It is easy to forget how important the sea was to Americans in the nineteenth century and earlier. The narrative of westward expansion and settlement has long tended to turn our historical gaze inward. The development of the Atlantic World paradigm that has been so influential in directing attention back outward, toward international connections across Atlantic waters, has also tended to neglect the space of the sea itself as a place of labor, migration, and imagination. Yet maritime history reminds us that the world's waters were a crucial part of the American (and global) economy and experience well into the twentieth century. And stories of the sea, in the form of both fictional narratives and first person accounts, captured Americans' attention when they appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books. Narratives of the sea came in both factual and fictional forms (though the boundary between the two could be fuzzy), each extremely popular in nineteenth-century America. Thus, the sea also held a powerful place in the American imagination.
Robin Miskolcze's book, as the title suggests, focuses on the role that nineteenth-century sea narratives played in the construction of American identity. In particular, she is interested issues of gender and national identity, and the ways that sea narratives portray and construct gender roles. What does all of this add to the study of religion? According to Miskolcze, quite a bit. “Anglo-American women who appear in antebellum sea narratives,” she argues, “are often portrayed as models of American ideals derived from women's seemingly innate Christian self-sacrifice” (x). The title of her study comes from the familiar maritime directive to save “women and children first” in times of disaster, such as shipwreck. This directive, suggests Miskolcze, “in turn defined a new masculine individualism, one that was morally minded, rooted in Christian principles, and dedicated to preserving virtue” (xi). Thus “the exceptional nature of America, a nation chosen by God, depended upon this ideal” (xi). And this ideal was constructed and promoted, to no small degree, by the production and consumption of sea narratives.
The book is organized into five chapters arranged thematically that roam across a wide variety of texts relating to life on the sea. The first treats shipwreck narratives in early American literature, focusing on themes of providence. The second discusses narratives by and about female shipwreck victims, some fictional and some “true.” The third chapter addresses the Middle Passage in writing by and about black women. Chapter 4 looks at English women captives in American shipwreck narratives. The final chapter explores cross-dressed female seafarers in early American popular literature.
Each of the topics covered in her varied chapters raise interesting questions, and certainly place an abundance of interesting material in front of the reader—material that would be intriguing to take up in religious studies and American religious history. For instance, in her first chapter Miskolcze argues that shipwreck narratives shift from a focus on divine providence in the eighteenth century to a focus on human agency and the responsibilities of men to save “women and children first” in the nineteenth century. She explains this shift in relation to changing understandings of American national identity over this period of time, from American exceptionalism dependent on God's grace to a more free-willed Enlightenment perspective. Women in sea narratives mediated this transformation, embodying “both Providence and nation, both godly and human virtue” (24). “Representations of women at sea,” she writes, “served as a repository for Anglo-American anxieties about exceptionalism and the desire to fulfill both its promise of individual liberty and its special covenant with God” (xiv). Thus, for Miskolcze, narratives about women in danger at sea are in fact allegories about the nation and its “crisis of identity” (xiv). The material that she examines, especially the patterns and transformations over time that she identifies, are highly suggestive.
However, there are also limitations to Miskolcze's analysis. In her allegorical reading, women in the narratives are always images of the nation. I found myself wondering how her analysis would change if she did not begin with that assumption in each case. She also suggests that sea narratives about women were designed to teach men how to be men. This raises a host of questions about both audience reception and authorial intention that Miskolcze does not examine. She further explains that African American women used sea narratives differently—appealing to “women and children first” to assert their womanhood and humanity. This seems more purposeful, but again the author ultimately reads these narratives as messages for white men. Her final chapter on cross-dressing female sailors is perhaps the most disappointing. If her thesis about national identity and gender construction in sea narratives is accurate, then one would expect her to do much more with the issue of cross-dressing, playing on the ambivalence of gender, national identity, and representation.
What is especially lacking in this book is any development of the mechanisms by which these narratives constructed national identity. The author relies on some literary theory, but it is tenuous. Similarly, there could be more engagement with work on gender. Miskolcze's readings assume a consensus view of women, men, virtue, and “Christian ideals” that is troubling. In the end, the analysis is simply too neat. This is especially striking given the setting of the narratives themselves: the unpredictable space of the sea, full of danger, labor, and conflict. The sea was also a place romanticized in literature, removed from the difficulties of its immediacy, as a place set apart, where dramas could be imagined and played out under different rules. And yet Miskolcze's analyses of sea narratives as constitutive of national identity and gender construction shy away from the ambivalences of the space of the sea itself and how this might aid, or hinder, the formation and uses of such narratives for these purposes. I was left wondering, why sea narratives? Why the sea?
Nevertheless, Miskolcze brings to light an intriguing resource for exploring an aspect of American religious history that has been overlooked. The sea was an important touchstone, materially and imaginatively, in American life in the nineteenth century, that scholars of American religion would do well to explore. Miskolcze's book is a good place to start.
