{"id":26697,"date":"2012-11-26T21:58:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T21:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26697"},"modified":"2012-11-26T21:58:06","modified_gmt":"2012-11-26T21:58:06","slug":"the-life-and-writings-of-betsey-chamberlain-native-american-mill-worker-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26697","title":{"rendered":"The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (review)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Studies in American Indian Literatures<\/a>
\nVolume 24, Number 3<\/a>, Fall 2012
\npages 138-141
\nDOI: 10.1353\/ail.2012.0035<\/a><\/p>\n

Margaret M. Bruchac<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

By reconstructing the life history of Betsey Guppy Chamberlain<\/a> (1797\u20131866), historian and librarian Judith Ranta has done some fine detective work that illuminates an otherwise little-known aspect of women\u2019s lives in nineteenth-century New England. This compilation will be useful for scholars of social history, yet there is one significant flaw. Ranta champions Chamberlain as a Native American author, and she has organized the collected works to emphasize this point.<\/p>\n

We need not retroactively adjudicate degrees of Indian blood, but we must weigh real and fictive kin affiliation when discerning social identities. Betsey\u2019s paternal grandmother, Sarah Loud Guppy, was said to have some Indian blood, but no specific tribal nation was ever recalled. Betsey\u2019s parents, William and Comfort Guppy, who lived in Brookfield<\/a> and Wolfboro, New Hampshire<\/a>, near Lake Winnepesaukee<\/a>, identified as white people. Given their locale, in Central Abenaki homeland, Ranta assumes that Betsey\u2019s grandmother was Abenaki Indian. There is no evidence, however, to indicate that Loud, her son, or her granddaughter ever self-identified or were counted among members of any Abenaki (or other Native American) community.<\/p>\n

Chamberlain\u2019s publications began only after the death of her first husband, Josiah Chamberlain, when she left an intentional community (likely Shaker) in New Hampshire. She worked in the textile mills around Newmarket and Lowell, Massachusetts<\/a>, and ran a boarding house, while publishing dozens of articles in the mill\u2019s journal, the Lowell Offering. In 1843 she married Charles Boutwell and moved to Illinois, but she returned to Lowell to work two more years in the mills and publish more stories in the New England Offering before settling in Illinois.<\/p>\n

Ranta convincingly demonstrates that Chamberlain had ready access to popular literature, so it is no surprise that her narratives reproduced prevalent social and ethnic stereotypes. Along with hundreds of her fellow female textile workers, she partook of Lowell\u2019s public libraries, lectures, and events and attended \u201cImprovement Circles\u201d featuring amateur readings at local churches. Chamberlain was sensitive to anti-Indian prejudices, and her style resembles that of Lydia Maria Child, with its feminine sensitivities and calls to justice for the downtrodden. Yet, as Siobhan Senier has observed, Chamberlain\u2019s melodramatic short fiction and vignettes of home life matched popular genres, and her \u201cdream visions\u201d resembled transcendentalist ramblings (Senier 673). None of this suggests tribal heritage.<\/p>\n

Ranta claims that Chamberlain tapped Algonkian storytelling practices, but I see no trace of Indigenous oral traditions, cultural practices, or environmental knowledge in any of her writings. Curiously, Ranta censored the collection by omitting Chamberlain\u2019s lurid stories of Indian attacks against white settlers, perhaps because these might undermine assertions of identity. Chamberlain\u2019s anecdotes of Indian encounters on the colonial frontier employ sharp gender and racial divisions with satirical overtones and Christian messages; Native voice and agency are absent or marginalized. For example, \u201cThe Indian Pledge\u201d recounts the rescue of a racist young white man by a \u201csavage\u201d Indian, in exchange for the gentle white wife\u2019s earlier kindness to the poor Indian. \u201cA Fire-Side Scene\u201d features an old Yankee veteran recalling, with some pride, the mass burning of a Native village on the western Miami frontier (125\u201326). Chamberlain\u2019s pseudonymous \u201cTabitha\u201d (presented as the author of these tales) seems to be an alternate identity, rooted in ethnic masking or cultural appropriation.<\/p>\n

Chamberlain\u2019s creative work must be seen as a commercial transaction; whether paid or not, she trafficked in productions that elevated her own social position. She earned high wages in the mills, but she also found time to compose more than forty stories for the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering in a few years\u2019 time. Exotic narratives containing Indians, scripted by a woman of mysterious ancestry, would have been an easy sell, but what was her inspiration? Was her favorite literary character, the \u201cold maid,\u201d based on some older woman who befriended the mill girls? Who…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker (review) Studies in American Indian Literatures Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 2012 pages 138-141 DOI: 10.1353\/ail.2012.0035 Margaret M. Bruchac By reconstructing the life history of Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797\u20131866), historian and librarian Judith Ranta has done some fine detective work that illuminates an otherwise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,8,3015,20,25],"tags":[12897,12898,12895,12894,12896],"class_list":["post-26697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-usa","category-women","tag-betsey-guppy-chamberlain","tag-judith-ranta","tag-margaret-bruchac","tag-margaret-m-bruchac","tag-studies-in-american-indian-literatures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}