Mary Rowlandson Captivity Narrative

0:00 captivity narratives I'm going to go up to the top now and you'll see me go into full screen mode here with the slide so that we can take a look at them together I'm thinking that in your view on your end that one of the things that you might want to do is open this up in notes View and you could type while you're listening to the lecture or you could watch it through one time and then watch it again type notes separately and then stick it in the PowerPoint or you could do it right in your blog however you'd like to go about doing that this painting that you see represented in the first slide is called the murder of Jane McCrae and it's an interesting um event from early America

0:47 when M Jane McCrae was taken by the Indians it became a sensational tale that was retold not always with accuracy and there are some accounts of that in the Norton anthology there's a breakout section that you can see there on captivity narratives in those intermediary pages that you get that are kind of like booklets inserted in the Anthology um I'll apologize right now here at the beginning of this lecture for the sound quality I left my headset at my office on campus and I'm making this from home so you might catch some noises like creaking chairs cats in the background and so forth the word c captivity comes from the Latin caper to take and captivus the

1:35 captive one who's taken and then by implication is held so captivity the idea is that somebody's being hold held of course with um without their permission and from the experience and from the stories of captivity there are quite a number of fantasies that develop from it and that might seem an odd word to apply but if you take a look at the painting that you see on your screen there now I think you can understand some of the elements of fantasy involved I mean you have here romantic art look at the the way that you have the breasts of the of J McCrae glowing you have her in this pose um really classical art motifs going here if any of you know

2:22 about art history you'll you'll be able to see a lot of things in the poses that relate back to classical Greek and Roman art even from The Stance of the way the Native Americans are portrayed there's also an implication of sexuality here that you'll see but as I mentioned in class yesterday there was there is no evidence of rape by American Indians from any of these captures because they did not find the white women appealing so when you look at this you have an idea of the way the white people would have thought of captivity but it doesn't really portray the way that the American Indians would have thought of it there are many different types of captivity you have literal captivity by Indians or

3:09 others so you know the The Taking of the captain the captive the the keeping of the captive so the literal captivity you have spiritual captivity as something that's metaphorical spiritual captivity is something that we've already had a glimpse of with the different texts that that we've been looking at the idea of being held captive by your spirituality by your love of God by your feelings of needing to be Pious so we have the literal captivity the spiritual captivity a third type of captivity is by the imagination being held captive by your

3:55 imagination by reading a fourth type of captivity would be sexual captivity by seduction being held captive by your seductive feelings your sexual feelings your emotional feelings for someone a fifth type of captivity is racial bondage racial bondage such as slavery of Indians and Africans and America so racial captivities the sixth type is

4:42 sensibility sensibility is a term that you'll probably hear in a British literature class it's the type of captivity being held captive and bound by one's feelings in early America the term captivated would have been used often as a synonym for being mesmerized by Magic the thing about it is the term mesmerized wasn't a you don't have to copy this part down it's just trivia here for you but mesmerized came about from a man named Mesmer that popularized and maybe even invented that that would

5:28 be hard to prove hypnotism so the word mesmerized actually comes about a little bit later than this time period that we're in right now captivity also relates to the concept of captive Israel that we've talked about in class with the idea of America as a New Canaan a promised land and with that we get ideas of the Wilderness as a space where Cap AC ity happens so the Wilderness not just as an actual space But as a a symbolic space in early America the space where the devil might live the space

6:16 where there might be certain freedoms and opportunities not in the towns and the cities we end up with an overarching idea of savagery and civilization in opposition so you might phrase that as savagery versus civilization so I'm going to run down those six types of captivity that I just talked about literal captivity like being taken captive by Indians or others or uh maybe the idea of being um held in bondage of some sort number two spiritual captivity three held captive by the imagination such as by reading four sexual captivity by

7:04 seduction five racial bondage as captivity such as the slavery of Indians or Africans in America and six sensibility being bound by one's feelings even today well this is this isn't right now right now but this is fairly recent if you if you want to pause the video and go and Google this book you might get a little bit of information on how the Captivity narrative is still very much around this is not the only way and towards the end of the lecture I will come back to a way that captivity narratives are still very popular in this

7:50 case this uh follow the river book was a pretty big bestseller and it's good I've read it it emphasizes the salacious and fantastic and terrible parts of the drama that would happen with the actual taking of the captives the the killings the murders the violence in a way that you don't see in the Captivity narratives that were written by the actual early Americans who were involved are a number of reasons for that that we'll get at a little bit later on but if you want to pause it and

8:36 go look this up on YouTube there is a trailer from a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie that was made based on this book and I think you'll get a real kick out of it because it is like quintessential I think it's early 1980s or mid 80s total cheeseball TV movie fair and you might get something out of it as far as wanting to write about it on your blog maybe even post that video up if you're interested in it because I'm in I'm interested in trying to figure out what are the anxieties portrayed in it that would have appealed to an American audience even in the in

9:24 in the time when that Hallmark Hall of Fame movie came out why is it still appealing to look at the American Indians as some sort of racialized other the Captivity of Mary rollinson takes place during King Phillip's War I don't want to go into a huge amount of details about this because it's something you can readily look up I'm a big fan of using what we have available to us in other words the great encyclopedia in the sky the internet and of looking primarily at sites with a doedu so that you know you're getting something hosted from a college or university so the doedu sites are particularly

10:10 good a few things about this war that I do want to mention um that what Mary rollinson doesn't tell you is the raid at L Lancaster that she was involved in where she was taken was part of Retribution by the naret Indians so it was it was revenge for a massacre that the whites had done of more than 600 people in an Indian town so the British had set wigwams on fire they burned families and um children to death in the wigwams and so this capture of Mary rollinson was in

10:57 part revenge for that this is also part of the French and Indian Wars in early America and there was a fear on the part of the Puritans of the French as Catholics so there's a there's a religious aspect of the French and Indian war that you shouldn't Overlook in this war over 2,600 Colonials were captured or killed about 1,200 homes were burned a lot of food was destroyed about 8,000 head of cattle were lost so it was a devastating war in

11:44 the colonies the oh I should go back and just tell you what this is I found this image doing a Google Search and I was fascinated by because it's a board game involving King Philip's War so I just thought that was really odd so I popped it up there this is more traditional type of image that you would see with a code of the colonies and so forth where this war happened this War was between the alanin speaking Indian tribes and the English in the colonies in New England so it didn't involve the Dutch in New York

12:30 over half the towns in New England were involved if you did it by ratio about one in 20 people were killed in this war so that's white and Indian both together and you're looking at about the deaths of 3,000 American Indians what were they fighting over well I I me mentioned the the religious aspect of the French and Indian Wars with the French being Catholic they were fighting over land which is probably no surprise knowing the history of America Devastation of Indian corn

13:15 fields by livestock so you'd have the livestock the cattle brought in this is why so many cattle were killed for trampling their fields The Bullying of the Indians to keep pushing them out of the the fields that they wanted to take over humiliation of the Indian king metacomet who was called by the colonist King Phillip I don't know how they got that out of metacomet but they did somehow and that's why it's called King Philip's War so they were growing tensions and in this war captives were taken and I think some of the reasons might be surprising and interesting to you you have trade as part of the reasons

14:04 that captives were taken right I'm going to I'm going to take this and and I'm going to use this captive now as a bargaining chip enslavement basically to use the captive for labor in the Indian tribes and revenge but also and here's where it's surprising adoption Indians would commonly take white children in particular to replace lost family or tribe members that had perished by disease or in the war so you have trade enslavement Revenge Ransom money and then adoption the surprising one and that's because your Native Americans at the time did

14:49 not have the same cultural construct of racial Purity as Europeans it didn't bother them to take white people in and then have them as part of their families as far as statistics go between 1675 and 1763 there were approximately 1,600 captives taken so about 1,600 captives taken between 1675 and 177 1763 so it was a real possibility the population was low in the areas this was happening in um typically men and young children were often killed in attacks forced marches killed many of them like what you see happen to Mary

15:36 rolinson child along the way this is a kind of a crude drawing that um was done around the time of Mary rollin's capture you see the woman there wielding some sort of um weapon it's hard to tell exactly what it is there this is the first narrative by a woman in America it was a generation before Anne Brader so we did go a little bit out of order it stayed in print well into the 18th century it was a phenomenal bestseller partly because of the Exotic nature of the events that she's telling and it had a tremendous influence on later captivity narratives like Anne Brad street Mary

16:21 rollinson was born in England she was educated she married a calvinist minister and that had a great amount of influence on the publication of this captivity narrative at the time Literacy for women about 40% were able to write as far as the men about 60% of men were able to write and the number of men and women who were able to read was slightly higher so more could read than could write so we're looking at about 40% who could write about 60% of men were able to write just to give you some context for

17:07 what you're what you're reading and how it was a you know that's close enough to say about 5050 on whether or not somebody was able to write or read around this time period in early America Mary rollinson was able to speak Algonquin so she knew the American Indian language she would have known and recognized some of the Indians who captured her and they would have likewise known who she was when they took her and they took her because she was a powerful woman from her status in the capture she was involved in it lasted and you have some of this context

17:53 probably for in your Anthology too but 11 weeks and 5 days and she wrote it two years later so I want you to think about that two years after so the the facts you know we've been talking a little bit about the blur between facts and and fiction and fiction and non-fiction in the class keep it in mind she wrote it two years later the text was first published in America and then in London which was interesting at the time to have it come out in America First was an international story usually women were writing private documents you know already that that it wasn't typical to have documents written by women and and in the public sphere just from what we talked about with Anne Brad street there's some gender differences

18:39 in men and women's captivity narratives the gender differences you have men's captivity narratives highlighting action and escape and Adventure typically action adventure and Escape in the men's captivity narratives women's usually would emphasize pass passivity and distress so passivity and distress there weren't very many printing presses in America so this came out because there was an agenda a minister who was very prominent his name was increase ma don't you love his first name increase increased ma wanted to print this because we were on the second generation of Puritans in America at the time so your first your first Puritans were dead the ones who

19:25 came the Mayflower Etc they were dead the church was falling off um attendance was down there's an aspect of propaganda to this that might make sense to you now that you've read it where you have the membership in the church dropping the tale of distress to show how God could save someone who was Pious there's a spiritual agenda here and the introduction to it shows how there's a a propagandist purpose to this and if you look I think it's here in the frontis piece this is called a front's piece in a book I'm not sure let me see if it's in here or not

20:13 um it's probably on the next page there's a there's an introduction with increased matter promoting this book overtly don't read it literally it's an edited text very much an edited text so the parts that you find in there that might not sound right or don't stick right with you think about it as heavily edited think about Mary rollinson as having a double voice the same way that you have in and Brad street try to think about when you see her real personality whatever we can try to discern from a text like this versus something that seems more constructed what parts appear to be written more for the public public what

21:00 parts appear to be written more for the private so keep working that public private Duality as you're reading this text has elements of a Jeremiah now I know I'm moving fast through this so you can pause it at any time during the lecture it's a sermon with three parts so a Jeremiah it has these different aspects to it these three parts are important because you have first the rules and then how people stray from the rules and then how people return to the fold so the idea is there's these rules established in this type of sermon people go away from it

21:45 and then they come back to the fold so you might want to pause on this you also can obviously take this directly into your notes it's a powerful type of sermon used in early America particularly when they were trying to recruit people back into the church so you might want to consider this captivity narrative as a Jeremiah again I want to emphasize this was a transatlantic text this is an anachronistic image obviously if you look closely you'll see it's a German map from much later but I just I like this image because it gives the idea of shipping trade going back and forth and

22:31 this book being shipped back and forth these ideals and ideas in the Jeremiah going back and forth across the Atlantic this is something um that I want you to take particular note of the idea of captivity as a destabilization of identity this is a vital concept we're going to start over to the right with the first point this I'm going to call this this is the Captivity diagram the captive starts at home the ideas are in a state of Faith with with they're innocent they're they're ignorant they're in a state of Slumber we go down to the bottom they're captured they are removed into Satan's

23:17 snares and thus they experience some sort of Awakening to the evil of the world the third phase is captivity itself self the trial the humiliation and the new reality of being held captive and then the fourth and final stage of captivity always involves restoration Redemption being going back into the full you can see how this goes along with the Jeremiah and returning into public life so it's a destabilization of identity because once you've gone through these phases you can never be who you were at the beginning and your identity is therefore

24:03 not fixed but variable you can apply this to your own life when you go through a traumatic event you're never the same On The Backs side a lot of you will know that from your personal experiences it changes who you are as a person and what this genre does is it mirrors the anxieties of people of any time you could write a captivity narrative now give it the same applications and you would see the the hopes the fears the anxieties of the people of any time reflected in these different stages so if you move through them you could apply something like this not only to Mary rolinson but also to the slave

24:48 narratives that we're going to read a little bit later on in the class I'm not going to read through all these just for the sake of time and not having this go on for too long what I'd like you to do is just copy paste these um the ones that you might find useful for your blog post um if you've already done your blog post then maybe these are things that you could look at in other blogs when you're responding to them and see how you could apply some of these questions there and um have a a discussion of sorts in the comments on other people's blogs maybe applying some of these questions so whether on your own or in somebody else's I want to end with a little bit of contextualization of just comparing this to popular uh ideas in America today

25:36 worldwide experiences other places that you might see captivity narratives I talked about how they always mirror the anxieties and fears of people of any time period so that's why I have this image of alien abduction here because alien abductions always have the same characteristics of the Captivity diet diagam here same thing prisoner of war experiences reflect the same aspects slave narratives reflect the same aspects that might also produce something interesting in the writings that you do and the ideas you have about this what are some of those comparisons okay so be on the lookout

26:22 for the lecture I'll get the lecture for tomorrow posted probably around the same time tomorrow morning morning early in the day and I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say about this text and these lecture these lectures thanks so much and I'll see you on Tuesday for

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