Introduction to The Captivity Narrative

Captain John Smith

Mary Rowlandson

Olaudah Equiano

Background Concepts

• Text: a way of viewing the written word as an open, infinite process that is both meaning-generating and texts and meaning subverting, rather than closed with one meaning.

• We also push the word text beyond the printed page into institutional practices and social structures that can also be studied as codes (unwritten laws).

Background Concepts

• Code: an unwritten law, something practiced and accepted in a particular time and place

• Cultural Code: institutional practices and social structures accepted by particular cultures at a given time (also unwritten laws).

Background Concepts• Speech is to language as individual

actions are to cultural codes. Repeated

• Actions• Gestures• Speech acts• Written or Visual texts can all be interpreted in some way.

Background Concepts

• Close reading: paying close attention to figurative language (tropes), actions, gestures, speech, in written and visual texts in order to interpret what is being suggested - the implied (or unsaid) – meaning in some way.

Background Concepts

• trope: any word, phrase, speech action, or physical action that suggests more than one meaning

The Golden Rule of Close Reading IS: NOTHING IS REAL !

Virginia Stretched to the Pacific in the 17th Century

(John Smith's Map of Virginia used in various publications, first in 1612. Other versions available at source URL. Source URL: http://www.virtualjamestown.org/jsmap_large.html ), as found at http://Common Share. org, October 31, 2009.

Pocahontas Saving Smith Before Powhatan: Truth or Fiction?

Postcard rendition of Pocahontas saving Smith before Powhatan, as found at http://historichamptonroads.com/colonial_history_15.htm, November 2, 2009.

Characteristics of the Captivity Narrative

A Basic Narrative Pattern:Separation (the abductionTransformation

Ordeal,Accommodation, andAdoption

ReturnEscape,Release orRedemption

An Algonquian warrior such as

those who captured

Captain Smith

Characteristics ContinuedGory descriptions of acts such as scalping, cannibalism, torture, slaughter of innocents• Tropes of fierceness: *• Powhatan sitting before a “fire upon a seat like a

bedsted”• Powhatan’s robe of “rarowcul (raccoon) skins, and all

the tayles hanging”• Men and women “with heads and shoulders painted

red…and white beads about their necks• Trope of exaggeration: *

“being ready with their clubs to beate out his braines”* All examples are from Heath, Volume A, p, 258.

Characteristics Continued

Identification of the hero or heroine’s adventures with those of the individual Christian confronting the world on the way to the celestial city and being saved by divine intervention

• Pocahontas as savior: “When no other treaty could prevail, got his head in her armes, and laid her owne upon his to save him from death” (p. 258)

• Ode to God: “But almightee God (by his divine providence) had mollified the hearts of those sterne Barbarians with compassion” (p. 259).

Characteristics, Continued

Descriptions of mysterious wildernesses and strange landscapes

Detailed descriptions of Native American life

The lurking, but rarely fulfilled, threat of sexual violation by depraved pagans

• The attempt to arouse the sympathy and humanitarian impulses of readers against chattel slavery (as opposed to indentured slavery that Equiano accepts)• Emphasis on traditional Christian religious ideas• Show of acceptance of the ideals of the dominant society• Emphasis on the cruelty of individual slave owners

And with the Slave Narrative: