The Perils of Native American Urbanization and Alcoholism in Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 8 (1998) : 51-63. The Perils of Native American Urbanization and Alcoholism in Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture Frederick Hale In the imaginative literature that has furnished much of the impetus for and intellectual backbone of the so-called “Native American Renaissance” since the late 1960s, the tribulations of urbanization have been a relatively frequent but nevertheless underdeveloped theme. This has been so although one of the side effects of this urbanization, immoderate consumption of alcohol, has virtually been a leitmotiv in this literature. The use of the city as a socio-geographical locus in Native American fiction can be traced back at least as far as N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1969, House Made of Dawn. This novel described the difficulties of a mixed-blood Pueblo ex-convict who accepted relocation to Los Angeles during the early 1950s. It apparently influenced numerous subsequent works by, inter alia, Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, 1977) and Janet Campbell Hale (The Owl’s Song, 1974). That these and many other Native American authors have written much about urban life during the past quarter-century is hardly surprising when one considers that since 1970 a majority of Native Americans in the United States have resided in cities. This profound demographic shift with its attendant social problems has prompted a spate of sociological and anthropological studies exploring the adaptation of Native Americans to urban life since the Second World War. Literary artists have participated in parallel examinations from their own perspectives, which in many cases have been internal. The ranks of the urbanized Native Americans have included many of the littérateurs who have followed in Momaday’s tracks, such as authors Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Hyemeyohsts Storm. One can safely predict that, while noteworthy imaginative literature by such authors about historical themes as well as reservation and small town life will continue, the ongoing flight to the cities and vicissitudes of adjustment to urban society will gradually become even more powerful determinants in shaping the venues and the thematic substance of Native American fiction in the future. Furthermore, since urban areas are centers of social tensions and disruption, one can equally cautiously prognosticate that alcohol and other addictive substances will more than ever constitute a central literary topic. However, while for decades sociologists and other social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to alcoholism and various other forms of chemical dependency among both rural and urban Native Americans, literary critics and scholars have not paid equal attention to literary treatments of the same phenomena. This inconsistency in the scholarly literature can be attributed in part to the fact that most of the pertinent authors have been largely neglected. Since the 1970s international literary scholarship has illuminated the works of only a few of the novelists and other artists who have written about urban Native American life and left those of others in the shadows. Inexplicably in the latter camp are the novels of Janet Campbell Hale, especially The Owl’s Song and The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985). This article is intended as a step in the direction of filling that lacuna by examining Hale’s consideration of the difficulties of urban migrant adaptation and especially alcoholism in the latter work. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture is arguably a milestone in the evolution of Native American fiction, not merely because it focuses on the urban scene but also because in it Hale presents a detailed analysis of a woman’s tribulative adaptation to university life and cross-cultural social relationships. The latter include interracial marriage, in the San Francisco area during the era of the Viet Nam War, drawn heavily from the well of her own experiences. This groundbreaking novel thus lies at the juncture of fiction and autobiography. In the present analysis, I focus primarily on Hale’s treatment of difficulties that a largely detribalized female Native American alcoholic faces in a kaleidoscopic environment of rapid social and political change. Spanning nearly 200 pages and divided into seventeen brief chapters, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture is written, strictly speaking, from a conventional omniscient narrator viewpoint. However, it is in effect a first-person account. This allows Hale to probe deeply into the mind of her troubled protagonist, a displaced Coeur d’Alène law student at the University of California in Berkeley. She is arrested on her thirtieth birthday, in 1980, for driving a motor vehicle while intoxicated. During her extended weekend of incarceration, as she awaits arraignment, she reflects on the course of her life that has placed her into that inauspicious state which contrasts sharply with her status as an aspiring officer of the court. Hale, herself a Coeur d’Alène who studied law at that university without completing a degree, empties her own cornucopia of afflictions, in creating memories that Cecelia recalls in flashbacks, to illuminate the self-righteous perspective of a person who believes she is suffering injustice at the hands of the legal system. It soon becomes evident that Cecelia has contributed greatly to her own downfall through numerous adulterous trysts and many years of abusing alcohol. In the process of reviewing her life, this confused woman attributes guilt to her family of origin, especially her malevolent mother, her condescending second husband—a welfare bureaucrat who apprehends her failing to report earned income, and the long history of Euro-American exploitation of Native Americans, while consistently exonerating herself from any responsibility other than consuming more drinks than she could handle. In a moderately Kafkaesque twist, Cecelia does not know why she is being held for several days without being charged. Eventually she is told that there is an outstanding warrant for her arrest stemming from alleged welfare fraud more than a decade earlier. Her enraged husband, who has been caring for their children in Spokane, Washington, travels to Berkeley to post bond for her and, having done so, to begin the process of ridding himself of this inappropriate spouse by terminating their infelicitous marriage. With her life seemingly in tatters, Cecelia elects to commit suicide and illegally purchases a handgun for that purpose. The statute of limitations kills the outdated charge of welfare fraud, however, and the novel ends when the would-be suicide victim cannot muster the courage to execute her plan of self-destruction. Cecelia chooses to go on with her life, complete her studies, and fulfil her dream of following a legal career. A cardinal factor in Hale’s writing which wields great influence in the plots of both The Owl’s Song and The Jailing of (...truncated)