The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright

Esther Wheelwright took on many identities, cultures, and names over the course of her life. From a young girl living in the frontier of Maine, to a war captive among the Wabanaki, she finally chose her own destiny within the limited choices open to her in 1713, when she took vows to join the Ursuline sisters in Quebec. Ann M. Little narrates these journeys in her meticulously researched biography The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Little's work begins by exploring the cultures Wheelwright inhabited. A common problem among early American historians is trying to find ways to read, write, and analyze the silences in our archives. Little's focus on the “communities of women” is an absorbing intervention into the dearth of sources on Wheelwright's experiences as a youth (p. 4). Sharing the gendered expectations and experiences of English, French, and Wabanaki women and girls, Little focuses on commonalties rather than differences. She reminds readers that Native American gender ways were not as oppositional to the English and French as we have come to emphasize through our reading of eighteenth-century European colonists' perspectives on Indians. Of particular merit is her reading of the important roles of women in the three cultures in remaking identity through bathing, dress, and display

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Biography · Destiny (ISS module · Frontier · Girl · Identity (music · Intervention (counseling · Political science · Power (physics · Reading (process · Sociology · Canadian Identity and History · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Psychology