Records of degradation: The functions of the Indian captivity genre, 1682--187

In 1682, after three months of captivity among the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians during King Philip's War, Mary Rowlandson wrote The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, an immensely popular account that became the model for what is one of the few uniquely American genres: the Indian captivity narrative. From the close of the seventeenth century to the close of the American frontier some 200 years later, hundreds of accounts were written by those who found themselves violently thrown into societies that had motives and customs alien to their own. These were one-sided portrayals, where little or no mention was made of the tragic violence committed against Native Americans. At the same time, these unbalanced, sometimes inarticulate works were by far the most popular source of information concerning Indian cultures for American readers up to the beginning of the twentieth century.;Recent studies of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God have indicated that Rowlandson's narrative voice seems to subvert the instructive religious paradigm found in most Puritan accounts of King Philip's War. A similar argument can be made for narratives written up through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in many captivity accounts, what one encounters is not a unified voice, but a strange and often contradictory one in which the captive's understanding of her/his experience occasionally appears to be in opposition to prevailing ideology. One goal of this study will be to find an explanation for the multivocality that is frequently encountered in the genre.;Each chapter of this dissertation will be devoted to a close reading of one or two narratives from a particular era, pulling in relevant details from other works as needed. By limiting the scope of this study in this way, I will be able to intricately focus on the inconsistencies in the narrative voices in these works, infusing the dissertation with a similar sort of detailed analysis seen in the recent studies of Mary Rowlandson's narrative. While I grant that many captivity narratives were hastily written and suffer from what could mildly be called "excess," many more narratives reveal a complexity and depth that provides insight into the ways the captives and their audiences understood their relation to the frontier and the Native American.