Abstract

In this study we try to explore the concept of stories of captivity in a holistic context. The main focus of the research is on comparing and contrasting and its relation with other narrative. The research also analyzes many aspects of stories of captivity and tries to gauge its effect on different narrative.

The stories of captivity

Introduction

Captivity narratives emerged with the settlement of North America and continued as a significant genre in American literature until the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. The first captivity narratives may have been created by Native Americans who were captured by early Spanish explorers. However, the genre commonly refers to the accounts written by European settlers who were abducted by Native Americans. Many scholars cite Captain John Smith's General History of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624) as containing the first American captivity narrative. The term refers to a standalone captivity narrative genre of American literature that the experiences of white settlers in North America, mostly women, in Indian captivity portray. Captivity narratives were in the 17 Century a considerable influence on both the autobiographical literature as well as later on the American novel (Pearce, 47).

Captivity of Mary Rowlandson

Since the publication, of Mary Rowlandson's, Sovereignty and Goodness of God ..., released six years after the close of King Philip's War and the death of the Pokanoket leader, Metacomet, in 1682, the Indian captivity narrative has operated as a widely influential component of American literary, historical, and cultural discourse. From the seventeenth century to present, the metaphors, symbols, and the implicit ideologies of this literary genre have had a powerful and enduring influence on the public's perception of American Indian people, and the development of an expansionist American ideology. As a result, the operant binary of the bloodthirsty “savage” and the “civilized” Euro- American has become a common feature of discourses in which American Indian people have been, and continue to be, represented in American historiography, literature, art, film, and popular culture, while also serving as a primary textual justification for the territorial expansion of the United States, and as an implicit justification and historical alibi for the concomitant destruction of American Indian societies and cultures (Rowlandson, 20).

The publication history of Rowlandson's narrative, originally printed in four editions at New England and London in 1682, is suggestive of this assertion. Taken together, with subsequent reprints issued in 1720, six editions printed in the volatile revolutionary period from 1770 to 1773, and six additional editions released in the early years of the New Republic between 1791 and 1800, the republication of Rowlandson's narrative corresponds to periods of intense national trauma and societal upheaval. It is enlightening that, in the subtitle to the editions published from 1720 to 1796, Rowlandson is characterized as one “who was taken Prisoner by the Indians ... treated in the most Barbarous and Cruel manner by those vile Savages.”

These and other captivity narratives, such as that of Hannah Dustan, and Quentin Stock well, provided the reading ...