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LITR 4231 Early American Literature 2012 Student Midterm Samples 2. Short essay (4-6 paragraphs) on 1 of 2 options (or combinations as inspired) :
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Elizabeth Eagle
The
Captivity Narrative:
The Stories
of Mary Jemison and Mary Rowlandson
In this course, I have found that I am most fascinated by the captivity
narrative. I suppose that I am most intrigued by the idea of the captivity
narrative as much as I am by the actual narrative itself. The captivity
narrative did not begin with the stories of Native Americans kidnapping early
American settlers but has its origins in the stories of men and women captured
by pirates and living aboard ships as pirate servants and later as pirates
themselves. The captivity narrative appeals to me because it is the near
complete surrender of a person to the mercies of another which reveals the
psychology of the captive as well as their captors and forces the captive to
consider their captor’s culture in understanding why they were captured in the
first place and to determine whether they will make their escape or continue to
live among their captors. Two famous stories that describe the captivity
narrative are the stories of Mary Rowlandson and Mary Jemison. Both women found
themselves in extraordinary circumstances when they were taken from their homes
as captives of Native Americans.
The first story is that of Mary Rowlandson. Rowlandson's story is
considered the “first” of the captivity narratives that would become a popular
genre in early American literature. Rowlandson traces the story of her capture
after witnessing the deaths of many of her family members, the destruction of
her town, and the deaths of many of the townspeople that she knew. Rowlandson
recounts that she had previously claimed that “if the
Indians should come, I should choose rather to be killed by them than taken
alive” but she acknowledges that once her town was set upon she changed her mind
and “chose rather to go along with those (as I may say) ravenous beasts, than
that moment to end my days”. Rowlandson claims she went with the Native
Americans so that she could “better declare what happened to [her] during that
grievous captivity” (Rowlandson).
For the literature student and the historian, it is wonderful that she chose to
remain alive and follow her captors away from her town for this educated woman
would then shed light not only on the violent struggles between the Native
Americans and the early settlers but also reveal the cultural mindsets of the
two.
Rowlandson traces her captivity through twenty “removes” which reveal not
only her dependence on her religion for survival but of the intricacies of
Native American life that had previously not been known to much of the early
American population and offers a first hand account of life in early America for
modern day historians. The captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson is important
because the reader is given a view of Native Americans by an educated,
religious, white woman. While the facts of Rowlandson's gender and ethnicity
color her observations, it is her disdain and abhorrence of the culture of the
Native Americans that gives modern historians the best view of Native Americans.
Because Rowlandson was so repulsed by the Native Americans and her experiences
among them, she felt that she must reveal their traits, habits, and customs to
the rest of the world since they were in direct opposition to her own accepted
norms. In this way, Rowlandson's prejudice towards her captors provides a wealth
of information about both cultures thus making her story that much more
intriguing.
The captivity narrative of Mary Jemison is somewhat different from Mary
Rowlandson's but offers many of the same conclusions. In Jemison's story, she is
captured by Native Americans as a young teenager. She is told by her mother “if
you shall have an opportunity to get away from the Indians, don't try to escape;
for if you do they will find and destroy you” (Jemison). Shortly after giving
her daughter this advice, she is killed. These words had a profound effect on
Mary Jemison because she took her mother's words to heart and did not try to
escape. In fact, she was nearly rescued from the Seneca tribe but chose to
remain among them. Jemison's story is important because it reveals why many
early American children chose to remain among their Native American captors once
removed from the homes. Most of these children simply adapted to the Native
American way of life once they understood their own families to be dead. A child
would understand, just as Mary Jemison did, that a return to their own homes
would be lonely and frightening since their families had been destroyed.
Jemison's story differs from Rowlandson's in many respects. The
difference in their ages and thus their lives establishes a different frame of
thinking and thus provides a very different frame of reference when Jemison's
story is read, particularly after reading Rowlandson's. Rowlandson was a married
woman with children. Some of her children survived the attack and so she had
reasons in which to escape her captors and rejoin the society she had been a
part of for her entire life. Rowlandson was also a devout Christian which not
only colored her views of the Native Americans but made her view the Native
Americans as culturally and racially inferior. She felt she could never live
among them since their lifestyle was so different from her own. For Jemison, as
a young teenager, she was not worldly enough to want to completely escape.
Jemison knew her parents were dead as well as her older siblings. Once she had
been assured her younger siblings would not be harmed, she settled on the task
of her own survival. Jemison was young, unmarried, and childless and so without
a home and family to return to, Jemison accepted her fate and the words of her
mother. Jemison began the process of understanding her captors and learning the
lifestyle she knew would fast become her own. In this way, Jemison's story
offers a vastly different view of Native American life because she accepts her
captors and their culture and then embraces it. Her narrative is considered to
be far more realistic and factual because the story she is telling is her own
and she describes a culture and a people that became her own culture and her own
people which is in direct opposition of the views of Mary Rowlandson.
By reading these two captivity narratives my understanding of the genre
has evolved since I have been exposed to two very different readings of a shared
experience. Rowlandson's captors are mindless beasts which I know is not true,
the Native Americans were humans just like her. Jemison's story is far more
realistic to me but I enjoyed the contrast of her story with that of
Rowlandson's because it sheds light on the sharp differences in the cultures as
well as the prejudices of the early Americans against the Native Americans which
in turn reveals why and how the Native Americans were treated so harshly and
unfairly in their dealings with the early American settlers. These two stories
help the reader to better understand Native American literature as well as early
American literature before and after the two cultures met by providing an in
depth look at the Native American culture through the eyes of a European. The
captivity narrative continues to be a popular genre whether the story be about
alien captures or pirate captures. This genre is also seen in cinema because
like the early captive narratives, the stories offer a view of another culture
from the eyes of someone who does not understand the culture of their captors.
The acceptance or denial of the captor as a valid lifestyle becomes the most
striking component of the narrative. What facet of the captors makes the captive
decide to embrace their fate? What facet proves too much for the captive and
forces them to escape? The struggle between these two questions for the captive
becomes the struggle of the reader as the reader comes to identify with the
captive and thus must decide for themselves if they would follow Mary Jemison's
path or the path of Mary Rowlandson.
