There is a certain dissonance between the last chapter (16) and the first 15 chapters that continues to confuse me thoroughly. How can a woman who says that "Indians must be Indians", who refuses to leave the community (more or less) who kidnapped her, and had children in that same community talk about her "reduction from a civilized to a savage state?"
Has Seaver simply hijacked the book to undermine Jemison's ultimate point that the Indians and their culture are truly civil and organized? Is their still a certain ambiguity with which Mary Jemison views her life? The first question is practically unanswerable although on a completely visceral level I feel like that this has a real chance of being right. The second question is one that deserves more analysis. One possible explanation for this "gap" may be her later acclimation into white society and then coming under what can pretty much be called an epiphany. Now being "able" to frame the narrative in the way most colonial settlers would, Jemison may now just view her life differently in the future than she did at the "present".
However, with this chapter, the idea of the author comes into question. Is this book when there is such cognitive dissonance between the last and first 15 chapters truly a narrative of the life of Mary Jemison? Should this book be rethought of as a collaborative effort between Seaver and Jemison to find a harmonious narrative that reconciles both the need to find common ground between these two uniquely different cultures as well as to create a thrilling, best-selling book? Perhaps this is the way that this book is best framed because the more I try to reconcile the incredibly contradictory thoughts of Jemison the more I confuse myself. Instead of narrowly focusing on Jemison and Seaver maybe I should focus on the social and cultural contexts that ultimately shaped this book and view Jemison and Seaver as cogs in the wheel of their cultures.
Who knows though? I'm still confused as evidenced by the rambling nature of this post.
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3 comments:
Vu, Your thinking about NMJ as a collaborative effort is particularly provocative--focusing on Seaver and Mary as social/cultural figures (that is, people deeply situated in their historical, cultural moment) will most likely help you parse this mind-boggling chapter. --enf
When I read the question Vu poses in the first paragraph a few times, I started thinking of possible ways that Mary's actions could coincide with her statement about her "reduction from a civilized to a savage state". "Indians must be Indians" made me think of a previous post (catie's maybe?) that talked about the different ideas of morality for whites and Indians. Mary may have used this type of justification for the Indian's use of torture.
Before Mary has children, she has every desire to return to the white people. Her depression returns after having contact with white people and not being allowed to go with them. It is only when she has a family that she has become integrated into the Indian society and cannot leave. One of the times she is offered liberty she would have gone if Thomas would have been able to go with her.
I feel like throughout Mary's life she had to do what she did what she had to do to get by and try to live a somewhat meaningful life. I wonder if there was a time lapse in when the first fifteen and the last chapter(s) were written. The last chapter could then be seen as a retrospective view of her life overall. Could she be saying that although she was happy, this single event, this "reduction", didn't allow her to feel true happiness, or at least not as much as she would have if this event hadn't occurred?
I believe that the fact of the matter is that Seaver wants to shape Jemison's accounts into such that can be read by the "white" population and be accepted. One can say that Seaver is trying to save face so that both he and Mary can be presentable figures in society. For example, on several accounts Seaver places parenthesis around explanations pertaining to certain statements that Mary makes. Seaver at least wants people to know that he is different from Mary.
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