleeding, and our hearts no less than our bodies. About a mile we went that night, up upon a hill within sight of the town, where they intended to lodge. There was hard by a vacant house (deserted by the English ...). I asked them whether I might not lodge in the house that night, to which they answered, "What will you love English men still?" (325)

Surrounded by "nothing but wilderness, and woods, and a company of barbarous heathens," the English subject becomes poignantly aware that survival depends on her ties to a community that cannot be experienced directly (342–43). It requires her captivity in a strange and hostile place to equate the enduring love for signs of Englishness with what is most essential about the protagonist herself.

For lack of English inscriptions, the American landscape exists for Rowlandson—as it did for Locke in his Second Treatise of Government —

as a blank space lacking cultural inscriptions of any kind.^[29] Out of lack comes longing, and out of longing, words. Having emptied the landscape, Rowlandson's words proceed to inscribe it with signs of the absent homeland. "As we went along," she writes, "I saw a place where English cattle had been. That was comfort to me, such as it was: quickly after that we came to an English path which so took with me, that I thought I could have freely lain down and died" (335). What is a landscape where "English cattle had been"? Certainly it is something more on the order of a rotten nature than nature either raw or cooked.^[30]

Rowlandson describes her solitary state as a significantly fallen one in contrast with direct participation in the community of believers. But that same state of isolation gives her—though she is in no other way distinguished among English women—decisive superiority over native Americans. She is self-reflective and thus a whole world unto herself; Indians exist in her account as mass man, devoid of individuated interiority and thus lacking the capacity for self-examination. Whenever Rowlandson finds herself spiritually lacking in the eyes of God, she testifies to the presence of a peculiarly English consciousness.

When I came to the brow of the hill that looked toward the swamp, I thought we had been come to a great Indian town (though there were none but our own company). The Indians were as thick as the trees: it seemed as if there had been a thousand hatchets going at once: if one looked before one, there was nothing but Indians, and behind one, nothing but Indians, and so on either hand, I myself in the midst, and no Christian soul near me, and yet how hath the Lord preserved me in safety! (334)

It is one of the great ironies of Western history that, in standing in for the original speech community in this way, Rowlandson's written English distinguished its author from members of that original community as well as from those people who neither spoke nor wrote English at all.

Rowlandson's account presupposes a single community that is united on the basis of literacy. This community is more English than Christian, though it is certainly Christian, and indeed puritan.^[31] Rowlandson frequently refers to the Bible in her effort to sustain herself in solitude. These references suggest that her body is infinitely valuable, not because it contains a Christian soul—presumably that could survive without a body—but rather because it houses a unique sensibility, the source of the language composing the narrative and thus of the meaning that clings to those words across the ocean and down through the ages.^[32] Her writing separates Rowlandson from England, then, and from all other forms of cultural exchange—not only speech but also the exchange of labor, goods,

and all the symbolic gestures that are now considered part of daily life. But in doing so, the narrative simultaneously converts a form of literacy based on the print vernacular into a new basis for English identity.^[33] It is not difficult to imagine how such narratives produced the kind of nationalism that was especially strong in those areas of New England where print was abundant and literacy high.^[34] But what of the fact that these accounts circulated back to England and were avidly consumed there? On this matter scholars may have had little to say, but fiction has a great deal to tell us.

The kind of captivity narratives we have been discussing simultaneously record and create a new source of value that contemporary scholars neglect to factor into their accounts of earlier periods. Rowlandson's narrative demonstrates how an individual could acquire value quite apart from wealth and station simply because she was the source of writing. She emphasized her separation from her culture by organizing her account as a series of "removes" or marches. Richardson capitalized on the popular appetite for such narratives when he separated Pamela from her parents and then filled her with a single-minded desire to return. Throughout her account of captivity, Pamela reaffirms this solitary wish: "And now, my dearest father and mother, expect to see soon your poor daughter, with an humble and dutiful mind, returned to you" (31). Instead, of course, her master removes Pamela still further from the sanctuary of the family to whom she writes. Rather than send her home to them, he takes her to a more remote estate where he contrives to weaken her resistance. To be sure, these removes expose her to the seduction of a wealthy landowner rather than the violence of heathens. Yet each remove takes her farther into a world bent on destroying her cultural identity, which she tries to maintain by writing letters.

Were it not for the fact that Pamela is locked away in the heart of an older, agrarian England, the terms of her captivity would certainly have reminded scholars before now of Mary Rowlandson and all the other English women captured by Indians. "I find I am watched and suspected still very close; and I wish I was with you," Pamela confides in a letter to her parents. "But that must not be, it seems, this fortnight.... It will be a tedious and a dangerous one to me" (217). A second generation of captivity narratives that appeared around the time of Pamela 's publication attempted to close the gap between the theological discourse found in captivity narratives and the language of sentimental fiction. One captive describes her experience in terms that might have

come straight from the heroine of a Gothic novel. "I dreaded the tragical design of my master," Elizabeth Hanson confesses, "looking for his coming to execute his bloody will upon us."^[35] Though rape, as Mr. B.'s housekeeper puts it, may not seem "so bad as cutting her throat," most readers appear to have accepted Pamela's view that it was better to die than have sex with anyone but one's husband. Could it be that they heard in her protests the sentiments of colonial heroines responding to the Indian menace? What else would have made the loss of her virtue equivalent to losing one's English identity? "I trust," writes Pamela in a voice that might be mistaken for Mary Rowlandson's, "that God who has delivered me from the paw of the lion and the bear ... will soon deliver me from this Philistine, that I may not defy the commands of the living God! " (218).^[36] Rowlandson's account of her captivity may seem worlds apart from Richardson's protracted tale of attempted rape—until one considers what each accomplishes by gendering the writing subject.

Something of great importance to the respective readerships hinges on the fates of these women. Rowlandson is taken from her husband and turned into an Indian's slave. Pamela is taken from her parents and turned into the object of a libertine's desire. In both cases, the trials of the body matter less than the mental cruelties the women suffer. The captive's ability to return to the fold depends entirely upon qualities of mind that resist illegitimate forms of domination. That both New England Indians and old English aristocrats are inferior to the ordinary ("true") English person is indicated by their women. Rowlandson describes one of her master's squaws as "a severe and proud dame ... bestowing every day in dressing herself neat as much time as any of the gentry of the land: powdering her hair, and painting her face, going with necklaces, with jewels in her ears, and bracelets upon her hands" (351). The description could easily be transported into Richardson's fiction to describe a woman of the upper gentry. Indeed, Mr. B.'s sister fits this stereotype. In either case, this kind of woman is contrasted with the ordinary English woman, whose virtues are identified with the virtues of the English in general. This is the point of the strange and seemingly extravagant ritual by which the newly reformed Mr. B. plans to introduce Pamela—now his fiancée—into polite society dressed in her rustic homespun. "I have told them the story of your present dress, and how you came by it," he informs her:

One of the young ladies begs it as a favour, that they may see you just as you are: and I am the rather pleased it should be so, because they will perceive

you owe nothing to dress, but make a much better figure with your own native stock of loveliness, than the greatest ladies arrayed in the most splendid attire and adorned with the most glittering jewels. (286)

We might even regard Pamela's appearance in this emblematic form as Richardson's way of acknowledging the relationship between his epistolary heroine and the authors of captivity narratives.

If, as we are claiming, Pamela is a captivity narrative, then how might this interpretation redefine that novel and the whole tradition of sentimental and Gothic fiction that it inaugurated? Richardson located his captivity narrative in an aristocratic manor house, the symbolic center of early modern England. There he made readers care about the chastity of an otherwise insignificant serving girl in the same way they had already come to care about English women who had been abducted by Indians in British America. An advertisement for Rowlandson's narrative appearing in the first American edition of The Pilgrim's Progress (1681) suggests how such concern was generated: "Before long there will be published ... the particular circumstances of the Captivity, & Redemption of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; and of her children. Being pathetically written, with her own hand."^[37] The emphasis shifted from the pathetic to the sensational when advertisers wanted to appeal to the readership back home in England. Here, for example, is an announcement that appeared in the Term Catalogues : "The history of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, a Minister's Wife in New England; with her cruel and inhumane Usage amongst the Heathens for Eleven Weeks, and her Deliverance from them. Written by her own Hand, and now made Publick."^[38] Her English publisher emphasized Rowlandson's position as an abducted wife rather than as a mother sent into captivity with her children.

Rowlandson changed English identity by maintaining her own identity among the heathens. Richardson made the ruling classes appear unfit to rule because its members seemed incapable of ruling themselves. He made their sexual practices testify to that inability. One must agree with Henry Fielding that the real scandal of Pamela is not her abduction but the fact that Richardson gave her the authorial prerogative not only to represent her own behavior but also to evaluate that of her master.^[39] That prerogative could not have been imagined, much less taken seriously, without the power behind it that print had apparently acquired in North America. The captivity narrative requires the captive to ward off the threat of another culture by preserving the tie to her mother culture through writing alone. But there is another requirement for Pamela's prototype,

which is directly related to the gender of the individual from whom writing comes. The captivity narrative requires that the detached—and thereby individuated—individual be reincorporated into the culture from which she has been separated.^[40] Robinson Crusoe cannot quite manage such a return. Even though he finds his way back across the Atlantic, he feels compelled to leave again; he fails to fit into early modern British society after becoming rich and powerful overseas. Let us consider, then, how Pamela does what female captives such as Rowlandson could and Crusoe could not accomplish.

On the level of plot, Rowlandson ends up pretty much where she begins, in the bosom of her family and friends. Indeed, she seems to return to the same community that was in place before the Indian uprising, and her return appears to restore that community's original state of wholeness. Her narrative no doubt acquired some of its enormous popularity on both sides of the Atlantic from its insistence that English people could not be at home except with other English people and that English women could feel secure only with a specific English male and the offspring they produced together. But even this appeal to family feelings is not sufficient to explain the cultural-historical importance of captivity narratives. Their peculiar form of narrative closure does not simply close the gap between the narrating subject and her object of desire, the community from which she has been separated. Nor do those narratives merely elevate the English way over all other ways of being human; they also distinguish the New World community to which the captive returns from the Old World community she left behind. At least, this is what one gathers from comparing the female captivity narratives with Pamela .

The opening of Rowlandson's account represents the original community in this fashion: "Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on the head, if we stirred out" (323–24). When the Indians invade Rowlandson's New England household, that household is made up of Christians, largely women and children. The reader cannot tell individual families apart, much less individual bodies. It takes the solitude of her captivity to turn the narrator into a separate individual. When she is absorbed back into the community at the end of her captivity, however, her narration does not lose its self-enclosed character.^[41] Her separation from that community paradoxically defines what and who she is even after her return to friends and family, and the community necessarily changes once it has opened its doors and

admitted such an individual.^[42] The captive's return transforms that community into one in which the individual counts. Though her description of the initial onslaught of Indians reveals little grief on her part for those family members who were lost, the search for a lost plenitude and wholeness continues to motivate her account as Rowlandson awaits the recovery of each and every child remaining in captivity. A continuing lack thus characterizes the reunion with her husband: "We were now in the midst of love, yet not without much and frequent heaviness of heart for our poor children and other relations who were still in affliction" (362). And when all the pieces of the family so incinerated, dismembered, and dispersed are finally reassembled, it is a markedly different social unit from what it was before; it is now a family organized around the heterosexually monogamous couple and their immediate offspring. Nested in a household that is nested in a community of such households, the family becomes the ideological cement between the isolated authorial consciousness of Rowlandson and a community of readers.

As we noted in chapter 7, the early-seventeenth-century puritan authors thought of the household as a little commonwealth, an autonomous domain within early modern England at whose doorstep the power of the monarch ideally stopped. But something happened to this century-old model for Protestant dissent when it was restaged in a colonial setting. By rebuilding the original household, Rowlandson's account fills the imaginary space onto which Paradise Lost opens in the last few lines of book XII. This space was cleared by the fire that swept through Thomas Sprat's London as well as by the plague that William Petty sought to combat by proposing that all families—not only those of the elites—be moved to houses within a day's carriage ride of London. The household that assembles around Rowlandson upon her return is one made up of individuals whose place is determined by their demonstration of endurance, compliance, sensitivity, and devotion. These faculties may take various symbolic forms, or so the heroine's trials suggest. But by far the most powerful demonstration of her personal worth is the published word—the captivity narrative itself. Along with printed sermons, almanacs, and local newsletters, it indeed provided a means of consolidating all those who participated in the English diaspora.^[43] Apparently believing the print vernacular was capable of reuniting what the colonial experience had torn asunder, these people, one could argue, reinvented English for themselves. As print began to serve this purpose, it produced a whole new concept of the nation as a people detached from the European country of origin to which they were reconnected by a literature. It is

in this way that the formation of New World nationalism allows us to imagine how eighteenth-century readers back in England began to reconceive that nation as a readership.

Is this reconception of England—as a nation made up of families that are in turn made up of literate individuals—not precisely what Richardson's fiction tries and manages to do? Is this not the purpose of detaching Pamela from a family who sent their offspring into service with the local landowners, thereby relinquishing whatever authority they might have had as parents? From the very beginning Pamela seeks to return to her family. But her return from her Gothic remove into the heart of old England is not a return to her original state so much as the production of new origins for herself and for English society as a whole. Indeed, this is more obviously so in Pamela than in New World captivity narratives.^[44] In making a place for the letter-writing subject within it, the community becomes one of equally self-enclosed individuals whose sentiments appear to matter as much as their birth. By showing that Richardson's narrator goes through the same process of exile and return as Rowlandson did, we are suggesting that the insertion of such private spaces within an earlier landowning culture could just as well have transformed England too.

The abduction and return of these women perform a transformation that could not be accomplished in overtly political terms. They begin as wordless objects in an exchange among men, but both evolve into bodiless subjects of writing. In doing so, they distinguish an earlier, apparently more primitive aristocratic culture from one in which every literate individual matters. The community to which they belong changes accordingly, from one governed by a monopoly on violence to one where mastery is exercised strictly through words. In returning to their mother cultures, then, they quietly and almost imperceptibly change that culture forever. In both cases, a speech community gives way to one for which writing not only establishes the model but also poses as speech, as thought, and by way of speech and thought, as human nature itself. Of this discursive formation, something remains to be said concerning the secret of its longevity.

We have focused on the captivity narrative as the means of individuating English consciousness and of placing it in a position of mastery over all that it surveys—including an alien landscape, the indigenous peoples of the Americas, other English people, and even one's own body. The capacity of her writing to perpetuate the individual under circumstances so hostile to individuality remained unequalled, perhaps, until

the publication of Pamela . By connecting Rowlandson to Richardson, we have used the captivity narrative as the basis of a theoretical model that supplements both Anderson's and Foucault's accounts of modernity by articulating each to the other. We used Anderson's account of how the traditional bases of English identity were transported to North America to explain the sudden emergence of what Foucault calls discourse. In using Anderson to supplement Foucault's Eurocentric account of modernity, we have also reversed Anderson's tendency to see culture as moving from Europe to America. The extension of English into the colonies, together with a radical redefinition of what an author was and who could be one, necessarily changed the culture of origin. Its most cherished signs and symbols no longer had to be embodied, circulated among a restricted group of people, or carried across the ocean on a ship. If one can imagine how culture, so called, came to be embodied in print, it does not take much of a leap to consider how vernacular English began to carry on a life apart from speech and thus from the place where it originated and especially from the things to which it once referred. As print joined the European metropolis to points scattered throughout the colonies, and all these points to readers back in England, in time readers came to think of themselves as occupying positions within the vast and intricate network of such relationships that identifies a modern culture.

Let us retrace the logic that brought us to this conclusion, a logic which, we have argued, can be extrapolated from Paradise Lost . As Milton's attempt to reproduce a culture from which he had irrevocably separated, the poem offers a paradigm for the operations of a peculiarly Anglo-American brand of imperialist nostalgia.^[45] His sense of separation from an originary speech community compelled the translation of English culture into the writing that subsequently became the basis for a new kind of community. To represent the new world that came into being through the American adventure, authors of captivity narratives were, like Milton, looking backward, and their accounts are infused with a poignant longing to return. In the case of an originary speech community, however fantastic to begin with, this desire on the part of North American Englishmen to return compelled the reproduction both of that community in writing and of the primal lack of a speech community that written words can never fill. In this instance, one might say, language lost its innocence—its Adamic character—and began to behave as signs, writing, or the supplement, which relocated the preindustrial speech community still further in the past with each and every replication. Noting

how Richardson actively displaced an older landowning England as he reproduced it in Pamela's letters, our argument moved from the present time back to the late seventeenth century in search of a work that might have empowered the author so that no other form of cultural authority was necessary save that of writing. For such would have to be the prototype of the sentimental fiction identified with Richardson.

If literary or cultural scholarship remains within the boundaries of the English nation as writing would later define it, virtually all the materials that went into making the English novel can indeed be found in England. However, nowhere did such an earlier England pull these materials together in any way that anticipated the magic Richardson obviously had to have in order to found the genre. Thus we shifted our attention to Mary Rowlandson's account of her captivity. We found in it a perfect demonstration of what happened when the print vernacular came to be the only tie between an Englishwoman in exile—stripped of all the other powers and properties of being English—and the culture of her origin. If one regards her account as the first appearance of the author who is an entire world of consciousness and an authentic source of language, then her narrative can be used to imagine how a new basis for nationality came into being. What distinguished her and others like her from previous authors was her desire to return to a pre-individuated speech community. What made her narrative important to English readers was the promise that she would put an end to writing, dissolve the world she represented, close the gap that written words produced between herself and other people, and communicate in speech. That, of course, is something that writing can never do. Such an attempt to return to a lost speech community though writing did not make authors vanish but put them on the sociopolitical map. After the New England colonies made a return to an earlier England fundamental to their own identity, Richardson appropriated the same equation between the writing subject and the English subject for an Old World setting. At that point, Robinson Crusoe could be incorporated in a national literary tradition that went back to The Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost .^[46] Rather than identify any such origin for the novel, however, our purpose has been to question the whole venture of doing so.

Programs in English and American literature generally ignore the thoroughgoing transformation that English culture underwent in the New World. With flawless consistency most scholars and critics still assume that American literature originated in England.^[47] Even on this side of the Atlantic, high culture remains steadfastly Eurocentric. By the time they

enter our classrooms, students have already been taught, much as we ourselves were, to regard Pamela and Clarissa as prototypes both for English domestic fiction and for the American novel, from Rowson and Cooper to Hawthorne and James. And Mary Rowlandson's narrative exists for most educated Americans as an anomaly of America's preliterary past that has little or nothing to do with the English literary tradition.^[48] This fact requires us to consider, in closing, the effects of any analysis that relies on origins to explain what a cultural object is. Because it is joined to the present by a narrative that seems to be carried along by history itself, the point of origin—once so designated—tends to remain impervious to questions, and all things American still seem to have begun in Europe. More specifically, the captivity narrative reveals how deeply ingrained is the habit that causes any quest for origins to posit a source for language in an authorial consciousness. An author in turn implies a nation (in whose language she or he is writing) and a family (that is presumed to generate the author's deepest and most natural emotions along with the body containing them).

To the cultural formation that one inevitably reproduces in the name of returning to origins, we have given the name Imaginary Puritan. We believe that the attempt to return to origins operates on a transnational scale to obscure what might be called the logic of supplementarity, by which the colonial world revised the so-called culture of origin. In concluding our study of the relationship between the emergence of the author and the transformation of England into a modern nation state, we feel compelled to stress the problematic nature of the term "origins" contained in the subtitle of this book. If this chapter has claimed to return in time and place to the beginnings of English fiction, let it now dispel that illusion.

By implying that English fiction comes from captivity narratives, we have tried to illustrate how those narratives succeeded in producing their own origins, in turn producing a world of things and people that seemed to be outside and prior to writing, however long ago those people and those things vanished into the past. By regarding Pamela as a continental version of the American captivity narrative, we called attention to the power the novel attributes to the printed word; it is nothing less than the power to create the authorial consciousness from which print henceforth appeared to come and the readership among whom it would circulate. In telling the story of the English novel in this way, then, we have not really recaptured the origins of the novel. We have used the novel to imagine a moment when words on the page acquired the subtle and enduring power to produce the human source from which they came.