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Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth

 | 
Michèle Lurdos
, 
Judith Misrahi-Barak

Crossing Borders

Transporting possibilities: Reading Cultural Difference in Captivity Narratives

Melissa Adams

Abstract

In the eighteenth century, British readers were cautioned against being ‘too involved’ in their reading materials. Reading could potentially transport one to other places, other times, even inside other bodies. Yet, reading was crucial to a conception of advanced British civilization that emphasized not only extensive trade, but also a high value on learning, an appreciation of the arts, and an enhanced capacity to feel. This paper’s objective is to elucidate what we might call the absorptive power of reading, through the increasingly frequent descriptions of reader identification as a transporting experience, one that literally carries us away. By investigating the evolving use of the word ‘transport’ in the late eighteenth century, this paper will attempt to navigate the intersections between reading, feeling, and the discourses of travel. Close readings of two colonial American captivity narratives provide spaces to unfold the work of early ethnography, sympathy, and textual transport. I will take seriously the claim that, in the eighteenth century, reading may, in fact, have been dangerous by describing the rhetorical difficulties inherent in an imperial mission to civilize others (rather than to sympathize with them). By replacing sympathetic textual transports which offer readers possibilities of cultural exchange with romanticized, historical transports that take one back to an idyllic, pre-colonial setting, many British authors depoliticize the transformative powers of reader identification in proto-ethnographic texts.

Testo integrale

  • 1 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, ‘Letter V’. Letters on the Study and Use of History (Hamilton, Ontario (...)

‘Authentic histories... may transport the attentive reader back to the very time, make him a party to the councils, and an actor in the whole scene of affairs.’
Henry St. John Bolingbroke1.

  • 2 Pinch, Adela, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. (Stanford: Stanfo (...)

1‘Transport’ in the eighteenth century encompasses not only the traditional notions of travel such as crossing land or sea but expands to include travel via the imagination and the emotions. As Adela Pinch has shown, feelings in this period ‘seem to have lives of their own; they wander from person to person like vagrants unattached to specific individuals’.2 Theorists such as Hume, Kames, and Smith describe emotion in the language of movement. Simply stated, feeling is a process of being moved by an object or an experience external to the self. This paper explores emotional travel, or transport, through the medium of the printed text. In this period, reading is described as a practice that takes us outside of ourselves; it transports us away to other locations, times, dangers, adventures, even inside other bodies.

  • 3 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism. 1762. James R Boyd, ed. (New York: Barnes, 1869).

2Aesthetic critics in the period agree that our experiences inside the text transport the object that we are considering to us. ‘Ideal presence’, writes Lord Kames, is the imaginative power that brings an object or event that we have never witnessed to our mind’s eye, that is, it gives ‘an impression that every incident is passing in my presence’.3 He continues, ‘the reader’s passions are never sensibly moved, till he be thrown into a kind of reverie; in which state forgetting he is reading, he conceives every incident as passing in his presence, precisely as if he were an eye-witness’ (Kames 1869: 65). Kames’s theory of reading places the reader on the scene of action, but it does not ensure that the reader feels for or identifies with the characters and events in the text. To understand a reader’s emotional response, we will turn to Adam Smith’s theories on sympathy.

  • 4 Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. A.L. Macfie and D.D. Rapael, eds. (Indianapolis: Lib (...)

3Smith argues that by imagining how we would feel if placed in another’s situation we may ‘enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him’.4 This exchange requires active participation on the part of the sympathizer:

The spectator must, first of all, endeavor, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of the distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded (Smith 1982: 21).

4In Smith’s account we are ‘changing places in fancy with the sufferer’ and the language here focuses on the imaginative travel between two physical bodies. Prepared to enter with feeling into the case of the other, the sympathetic reader has the potential to be transported by their reading.

  • 5 I use the term ethnography and ethnographic as a means of capturing the emerging interest in studyi (...)

5‘Textual transport’ occurs when a reader has a deep identification with a text, so much so that, like Bolingbroke’s ‘attentive reader’ in the epigraph above, she is not simply a witness, but imagines herself an actor in the ‘whole scene of affairs’. The transported reader transcends a limited notion of the self and enters into new experiences, motives and feelings by imagining herself in the place of the protagonist/other. I find that ‘ethnographic’ texts, that is, texts generally concerned with documenting cultural differences, offer a particular awareness of the possibilities of textual transport because these texts must continually negotiate new ways of experiencing the world.5

  • 6 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (New York: Routlege, 1992): (...)

6 Reading and travel share a structural resemblance in that both produce the potential for exploring cultural differences. Mary Louise Pratt calls this potential ‘transculturation’, a procedure ‘of recognizing and renegotiating cultural differences between the metropole and the periphery’.6 Both readers and travelers undergo encounters that necessarily alter their conceptions of self and home, experiencing lasting transformations that change the way they interact with the world, whether those encounters with ‘others’ occur face to face in the contact zone or between the pages of a book read safely at home. Though this description of transculturation tends to elide the discrepancies between encounters of cultural difference ‘on location’ and encounters of difference ‘on the page’, I want to investigate the ways in which transport mediates these discrepancies.

1 Spectators and Human Nature

  • 7 Addison, Joseph, ‘The Spectator No. 1’ 1710-11. Addison and Steele: Selections from The Tatler and (...)

7Thus I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species.7

  • 8 For instance, Samuel Johnson’s corrections of the misinformation of older travel accounts of Scotla (...)

8With the success of The Spectator, British essayist Joseph Addison made the study of other people’s quirks and behaviors into a national pastime. To qualify as a spectator he suggests that one must have the ability to blend in with the parties to be observed, but one must remain an outsider and a silent witness to the goings-on around one. The ‘looker-on’, as the narrator describes himself, hopes to divert and improve his countrymen with the insights he has gained by a careful study of those around him. In The Spectator, Addison endeavors to draw portraits of his own countrymen, a kind of local ethnography, but the interest in national characters extends beyond the British clubs, markets, and cultural events depicted by the spectator and his friends. With the expansion of trade markets and the growth of colonial territories reliable ethnographies of ‘global others’ become increasingly valuable. As the century progresses, readers are less satisfied with exaggerated or fantastic accounts of unknown places and peoples.8 Instead, they seek a sturdier foundation for the investigation of specific cultures and of human nature more generally. As Hume and others set out to create a new ‘science of man’, the study of human nature and the voice of the ethnographer play an important role in the emerging literature of the period. One finds ‘the spectator’ examining human behavior in travel literature, scientific inquiries, poetry, fiction, miscellanies and newsletters, memoirs and biographies, aesthetic treatises, and epistolary correspondence. As the interest in studying human nature increases, British authors in the period continually ask their readers to imagine what they have in common with peoples so distant and different from themselves.

  • 9 For a general introduction to the genre of the captivity narrative in the American setting see: Van (...)

9While there are many texts one might look to in exploring the possibility for textual transport in early modern ‘ethnographic’ writing, I will focus on narratives by two British colonial women, Mary Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison’s A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. I have chosen to focus on captivity narratives9 because the genre escalates the demand for the readers’ sympathy and it forces one to consider the questions of cultural difference and similarity so important to this project. Although both of these texts are narrated by Caucasian women, Jemison’s account troubles the usual ethnographic dichotomy of whiteness as cultural authority and otherness as the object of study. The strategies for garnering reader sympathy and depicting Native Americans prove strikingly different in these two accounts.

2 Mary Rowlandson

What will you love English-men still?10

  • 10 Rowlandson, Mary, ‘A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.’ 1682. (...)

10Published in 1682, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her three month captivity by the Algonquin Indians during King Phillips’s War (1675-1678) went through four editions within the first year and quickly became one of America’s earliest bestsellers. Rowlandson’s text provides a vivid description of the atrocities she witnessed during the raid on her family as well as during the twenty ‘removes’ she was forced to make from her home in the English colonial territory of Lancaster, Massachusetts.

  • 11 I say that the text is not genuinely interested in ethnography because Rowlandson does not detail A (...)

11Rowlandson does not shy away from her feelings toward her Native American captors. She highlights their barbarous, even bestial nature with carefully chosen words; they are ‘murtherous wretches’, ‘bloody Heathen’, ‘merciless Heathen’, ‘ravenous Beasts’, ‘a company of hell-hounds’, and ‘barbarous creatures’ (Rowlandson 1998: 12-14). She is not writing a scientific study of Algonquin culture, but making an emotional appeal to other white readers. Her prose style, neither distant nor impartial, reflects this rhetorical goal. While Rowlandson’s readers do learn about late seventeenth-century Algonquin diet and travel habits, there is little information that one might call ethnographic in her narrative.11 In each ‘remove’, Rowlandson is drawn further from what she considers ‘civilized, English’ territory. As the distance from any familiar physical space increases, Rowlandson more aggressively maintains her efforts to establish a psychological space that is distinctly English.

  • 12 I am indebted to Nancy Armstrong’s and Leonard Tennenhouse’s reading of Rowlandson as the precursor (...)

12Rowlandson’s compulsory travels force her to recognize the vulnerability of the English on the outposts of their American settlements. As the group of captors and captives prepares to make camp, Rowlandson spies an abandoned English house (abandoned, she tells us, due to its proximity to Indian territory) and requests to sleep inside for the evening. Her Narragasett captors teasingly reply, ‘what will you love English men still?’ (Rowlandson 1998: 14). The implication here is that she must give up her English customs as she is now property of the Algonquin people. Ironically, the experience of being held captive motivates Rowlandson’s tenacious grip on her Englishness. Without the forced exposure to difference, Mary Rowlandson would not have the opportunity to create for herself a public identity as a suffering English heroine.12

13Rowlandson continually emphasizes the difference between the depths of her own feeling in comparison to what she sees as a lack of feeling in her Indian captors. This representation of a lack of feeling in Native Americans, repeated again and again in ethnographies and natural histories on the subject, emerges from the assumption that the expression of emotions is transparent as well as constant across cultures. Furthermore, these texts often conflate the expression of emotion with a culture’s relationship to and value for emotion. In Rowlandson, the lack of pity demonstrated by her Indian captors, for instance, when her mistress dismisses her from the family wigwam during a bitter, cold night, illustrates a complete lack of feeling, not simply in the individual, but in the culture more generally. These minor pieces of cruelty, along with the more violent accounts of her family’s destruction during the raid, descriptions of battle celebrations over ‘English scalps’, and the constant references to her captors as heathen savages create an almost impenetrable barrier to sympathy between this white woman and her native captors. By diminishing the possibility for her readers to identify with the Native Americans in her story, Rowlandson ensures that she and her readers remain committed to an English identity with all the customs and values inherent in it.

  • 13 Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, a (...)

14Although Rowlandson establishes a similarity between herself and her white readers by exploiting the difference between her Indian captors and civilized English people, her claim to an English identity is not as straightforward as she might have us believe. Rowlandson is not an Englishwoman in England; her captivity is the result of her presence in colonial America. Furthermore, she is markedly Puritan. Her difference from many of her contemporary readers, both in England and in other American colonies, would be obvious. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse argue, Rowlandson’s account ‘required her readers to change the way they imagined being English, because they had to imagine being English in America’.13 The sympathy Rowlandson extracts from her readers would not be based on similarity, but rather recognition of her difference as an American colonist, a Puritan, and, most importantly, as a surviving captive who returns to her community. These differences do not block sympathy nor do they prevent the reader from experiencing a deep identification with the sufferings of the protagonist. In fact, these differences entice the reader to work harder for the transporting possibilities latent in the text. The process of identification is worthwhile because Rowlandson provides highly-charged, new emotional terrain for her readers to explore.

15Readers who transport themselves to the American frontier and imagine being a captive do not have far to go in imagining life as an Algonquin. Michelle Burnham claims,

  • 14 Burnham, Michelle, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. (H (...)

While [Mary Rowlandson’s] narrative undoubtedly led readers in England to imagine ‘being English in America’, it is equally likely that it led English readers on both sides of the Atlantic to imagine the possibility of not being English at all, to imagine a liminal or hybrid, if not an Indian, cultural identity.... This narrative implicitly critiques the assumption that readers can identify only with figures whose culture, race, or nationality resembles their own, for to identify with Rowlandson is necessarily to identify both with her English difference from the Indians and with her difference from English culture through her participation in Algonquin society, both with her insistent Englishness and with her departure from it.14

16Burnham’s insistence that sympathy is possible despite cultural and racial differences proves crucial to this paper’s argument that textual transport actually requires difference in ethnographic narratives. In the next section I will investigate the transporting possibilities in Mary Jemison’s ethnographic depictions of Seneca life as well as her strategy for eliciting sympathy for Seneca traditions.

3 Mary Jemison

Their tears flowed freely, and they exhibited all the signs of real mourning.15

  • 15 Seaver, James E. ‘A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.’ 1824. Women’s Indian Captivity Nar (...)
  • 16 Although this book is published in 1824, the main events of the text are located between 1758 and t (...)

17Mary Jemison was fifteen years old when she was captured by a Shawnee and French raiding party from her family’s farm in western Pennsylvania on April 5, 1758. Though both of her parents and her three siblings were also taken captive, she was the sole survivor of the attack. Eventually, Jemison was adopted by two Seneca women as a replacement for a lost warrior brother. Jemison’s story is significant within the captivity genre because she chooses to remain with her Seneca family and actually identifies as a Seneca woman throughout her long life. Her narrative was recorded by James Everett Seaver, a local doctor hired by American antiquarians to write Jemison’s life story. Seaver certainly shapes Jemison’s narrative, and though the biography is told from Jemison’s first person point of view, his hand is visible in the diction and the arrangement of the events related. The book was first published in 1824 and was immediately a best-seller; it continued to be regularly reprinted throughout the nineteenth-century.16

  • 17 Seaver, James E., Seaver’s Introduction. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. 1824. Women’ (...)
  • 18 For instance, Jemison describes how a white man claiming to be her father’s relative cheated her ou (...)

18Jemison was approached by white historians to ‘perpetuate the remembrance of the atrocities of the savages in former times, [and] to preserve some historical facts... intimately connected with her life, and which otherwise might be lost’,17 but she employs several techniques for demonstrating her own Seneca affiliation and for crafting an emotionally resonant depiction of Seneca family life and cultural practices. As Seaver states in his introduction, ‘The vices of Indians, she appeared disposed not to aggravate, and seemed to take pride in extolling their virtues’ (Seaver 1998: 129). Furthermore, Jemison continually invites her readers to identify with Seneca characters over and above the often ruthless and greedy white individuals in the story.18 While Jemison’s narrative provides many interesting scenes of sympathetic exchange, I want to focus on the account of her Seneca adoption because it foregrounds two of Jemison’s primary goals: first, to give an ethnographic account of Seneca customs and cultural practices and second, to describe the emotional richness of Seneca family life. The adoption process begins as soon as Jemison arrives in her new family’s village; she is stripped, washed, and redressed ‘in complete Indian style’ (Jemison 1998: 142). She is then taken to her new home and placed in the center of the wigwam which is filled with ‘all the Squaws in the town’. The scene is worth quoting at some length:

They immediately set up a most dismal howling, crying bitterly, and wringing their hands in all the agonies of grief for a deceased relative. Their tears flowed freely, and they exhibited all the signs of real mourning.... In the course of that ceremony, from mourning they became serene—joy sparkled in their countenances, and they seemed to rejoice over me as over a long lost child. I was made welcome amongst them as a sister to the two Squaws.... It is a custom of the Indians, when one of their number is slain or taken prisoner in battle, to give the nearest relative to the dead or absent, a prisoner, if they have chanced to take one, and if not, to give him the scalp of an enemy. And unless the mourners have but just received the news of their bereavement, and are under the operation of a paroxysm of grief, anger and revenge; they generally save him, and treat him kindly. But if their mental wound is fresh, their loss so great that they deem it irreparable, or if their prisoner or prisoners do not meet their approbation, no torture, let it be ever so cruel, seems sufficient to make them satisfaction. It is family, and not national, sacrifices amongst the Indians, that has given them an indelible stamp as barbarians, and identified their character with the idea which is generally formed of unfeeling ferocity, and the most abandoned cruelty.... It was my happy lot to be accepted for adoption... and I was ever considered and treated by them as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother (emphasis added, Jemison 1998: 143-44).

  • 19 For an excellent discussion of the bivocalism in Jemison’s narrative see: Burnham, Michelle. ‘ “How (...)

19Notably, Jemison does not focus on her own emotional response to this highly significant moment in her life. Instead she portrays the depth of emotion felt by her Seneca sisters and the other women in the tribe. In this passage, she emphasizes that white colonizers have misinterpreted the Indians’ intensity of grief for unfeeling ferocity. No doubt this explanation for the taking of captives surprised many white readers. This passage is more complicated than it might initially appear, however. The narrative voice and rhetorical goals seem doubled here.19 On the one hand, the adoption scene becomes a tool for removing the stereotype of Indian cruelty by exposing the significance of emotional ties within Seneca families. Jemison uses the European assumption that emotion signifies humanity to revalue the previously misunderstood practice of taking captives. Readers recognize Seneca emotions (and thus Indian humanity) through emotional expressions such as tears and the wringing of hands. On the other hand, the fact that we need such ‘signs of real mourning’ creates some doubt and a simultaneous distance from this emotion. One suspects that Seaver may be stepping in at this point as Jemison has no motive for doubting her adopted sisters’ genuine grief.

20Knowing the audience will be unfamiliar with the adoption procedure, Seaver perhaps pushes Jemison toward an ethnographic style of description by focusing on the body language and actions of the women as well as the particular style of call and response chanting used. Jemison even recreates for her white readers the language of an adoption ceremony (I have cut it from this extended passage), though she could not have known what was being said at the time. The tears and words of mourning work both as signs of humanity and as curious markers of Seneca otherness. The explanation behind the particular cultural logic of adopting captives functions similarly. Seaver/Jemison provides specific and minute details about the process in order to grant white readers emotional access to a strange and unfamiliar set of cultural practices. The attention to ethnographic detail, allows Jemison’s readers to transport themselves inside the wigwam and to witness this emotional scene of family affection.

  • 20 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human (...)
  • 21 Buffon, Comte de, Histoire Naturelle. XVIII: 146. 1749. Translated by Thomas Jefferson in Notes on (...)
  • 22 Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia. William Peden, ed. 1781 (Chapel Hill: University (...)

21The length and detail of Jemison’s interpretation of the Seneca adoption process and the feelings surrounding it are more than justified when one considers the contemporary reflections on Native Americans located in the scientific writing of the period. For instance, American moral philosopher Samuel Stanhope Smith writes, ‘Savages as they are, they have the feelings of human nature’20 and Smith is actually gentler than earlier European authors. Nearly sixty years before Smith, French zoologist Comte de Buffon, argues that the American savages ‘lack ardor for their females, and consequently have not love for their fellow men: not knowing this strongest and most tender of all affections, their other feelings are also cold and languid’.21 In direct opposition to Buffon’s theories on the deficiencies of North American Indians, Thomas Jefferson comments that the typical Indian is ‘affectionate to his children... that his friendships are strong... [and] that his sensibility is keen, even the warriors weeping most bitterly on the loss of their children’.22 Although Jefferson purportedly defends Native Americans as capable of a full range of feeling, he undercuts the above assertion in a later passage describing a party of Indians attending ancient tribal burial grounds:

A party passing, about thirty years ago, through the part of the country where this barrow is, went through the woods directly to it, without instructions or enquiry, and having staid about it some time, with expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow, they returned to the high road, which they had left about half a dozen miles to pay this visit, and pursued their journey. (emphasis added, Jefferson 1982: 100).

22This strangely conjectural and passive construction of what should be an active process of expressing grief seems rather to deny human emotion, than to defend it. ‘Expressions which were construed to be those of sorrow’ sounds remarkably like Seaver’s phrase that ‘they exhibited all the signs of real mourning’. The doubt lying just beneath both of these phrases undercuts any true assignation of human status to those who only seem to feel. Both Jefferson and Seaver (for I do not believe that Jemison is speaking here) create substantial barriers between their white readers and their ethnographic subjects. Though less obvious, the effect is akin to Rowlandson’s constant referral to her captors as ‘bloody heathen’. Why do these so-called defenders of Native Americans create emotional gaps that make it more difficult for readers to experience textual transport?

4 The Dangers of Transport: Romanticizing the Past

In a little while they will go the way that their brethren have gone before.23

  • 23 Irving, Washington, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 1820-1 (Oxford: Oxford University Pres (...)
  • 24 We might see the success of the abolition movement in Britain as the ability of parliamentary membe (...)

23One answer to this question is simply that if you are a colonizer, a descendant of a colonizer, or if your nation is involved in the business of colonization, you cannot afford to sympathize with the losers in this game. Barriers to textual transport serve to lessen or even prevent identification when the process of transculturation might expose the violence of conquest inherent in colonial encounters. As we have seen ethnographic texts from this period bear a strange burden; they are meant to illuminate cultural differences as well as to convince readers of similarities. From the colonist’s perspective, the potential danger of textual transport is that readers will choose to side with the colonial victims, to take up causes such as abolition, and to allow these others their own sovereignty.24 One method of containing this danger is to exchange the experience of sympathetic transport for a romantic fantasy of the idyllic past. In closing, I will examine Samuel Johnson’s account of his voyage to meet a different group of savages, the Highlanders of Scotland. Instead of focusing on the reader’s transports, here I will look at Johnson’s relationship to sympathetic transport and his strategy for avoiding the problems of colonization by imaginatively transporting himself to a romanticized Scottish past.

  • 25 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a (...)

24For Samuel Johnson, transporting himself to the Scottish Highlands was a trip backward in the linear narrative of civilization and progress. Johnson’s rather romantic imagination pictures a barbaric way of life in a remote land which he hopes to record for posterity. In his travels, Johnson makes several observations about the state of civilization in the Highlands, which he considers to be the closest savage nation to his own enlightened London. Yet Johnson has hope that England’s crude northern neighbors will be successfully civilized. He triumphantly declares that the Act of Union in 1707 is finally paying off in that British manners have been transported to the wilds of Scotland: ‘Till the Union made them acquainted with English manners, the culture of their lands was unskillful, and their domestick life unformed; their tables were coarse as the feasts of Eskimeaux, and their houses as filthy as the cottages of Hottentots.’25 The sheer distance of the Eskimos and Hottentots from England and Scotland is intriguing; the Highlands are as distant from ‘civilization’ as these faraway lands are remote from the metropole. The only hope for these equally ‘savage’ cultures is the transportation of British values and customs to the remote corners of the earth, that is, for the success of imperial expansion.

25Yet for all Johnson’s haughty confidence in the transportability of ‘civilization’ to the Scottish Highlands, he expresses a sentimental sorrow, not indeed for the loss of a unique Scottish national identity, but for his own romantic disappointment in traveling so far only to find the Highlands quite changed:

There was perhaps never any change of national manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, and the subsequent laws. We came thither too late to see what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a system of antiquated life. The clans retain little of their original character, their ferocity of temper is softened, their military ardour is extinguished, their dignity of independence is depressed, their contempt of government subdued, and their reverence for their chiefs abated. Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remain only their language and their poverty.... a longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose curiosity pants for the savage virtues and barbarous grandeur (Johnson 1984, 73-4).

26Unlike the popular ethnographic travel narratives of violent, savage customs in the wilds of South Africa and South America, Johnson’s Scotland journal disappointedly documents the so-called advances made by the newest addition to the Union thanks to the civilizing efforts of their British neighbors. Johnson is too late to be the ethnographer of a lost culture, and can only report on the Scots’ progress toward British acculturation. He seeks the uncivilized wilds of the Scottish Highlands to witness the unfolding of civilization, but to his surprise, Johnson finds only a mundane terrain that has already been colonized.

27Yet Johnson certainly embraces the raptures of emotional transport when describing his trip to Caledonia. Johnson’s awe is directly connected to the historical achievements he romantically reimagines in this specific location: ‘To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings’ (Johnson 1984, 140-1). The culture may have already begun to look discernibly ‘British’, but here Johnson revels in his romanticized idea of historical Scotland. Ironically, Johnson’s personal experience of transport speaks to his civilizing mission (‘advancing us in the dignity of thinking beings’) while, at the same time, eradicating feeling (‘withdraws us from the power of sensation’). How are local emotions and the power of our senses being contrasted here?

28I suggest that the attempt to sympathize with local emotion ruptures Johnson’s discourse of civilization. In the present, he witnesses the unpleasant process of colonization as it is unfolding and it makes him uncomfortable. He can only feel transported while pondering the past (Highland culture) or the future (a civilized Scotland). Hoping to write the definitive ethnography of ancient Highland culture, Johnson finds that he has come ‘too late’ and his despondent tone marks a particular crisis of transculturation. For a brief moment, Johnson sees the changes in Scotland as a loss. It would take a new generation of Scots such as Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott to reimagine Scotland’s present and reinvent a unique Scottish heritage distinct from those transported British manners that Johnson celebrates.

29The shift from dangerous, sympathetic transport to romanticized, historical transport marks an important turn in colonial writing. American authors such as James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving as well as British authors like Johnson and even Mary Wollstonecraft (in Letters Written From Norway, Denmark, and Sweden) engage in this move toward a romanticized past as a coping strategy for the blunt realities of colonial destruction. The popularity of sentimental, as opposed to sympathetic, modes of expression in this period only heightens this disavowal of the violence of conquest. As Mary Louis Pratt reminds us, sentimentalism conceals ‘conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt 1992: 6). By tracing the changes in textual transport during the late eighteenth century, we open new avenues for exploring the various contexts for transport in the British Empire.

Bibliografia

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph. ‘The Spectator No. 1’ 1710-11. Addison and Steele: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Robert J. Allen, ed. (Fort Worth, Texas: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970).

Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992.

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John. ‘Letter V’. Letters on the Study and Use of History. 1735. [online]. Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University, Archive for the History of Economic Thought. [cited 15 January 2006]. (http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/-econ/ugcm/3ll3/bolingbroke/history).

Buffon, Comte de. Histoire Naturelle. XVIII: 146, 1749.

Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Litearture, 1682-1861. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997.

— —. ‘ “However Extravagant the Pretension”: Bivocalism and US Nation-Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001): 325-347.

Home, Henry, Lord Kames. Elements of Criticism. 1762. James R Boyd, ed. New York: Barnes, 1869.

Irving, Washington. The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 1820-1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Jefferson, Thomas. 1781. Notes on the State of Virginia. William Peden, ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Johnson, Samuel and James Boswell. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. New York: Penguin, 1984.

Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routlege, 1992.

Rowlandson, Mary. ‘A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson’. 1682. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Seaver, James E. ‘A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison’. 1824. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998.

Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. A.L. Macfie and D.D. Rapael, eds. Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982.

Smith, Samuel Stanhope. An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. 1810. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Press, 1965.

Van Der Beets, Richard. The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre. New York: University Press of America, 1984.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. 1796. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

Note

1 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, ‘Letter V’. Letters on the Study and Use of History (Hamilton, Ontario: McMaster University, Archive for the History of Economic Thought, 1735. [online, cited 15 January 2006, http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/-econ/ugcm/3ll3/bolingbroke/history]).

2 Pinch, Adela, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996): 1.

3 Home, Henry, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism. 1762. James R Boyd, ed. (New York: Barnes, 1869).

4 Smith, Adam, Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759. A.L. Macfie and D.D. Rapael, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982): 9.

5 I use the term ethnography and ethnographic as a means of capturing the emerging interest in studying cultural differences that we now associate with anthropology. In the eighteenth century, there is no standardized methodology for studies of human culture, but the wide range of genres using a proto-ethnographic voice is remarkable. Significantly, the proto-ethnographic is not confined to non-fiction accounts or to scientific inquiries, but appears in novels, poetry, and other forms of literature.

6 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (New York: Routlege, 1992): 6.

7 Addison, Joseph, ‘The Spectator No. 1’ 1710-11. Addison and Steele: Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator. Robert J. Allen, ed. (Fort Worth, Texas: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970): 103.

8 For instance, Samuel Johnson’s corrections of the misinformation of older travel accounts of Scotland, especially the remote western islands. However, Swift’s success with Gulliver’s Travels demonstrates that there was still an interest in fantastic ethnographies.

9 For a general introduction to the genre of the captivity narrative in the American setting see: Van Der Beets, Richard, The Indian Captivity Narrative: An American Genre (New York: University Press of America, 1984).

10 Rowlandson, Mary, ‘A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.’ 1682. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998): 14.

11 I say that the text is not genuinely interested in ethnography because Rowlandson does not detail Algonquin customs nor does she draw a national character of the American Indian. Her narrative reflects her own emotional and mental strategies for coping with her status as a captive.

12 I am indebted to Nancy Armstrong’s and Leonard Tennenhouse’s reading of Rowlandson as the precursor to the heroine of the English novel in The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life. Citation below.

13 Armstrong, Nancy and Tennenhouse, Leonard, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 204.

14 Burnham, Michelle, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682-1861. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997): 46.

15 Seaver, James E. ‘A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison.’ 1824. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998): 142.

16 Although this book is published in 1824, the main events of the text are located between 1758 and the end of the American Revolution when America is one of Britain’s most important colonial territories.

17 Seaver, James E., Seaver’s Introduction. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. 1824. Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives. Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998): 126.

18 For instance, Jemison describes how a white man claiming to be her father’s relative cheated her out of a significant piece of her tribal land.

19 For an excellent discussion of the bivocalism in Jemison’s narrative see: Burnham, Michelle. ‘ “However Extravagant the Pretension”: Bivocalism and US Nation-Building in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23 (2001): 325-347.

20 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. 1810. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Press, 1965): 214.

21 Buffon, Comte de, Histoire Naturelle. XVIII: 146. 1749. Translated by Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia.

22 Jefferson, Thomas, Notes on the State of Virginia. William Peden, ed. 1781 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982): 60.

23 Irving, Washington, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 1820-1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996): 248.

24 We might see the success of the abolition movement in Britain as the ability of parliamentary members to emotionally transport themselves into the position of the slave (or, more frighteningly, of the master).

25 Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (New York: Penguin, 1984): 51.

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Indiana University

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