The Jailing of Cecelia Capture and the Rhetoric of Individualism

I see my personal story as bearing witness to colonization and my writing as a testimony aimed at undoing those processes that attempt to keep us in the grips of the colonizer's mental bondage. Gloria Bird Gloria Bird's description of her writing as an act of "bearing witness" to those forces and processes that keep American Indians "in the grips of the colonizer's mental bondage" resonates with a reading of Janet Campbell Hale's critically neglected novel The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985). I say neglected in reference to the striking contrast between the amount of scholarship devoted to certain American Indian novels and the attention given to Hale's story of one Indian's struggle for liberation from mental bondage. While a casual search of the MLA bibliographic data base turns up references to numerous articles and dissertations devoted to such contemporary American Indian writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Linda Hogan, a similar search under Hale's name calls up very few citations. This constitutes a scholarly silence that is nearly deafening. What makes this silence puzzling is that Hale's novel was released to a number of positive reviews and even received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. (1) Certainly many possible explanations exist for this lack of scholarly engagement, not the least of which is the argument that the other writers produce more aesthetically pleasing texts. Yet aesthetic evaluation is a tricky process. For instance, it is easy to imagine an admirer of Sherman Alexie praising his clear style while in the same breath denouncing the stories of Gerald Vizenor as inaccessibly allusive. In response, a fan of Vizenor's fiction might deride Alexie's work as overly simplistic. This imaginary debate, in a microcosm, highlights the historical and cultural shiftiness of aesthetic criteria. However, my aim is not to argue for the aesthetic merits of what Toni Morrison calls "a beautifully written book." That seems more the function of the book review. I also do not wish to engage in an evaluative comparison of Hale's novel with the works of other more celebrated American Indian authors. Rather, I want to suggest possible reasons for the scholarly neglect of the novel and then argue for how it contributes an important, if neglected, element to the mosaic of contemporary American Indian literary expression. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture differs in significant ways from those novels that have elicited the lion's share of critical response. One of the most apparent differences is Hale's novel's lack of what I would call explicit signifiers of "Indianness." By "Indianness," I refer to the often overt elements of traditional indigenous cultures that inform and enrich the works of such writers as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. This absence in Hale's novel presents a critical dilemma for scholars accustomed to identifying and interpreting these elements. In other words, when we approach texts by Indian authors, many of us tend to look for traces of specific oral traditions, symbols from the Native culture, and articulations of an indigenous spirituality and worldview. Furthermore, we often find a style that defies conventions of literary realism and develops narrative themes that subvert or critique the dominant cultural values while celebrating aspects of indigenous culture. Or, in a recent strand of critical inquiry seen most prominently in the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Craig Womack, we might explore the relationship between cultural and political sovereignty and the works of literature. These elements and arguments do not assume a prominent position in Hale's novel. On the other hand, these elements do figure prominently in works of the two Indian writers who draw the most attention from literary scholars: Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine. …