In Suffering Childhood in Early America, Anna Mae Duane advances two critical projects simultaneously: thematically, she examines the elusive but powerful role played by children in early American culture; and methodologically, she presses the boundaries between cultural studies and history by stressing the role of metaphor in nonfictional as well as fictional texts. While some literary scholars focus on representation alone, enclosing the “real world” in scare quotes that implicitly question its accessibility and relevance, Duane keeps actual children – Pocahontas, Ann Putnam, William Apess – in play. Metaphorical children, she insists, matter in part because they affected real (no scare quotes) children. This is a move that deserves applause, although – or perhaps even because – it raises thorny issues about what, exactly, constitutes the relationship between documentary evidence and literary interpretation.

Duane's opening chapters concern what she calls the “colonial child,” a liminal figure who registered – and to some degree naturalized – the violence generated by clashes between Native Americans and European settlers. Children, she argues, served as noncombatant mediators, allowing Native cultures to influence Europeans and vice versa. Chapter 1, “Children in the Hands of Satan,” thus begins with an extended reading of Pocahontas, who functioned first as a bargaining chip but ultimately as an example of how Indian children might cross into English culture. Duane suggests that Pocahontas “leads the way” through the rest of the book, representing the symbolic power of childhood (26). Here I have a question, though: by the time Pocahontas died, she was a mother – and many later representations of her (see, for instance, Paula Gunn Allen) stress her maternal status above all. I would like to know more about why and how a post-pubescent girl might function as a child specifically. Is it because all women, or all Native Americans, were to some degree infantilized?

Cross-cultural figures like Pocahontas also sparked fears that influence might be a two-way street, and that children born on American soil might somehow “go native.” A mosaic of examples – from John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Oliver Haywood, Roger Williams, and others – shows that Puritans were strict disciplinarians, that they controlled (or tried to control) their emotional investment in their children, and that they were concerned with protecting them from outside physical and cultural contamination. By contrast, New England's Indian tribes were lax and affectionate with their children. Does this mean that when colonists worried about child-rearing and discipline they were worrying, specifically, about the cultural influence of Native Americans? And did Native American parenting practices in fact influence non-Native parents? Duane concludes with a cautious yes – and she is right to be cautious because proving this would require more time and space than her deliberately broadly synthetic approach allows. Still, the idea is provocative and exciting: in early America, childhood was distinctive because it represented an actual or perceived blend of white and Native cultures.

Captivity narratives – the subject of chapter 2 – have long been understood as a way of justifying colonial violence by framing the Indians as stoic, unemotional baby-killers. At the same time, in other eighteenth-century texts, Indians were cast as dependent child victims: noncitizens who could only be accommodated in the role of “grateful ward” (61). Setting these conflicting representations side by side, Duane notes the deadliness of both: either Indians lacked empathy (and must thus be exterminated), or they excited excessive empathy (and must thus be patronized). This impossible binary allows her to produce a fascinating reading of William Apess's Son of the Forest (1829). She suggests that Apess, as a Native American, courts white sympathy by drawing on the literary conventions of suffering childhood. However, rather than simply recapitulating the stock victim role, he reworks it: rather than trying to “wring tears from white adults, he reveals the devastation wrought by the infantilizing language of such adults” (83). In other words, Apess implies that the problem is not, or not just, race, but childhood – a condition that traps its victims in naturalized positions of powerlessness.

Duane's third chapter, “Pregnancy and the New Birth: Reproduction, Performance, and Infantilizing Republican Mothers,” makes a broad leap into the realm of the seduction novel, rethinking the role of pregnancy in Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791) and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797). Lines are implicitly drawn, from the violence of captivity narratives to the pains of childbirth; in both cases, this chapter argues, bodies are policed and infantilized. Duane's emphasis on the role of the fetus is a fascinating contribution to the critical literature. Rather than function as the unfortunate outcomes of seduction plots, these children-to-be take center stage, rendering the republican woman (like the stoic Indian) unfit for full citizenship. The argument takes so many turns – from Jonathan Edwards to puerperal fever – that it feels convoluted at times, but its conclusion is elegant and compelling: the growing fetus undermines both the Enlightenment “fantasy of self-ownership” and the religious ideology of self-surrender (124). In other words – interestingly – pregnancy raises more questions than it solves in these texts, even as it appears to be a transparent biological condition. Women's agency is bound up with children's agency – and both are undermined in cultures that grant only adult white males the ability to reach an “age of consent.” Duane gets so much said in this chapter that to press further questions seems unreasonable, but her discussion did make me wonder about the status of embryos in late eighteenth-century America: were they seen as babies? And were babies seen, precisely, as children?

The infantilizing narratives imposed upon Native Americans and white women also extended – with important differences – to enslaved men and women. Scholars have long noted that both abolitionists and southern apologists cast enslaved people in the role of vulnerable children, but Duane makes this common observation new again by historicizing and interrogating its contradictions. After all, during the American Revolution, rebels frequently cast themselves as Britain's children while arguing that the colonies had come of age and no longer needed the Crown's protection. To be a child was to represent the possibility of liberty, and to parent a child was, as John Locke framed it, to train him for ultimate freedom. Duane concludes that to articulate oppressive power structures in terms of parent–child relationships could be liberating because such relationships were a kind of social contract, promising eventual liberty and rights.

To track the trope of the revolutionary child, Duane turns to the example of the Haitian revolution, in which images of children were heavily deployed for various purposes. At times, Haitians were depicted as baby-killers, like the Indians in some captivity narratives. At other times, however, they were aligned (or tried to align themselves) with French and English rebels. As Toussaint Louverture put it, addressing the British, was it possible “that at the very moment when France triumphs over all the royalists and recognizes us for her children … that you should let yourself be deceived by our ancient tyrants?” (139). Haitian revolutionaries, Duane argues, wanted to be seen, at least sometimes, as children – not because they craved eternal dependence but precisely because childhood had come to represent inalienable rights, increasing respect, and eventual enfranchisement.

Even as the child came to signify revolutionary power, though, a competing model began to circulate, casting childhood as a permanently dependent and suffering state. While acknowledging a paucity of material, Duane attempts – here and elsewhere – to gloss the effects that these assumptions had on real people. For instance, she reads a diary by a slave ship's surgeon, William Chancellor, to trace his understanding of the kidnapped children he tended during a journey across the Atlantic around 1750. He moves from viewing the Africans as savages to sympathizing with them as suffering children, but far from turning abolitionist as a result, “his own experiential lexicon of caretaker and child allows him to extend the benevolent parent metaphor to himself, and … to white slaveholders across the globe” (156). A suffering childlike African requires, he implies, not liberty but sympathetic caretaking.

Metaphors are always contextual, embedded in larger discourses, and anyone who uses “the child” rhetorically – in the eighteenth century and beyond – risks losing control of its many connotations. Thus the concluding chapter argues that early American school records “can provide a provocative portrait of how the discourses of infantilization, education, and citizenship shaped one another” (166). Even when schools tried to teach specific ideas, they could not entirely control their students' minds. For instance, an 1819 speech given (but not written) by a child, James Fields, at the African Free School draws its child speaker into debates about African colonization. What did Fields learn from his speaking experience? It may be hard to tell exactly, but he does emerge later, as an adult, in firm opposition to colonization. On a methodological level, Duane argues that school record materials might enable critics to move beyond questions of individual autonomy and authenticity. The project of schooling is always collaborative, and even “rote” copying exercises carry the mark of a student as well as of a teacher. I do wonder, though, whether a bit of contemporary theory might have been useful for balance; there seems to be more theory in the first part of the book than there is in the end. If Homi Bhabha can shed light on colonial subjects, then perhaps, say, Paolo Freire could help readers to think through school subjects and pedagogical issues.

In general, though, Duane's restrained use of theory is a strength because she cleaves so closely and respectfully to her historical materials. Nonfictional accounts, especially, resist systematic interpretation – and here they are given the close readings that they demand. When binaries are invoked, they are always complicated, and specific theories are never allowed to overpower primary sources. This is a book that leaps between episodic bursts of insight rather than plotting out a grand overarching narrative. Such leaps are both necessary and compelling, because metaphors are not linear like history. Instead, they morph and reappear, always connoting something slightly different depending on the context. To draw too many large conclusions would be to obscure the protean qualities of “the child” as a concept. Children inhabit bodies, but they are also discursive actors whose bodies represent changing cultural forces and anxieties. I found my imagination captured by the individual characters who appear in this book: their voices are muted and mediated, but they are still given a measure of agency and respect as they emerge, not just as symbols but as – yes – real suffering children.

Anna Mae Duane's book on the image of the suffering child in early American culture and literature is a welcome addition to a growing body of critical work dealing with the image of the child representing the neuroses of the American populace or embodying the ideals and fears of a developing American nation. Like Caroline Levander and Karen Sánchez-Eppler (whom she does in fact cite), Duane looks to embodiments of white childhood through contrasting definitions of black or Native American metaphors of childhood to explain the formulations of middle-class American identity. Whereas Sánchez-Eppler looks to depictions of children as reinforcing middle-class culture, Levander finds that racialized definitions of childhood in the nineteenth-century US played a key role in the right to citizenship. Duane's book is unique, though, in its focus on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century formulations of American childhood in response to American concepts of liberty and independence. In the same manner that Thomas Paine articulated the uneasy relationship between the suffering child, colonial America, and the mother country, England, writers in the colonies and in the early Republic would associate the image of the child with helplessness or abandonment, and fears about American newness would emerge in bizarre concepts of the nonwhite child. The fear of alienation and homelessness was projected onto the Native American or African American child. In certain ways, all these books about the role of race in defining white childhood are indebted to Toni Morrison, with her idea that the early Americans projected their fears of the unknown or of failure onto the black population.

Duane first traces the image of the helpless child or the independent child back to European ideas of childhood conceptualized by Rousseau and Locke. Thus, for example, children could represent subservience and vulnerability or empowerment and independence, though the latter were fraught with growing pains which required the child to learn how to control his desires. Duane compares the victimized child's attempt to wrest agency from the parent to colonial America's struggle with the parent England. This metaphor is used consistently throughout the chapters which follow. Witnessing the plight of suffering children allows the colonial adult to wrestle with his own struggle for liberty.

In chapter 1, “Children in the Hands of Satan: Captivity, Witch Trials, and the Dangerous Child,” Duane discusses differences between child-rearing among the Native Americans and among the colonial Americans. The story of the captive child Pocahontas, who was after all a princess, is seen as positive by the settlers as she is compassionate and humane. However, in captivity narratives as well as in John Winthrop's account, Native American children were seen as potentially wild and demonic, with possible supernatural powers, compared to the more docile Puritan children whose spirituality was limited to the Bible. This rift would culminate in the account of suffering girls at the 1692 Salem witch trials, as fueled by Cotton Mather's account of suffering children at the hands of Indians. The proximity to the frontier and the agency of “magical” Native Americans accounts for the neurotic displays of anguish among the possessed children.

In chapter 2, “This Infant State: The Child Nation and Infanticide in the Early Republic,” Duane expands the Lockean and Rousseauian metaphors of self-control (of one's body and one's mind) as prerequisite to adulthood, especially as applied to Native Americans. Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, historians, government officials, and casual observers imagined the Native American to be inherently childlike, on the one hand, and dangerously stoical (and thus warriorlike), on the other hand. Captivity narratives would focus on the helpless white child in the hands of a cruel and stoical Indian captor. William Apess (1798–1839), a Native American who was also a Methodist minister and an activist for the Pequot nation, had to contend with these stereotypes of the wild independent Indian in his autobiography, Son of the Forest. In order to make himself seem less frightening to the average white reader, who imbibed stereotypes of an insensitive and stoical Indian culture, he had to position himself subversively as a child in need of protection (from the hands of an abusing grandmother, who herself had been corrupted by white culture). That might have been seen as counterproductive in rendering a group of people childlike, but it led to a more positive and sympathetic response by the white American reader. Using postcolonial theory, Duane shows that Apess's posturing was successful as he allied himself to the image of a helpless child, who would have been universally recognized as the child to pity in captivity narratives, slave narratives, and sentimental plots of white childhood. Apess also positioned himself in the tradition of child martyrs to make the Christian resonances of his story clearer. Apess's narrative is ultimately a call to justice through its indictment of the adults who would keep the child from achieving his God-given right of dignity and self-empowerment.

In chapter 3, “Pregnancy and the New Birth: Reproduction, Performance, and Infanticide,” arguably the strongest chapter, the growing pains of colonial America are clearly illustrated in mother–child relationships in two late eighteenth-century American seduction novels, Susannah Rowson's Charlotte Temple and Hannah Foster's The Coquette. Both texts impress upon the colonial reader the need to be reasonable in the absence of the mother. Unlike enslaved women, these two protagonists have agency over their bodies until they become pregnant. In becoming unreasonable and falling victim to seduction, Charlotte Temple becomes pregnant, is jilted, and dies giving birth to her daughter, Lucy, who ultimately, because of her unfortunate parentage, cannot marry the suitor she falls in love with (her half-brother). Thus Charlotte's child does not fare well. Hannah Foster's protagonist Eliza is wily enough to cover up her deceptive and amorous affair, but the book ends catastrophically, with Eliza's abandonment by her lover and the death of Eliza (and her baby) in childbirth. The wayward motherhood of Charlotte and Eliza is fraught with the fears of stalwart Republican motherhood, which renders the pregnant but homeless mother a vulnerable creature. In an attempt to juxtapose the colonial mother with the nonwhite mother, Duane does make a bizarre comparison: “The fetuses here – like those torn from the wombs of suffering women in Indian captivity narratives – function as hyperbolic renderings of a woman's hidden interior” (99). Duane does conclude with a more rational statement that white Republican mothers were transformed “from consenting adult agents to transparent childlike vessels” through the intrusion of the fetus (99).

In chapter 4, “The Revolutionary Child: Slavery, Affective Contracts, and the Future Perfect,” Duane works with the rhetoric behind changing images of the African American child. With John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, children were regarded as “revolutionary” and thus in need of guidance from a patriarchal power that would subdue their more dangerous impulses and ultimately lead them to American concepts of independence. This paternalistic relationship could be construed as especially true of the slave–guardian/master relationship. However, after the white imagination was captivated by images of suffering black children and helpless adults in slave narratives and accounts, that earlier image of emancipation gave way to an unfortunate equation of enslaved people with children, therefore perpetually dependent on paternal protection. Such a racist misconstruction was to be used by white abolitionists and apologists alike to defend their agendas. Duane argues that African American identity needs to be removed from “the infantilizing tropes of dependence and perpetual vulnerability” and that the “equivalence of childhood, and particularly black childhood, with a state of perpetual victimhood needs to be rethought” (159). Using two early slave narratives by Olaudah Equiano and Venture Smith, Duane shows, as she does with Apess (in the Native American section), how these writers reconfigure themselves to avoid the patronizing and incapacitating image of the black child as helpless. Equiano and Smith's autobiographical images permit a redefinition that comes from within, so that even though their history might not be entirely escapable, they can, through their resilience, reinvent themselves through creative possibilities. Observing the actions and politics of those in power, Equiano and Smith learn the means by which to empower themselves.

In trying to focus exclusively on the “rhetorical comparisons between suffering children and marginalized people” (4) to illustrate the numerous cultural conflicts (projected by adults onto children), Duane, at times, moves away from the suffering of the actual and not metaphorical Anglo-American child within the confines of its own home. Although psychological analyses are not in vogue at the moment, I would have liked to see more emphasis placed on the treatment of the child in colonial times or in the early Republic: for example, the idea of punishment (and the chastening rod) from a psychological point of view could be explored. It is never a good idea to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I am not sure if colonial parents were thinking about the treatment of Native American children when, for example, they inflicted violence upon their own children to mold them into malleable adults who would follow the rules deemed necessary for survival in a new land, which demanded communal behavior. Despite Locke's and Rousseau's sometimes conflation of children with Native American, I find it hard to believe that the English who settled in America and (unfortunately) felt themselves entitled and superior to the indigenous races would even draw comparisons between their children and those of the “others” (whether African or Native American). Their ways of bringing up baby would more closely resemble those child-rearing practices they learned from the mother country, so possibly a look at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British advice manuals for child-rearing would be warranted.

Thus, at times, references to colonial American historians like John Demos, psychoanalytic historians of childhood like Philip Greven or Alice Miller, or psychoanalytic literary critics like David Leverenz might have proved useful in Duane's book. Demos, for example, shows how obedience was inculcated in children and hostile behavior was punished so that the family unit could function harmoniously. Duane would explain it otherwise: “When New England colonists came up against what they felt to be the scandalously indulgent childrearing of Indians, they were forced to reassess their own attitudes toward children, even if only to recommit themselves to rigorous Puritan pedagogy” (14). The substance of such statements is purely conjectural.

But beyond such speculative statements, Duane's book does offer excellent readings of individual accounts of fear and dispossession wrought by a colonial America bereft of a mother country. Duane clearly illustrates with literary texts and historical documents how women and children of all races were subjugated and oppressed. There are, however, moments when I wish Duane would not try to put all suffering children under the same umbrella, as, for example, when she frames her argument: “Perhaps most important for this study are the conflicts that placed Indian, white, and African children in positions of extreme vulnerability and suffering” (14). By juxtaposing the concerns of the colonizer and the colonized, by making colonial Americans the colonized and not the colonizer, a sometimes unequal equation emerges. This kind of conflation takes away from the truest suffering children, the African American and Native American children, whose culture was being assaulted by the white colonizers. The place of the white Anglo in early American culture was clearly privileged. To put the image of the suffering white child next to that of the suffering black or Indian child, even metaphorically, does an injustice to the truly suffering child.

Duane's short epilogue, “The Materials and Metaphors of Schoolwork,” goes beyond the purview of the book but looks ahead to much-needed research, and I hope she does further explore the questions she raises – on the actual education of Native Americans and African Americans, as exposed in school records. As Duane so eloquently articulates the challenge,

Duane does illustrate the possibility of such research by giving an account of the New-York African Free School, which was established in the late eighteenth century to give a voice to black children. However, the quandary that Duane expressed throughout her book is also recorded in the writings and speeches of these black students, who, in discouragement, felt as if self-sufficiency was only a goal for the future. I welcome the project that Duane has started in her epilogue, as she addresses actual pedagogical practices which would liberate or continue to confine Native or African Americans.