Female and Unfree in America: Captivity and Slave Narratives

This study analyses two seminal American memoirs that depict female captivity: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). My aim is to discuss, using the tools of Critical Race Theory, the intersections of gender and race, focusing on how the two women’s femininity, as well as their individuality, is linked to Christianity and motherhood.

Cartographic Intertextuality: Reading The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson with Geographic Information Systems

The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson from 1682 is not only famous – or infamous – for its brutal descriptions of the armed conflicts of King Philip’s War, it is also a colonial document that contains both religious as well as spatial representations of Native American territories. This article proposes to analyze this entanglement of space and text with a combination of digital text analysis tools and geographic information systems (GIS). Applying the potentials of such technologies and methods to the study of captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s opens up new opportunities to better understand the interaction of writing and space in colonial New England.

Metalepsis in Autobiographical Narrative

How do fictional tactics operate in what is often simplistically termed the “factual” or referential world of autobiographical discourse? Many narratologists view the rhetorical figure of metalepsis as distinctive to metafictional texts and constitutive of “fictional” narration, which they posit in antithesis to “factual” narration. But regarding autobiographical narrative only within the realm of fact ignores its complexity. While some theorists of autobiographical narrative have read it through the rhetorical figure of prosopopeia, as elaborated by Paul de Man in characterizing its “de-facement” of subjectivity, we argue that the figure of metalepsis operates productively in autobiographical narrative, particularly hybrid and experimental texts. The use of metalepsis shifts levels or layers of narration across temporal and spatial planes in ways that confuse its diegetic and metadiegetic levels. That is, autobiographical narrative, while filtered through the récit factuel, is not consistently fixed in an extratextual, ontologically unified, referential world. We pursue this argument by exploring four cases: the circuit of transfer in incomplete conversion narrative (Rowlandson’s A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson); palimsistic seepage between the Bildungsroman and trauma narrative (Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius); narrative collision of “parallel universes” (Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted); and unstable witness to collective trauma by a second-generation narrator (Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale). Recent critical studies of metalepsis also probe how it presses at the limits of referentiality in life narratives by J. M. Coetzee, Javier Marías, and Christine Brooke-Rose. In sum, autobiographical narrative is by no means a referential, “monologic” mode easily differentiated from the dialogism and metadiscursivity of the novel; rather, it is a mode unsettled by figural, discursive, and temporal boundary-crossing.

The Captivity Narrative and East-West Understanding in Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies

The American captivity narrative, like John Smith’s account of his rescue by Pocahontas, derives its plot from accounts of captivity in the conflicts with Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. This cross-cultural provenance is reflected in Leila Aboulela’s The Kindness of Enemies which can be usefully compared with the greatest of the American texts, The Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), in regard to characters, plot, setting and sympathy for the colonized. In The Kindness of Enemies the captivity narrative goes both ways, into the East and into the West, and there are different ways and degrees of being a captive. Reading Aboulela’s novel requires ananalytic historical perspective on a Nineteenth Century Sufi rebellion during the Crimean War seen in counterpoint to the present besieged state of contemporary Britain. The novel broadens our common humanity as we share Natasha’s problem of having “morphed into something completely different” on her difficult journey into the West, into history and into her divided consciousness. Aboulela presents, in place of projection, an involving interchange and interpenetration of people, events, imagery and (opposing) cultures. My reading, organized around the motifs of dreams and sword, follows the struggles of protagonist and narrator Natasha with intercultural guilt during her research into the Chechen resistance to Russian colonization.

Allegories of Encounter

This book analyzes representations of reading, writing, and recollecting texts – “literacy events” – in early America’s best-known literary genre. Captivity narratives reveal how colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into the diverse experiences of colonial captivity. Captivity narratives reflect lived allegories, the identification of one’s own unfolding story with the stories of others. Sources include the foundational New England narratives of Mary Rowlandson and John Williams, the French Jesuit accounts of the colonial saints Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekakwitha, the Anglo-African John Marrant’s account of his sojourn in Cherokee territory, and the narratives of Colonel James Smith and other captives in the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century.

Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter

References to the famous 137th Psalm (“by the rivers of Babylon”) by colonial captives such as Mary Rowlandson, Isaac Jogues, John Williams, and Elizabeth Hanson are different from those of other Christian writers. Elements of the psalm were recapitulated in the ethnohistorical context of Indian captivity. These include the riverine landscape and pagan captors (verse 1), the compulsion to sing “songs of Zion” (verse 3), and infanticidal violence (verses 8-9). The question posed by verse 4 – “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” – may have been as relevant to the Christian Indians who were confined and persecuted by settlers during King Philip’s War as for any other Christian community.

Perilous Empathy on the Early Modern Frontier

The captivity narratives produced in New England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are rich and complex sources in which to discover early modern attitudes towards empathy. Contemporary scholars including Sara Ahmed and Carolyn Pedwell have argued that empathy can be problematic, reifying and reproducing various forms of injustice under the guise of fellow feeling. On the early modern North American frontier, empathy was understood as problematic for other reasons, an undesirable response to both the captors and the captive that was often diverted, displaced, or denied in captivity narratives. By situating the captivity narratives of Hannah Swarton, Hannah Dustan, Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth Hanson within their initial cultural contexts and contemporary theories of empathy and emotions, this essay contributes to an alternative history of empathy.