SOURCE: Carroll, Lorrayne. “‘My Outward Man’: The Curious Case of Hannah Swarton.” Early American Literature 31, no. 1 (winter 1996): 45-73.

[In the following essay, Carroll investigates Cotton Mather's underlying message in his account of Hannah Swarton's abduction, comparing it to Mary Rowlandson's narrative.]

Properly an instrument is an efficient cause moved by the principal to an effect above its proper virtue.

Oxford English Dictionary¹

Writing begins with an awareness of the person, not as an individual but rather as a social category.

Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter

In the conjunction of images of captivity, gender, and authorship found in women's captivity narratives, representations of power, powerlessness, and social authority exist in a dynamic relationship to one another. For example, Increase Mather endorses Mary Rowlandson's narrative,²The Sovereignty and Goodness of GOD …,³ to give evidence of divine “dispensation” and thereby asserts his prerogative as minister to grant legitimacy (his “dispensation”) to her suspect undertaking, publication. However, it is Rowlandson herself, moving across the New England landscape, and finally encountering King Philip, who earns the experiential authority to speak to the public—to publish—the particulars and the consequences of her captivity. Divine and ministerial authority depend on the singular female who recounts her exceptional tale to spread the news of providence at work in the New England wilderness. Increase Mather's “Preface” therefore seeks to recontain Rowlandson's authority under the rubric “dispensation” and place her safely back within the fold.

It is important to note that Rowlandson's journey begins and ends within the pale of Puritan practices. Although Lancaster is an outpost settlement, Rowlandson's husband is the minister for the community. And Rowlandson returns to Boston, where her story is published.⁴ Thus, with all her removes, Mary Rowlandson's journey terminates in the heart of New England Puritan culture.⁵ She spent the entire captivity among the Narragansetts in the wilderness, and her captivity had lasted approximately three months, an excruciatingly long time for her, but not nearly as long as other captivities. And Rowlandson was never installed in a French Canadian household, a fate that befell many subsequent captives. We may view her text as the preeminent example of the genre because, not only is it the first of its type and relatively long, but also its dramatic rendering of physical hardship and mental anguish produces rich images of the conditions of captivity. However, an examination of those captivity narratives published in the last years of the seventeenth century reveals that The Sovereignty and Goodness of God offers later writers not so much a model to emulate as a template against which to measure differences.

In these differences, stresses in Puritan culture reveal themselves. Reading for the ways that subsequent female captivity narratives vary from Rowlandson's (and on occasion echo it), we can recognize several cultural preoccupations. The texts address prescribed gender roles (and their corollary, the fashioning of a “reputation”) as well as fears concerning the vulnerability of northern borders to Indian and French attack. Variations and circumstances of publication—including date of publication, accompanying or embedding texts, attributions of authorship, and contemporary contextualizing documents—demonstrate that the female captivity narratives depict an array of issues: shrinking spheres of Puritan influence (and lax practices in the spheres purported to be properly constituted congregations), control of historiography (especially the writing of New England history), and the wars against the French (with the implicit threats of “papistry”). This catalogue of dread illustrates the broad context of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness.”

Understanding the importance of gender in these narratives allows us to examine the “errand,” especially as it attempted to construct a coherent society by instruction. Since instructional texts were crucial to shaping the culture, authorship offered a powerful instrument to those, like the Mathers, who held positions of authority. Authorship represented both a great burden—truthfully to display working providence—and a great avenue to power as a participant in cultural formation. That power in the hands of the traditionally quiescent female sector of the congregation posed specific problems for the ministers who saw the instructional potential in captivity but also the danger in allowing a woman to assert a public authority.⁶

Circumscriptions governing female authorship permitted spiritual leaders to reconfigure the female author, from subject of her narrative to object used for instructional purposes. This reconfiguration is achieved through the concepts of dispensation and reputation, terms that provide flexibility in dealing with the problem of the public, published woman. A goodwife superseding the bounds of home and hearth requires explanation and exculpation; thus Increase Mather preemptively defends Mary Rowlandson's propriety: “and therefore though this gentlewoman's modesty would not thrust it into the press, yet her gratitude unto God made her not hardly persuadable to let it pass, that God might have his due glory, and others benefit by it as well as herself” (320). He first emphasized that captivity can only be appreciated thoroughly by those who have suffered it and then goes on to argue that such captivity indicates divine dispensation. Through Mather's interpretation, the personal experience is transformed into a providential sign for all to read, or at least for all to understand. Here lies the justification for publication: because the text dramatizes God's mercy, specifically the spectacular form it takes in the New England forests, it warrants dissemination as example. This fact precedes all others, including the sex of the author. The dual definitions of dispensation, in its Puritan construction, allow for such elasticity. As both a system of divine ordering and a license for exceptional cases, dispensation provides a sense of God's plan, albeit not completely revealed, coupled with the concept that the plan is made (partially) visible through the unique experience of the individual, especially if the experience is itself unusual.⁷ Thus ministers like Mather can control the persuasive power of an author both personally exorbitant and with a unique story to tell, making her an instrument of their ends.

This combination of divine and ministerial authority, turning on the concepts of dispensation and reputation, can be found operating in subsequent captivity narratives attributed to women. When both God and a Mather interest themselves in a woman's text, there is certainly much at stake for Puritan culture. The instrumentality of the female author provides unique opportunities for lessons that exceed spiritual instruction and encompass larger issues of political and social import.⁸ Thus the figure of the woman captive who returns to write her story demonstrates not only the means by which Puritan ideologies can refashion the geographical/political frontiers but also the cultural frontiers demarcating private/public discourse. In this way the female author disrupts the conventional scene of public witness: the previously silenced woman not only testifies to personal salvation, but she does it in the broadest possible manner, the printed text.

Emerging into the public realm, a woman relies on her reputation, as well as a minister's testament, to grant her publication a nihil obstat. In Rowlandson's case, her reputation derives not only from her husband's position in Lancaster but also, as Teresa A. Toulouse indicates, from her own socially privileged family, the Whites.⁹ If a woman's dispensation to publish depends, at least initially, on the theological project of interpreting God's plan, then attestations to her good reputation clearly signal the much more temporal issue of class distinction. The two concepts are manipulated by the sponsoring clergy to fashion an apt instructional instrument legitimized by providential and secular authority.

This authority, indeed cultural prominence, of the Mathers throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth century arises from several factors that include their position as leading clergymen, practical politicking, longevity, and, not least, their prolific publication. The topics of these publications vary, from printed execution sermons to treatises on comets or the efficacy of inoculations against smallpox; both Increase and Cotton Mather wrote on a range of issues that extended beyond particular theological concerns. Diary entries by Cotton Mather testify to his almost obsessive concern with his own authorial practices and with publication; they indicate that Mather saw himself as an instrument and his writing as a means to further the work of Providence on earth.

Some of Mather's diary entries illustrate the collapse of distinctions between “private” writing—such as redactions of sermons made by congregants and brought home to be read to the family—with “public” writing—understood as the publication by printing press of texts meant for wide circulation. Particularly, emphasis on the trope of instrumentality confounds a reading of strictly bound realms of private and public. In the long entry for 20 August 1697, Mather records a day “sett apart, for the Exercises of a secret THANKSGIVING before the Lord” (Cotton Mather, Diary 1:226). Having first confessed his “horrible Sinfulness,” he writes: “I then solemnly declared unto the Lord, that I made Choice of this, as my chief Happiness, to bee a Servant of my Lord JESUS CHRIST, and an Instrument of His Glory” (Diary 1:227). He follows this declaration with a catalogue of reasons for thanksgiving. The “one special Article” is God's support for finishing what will become the (never published) Biblia Americana, here called “my CHURCH-HISTORY”: “I will in this Place, transcribe a few Lines of my Introduction to that History” (Diary 1:229). Thus the private diary receives a transcription of the (proposed) public document, and its introduction is embedded within the personal accounts of Mather's daily life where he records his determination to act on God's behalf. Writing, both private and public, represents an essential instrumentality, an exalted endeavor in which Christ is coauthor and for which Mather acts as both author and publisher.¹⁰

Authorship, for Mather, is simultaneously the act of an instrument and the instrument itself.¹¹ So, the public document signed at Mather's behest by the contentious members of the Watertown church represents both the means and the sign of reconciliation:

I did endeavour to do service, (especially, at miserable Watertown, bringing the People in the east part of that poor Town, to sign an Instrument, wherein they confessed the Errors of their late Actions, and promised by the Help of Christ, a regular Behaviour; and otherwise helping the Council that mett there).

(Diary 1:235)

This doubled function of the authorial instrument—tool and testament—collapses the public and private realms. With divine guidance, Mather expresses his interior life to provide teachings and models for the public. Although all authors convert private thought into public expression, Mather's conception of instrumentality conflates his private thoughts with divine intention. The provenance of these expressions—his sermons, histories, biographies, and reportage of current events—explicitly appears as God, the First Author, with Mather as temporal author/instrument. Authorship therefore is the public rendering of a providential agenda privately revealed to Mather as willing recipient of divine favor—“His favouring mee, with the Liberty of the Press” (Diary 1:228).

Among the stratagems Mather chose in publishing his divinely inspired texts were anonymity and pseudonymity. In To the People of New England, the opening address of Decennium Luctuosum, Mather argues for his own anonymity as the author of his history of the ten-year-war with Northeast tribes. However, the text includes a sermon delivered by him the previous September. He then elaborates on the conceit of anonymity by aligning his hand with God's, effectively making himself the instrument of divine revelation:

I pray, Sirs, Ask no further; Let this Writing be, like that on the Wall to Belshazzar, where the Hand only was to be seen, and not who'se it was. The History is compiled with Incontestable Veracity; and since there is no Ingenuity in it, but less than what many Pens in the Land might Command, he knows not why his Writing Anonymously may not Shelter him from the Inconveniencies of having any Notice, one way or other, taken of him.

(Decennium 181)

The purposes of this (false) anonymity, couched in terms of reticence and, especially, humility, are obscured by claims of “Incontestable Veracity,” an assertion that “the Author pretends that the famous History of the Trojan War it self comes behind our little History of the Indian War” and most directly by the invocation of the Biblical hand of God as a simile for the authorial hand. Thus the instrument and the power which it serves become one, and given Mather's strongly idiosyncratic style the authorship could hardly be in question for most who read this “anonymous” history, even had they been absent from the original sermon.

Mather's convoluted approach to authorship—his alternate claims, denials, and demurrals—achieves its most peculiar form in the captivity narrative of Hannah Swarton. Appended to his 1697 printed sermon Humiliations follow'd by Deliverances, the Swarton narrative stands at the end of a work detailing the tribulations of captives from the continuing skirmishes with the tribes along the frontiers. It is textually distinct from the body of the sermon, literally designated an appendix; like Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, the Swarton narrative is written in the first person. The story portrays a Hannah Swarton whose startling—and suspicious—capacity for theological debate indicates her exceptional grasp of subtle doctrinal positions, noteworthy in a frontier woman. And the curious dialogue this narrative conducts with the larger text that precedes it (and, to some extent, with Rowlandson's narrative) demonstrates some uses of the female author both within the Mather canon and within the broader sphere of New England Puritan literature. In these respects, the Swarton narrative avoids the tensions resulting from what Tara Fitzpatrick calls the “dueling textual voices” of the narrator and “the established ministers, who vied with the returned captives for authorial control of their narratives.” As she convincingly argues, “The women captives' ministerial sponsors sought, with decreasing success, to interpret the individual experiences of the captives as lessons directed at the entire community, regardless of the captives' own implicit resistance to such appropriation.”¹² But Mather's complete authorial appropriation of Hannah Swarton's “I” produces a new set of tensions, ambiguities, and images that speak more to representations of female authorship and the author's reputation than to the exceptional condition of the returned captive and her need to tell her own story.

Hannah Swarton left no personal records apart from the alleged narrative of her captivity. Her name appears in the list of redeemed captives presented by Mathew Cary to the Council of the Massachusetts Bay Province in October of 1695.¹³ There, she is named “Johana Swarton” from the town of York. As Emma Coleman notes, there are several errors in the hometown ascriptions of the various captives, and from the Narrative we know that Hannah Swarton resided in Casco ([now Portland, Maine] Coleman 1:74). Margaret Stilson, who was “in the same house with [Swarton]” was redeemed by Cary as well, although Col. Tyng and Mr. Alden, mentioned as part of the displaced English in Quebec, were not on the list of redeemed captives.¹⁴

The historical record of Hannah Swarton,¹⁵ then, exists in the Cary list and the appendix to Cotton Mather's 1697 text, A Brief Discourse On the MATTER and METHOD, Of that HUMILIATION which would be an Hopeful Symptom of our Deliverance from Calamity. Accompanied and Accommodated with A NARRATIVE, of a Notable Deliverance lately Received by some English Captives, From the Hands of Cruel Indians. And some Improvement of that Narrative. Whereto is added A Narrative of Hannah Swarton, containing a great many wonderful passages, relating to her Captivity and Deliverance.¹⁶ According to the testimony of the “Narrative,” Hannah Swarton moved to the Casco settlement from Beverly, and as such, lived outside the “public ordinances” of Puritan polity. This lack of ministerial control differentiated most Maine settlers from other captives, who, exposed though they were in the frontier towns such as Haverhill and Lancaster, had benefit of established congregations (Ulrich 175-80). Indeed, the inhabitants of the Province of Maine historically had been a thorn in the side of the Massachusetts Province, not only aligning themselves with the Crown in the uprising of 1688 but then also petitioning King William for “assistance and protection” against the Massachusetts rebels.¹⁷ Maine had a bad reputation as a region of outlaws, “ungospelized plantations”¹⁸ and, corollary to that, Catholic sympathizers—a thicket of renegade settlers requiring the firm hand of congregationalist discipline. The settlements in Maine did not function as proper frontier buffers; instead, they represented the threat of a porous, exposed, vulnerable array of backsliding or areligious English communities, established to trade with the Indians and French rather than congregated around an ordained minister (such as Lancaster was under Joseph Rowlandson). Both the political and religious concerns with these outlying settlements emerge in Mather's portrait of Hannah Swarton.

In his bibliography of Cotton Mather's works, Thomas Holmes notes that the Swarton narrative

printed for the first time in Humiliations, is told, unlike the [Hannah] Dustan account, in the first person. Evidently Cotton Mather was Hannah Swarton's “ghost writer.” The narrative is printed entirely without quotation marks. The story is told with rich and intimate details of Swarton's experience, but the text of it in polished prose, embellished with Biblical references, allusions, and illustrations, with occasional moralizings in the true Matherian manner, is clearly Mather's.

(Holmes 2:492)¹⁹

Holmes notices the affiliation between the stories of the two Hannahs who appear in Humiliations, Duston (variously spelled, “Dustin,” and “Dustan”) and Swarton. Although the Swarton text

was advertised in Tulley's Almanack for 1697 as a part of an intended publication entitled Great Examples of Judgment and Mercy, that work was probably not printed. … We know that the Swarton Narrative as it appears in Humiliations was printed with this work and does not consist of sheets printed with and transferred from any other work, for the Narrative begins on signature E2, while the leaf E1 contains the last two pages connected with the Hannah Dustan Narrative.

(Holmes 1:498 n. 6)

Mather includes Duston's heroic escape from her captors in the primary text but appends “Swarton's” relation as a cautionary tale of the spiritual perils of frontier life in an “ungospelized plantation.” Whereas Duston's experiences emphasize her divine “deliverance” and Mather celebrates her heroism, Swarton is most clearly marked out for “humiliations.” As Mather's instrument for instruction, the Swarton narrative administers a warning to those choosing to live “outside the public ordinances”; more significantly, it baldly reveals Mather's use of authorial prerogatives. By “ghosting” for Hannah Swarton, Mather can become her, simultaneously representing her experiences and projecting himself as Hannah into the Northern wilderness and the parlors of the papists.

Diary entries for the autumn of 1696 illuminate Mather's motives for publishing Swarton's story. His entry for 2 October describes a “secret Fast” practiced “Especially to obtain Mercy for this Land in its deplorable Circumstances, and a mighty Revolution upon the Kingdomes of Great Britain and upon the French Empire” (Diary 1:205). Again, on 10 October he keeps a day of prayer for “Captives in the hands of cruel Enemies” with the resulting “Newes that came the Day following, of several Persons, escaped out of the Hands of the Indians” (Diary 1:206). Mather's interest in the captives forms part of his larger political concerns. When he prays, his personal spiritual needs often align with the Colony's more global interests: he “wrestled with the Lord” to obtain the knowledge that “a mighty Convulsion shall bee given to the French Empire; and that England, Scotland, and Ireland, shall bee speedily Illuminated, with glorious Anticipations of the Kingdome of God” (Diary 1:207). For Mather, indeed, the personal (and, therefore, spiritual) is the political (and, therefore, historical).

The diary notes as well Hannah Swarton's place in this expansive scheme. Eager to make use of “the terrible Disasters wherewith some are afflicted,” Mather prepares for publication

a Collection of terrible and barbarous Things undergone by some of our English Captives in the Hands of the Eastern Indians. And I annexed hereunto, a memorable Narrative of a good Woman, who relates in a very Instructive Manner, the Story of her own Captivity and Deliverance. … Yea, I could not easily contrive, a more significant Way, to pursue these Ends; not only, in respect of the Nature of the Book itself, which is historical as well as theological; but also, in respect of its coming into all Corners of the Countrey, and being read with a greedy Attention.”

(Diary 1:210)²⁰

The “who relates” would seem to indicate that Swarton herself composed this text, at least orally giving it some kind of narrative form, but as Holmes asserts and an examination of the text's style and content demonstrates, the printed text is Mather's composition. The emphasis on the story's instructional use and on Mather's contrivance to publish something read with “greedy Attention” reveals the value of novelty in a woman's text, particularly as a magnet for public notice. “Historical” and “theological,” and purportedly produced by a captive woman, this captivity narrative provides Mather with ample opportunity to pursue his “Ends.”

His choice to impersonate Hannah Swarton rather than employ the third person depends for its success on the concepts of dispensation and reputation, the same terms anchoring the Rowlandson narrative, and here reconfigured to suit the circumstances of Swarton's 1690 Maine captivity. The dispensation is formal, inhering in the narrative's function as an appendix to the sermon; the text itself requires no apologia because its publication is literally contextualized. Reputation, however, is a more complicated matter, and this key issue enables Mather to write in the first person as Hannah Swarton. Unlike Mary Rowlandson, “gentlewoman” wife of a Lancaster minister, Swarton lives in a free-floating society without the rigid hierarchies in which “reputation” has meaning. Indeed, as far as Boston is concerned, Hannah Swarton has no reputation—until Mather confers one. In impersonating Swarton, Mather chooses a castaway from the Maine woods, a woman whose personal value in the Puritan hierarchy is insignificant. The text thus recognizes conventions of both gender and class. Women—hidden in their homes, bound to obedience—and settlers without name or fortune (especially, those who are not members of established congregations) are blanks. Their invisibility in Puritan society makes them perfect tablets upon which ministers such as Mather can inscribe meaning and position.

If Mary Rowlandson tries in her narrative to recuperate her social “credit” by publishing her sufferings, the Swarton text never addresses the anxieties Rowlandson displays, especially about returning to Puritan society. This is because Hannah Swarton's “credit” is identical with her text, both invented by Cotton Mather. He simultaneously constructs a reliable, reputable witness and her narrative, one “instrument” in the conflated Matherian sense of agent and document. The fiction of her authorship succeeds because the actual Hannah Swarton is a social nonentity and her experiences produce a tale of humiliation and deliverance that dramatizes the lessons of the sermon. To that end, Mather employs the figure of Swarton to illustrate the points of his homily.

Humiliations begins appropriately with an image of Old Testament punishment, a scourging, and emphasizes the “Instrument, every stroke whereof gave Three Lashes to the Delinquent” (Humiliations 3). Close reading of the text demonstrates that Hannah Swarton performs the dual role of delinquent and instrument for the readers of the printed sermon; she is both sinner and means of redemption because, in confessing her sins and properly suffering for them, she provides a completed figure of the redemptive process by which the reader can “lay by” the lesson. As Mather asks at the outset, “What signifies confession without reformation?” (Humiliations 14), and the re-formed Swarton embodies deliverance—after humiliation.

The sermon was “preached at the Boston Lecture on Thursday, May 6, 1697” and a “public fast was observed a week later” (Holmes 2:488). As a jeremiad, it called for a fast to address the “Sad Catalogue of Provocations” (Humiliations 7) by which the population had angered the Lord and thereby drawn down his wrath. These provocations included twenty offenses, ranging from apostasy to “the woful Decay of good Family Discipline” (Humiliations 9). There is little attempt to classify the sins by degree of severity, so that the “multitudes” castigated for being unregenerate are listed along with the problems evinced by “a Flood of Excessive Drinking.” Humiliations thereby stands as a compendium of ministerial anxieties that predictably encompass both spiritual and social issues, personal salvation and cultural conformity.

For example, in opening the text of 2 Chronicles 12:7 (“When the Lord saw, that they humbleth themselves, the Word of the Lord came unto Shemajah, saying, They have humbled themselves, I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance”), the second lesson describes the necessity of regular fasting, a duty not practiced “often enough” by the Church in New England. “Like Silly Children we know not when to Feed, and when to Forbear Feeding. But our Good God, in His Word ha's taught us!” (Humiliations 23). This theme is retrieved in the Swarton appendix with an ironic twist.

For the first Times while the Enemy feasted on our English Provisions, I might have had some with them: but then I was so filled with Sorrow and Tears, that I had little Stomach to Eat; and when my Stomach was come, our English Food was spent, and the Indians wanted themselves, and we more: So that then I was pined with want.

(Humiliations 52)

Swarton, “Like a Silly Child,” represents not only the extreme of enforced fasting, but also the wilful behavior of someone who succumbs to her emotions rather than attending to her needs. As well, Swarton's “want of Cloathing” and insufficient covering so that she is “pinched with Cold,” aggressively answers the sermon's call to put aside “Gay Cloaths” for “Sober, Modest, Proper, and very Humble” attire and symbolizes the chastisement due to “Churches [who] fall asleep till they are stript of their Garments” (Humiliations 26, 34).

The preeminent icon of Humiliations is the Judea capta motif. As Annette Kolodny notes, “New England divines were quick to seize upon the emblematic, typick features inherent in the increasing incidence of captivity” (Kolodny 20). Mather recalls a tradition of coins made in commemoration of the Roman conquest of Israel, then contextualizes it with one of his favorite scriptural representations of womanhood, the Daughter of Zion: “She being Desolate, shall sit upon the Ground” (Humiliations 31). As in Mather's 1692 sermon-cum-conduct book, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, the Church (here, synonymous with “New-England”) is again “figured by a woman.”²¹ Translated from Israel to the northern woods, Judea no longer leans against a palm tree:

Alas, If poor New-England, were to be shown upon her old Coin, we might show her Leaning against her Thunder-struck Pine tree, Desolate, sitting upon the Ground. Ah! New England! Upon how many Accounts, mayst thou say with her, in Ruth 1.13. The Hand of the Lord is gone out against me!

(Humiliations 31)

Mather reprises the woman/tree figure in the appendix, creating the image of Hannah Swarton, “pined with want,” “pined to Death with Famine,” and exhausted to the point of utter resignation, “so that many times I thought I could go no further, but must ly down, and if they would kill me, let them kill me.”

Yet Swarton “held out with them,” sturdily marching, outlasting poor John York who, weakening under duress, was killed by the Indians. Significantly, the only people who die in this narrative are men; women prevail throughout. The absence of men in the Indian captivity section of the Swarton text echoes their absence from the sermon (excepting the brief allusion to Thomas Duston's escape from the Haverhill attack). Mather closes the theological section of the sermon with a question: “Now, who can tell, how far one Humble Soul, may prevail, that shall put in Suit, the Sacrifice for the Congregation?” (Humiliations 39). The answer sat in front of him at the lecture in the person of Hannah Duston. Her trials readily provide the conclusion to the sermon proper and her actions and experiences, in many ways, determine the figuration of Hannah Swarton.

The relationship of the two Hannahs is crucial to an understanding of what is at stake in the authorship of the Swarton narrative. In dialogue with the sermon, the Swarton text recontains the image of a woman superseding her role, that depicted by the heroic, yet murderous, Duston, who killed and scalped her captors. The entire “Appendix” immediately follows the Duston passage, which is itself part of the sermon but distinctly bound within quotation marks. As well as creating a passive counter to the active Duston, the first-person Swarton text purports to be Hannah's version of her own experiences, a simultaneous claim to authenticity and immediacy. The Duston story, however, is removed from this immediacy graphically, by the quotation marks (that reveal it to be someone else's version of the events), and grammatically, by its third-person narration.

Indeed, the title-page of Humiliations refers to the Duston escape tale as “A NARRATIVE, Of a Notable Deliverance lately Received by some English Captives, From the Hands of Cruel Indians, And some Improvement of that Narrative.”²² Hannah Duston may have initiated her own escape, but at the Boston Lecture she heard her own exploits narrated back to her, recontextualized—“improved”—by Mather, her exceptional behavior reconfigured for the purposes of the sermon. Hannah Swarton, captured, sold to the French, and ransomed back to Boston, represents not only the more common fate of the captive, but also the value of passivity. That is, Duston is transformed from an active subject to a passive object, while Swarton, passive sufferer, becomes the narrator of her own story, the speaking subject. Female resistance in any form must be contained: Swarton is ascribed the unusual role of author precisely because she is a nonresisting woman, humiliated by her sins, whose reputation is manufactured then manipulated for its instructional value. The image of the passive woman, even one writing her own story, is the example that really closes the printed version of the sermon.

The juxtaposition of Hannah Duston and Hannah Swarton speaks to the problem of redeeming the captive woman from her position out of bounds, again a question of dispensation and reputation. Duston's dispensation for her lethal actions relies both on her extraordinary deliverance and on her position outside the law: “and being where she had not her own Life secured by any Law unto her, she thought she was not forbidden by any Law, to take away the Life of the Murderers, by whom her Child had been butchered” (Humiliations 46), and her reputation is made upon her return by the acclaim she receives.²³ The repetition of “Law” and emphasis on her child's murder surely means to justify Duston's actions. But for those in the congregation who recall the trial of 1693, the line reverberates with the fate of Duston's sister Elizabeth Emerson, who was executed for killing her illegitimate infant. Mather's personal connection to Emerson is noteworthy because he not only preached the sermon on her execution day, but he later published that sermon with “a pathetical Instrument” “obtained from the young Woman.”²⁴ Although one was punished and the other praised, the significant characteristic shared by the sisters is a capacity for violence, indeed, murder. In light of Elizabeth Emerson's story, Mather's transformation of Duston from active deliverer to passive listener becomes more urgent: Duston's killings require exculpation, divorcing her (frighteningly similar) behavior from her sister's.

Symbolically, however, Hannah Duston's exorbitant actions are redeemed through the representation of the later Hannah, Swarton. Referring to a Biblical figure, the sermon asserts that Duston and her companion Mary Neff, “do like another Hannah, in pouring out their Souls before the Lord” (Humiliations 45). The concatenation of Hannahs creates an affiliation, from the Old Testament to Duston to Swarton, with Duston set off by the figures who “pour out their souls.” The Hannah of I Samuel supplicates the priest Eli, and Swarton asks forgiveness while recounting her wilderness experiences: they reach out to the elders for deliverance. Thus an implicit comparison is set up between the two New England Hannahs. The “Improvement” following Duston's story, directed at Duston, Neff, and Lennardson, makes it clear that none of the escapees had publicly confessed the spiritual experience of redemption.²⁵ So, Mather admonishes them, “You will seriously consider, What you shall render to the Lord for all His Benefits?” (Humiliations 49); Hannah Swarton's narrative, which contains her testimony of spiritual redemption, concludes with that same text. Swarton therefore recuperates the as yet unregenerate Duston by providing the image of a woman who undergoes conversion during her captivity, thus making her first-person narrative worthy of dispensation and producing her new reputation. That is, if Duston's experience is noteworthy because it represents divine intercession resulting in her physical redemption, Swarton's story displays the greater providence of a religious conversion. So, female captivity permits a broad range of behaviors as long as the woman ends firmly ensconced in the ministerial text, recaptured for Puritan instruction.

In this respect, the Swarton text improves on previous captivity stories, particularly Mary Rowlandson's. Cotton Mather authorizes his own work by obviously alluding to the popular 1682 text introduced by Increase Mather. Mather goes one better than his father, however, not merely writing a preface, but actually composing the entire text. And, in following Rowlandson, Mather concludes the Swarton narrative with the same scripture (Psalms 116.12) Increase Mather uses in his Preface:

To conclude: whatever any coy fantasies may deem, yet it highly concerns those that have so deeply tasted, how good the Lord is, to enquire with David, What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me. Psalms 116.12.

(Rowlandson 321)

On several levels, “A Narrative of Hannah Swarton” becomes a condensed version of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, with language and images abbreviated, telescoped, and combined in a rush to get to the crucial encounter with French Catholics. For example, Mary Rowlandson's twenty “Removes” reduce to Swarton's “Thus I continued with them, hurried up and down the Wilderness, from May 20, till the middle of February” (Humiliations 52-53). Where Rowlandson remained in the wilderness with the Indians from February 1675/6 to May 1676, Swarton's captivity lasted five years, from May 1690 to November 1695, largely spent in Canada. (She arrived “in sight of some French houses” in February 1690/91). Yet the Rowlandson narrative is a book-length text, running to seventy-three pages in its 1682 Cambridge edition, while the Swarton “Appendix” is only twenty-one pages long.

The popularity of Rowlandson's narrative may have been reason enough for Mather's translation of some of its elements into his own publication. In recalling many features of the Rowlandson text, Mather at once asserts the primacy of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and establishes the female captivity narrative as a genre with standard images: privation in the woods, loss of kin, spiritual conversion. Mather's reiteration of his father's scriptural quotation both in the Duston section and the Swarton appendix signals another, less obvious but potent, component of the emerging form: whether the text is prefaced by a minister or actually written by one, the (purported) authors depend on the sponsoring ministers for the dispensation to publish. The Rowlandson text, with Increase Mather's preface and Joseph Rowlandson's closing sermon, gives Cotton Mather a model for ministerial publication that he quite capably wholly inhabits.²⁶

Both indirectly and directly quoting Rowlandson's narrative, Mather provides a shorthand, recognizable digest of wilderness suffering en route to Quebec. But Indian captivity is not the focus of the Swarton narrative. Hannah Swarton's main adversaries are not her captors, the murderers of her husband and son, but the French who imperil her immortal soul. The distinction between Swarton's relationship with the Indians and that with the French can even be traced in the narrative's disposition of pronouns: at times “we” refers to the English captives, at times to Swarton and her Indian captors, but “we” never comprehends the French. Unlike Mary Rowlandson, who resented her Indian mistress, and Hannah Duston, who killed two men, two women, and six children, Hannah Swarton seems sometimes even to appreciate her captors. She is often left alone with her Indian mistress, and the two fend for themselves, subsisting on a maggoty moose liver or contacting a canoe of squaws who give Swarton a roasted eel. The spiritual bond she will later form in Quebec with Margaret Stilson is foreshadowed in this earlier connection with the Indian women who tend to her mortal needs.

The brevity of the Indian captivity section allows Mather to acknowledge the physical dangers of life on the frontier on his way to the real matter at hand: emphasizing the spiritual traps awaiting English settlers placed in proximity to French Catholics. As well, the narrative exposes the failures of the English missionary project when Swarton's “Indian Mistress” declares “That had the English been as careful to instruct her in our Religion, as the French were, to instruct her in theirs, she might have been of our Religion” (Humiliations 55). But the problem of proselytizing Indians is only incidental to Mather's immediate project of castigating, and besting, the French.

His “Appendix” consists of nine paragraphs, and by the third, Swarton has arrived in Quebec. The majority of scriptural quotations occur in the French section of the narrative. For example, only three short passages, from Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Job, appear in the text until the narrative approaches Swarton's first encounter with the French. As if bolstering her faith in preparation for that “trial,” lengthier interpolations from Psalms and Job remind Swarton of her spiritual and physical humiliation, and the paragraph ends with an attestation of their efficacy: “And by many other Scriptures, that were brought to my Remembrance, was I instructed, directed and comforted” (Humiliations 59). These quotations presage Swarton's remarkable facility in recalling scripture during religious debate, where she parries with the French Catholics who besiege her soul.

This passage reveals just how far Mather will stretch the captivity conventions to suit his agenda. Whereas the Rowlandson text, in general, confined itself to Rowlandson's personal spiritual and psychological matters, Mather uses the Swarton narrative to address contemporary social and political concerns. Removed from the wilderness, safe from the Indian captors, Swarton finds herself serving in a French household but under pressure “to Turn Papist.” She is threatened with deportation to France, where she would be burned; this threat serves Mather's aim of demonizing the French and increases the dramatic effect when Swarton challenges her captors on their own theology:

For their Praying to Angels, they brought the History of the Angel, that was sent to the Virgin Mary, in the First of Luke. I answered them, from Rev. 19.10 and 22.9. They brought Exod. 17.11 of Israels prevailing, while Moses held up his Hands. I told them, we must come to God only by Christ, Joh. 6[.] 37, 44. For Purgatory, they brought Mat. 5.25. I told them, To agree with God while here on Earth, was, to Agree with our Adversary in the way; and if we did not, we should be Cast into Hell, and should not come out until we Paid the utmost Farthing, which could never be paid.

(Humiliations 63-64)

Surprisingly adept at arguing doctrinal subtleties, “Hannah Swarton” functions most obviously here as Mather's instrument, proving the superiority of Puritan doctrine and practices over Catholic. The text itself nods toward the improbability of an unconverted frontier woman triumphing in theological argument with “the Nuns, the Priests, Friars, and the rest” (Humiliations 62). After this breathtaking scholarly fusillade from both sides, the narrator confesses “But it is bootless for me, a poor Woman, to acquaint the World, with what Arguments I used, if I could now Remember them; and many of them are slipt out of my memory” (Humiliations 64). Hannah Swarton triumphs because she has God (and Cotton Mather) on her side. Her French adversaries are doomed to fail in the face of such truth and power. That she is “a poor Woman” only makes the victory more compelling because she excels in a man's realm, with the sanction—and considerable scriptural knowledge—of a Puritan divine.

However, the indictment of Hannah Swarton's memory after so sharp a demonstration of its facility—literally citing chapter and verse to counter the Catholics—subverts the debate's authenticity and, ultimately, the very authority for the text, her remembrances. The authorial—and authoritative—voice falters here, perhaps retreating from that frightening Hutchinsonian image of the woman preacher, and reveals the fiction of the historical Hannah Swarton's authorship. From the description of her arrival in Quebec, we know that Hannah could not speak French, yet her skills improve dramatically so that she can hold forth against her enemies. This, and the relentless interpolations of Mather's interests should give the game away for later commentators. However, Fitzpatrick ascribes authorship to both Mather and Hannah Swarton, contending that, although “Swarton's narrative conveyed the most absolute submission to the will of God, … [it] again conflicted with Mather's interests in transcribing her story” (Fitzpatrick 17).²⁷ It is difficult to see a conflict of interests, given that the narrative produces not only a redeemed soul, but also representations of religious declension, missionary failure, French coercion, Indian brutality, the dangers of life outside Puritan polity: all images and themes Mather consistently employed to critique the political and religious establishments in Boston for administrative laxity in Maine.²⁸

A redemption occurring without benefit of the “public ordinances” might seem to certify the exceptionalism of Hannah Swarton.²⁹ However, in captivity, Swarton does find a “congregation” among the other captives in Quebec. In the midst of spiritual despairs over her own regeneracy, the narrator states “I had gotten an English Bible, and other Good Books, by the Help of my Fellow Captives” (Humiliations 66). By means of this Bible and meditation, she achieves an understanding of her own salvation and describes it in the conventional language of conversion, noting the “Ravishing Comfort” that fills her and harkening to her previous sinfulness.³⁰ The group of captured English provides an impromptu reconstruction of basic Puritan practice:

I found much Comfort, while I was among the French, by the Opportunities I had sometimes to Read the Scriptures, and other Good Books, and Pray to the Lord in Secret; and the Conference that some of us Captives had together, about things of God, and Prayer together sometimes; especially, with one that was in the same House with me, Margaret Stilson. Then was the Word of God precious to us, and they that feared the L O R D, spake one to another of it, as we had Opportunity. And Colonel Tyng, and Mr. Alden, as they were permitted, did speak to us, to confirm and Strengthen us, in the wayes of the Lord.

(Humiliations 68)

Although neither Tyng nor Alden is an ordained minister, they function as representatives of the ministry in their exhortations to spiritual strength. The women pray together at home, but in the “public” world of the captive congregation, men lead. When the French finally prohibit the gathering, Alden sends a message “That this was one kind of Persecution, that we must suffer for Christ” (Humiliations 68-69). Thus, as Fitzpatrick notes, captivity “relocat[es] the central experience of trial and redemption” (Fitzpatrick 17), but this narrative does so by reconstituting Puritan community in the “wilderness” of French homes and churches: the text explicitly refers to Swarton's “Captivity, among the Papists” (Humiliations 69).

In Quebec Swarton is treated well by the French woman from whom she begs provisions and is finally bought by the “Lady Intendant.” Emphasizing female community reinscribes proper domestic roles, which in themselves render Swarton properly passive. The first part of the narrative depicts Swarton obeying her Indian master and mistress, as when she aids them by gathering berries. When she arrives in Canada, however, this replaying of the Puritan domestic gives way to the pressing concerns of spiritual contest; once in a functioning household, the role changes. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes, Boston ministers saw the threat of Catholicism more deeply troubling than the Indian menace, especially where the captives were women, because “twice as many females as males remained with the [French] enemy.” She attributes this behavior to “the primacy of marriage, the influence of religion, and the supportive power of female networks” (Ulrich 208). These networks, explicitly portrayed in the scenes with her Indian mistress and the squaws, disappear once Swarton's captivity with the French becomes the focus of the narrative. Her only female friend in Canada is the Puritan Margaret Stilson.³¹

Indeed, the relatively condensed account of Indian captivity comes to a remarkable conclusion with a spectacular image. When Swarton visits the first European home she has seen in nine months to beg for food, she is given beef, bread, and pork and is expected to return to her captors. “But the Snow being knee deep, and my Legs and Hams very sore, I found it very tedious to Travel; and my sores bled, so that as I Travelled, I might be Tracked by my Blood, that I left behind me on the Snow” (Humiliations 60). Immediately after this sentence, Swarton asks to spend the night at the French house, and she never returns to the Indians. Here, the transformation in circumstances that the narrative characterizes as a “Change, as to my Outward man” opposed to the “Inward man” is marked in blood. In the forest, suffering from scant cover, Swarton bleeds; once in French hands, she is brought to the hospital where she is “Physicked and Blooded” (Humiliations 62). The move from external to internal, registered in blood, signals the beginning of her greatest trial. Previously, Swarton's emblematic suffering resonated with other accounts of wilderness captivity. Her blood on the landscape writes the recognizable tale of survival as seen in Rowlandson; in this respect, it metaphorizes female authorship, the fiction of a teller and her (salvational) tale, the marks on the page. The shift from outward to inward “man” actually represents a shift from passive female captive to active male debater; more precisely, Swarton's blood marks the end of Swarton's story and the initiation of Mather's theological tour de force.

In this, the Swarton narrative's value as an Indian captivity tale is superseded by the powerful image of English Protestantism conquering French Catholicism. As we have seen, the narrative emphasizes the French aspect of the captivity, not only in the amount of text dedicated to French, as opposed to Indian, captivity, but also in the reconstructed Puritan congregation in the heart of Canada. Swarton's transformation, from passive Indian captive to aggressive theological warrior, indicates that this story, although initially echoing previous captivity narratives, has a different agenda. It is indeed a tale of suffering, conversion, and return. And as a conversion narrative, it reinforces the concept that the greatest battles occur internally, spiritual wrestling in the privacy of the soul. Yet this wrestling is then externalized in the theological debates. Hannah Swarton's fictive authorship thus channels the flow of Puritan instruction, into “Hannah Swarton” then out again to the French, an instrument of Mather in the Canadian wilderness.

As J. M. Bumstead notes in his study of colonial captivity narratives, “Because of the emphasis on the Indian, it is frequently overlooked that most of the captivity accounts [between 1680 and 1760] record contact with the French” and the frequency of French contact can be seen in Emma Coleman's two-volume study of Canadian captives.³² Mather's “Appendix” to Humiliations follow'd with Deliverances was the first published account of a captive brought to Canada. As I have noted, Swarton's narrative is indebted to the Rowlandson text, but the Swarton account, in turn, dramatizes the concerns of a specifically French captivity that surface in subsequent narratives set in Canada. In so doing, it shifts away from the Indian captivity's focus on the exigencies of wilderness survival. Indeed, no actual wilderness threatens Swarton once she arrives in Quebec, and the anxiety about physical suffering gives way to spiritual turmoil. Civilization (albeit French) offers a test of faith as demanding as the thickets of the north woods. Ardent Puritans like John Williams remain steadfast until deliverance. Others, such as Williams's daughter Eunice and, apparently, Swarton's own daughter, succumb to French influence.³³ Later captivities, particularly those published after the Revolutionary War, negotiated the difficult task of recounting a time when the French, contemporary allies of the new Republic, represented a great threat. Jemima Howe's captivity narrative (1792), for example, is notable for its delicate, even sentimentalized, portrayal of her French captors and was used later as anti-British propaganda.³⁴

By 1792, women's publications were more common than in the days of Hannah Swarton. Mather's impersonation relied on the historical and cultural forces shaping gender roles and authorship in 1697. But use of the captivity narrative as anti-French polemic persisted throughout the wars between France and Britain waged during the eighteenth century. The endangered soul, snared by Catholicism, remained a potent icon in the ideological battles fought in the colonies. Cotton Mather, in the guise of Hannah Swarton, established captivity as a genre that not only attacked Indians as brutish heathens but reached into the refined parlors of Quebec to find horrific threats there as well.

“THE WONDERFUL DISPENSATIONS OF HEAVEN”

When Mather turns to history to chronicle ten years of debilitating Indian warfare, he constructs thirty “articles” to illustrate the awful depredations endured by English settlers throughout New England. Decennium Luctuosum is a catalogue of horrors, graphically informing readers about scalpings, eviscerations, immolations, and hatchetings. A series of captivity stories appears in the text, including “Article XXV,” “A Notable Exploit; wherein Dux Femina Facti,” the tale of Hannah Duston. Published only two years after Humiliations, however, Decennium does not include the Swarton text. Mather used his own material from other sources to bolster the book, and the opening “articles” detail early skirmishes on the eastern frontier. It would seem that Hannah Swarton's story, beginning with the attack on Casco, would fit naturally into this scheme. But Decennium Luctuosum emphasizes Indian brutality, not French religious coercion. In fact, the final pages of the book portray the fallacies of Quakerism rather than the importunities of French Catholicism. Therefore, although the “Narrative of Hannah Swarton” purports to be an Indian captivity narrative, a personal account of suffering in the hands of the tribes, it is more accurately characterized as a French captivity narrative and theological exercise. As such, Mather rightly excludes it from this historical text, keeping his antipathies focused on the “Nations of Indians.”

As self-professed historiography, Decennium Luctuosum moves away from earlier homiletic tracts employing current events to demonstrate providential displeasure. The text's obsessive classicism, interpolating more Latin and Greek than scripture, secularizes the project. Here is no sermon to instruct readers in the path of salvation but rather a highly sensationalized register of relentless misery and occasional relief.³⁵ As history, it required the omniscient authority of third-person narration. In the self-effacing tone adopted at the outset of Decennium, Mather states:

In Truth, I had rather be called a Coward, than undertake my self to Determine the Truth in this matter; but having Armed my self with some good Authority for it, I will Transcribe Two or Three Reports of the matter, now in my Hands, and Leave it unto thy own Determination.

(Decennium 186)

He includes accounts from “a Gentleman of Dover” and “a Gentleman of Casco” that indict not only the Indians but particularly Governor Andros for their roles in fomenting the hostilities. The language of both accounts replicates Mather's own perfervid prose in the introduction and the text following; when he appends a third account, “which was published in September, 1689,” it is an excerpt from his own sermon, “Souldiers Counselled and Comforted” (Boston, 1689 [Editor's Note, Decennium 190]). Significantly, the “Gentlemen” whose reports are embedded in this Mather text produce an entirely different discourse from the Swarton narrative. Theirs is literally named “Authority” and represents public witness to political events, not personal (and spiritual) experience. So although Mather “transcribes” male authors to support his history, this purloined authorship is contextualized as historical, public, and authoritative: an admitted transcription, not a fictionalized first-person relation.

Mather's final rendition of the “Narrative of Hannah Swarton” appears in 1702 with the publication of Magnalia Christi Americana. Having begun its literary life intended for a text never printed, then appearing as an appendix to a sermon, the Swarton passage finally rests among some of Mather's stranger productions. Reprinted in chapter 2 of the sixth book of Magnalia, the narrative seems to come full circle. From the unpublished Great Examples of Judgment and Mercy, Swarton's story moves to the section designated “Illustrious Discoveries and Demonstrations of The Divine Providence in Remarkable Mercies and Judgments on Many Particular Persons.” There are minor, but telling variants between the two versions; for example, the word “them” is more often rendered “'em” in the Magnalia, approximating a frontier women's conversation more than the formal discourse of the printed sermon.

The strangest variant occurs near the end of the text where Swarton, having bested the Catholics, resumes her retrospection of scriptural comfort,

I often thought on the History of the man Born Blind; of whom Christ, when His Disciples asked, Whether this man had Sinned, or his Parents? answered, Neither this man, nor his Parents; but this was, that the works of God might be made manifest in him. So, tho' I had deserved all this, yet I knew not but one Reason, of Gods bringing all these Afflictions and Miseries upon me, and then Enabling me to bear them, was, That the Works of God might be made manifest.

(Humiliations 70)

Within the Puritan calculus of sins accounted and punished, Swarton “deserved” the miseries she incurs. In Magnalia, the word “deserved” becomes “desired” (Magnalia 360), signalling a shift from passive suffering to active atonement and utility. If the first version suits Mather's reliance on the required passivity of a woman author as instrument, the second version ups the ante. That is, in moving from a deserving subject to a desiring subject, the instrument becomes a more fit vessel for the lessons offered. The variant represents Hannah Swarton as a willing instrument, a self-aware subject for the manifestation of divine providence. Although this would seem to subvert the passivity of the Humiliations narrator, the Magnalia text offers a Swarton utterly complicit in her abjection. This odd rendition of Swarton's spiritual self-evaluation aptly illustrates a powerful figuration of the female author: one conscious of, and acceding to (indeed, craving), the redemptive use of her publicized figure.

Magnalia recontextualizes Hannah Swarton's story once more. Clearly not of historical value—or it would have been included in the voluminous Decennium—the narrative assumes the status of a curiosity, an “extraordinary salvation.” Magnalia's Swarton follows descriptions of miraculous rescues and “rare cures,” where Mather recounts the tale of dropsical Sarah Wilkinson:

When she was open'd, there were no bowels to be found in her, except her heart, which was exceeding small, and as it were perboil'd. … Other bowels, none could be found: yet in this condition she liv'd a long while, and retain'd her senses to the last.

But we will content ouselves with annexing to these things a narrative of a woman celebrating the wonderful dispensations of Heaven.

(Magnalia 356)

Proceeding from the amazing hollow woman to Hannah Swarton, the segue seems quirky at best. Yet relegation of the narrative to a passage of “Believe It or Not” sensationalism reveals its oddity even in Mather's estimation. By 1702, over thirty years of intermittent, sometimes acute, Indian battle had made captivity commonplace. Gory, horrific tales fill Decennium Luctuosum, and women constitute the majority of sufferers. Without fierce anti-Indian rhetoric, the Swarton narrative cannot perform the ideological work that a story like Duston's can. Nor can its highly stilted version of religious contest, which actually portrays the French as kind, if zealous, missionaries, suffice for the scathing criticisms the continuing warfare requires. Reduced to a conventional spiritual conversion account, the “Narrative of Hannah Swarton” provides insufficient propaganda to warrant reprinting as history or jeremiad. Subject of a text without social utility except as an exhibit in Mather's freak show of remarkables, Hannah Swarton, who never wrote her own story, is an appropriate emblem of his use of female authorship: a hollow woman, filled in by Mather's (divinely directed) hand.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich describes Hannah Swarton as “the ideal captive” (Ulrich 180). Indeed, Swarton represents the idealized captive, Mather's extension into the theological thickets of Catholic Canada, whose “means of … Deliverance, were by reason of Letters” (Humiliations 71). In staging Hannah Swarton's conversion not in the wild forests of northern New England but the civilized venue of the French Lord-Intendant's home, Cotton Mather literally domesticates the captivity narrative and extends its utility as a device for propaganda against both the French and the Indians. Alluding to the familiar imagery of deprivation, he moves quickly to the more important business of conversion in the face, not of physical suffering, but of religious antagonism. Although she has suffered the grueling journey of winter travel through northern Maine forests and lost her family in the attack, Swarton's gravest concern is arrival in Canada, “for fear lest I should be overcome by them, to yield to their Religion” (Humiliations 59). The horrors of Indian attack and near-starvation fade in comparison to the “greater snare” of Catholicism.

Mather both cannily taps popular images of suffering and invents fresh ones like Judea capta to assemble his own version of captivity's humiliations. Adopting a woman's voice, he elaborates on the figure of the virtuous woman, extending the instrumental potential for this usually silent segment of the Church. Mather's own complicated engagement with the vicissitudes of authorship allows him to invoke certain expectations about female authors in his readers while simultaneously creating a new use for woman's publication, as a variation on pseudonymity and anonymity. In this, he relies on what Michel Foucault characterizes as the author's “classificatory function.” “Such a name,” here, the woman's name, Hannah Swarton, “permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts” (Foucault 107). Although Hannah Swarton's name appears only once as author, the scarcity of women's texts in the period affiliates “her” relation with Mary Rowlandson's and so claims authenticity only from an extraordinary experience like captivity. This authenticity is the prerequisite for female authorship and is differentiated from the authority of the male accounts Mather interpolates into Decennium; women's publication can only signalize the private experience of deliverance as opposed to the public function of the male writer as historian and reporter.³⁶ This distinction accounts for the Swarton narrative's absence from Mather's historical productions and its final home in a series of curiosities. “A Narrative of Hannah Swarton” had outlived its usefulness by 1702; as instrument in the vast project of ecclesiastical and secular history, which Magnalia attempts to unite, the woman's story remains much too personal, even idiosyncratic, to serve as an entry into the public spectacle of Puritan progress. Appended to the tale of the hollowed-out woman, Hannah Swarton's narrative represents the limits of female authorship's utility for Mather. He never published as a woman again.

Notes

1. From Baxter's Catholic Theology, an entry from 1675, in the Oxford English Dictionary for “instrument.”

2. Increase Mather's authorship of the preface remains unproved. However, several scholars believe that textual evidence supports the premise that Mather was indeed “Ter Amicam” and wrote it (Minter 343 n.; and Derounian 85). Although there is no absolute confirmation for this assumption, I am persuaded by Derounian et al. that Increase Mather is the likely author and, as my argument will demonstrate, his authorship influences Cotton Mather's foray into the captivity narrative form. However, even if Increase Mather were not the author, the Rowlandson Preface stands as a kind of editorial practice whose emphasis on dispensation and reputation recurs in Cotton Mather's works discussed here.

3. I use The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative Of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson … in Slotkin and Folsom, because, unlike the True History, which was published in London, Sovereignty was published and circulated in the Colony.

4. “Our family being now gathered together (those of us that were living) the South Church in Boston hired an house for us: then we removed from Mr. Shepards, those cordial friends, and went to Boston, where we continued about three-quarters of a year: still the Lord went along with us, and provided graciously for us. I thought it somewhat strange to set up housekeeping with bare walls; but as Solomon says, Money answers all things; and that we had through the benevolence of Christian friends, some in this town, and some in that, and others: and some from England, that in a little time we might look, and see the house furnished with love” (364). It is clear from the list of “friends” that the Rowlandsons enjoyed a great deal of support after their trials. The breadth of support, from various towns and from England, speaks to the relative importance of the Rowlandson and White families.

5. The Rowlandson family then moved from Boston to Wethersfield, Connecticut.

6. The Biblical authority derives in part from the Pauline proscription against women speaking in Church in 1 Timothy: 11, 12. The notorious, more proximate, example of the problem is, of course, Anne Hutchinson.

7. In The Doctrine of Divine Providence, Increase Mather offers theodicy couched in terms of the exceptional. He cautions readers not to rely too much on their own understanding or reason. “To make things depend chiefly upon the decrees and wills of man, is to place Man in the Throne and to dethrone him that sitteth in Heaven. We must therefore know, that all Events of Providence are the issues and executions of an Ancient, Eternal, Unchangeable decree of Heaven” (8). Explicitly, the verb “to dispense” speaks to both this “decree” and the interpretation of the exceptional: “There are also extraordinary mercies and extraordinary judgements, which the Providence of God does sometimes dispense towards the children of men” (47).

8. Increase Mather notes the “atheistical, proud, wild, cruel, barbarous, brutish (in one word) diabolical creatures” (321) who captured her and the folly of a premature determination “that the army should desist the pursuit, and retire” (318) in their battle against the Narragansetts. Thus, Mather's preface places Rowlandson's tale within a broader range of Puritan concerns, from the diabolical provenance of the Narragansetts to the ill-executed military strategies of “the forces of Plymouth and the Bay.”

9. Toulouse argues that it is precisely the anxiety of a captive woman to redeem her social value within the “hierarchical social discourse” of Puritan New England that characterizes the Rowlandson narrative. She notes that Rowlandson's father, John White, was “Lancaster's wealthiest citizen” (670).

10. The Diary contains many references to Mather's visitations among his congregation in which he disseminates his own work.

11. “When I have readd thro' a Book, at any time, I would make a Pause; and first, give Thanks to the Father of Lights, for whatever Illumination He has by this Book bestow'd upon me. Secondly, If the Author be in his Book an useful Servant of the Church, I would give Thanks to God, for His Raising up such an Instrument, and Inclining and Assisting of him to this Performance …” (Diary 2:226).

12. Fitzpatrick characterizes the “dueling textual voices of the captives and their ministerial sponsors” as “palimpsests, engraved by authors whose exegeses are in dialogical relation to one another.” Acknowledging “the clergy's attempts to impose a socially and doctrinally unified and orthodox interpretation of the captives' experiences,” Fitzpatrick reads in the tensions between these voices a “gendered site of … narrative formation” (2). The subversive effect of the woman's voice, noticed by many scholars, including Fitzpatrick, in studies of Mary Rowlandson's narrative, meets an unusual obstacle in Cotton Mather's treatment of Hannah Swarton's story.

13. See “INSTRUCTIONS TO MATTHEW CARY ABOUT BRINGING PRISONERS FROM CANADA; INFORMATION OBTAINED BY HIM IN QUEBEC, AND LISTS OF THE PRISONERS REDEEMED AND LEFT IN CANADA—1695.”

14. Edward Tyng was commander of Casco fort until 1688 when he was appointed Governor of Annapolis by Phips. He was returning to Maine when he was captured on board John Alden's sloop. Alden was in the service of the Colony “to provide provisions and clothes for the force at Falmouth.” Both Tyng and Alden were carried to France, and Tyng died in prison there. Alden returned, only to be charged in the 1692 witchcraft trials (when he was 70 years old). He escaped from a Boston jail and hid until the furor passed (Coleman 1:70 n., 215-16). Another, less reliable, source for Swarton, Tyng, and Alden's stories is Willis, who relies unquestioningly on Mather's text.

15. Coleman has traced a history of John Swarton [“spelled on Canadian records: Soarre, Shiard, Shaken, Soüarten, Sowarten, Schouarden, Souard”]: “John Swarton of Beverly received a fifty acre grant in North Yarmouth. In his petition he said he had fought with Charles II in Flanders.” “Church mentions ‘One Swarton, a Jersey man’ whose language he could hardly understand” (Coleman 1:204).

16. Because my concern with the Swarton narrative includes its publication history, I use two versions of the text. The first, hereafter referred to as Humiliations, was published in 1697 and the second version, “A Narrative of Hannah Swarton,” appeared in Mather's Magnalia. The variants are discussed below.

17. The petition accuses the Massachusetts Bay leaders of dragging their heels in dispatching aid to Maine during the Indian attacks waged in the summer of 1688. It not only praises the work of Gov. Andros in providing relief to the Province upon his return from New York and getting a full report of the depradations, but it indicts the “Change of Government” (after the insurrection of April 1688) with supplying the Indians “with stores of Warr and Amunition by vessels sent by some in Boston to trade with them, and thereupon [the Indians] took new Courage and resolution to Continue the Warr; and having got to their assistance other Indians, who before were unconcerned they presently burnt and destroyed the several Fortifications which the Forces had deserted. …” The petition was signed 25 January 1689, almost a year after the anti-Andros uprising in Boston, and shortly before the attack on Casco.

18. Mather later wrote specifically about the dangers of living without benefit of a minister in his 1702 Letter to Ungospelized Plantations.

19. Holmes asserts that “Cotton Mather wrote this Narrative some time between November, 1695, the month of Hannah Swarton's return, and November, 1696—probably nearer the latter date—when he wrote his advertisement for Great Examples, the work in which he first intended to print the Swarton Narrative” (2:493).

20. Holmes discusses the trajectory of the Swarton text at length (1:452-53). It was advertised as part of the forthcoming Great Examples of Judgment and Mercy, which was never printed.

21. Mather explicitly metaphorizes female virtue as the Church itself: “Indeed, there are more women than men in the Church and the more virtuous they prove, the more worthy will the Church be to be figured, by a woman that fears the Lord” (Ornaments 9).

22. Holmes initially states that the Duston Narrative “as it now stands is almost certainly of Cotton Mather's authorship or editing” (2:491). However, in a longer consideration of the timing of the sermon and Mather's other attempts at fact-gathering, he concludes, “We are inclined to believe, therefore, that the original of the Hannah Dustan Narrative was written by the Rev. Benjamin Rolfe of Haverhill, but that its statements were confirmed by Cotton Mather's interview with the principals, and that the printed text received his editorship” (2:492). This view is supported by the title page's presentation of the story as an “Improvement.”

23. The variant reading of the Duston episode in Decennium Luctuosum provides information about the specific rewards received by Duston, Neff, and Lennardson.

24. See Holmes (3:1198-1200) for notes on the sermon Warnings from the Dead (Boston, 1693). Emerson's “Instrument” was reprinted in Mather's Pillars of Salt and in the Magnalia. Ulrich reports that Emerson was severely beaten by her father and indicates that this abuse could account for her “rebellion” (Ulrich 197-98).

25. Duston (1657-c. 1735) did not become a member of the Church until March 1727, almost exactly thirty years after the captivity. See Taylor 182.

26. Comparing Rowlandson's captivity narrative with Life Among the Indians, the 1857 account of Olive and Mary Ann Oatman's captivity (and its subsequent editions), Derounian-Stodola argues that the two texts are “complementary examples of intertextual continuity and narrative evolution” (33); she sees continuity in the works' function as “political guises” (43) but distinguishes them through their respective authorial voices. So, because “Mary Rowlandson's voice and style still dominate her narrative … we might identify her text as ‘factive,’ that is, told in the first person and tending toward veracity” (43). However, the Oatman narratives, which Derounian-Stodola argues are “constructed—indeed, created” (35) by a Methodist minister, Royal B. Stratton, seem to her “‘fictive,’ that is, tending toward fiction and using narrative strategies appropriate to that genre” (43). If one were to argue continuity along the lines of “ministerial involvement,” as Derounian-Stodola does, the Swarton narrative provides much more evidence of ministerial manipulation, especially in terms of the purported/purloined authorial voice. Swarton's is indeed “fictive” in Derounian-Stodola's terms.

27. Fitzpatrick argues that Swarton was “converted at the hands of apostates, whose challenges to the ‘true religion’ prompted Swarton's profession of Puritan faith.” She sees this as a subversion of the notion that conversion should occur within “the communal covenant,” which would offer nurturance within Puritan social order, the congregation.

28. See the controversy surrounding the publication of Publick Occurrences, an anonymously published criticism of the government's campaign on the eastern frontier, and Mather's “slippery” disavowal of his authorship in Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather 75-76. Mather's dodging is evident in his letter to John Cotton (October 17, 1690) protesting that “the publisher had not one line of it from me, only as accidentally meeting him in the high-way, on his request, I showed him how to contract and express the report of the expedition at Casco and the east” in Silverman, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather 27. These are the expeditions that should have prevented the attack on Casco that resulted in Swarton's capture.

29. Mather reminds his audience in the sermon that “Words that are spoken in an Ordinance of the Lord Jesus Christ, carry with them a peculiar Efficacy and Authority” (Humiliations 48).

30. “I desired to see all my Sins, and to Repent of them all, with all my Heart, and of that Sin which had been especially a Burden to me, namely, That I Left the Publick Worship and Ordinances of God, to go to Live in a Remote Place, without the Publick Ministry …” (Humiliations 67-68).

31. According to church records, Swarton's daughter, whose whereabouts were unknown at the end of the narrative, remained in Canada and converted. See Levernier and Cohen 31-32.

32. Bumstead states that Mrs. Sarah Gerish was “the first Canadian captive whose narrative was printed” because it was included in Cotton Mather's A History of Remarkable Occurrences in the Long War (1699) [see note below]. Since Swarton's text appeared in 1697, hers was certainly the first. Although Bumstead's article contains other errors, it is a useful overview of British responses to French Canadian captivity. He argues that French attitudes toward Protestant captives changed from “efforts at complete cultural assimilation of the captive” to a more detached and “regularized” practice of incarceration. So, where Swarton and other earlier captives lodged with French families as house servants or farm workers, later captives were treated as conventional prisoners-of-war and passed their captivities in “formal prison buildings” (87). Some of the language that appears for the first time in the Swarton text is reiterated in later narratives, such as the differentiation figured by the “inward man” threatened by French Catholics and the “outward” man provided for by them. Bumstead does not mention the Swarton narrative in his study.

33. Bumstead argues that “The real dramatization of the ambiguities and anxieties of the English was done by John Williams …” (82). See his discussion (82-84) of Williams's The Redeemed Captive.

34. See “Jemima Howe—Background” in Kestler 139-42. There are several versions of Howe's narrative, as Kestler notes; I refer to “A Genuine and Correct Account of the Captivity, Sufferings and Deliverance of Mrs. Jemima Howe, of Hinsdale in New-Hampshire.” “Taken from her own mouth, and written, by the Reverend Bunker Gray [sic],” in Washburn.

35. The story of seven-year-old Sarah Gerish, “a very Beautiful and Ingenious Damsel” foreshadows the sensationalism of later captivity narratives in its sentimental rendering of the little child imprisoned in a wilderness with a “Dragon” for a master. The Gerish account is notable, too, for its representation of sexual threat when Sarah's master commands her to “loosen som of her upper-Garments.” “God knows what he was going to do …” the account continues, but no harm comes to the child and she is eventually restored to her family (Decennium 200).

36. Derounian-Stodola notes that “by the mid-nineteenth century, the Indian captivity narrative was no longer primarily an autobiographical literary construct but was often an exploitative political vehicle to facilitate genocide [of Native Americans]” (44). As my argument demonstrates, the construct and the vehicle were conflated as early as 1697. This political aspect of the texts appears precisely because women's stories were private matters. They therefore depend for publication on ministers, who can offer both dispensation and certification of good reputation, because the Church is a public institution that shapes and ministers to the private soul.

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