The Jailing of Cecelia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale

First published: 1985

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1980

Locale: Berkeley, California; Spokane and Tacoma, Washington; and reservations in Idaho and Washington

Principal Characters:

• Cecelia Capture Welles, a thirty-year-old Indian woman in her second year of law school
• Mary Theresa Capture, her mother
• Will Eagle Capture, her father
• Brian (Bud) Donahue, her first lover and the father of her son
• Nathan Welles, her husband, a teacher in Spokane

The Novel

Drawn from the author’s experiences of growing up as a Native American in a white-dominated society, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture consists of the reflections of the title character, who is spending a weekend in jail after her arrest for drunk driving. She scans her entire life, discovering that in many ways she has been repeatedly imprisoned by her society and culture.

The novel begins in jail. Cecelia’s immediate fears center on the compulsory mugshots: They will make her look ugly, because she could not fix her face and hair. She recognizes that only a woman would care about this, and only in a culture that disproportionately glorified female attractiveness. In a cell with a white prostitute and a black thug, Cecelia realizes that, like them, she has spent her life trying to attract men. She bypasses the chance to call her husband for help, reassured that she will be released as soon as she sobers up.

Gradually, she pieces the past day, her birthday, together. As usual, she had forced herself through the deadening routine of law school, alleviating the pain with a rare thermos of wine to celebrate the day. The alcohol brings little relief; only the pressures of professional school keep at bay the emptiness of her life. She lives in a shabby apartment with few pleasantries; her husband—by now a husband in name only—and children are hundreds of miles and several months away; she has no transportation in the rainy winter of San Francisco Bay; her life consists of unrelieved study; she feels overweight and unattractive. Her most recent effort at romance lasted one night with a nameless man. At school, she has to confront a lover whom she reluctantly left after learning he already had a permanent relationship. Yet the wine at least gets her through the day.

After school, she makes the rounds to celebrate. She toys with a man who tries to pick her up. The experience reminds her of a game she plays with her husband in which they act like strangers who discover each other in bars. Remembering Nathan, she recalls what their marriage has become. That thought drives her in tears out of the bar. Her car is stopped before she gets home.

While waiting in her cell to be interviewed, Cecelia recollects her childhood on various reservations. She had been the last surviving child of an Indian father and a white mother. Her mother had belittled her because she was darker and coarser-haired than her older sisters; her mother’s whole side of the family shunned their Indian relations. She insisted that the girl’s dreams were ridiculous; like all women, Cecelia could rely only on her looks to make her way. Cecelia’s father, however, was exceptional among his race because of his education, and he drove this last daughter to become an example of success. Because he had failed at that himself, having dropped out of college before fighting in World War II, he now spent every evening getting drunk. Cecelia grew up desperate to escape the squalor of a reservation life made worse by an alcoholic father and a physically and emotionally crippled mother.

Cecelia is stunned to learn that she is not being released because of an old charge of welfare fraud. After she had fled her home at the age of sixteen for the Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco, she had met a gentle college-age man at one of the park “events” of the period. Under the influence of drugs, alcohol, and the spirit of the time, she had taken him as her first lover. After a single weekend, he had disclosed that he had been drafted; his ship was leaving for Vietnam immediately. She was bearing his child when he died there. In the early years of single motherhood, she was caught working while on welfare, and she skipped town before repaying the entire assessment. Later, she completed college and met her present husband.

Now she has to call him. On the day he bails her out, they agree to divorce. Before the hearing, Cecelia buys a gun; she will kill herself rather than return to jail. Her case, however, is dismissed because of time limitations. The novel ends when she drops the bullets at the grave of Bud, her first lover.

The Characters

The novel has essentially only one character, Cecelia herself. Although the book is narrated in the third person, Cecelia is the only character presented internally as well as externally; hers is the only consciousness readers enter. All other characters— including those with direct bearing on the action—appear only as they affect her. This close-up technique highlights and heightens Cecelia’s persona, enabling the reader to identify easily with her, to experience events through her. Because the novel is an exercise in ethnic consciousness-raising, this succeeds: Readers certainly learn the problems in development faced by Native American women. Yet the approach also reduces the status of all other characters and possible points of view.

Cecelia is complex enough and her situation difficult enough to deserve central staging in a work devoted to her. Simply describing that situation illustrates the complexity and difficulty. She is a thirty-year-old, reservation-reared, codependent Native American woman in her second year of law school. She thus exemplifies at least six levels of social and cultural dislocation, six barriers to her chosen goal.

Reared in segregation, she begins with the burdens of inferior education and inadequate role models, conditioned to accept secondary, or even tertiary, status. With an alcoholic father and disabled mother, she has grown up assuming that such deficiencies are normal. Membership in an ethnic minority reinforces many of these patterns, as does being female; both compound the prejudice she encounters trying to overcome them. She is an older student; even her Ph.D.-pursuing husband skips her university graduation, apparently because he finds something distasteful about her failure to graduate until the age of twenty-six.

Furthermore, she has dropped out of both high school and law school; she has a history of failure. Moreover, she has two school-age children, the older already in academic and social trouble, supposedly because of his absentee mother. Moreover, this is only a partial list of her problems. Looming over all is the fact that the program of study she is pursuing involves a partial betrayal of her heritage. She is becoming expert in the legal system that justified the brutal depredation of her ancestors, and she is running the risk that she may use her education to turn her back on her people. Her own personal history seems likely to trip her up, if not trap her completely. Her story begins with a drinking bout, merely the last of a long series, and she fails to find a single stable love relationship by the age of thirty. If life were a baseball game, she would have struck out before ever getting to the plate.

Yet all this serves only to spotlight her saving quality: Cecelia Capture simply will not quit. She is indomitable, a pillar of resolution. What makes this more remarkable is that she clearly does not enjoy what she is doing. Law school is drudgery for her; she suffers it only because it alone will get her what she wants. The discipline is so uncongenial that her only effective recitation occurs when she has drunk enough wine to anesthetize her normal tensions. Her classmates find her aloof and disconnected, and she has no close relations with any of them. She hates being separated from her children, especially because she knows her absence is hurting them. Exactly what motivates her is not clear. She does what she does partly to fulfill her father’s ambitions, but more to overcome the limitations imposed on her by family, race, and culture. She simply will not be stopped.

Critical Context

The Jailing of Cecelia Capture is possibly more important as a cultural document than as a novel. Published in 1985, long after the energies of the radical American Indian Movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s had largely burned out, the book demonstrates that self-realization and cultural integrity for Native Americans remain possible even under the jurisdiction of the United States. The novel shows that a person can work for her people while giving up only—or mainly—the limitations they confuse with their culture—and also shows how lonely such a passage can become.

The book is hard-eyed and uncompromising. Its depiction of common reservation life pulls few punches: The majority appear alienated from the ways of the past, which require too much effort to sustain, and mired in the unnourishing bread and pompous circuses of American commercial culture. The tribes seem caught in a world compounded of the dregs of two societies, able to function in neither. Cecelia gains only credit for turning her back on the shabby mobile-home and junked-car surroundings of her parents and siblings, but the urban American Dream, on close inspection, seems hardly congenial. Upward mobility into material culture is not Cecelia’s ambition, but it is about all she is offered. None of the men she meets is capable of recognizing her for herself. Her most positive encounter is with another Indian, who offends her by referring to her as a squaw with an education. Eventually, she discovers that even her Ivy League-educated Mayflower-descended husband has chosen her not for what she is but for what she represents to him—the victim of the crimes of his ancestors. Yet it is precisely her self, her embattled self, that she finally discovers as worth preserving from assaults from two cultures leagued together to deprive her.

Bibliography

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen M. Sands. American Indian Women: A Guide to Research. New York: Garland, 1991. This standard reference work lists all of Hale’s publications in books to 1991 and directs students to relevant studies of her culture and background.

Berner, Robert L. Review of The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, by Janet Campbell Hale, and Last Fall, by Bruce Stolbov. American Indian Quarterly 14 (Spring, 1990): 214-215. Explores the differing ways both novels treat the concept of tribal identity in relation to “modern individualism.” A brief but incisive examination of Hale’s novel.

Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Songs from This Earth on Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Greenfield Center, N.Y.: Greenfield Review Press, 1983. Bruchac collects several poems by Hale, including some that connect with the world of Cecelia Capture.

Cole, Diane. “The Pick of the Crop: Five First Novels.” Ms. 13 (April, 1985): 14. A generally sympathetic review of the novel, although Cole believes that the cards are stacked against Nathan, the small-minded husband who is almost a caricature. Cole also examines the theme of physical and emotional imprisonment in the novel.

Hale, Janet Campbell. Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter. New York: Random House, 1993. This is not a strict autobiography but rather a collection of semiautobiographical essays that shed light on Hale’s personal and tribal background. In many, she touches on connections between her actual experiences and the fictional ones of Cecelia Capture and reflects on the situation of the Native American caught between cultures. She also illuminates many tribal customs and traditions, particularly those concerning women.

Library Journal. Review of The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. 110 (March 15, 1985): 72. A short review which stresses the themes of alienation and imprisonment. Finds the protagonist’s emotional entrapment more severe than actually serving time in jail.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Biblio-graphic Review, and Selected Bibliography. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Offers a brief overview of Hale’s life and discussions of The Jailing of Cecelia Capture and Owl’s Song, both of which deal with reservation alcoholism, suicide, and other problems in the urban landscape.

Wiget, Andrew O. “Native American Literature: A Bibliographic Survey of American Indian Literary Traditions.” Choice 23 (June, 1986): 1503-1512. Contains little direct information about either Hale or the novel, but does place both in the burgeoning context of Native American literature. A useful forging of lineages.

Wolitzer, Meg. Review of The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, by Janet Campbell Hale. The New York Times Book Review 90 (April 7, 1985): 14. Wolitzer summarizes the plot neatly, focusing on the series of repressions suffered by Cecelia from unhappy childhood to parental programming to loveless marriage.