First Friday Talk

First Friday Talk

(First Friday is a monthly meeting of the women's studies faculty at Vassar at which we discuss our research. Faculty and interested students attend.)

My work on Pocahontas integrates my two intellectual interests--women's studies and Renaissance drama. My teaching in the introductory women's studies course at Vassar with its emphasis on the intersections of gender, race, and class led me to consider constructions of race in Renaissance drama. I became particularly interested in investigating the racial discourses of Renaissance plays and began to think about the effect of those plays on non-white, female audience members.

By chance, I happened to visit the Jamestown settlement in Virginia and there I saw a young American boy of about eight who was standing in front of the bronze statue of Pocahontas that is placed at the entrance to the settlement. The boy, blond and blue-eyed said, "Dirty Indian" and spat at the statue. This made me more determined to understand the racial codes of the early modern period that formed the foundation of such attitudes.

Somewhere, tucked in the back of my mind, was the information that Pocahontas, on her visit to England, had attended a masque at King James I's court. I decided to investigate her responses to the spectacle of English culture. I had been invited to contribute a paper to the Shakespeare Association of American for a seminar on Women and Literacy and decided to write about Pocahontas. I discovered, as I began to investigate the records of her life, that although Virginia Company supporters boasted of her conversion into an English lady, she had not been taught to write and no one had thought to record her reactions to England. Her life was recorded primarily by Englishmen who colonized Virginia and one artist, Simon van de Passe, from the Netherlands, who produced her portrait. These are the major events of her life.

A common confusion arises in her story in which the man she rescued, John Smith, is conflated with the man she married, John Rolfe.

There is no extant portrait of John Rolfe, though his descendants have some buttons they claim are authentic.

John Smith, a captain, adventurer, soldier, sold into slavery in Hungarian wars against the Turks, was captured, and escaped through the help of the Lady Tragabazinda. He became one of the leaders of the Jamestown colony. On an exploring expedition, he was captured by the Powhatans and taken before their emperor. Smith survived captivity, he later claimed through the intervention of Pocahontas, and returned to the colony, where he subsequently suffered a severe injury in a gunpowder explosion and returned to England in 1609.

John Rolfe, an English colonist who sailed to Virginia in 1609, was shipwrecked off Bermuda in the accident that forms one of the sources for Shakespeare's The Tempest. After the death of his first wife, he married Pocahontas in 1614. Rolfe accompanied her to England, and after her death, married again. He died in 1622, though probably before the massacre of that year.

Pocahontas is mentioned in the early texts published in London about the Jamestown settlement. Smith, in the True Relation printed in 1608 tells of his capture in December, 1607, though he does not mention Pocahontas until the end of the text when she comes to parley for prisoners.

John Smith True Relation 1608

"Powhatan, understanding we detained certain salvages, sent his Daughter, a childe of tenne yeares, which not only for feature, countenance and proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit the only Nonpariel of his country."

"Nonpareil" a term marking her as exceptional was frequently used about her.

Ralph Hamor called her Nonparella in 1615.

Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia 1615

'It chaunced Powhatans delight and darling, his daughter Pocahuntas, (whose fame hath even bin spred in England by the title of Nonparella of Virginia) in her princely progresse, if I may so terme it, tooke some pleasure (in the absence of Captaine Argall (to be among her friends at Pataomecke (as it seemeth by the relation I had) imploied thither, as shopkeepers to a Fare, to exchange some of her fathers commodities for theirs. . . ." (4)

William Strachey, whose memoir of the colony was written in 1612, though not published until the nineteenth century, used the term "wanton" to describe her.

William Strachey, Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania, written 1612, published 1849

[T]herefore would . . . Pochohuntas, a well featured but wanton young girle Powhatans daughter, sometymes resorting to our Fort, of the age then of 11. or 12. yeares, gett the boyes forth with her into the markett place and make them wheele, falling on their handes turning their heeles upwardes, whome she would follow, and wheele so her self naked as she was all the Fort over, but being past once 12. yeres they put on a kynd of semicinctum leathren apron (as doe our artificers or handicraftsmen) before their bellies and are very shamefac'd to be seene bare: (72)

There is some slippage of the meaning of the term wanton in the early seventeenth century. While generally meaning undisciplined, when applied to girls and women, the term also signalled that they were unchaste.
Pocahontas itself is a nickname which indicates her frolicsome energy that is captured so clearly in Strachey's story of her cartwheeling through the marketplace. Her formal name was Matoaks or Matoaka.

John Smith, when captured in 1607, was received by Powhatan and, he later claimed, was saved from execution by the intervention of Pocahontas. She became an intermediary between her father and the English and parleyed for the exchange of Powhatan captives for food, food which saved the lives of the colonists who were unable to grow sufficient supplies to survive the winter.

Smith's first description of her, in which he describes her as 'nonpareil,' reports he appearance in a parley for prisoners, where notably, she refuses to look at the men who have been shamed by being taken captive.

John Smith True Relation 1608

"Powhatan, understanding we detained certain salvages, sent his Daughter, a childe of tenne yeares, which not only for feature, countenance and proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit the only Nonpariel of his country."

In 1613, Pocahontas was tricked into boarding a ship of Captain Samuel Argall and was held hostage by the colonists for over a year to force a truce with her father.

Ralph Hamor, in A True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia (1615)reports the kidnapping.

Pocahontas was tricked on board Argall's ship through the medium of two Indians, Iapazeus and his wife, who were bribed with a copper kettle. When Pocahontas realized that she was not going to be allowed to go to shore, she indicated her distress through silence: "whereat she began to be exceeding pensive, and discontented" (6)

She was held in the Jamestown settlement for over a year and was married to John Rolfe in April 1614. Ralph Hamor's True Discourse also includes a copy of the letter that John Rolfe wrote justifying his marriage to Sir Thomas Dale.

The letter is hardly a romantic description of his feelings for his bride.

"one whose education hath bin rude, her manners barbarous, her generation accursed, and so discrepant in all nutriture from my selfe," (John Rolfe, Letter to Sir Thomas Dale, printed at the end of Hamor's True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia 1615, 64)

Rolfe seems to see his beloved as one who has lured him into a labyrinth, perhaps the minotaur itself.

"To whom my hartie and best thoughts are, and have a long time bin so intangled, and inthralled in so intricate a laborinth, that I was even awearied to unwinde my selfe thereout" (Hamor, 63)

He blames Pocahontas for luring and inciting him to desire.

"her great apparance of love to me. . . besides her owne incitements stirring me up hereunto" (Rolfe in Hamor, 65-66).

In 1616, after the birth of their son Thomas, John Rolfe and his bride sailed to England where she was displayed by the Virginia Company as evidence of the success of the colony. Her conversion to Christianity and demonstration of civility through the wearing of English costume and courtesy in the English mode were presented as evidence that the New World " savages" were capable of transformation into Christians and gentlefolk and that the motivations of the colonists were selfless.

Samuel Purchas, a clergyman who supported colonization and complied records of early English explorations and settlements in Hakluyts Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), reports that he saw Pocahontas, but he fails to offer a description of her. His judgment is guided her reception by his patron, the Bishop of London, rather than by her behavior itself.

"I was present, when my Honorable and Revered Patron, the L. Bishop of London, Doctor King entertained her with festivall state and pompe, beyond what I have seene in his great hospitalitie afforded to other ladies," (19: 118)

This small passage demonstrates the crucial element of rank that governs evaluation of Pocahontas. Her reception by the ranking figure in the room, the lord bishop, determines the judgment of the lesser figures there. Her reception by King James I is recorded in a similar fashion by John Chamberlain. Most significant is her placement by the King at the masque at court.

John Chamberlaine, Letters to Dudley Carleton 1617

"The Virginian woman Poca-huntas, with her father counsaillor hath ben with the King and graciously used, and both she and her assistant well placed at the maske. She is on her return (though sore against her will) yf the wind wold come about to send them away" (Chamberlain, 2:50)

Chamberlaine also sent a letter to his friend Dudley Carleton and enclosed a picture of Pocahontas, presumably the engraving by Simon van de Passe.

"Here is a fine picture of no fayre Lady and yet with her tricking up and high stile and titles you might thincke her and her worshipfull husband to be sombody, yf you do not know that the poore companie of Virginia out of theyre povertie are faine to allow her fowre pound a weeke for her maintenance." (2: 56-7)

His comment "no fayre Lady" contains a double insult to Pocahontas that impugns both her rank and her sexual honor. "No lady" questions both her sexual honor and her rank, the position she holds because of her blood, and thus destabilizes the Virginia Company emphasis on her royal status and her sexual honor.

This comment may mark the shifting of "fayre," which earlier simply recorded the attribution of beauty in a woman, a fair lady, but which became a comment on skin tone, one aspect of the developing discourse of racial difference. Chamberlain may be calling her no beauty or he may be punning on the darkness of her complexion.

OED records this use of fair to indicate lightness of complexion.

The skin color of the native American population was of great interest to the early explorers who like Smith explained "of a colour brown when they are of any age, but they are borne white" (Map of Virginia)

The belief that the native Americans were born white suggests initial fluidity of the nascent discourses of race which slowly were anchored into law in the Virginia colony and led to the enslavement of Africans, a process that is marked in law over forty years.

Chattel slavery in Virginia preceded the arrival of Africans in the colony in 1619.

Many white indentured servants found themselves held beyond terms of indenture. In 1619, 90 English virgins were sold to the colonists for tobacco. The trade in humans, black and white, was established at the time of the arrival of the Africans.

Paula Giddings in When and Where I Enter traces the legal distinctions made between black and white women during the seventeenth century.

In the triangulation of black, white and red, Indians remained somewhat apart, although after the massacre of 1622, they were described as bestial and vipers, descriptions utilized to justify the military onslaught by the colonists against them.

After the death of Pocahontas, she becomes a figure of benevolence, a retrospective image of Edenic hope and generosity

The intersections of race and class are marked in the portrait by Simon Van de Passe, a Dutch engraver from a prominent family of artists.

He had moved to London some years earlier where he had produced engravings of a number of the people involved in the Virginia colony.

He, like Pocahontas, was 21.

The subscript to the engraving emphasizes the crucial elements of the story: that the daughter of the great Indian emperor, Powhatan, has been converted and married to an English gentleman.

Despite the triumphant claims of the words, the portrait itself reveals some tensions about those claims. While Pocahontas is described as the daughter of a king, a claim reaffirmed by the ostrich feathers in her fan, she is not presented in court dress. Unlike other contemporary portraits of court ladies by Van de Passe, her body is decorously covered in a tightly buttoned robe.

Her hat is very fashionable the hat, though not exactly like the hat with the curly brim worn in the Paul van Somer portrait of Queen Anne in 1617. The hat, the French capotain, was worn by both men and women, although after Anne's death, the wearing of men's hats by women was prohibited in a promulgation read in Church.

Many modern viewers, on first seeing the Van de Passe engraving, believe that they are looking at the portrait of a man. I suggest that racial difference is being coded as gender difference, although some claim that she is simply being represented as an English gentlewoman.

It is very difficult to find evidence of Pocahontas's reactions to the spectacle of English culture and reaction to English colonization of her land. Seven years after her death, John Smith published his Generall Historie of Virginia in which he tells of his intial rescue by Pocahontas and of his last meeting with her.

This scene, like so much in the Pocahontas narrative, provides an interpretive challenge. Smith claims that he sent this letter to Queen Anne in 1616 to introduce his protege to the court. There is no evidence that the letter was sent, though no one challenged the claim when he published it in 1624. Smith was seeking patronage for further colonization in America and was trying to ingratiate himself with the powerful at court. The scene also can suggest his own resentment at the Englishmen who failed to provide him with the rewards he felt he deserved.

While the words may not be hers, the moment when she turns away from Smith and refuses to speak, echoes previous moments of silence in the accounts of her. Certainly her silent reproach can be recognized. The silent woman, who had no skill in literacy and portraiture, was sufficiently powerful to engage the imagination of the Englishmen who met her. Her story has been on continuing interest throughout American history, most recently in the Disney Studios animated cartoon, Pocahontas. The cartoon, with its emphasis on ecological balance and multicultural respect, reproduces a current American cliche about the wisdom of the native Americans, one less pernicious and more accurate than earlier representations of their "savagery." Yet the shape of the story itself, which represents a romance between John Smith and Pocahontas and eliminates entirely her marriage with John Rolfe, reveals the continuing resistance of Pocahontas to entire containment within the narrative frames of those who would tell her story. The story of a young girl who courageously rescues one colonist then marries another is not readily confined within the structures of conventional romance. As she does repeatedly in the representations that attempt to define her, Pocahontas cartwheels free.

-Bibliography

Karen Robertson, Vassar College, produced with the assistance of Matthew Hanlon
and Josh Lechner.

A longer version of this work can be read in the spring issue (1996) of Signs.

Signs: A Journal of Women, Culture and Society 21 (1996):551-583.