Abstract
The image of escape from bondage to a land of freedom has provided a powerful and recurring figure in American literature, both theological and secular, from the colonial period into the nineteenth century and even later.1 Richard Slotkin’s seminal account of American cultural mythology, Regeneration Through Violence, and Annette Kolodny’s equally important study of colonial American women’s writing, The Land Before Her, both attribute to the captivity narrative a powerful originary influence upon the shape of later canonical writings.2 Within the context of Puritan captivity narratives, the style of typology which was based upon the biblical freeing of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt offered a means of representing the ordeal of captivity as a necessary part of God’s redemptive mission in the New World.
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Notes
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1800 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973)
Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860 (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
See also Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (1953, rev. edn, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1988).
Mary Rowlandson, ‘The Sovereignty and Goodness of God’ in Alden T. Vaughn & Edward W. Clark (ed.), Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724 (Cambridge, Mass. & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 35. Future references are given in the text.
Houston A. Baker, Jr., ‘Autobiographical Acts and the Southern Slave’ in Charles T. Davis & Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), The Slave’s Narrative (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 242–61.
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 1. Future references are given in the text.
William L. Andrews, ‘The First Fifty Years of the Slave Narrative: 1760–1810’, in John Sekora & Darwin T. Turner (ed.), The Art of Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory (Western Illinois University, 1982), p. 13.
Mary Helen Washington, Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860–1960 (1987, rpt London: Virago, 1989).
Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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© 1996 Deborah L. Madsen
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Madsen, D.L. (1996). Captivity Narratives: Mary Rowlandson, Harriet Jacobs and the Rhetoric of Exceptionalism. In: Allegory in America. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379930_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379930_4
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