in English This particular MA thesis concentrates on the portrayal of Indians in captivity narratives of the early seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the essential source material being Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, first published in 1682. The thesis explores the relationship between Native Americans and settlers who saw Indians as a threat to their own existence and also as a threat to the western expansion. It also focuses on the confrontation of savagery and civilization from the point of view of common presuppositions and prejudices about the Native Americans that are very often depicted in several captivity narratives. Moreover, the thesis provides necessary definition of the genre of the captivity narrative with regard to the reaction of the reading public in the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the first arrivals of settlers and explorers the American continent symbolized a land of vast opportunities. Nevertheless, the continent not being fully explored was shrouded in a veil of mystery. Explorers and adventurers were fascinated by the extensive natural resources they found in the New World. Moreover, the New World was often called New Canaan or the Garden of Eden as it symbolized for the newcomers a possibility to start a new...

The term "narratives of confinement" redefines the parameters by which first-person, fictive and non-fictive, accounts of female captivity are classified, broadening the genre beyond Indian captivity narratives and slave narratives to include other works in which female narrators describe physical and/or psychological confinement due to tangible or non-tangible forces. Often these narratives exhibit the transformation of the drudgery of housewifery into powerful symbols of resistance and subversion, especially in reaction to traumatic events related to confinement. Needlework and food, including its preparation and distribution, frequently emerge as metaphors that express the ways in which disempowered women seek to regain control in their lives: sewing often represents an effort by women to seize power, blending the creative act with economic achievement; food preparation also relates to creativity and economic achievement and often represents love and nurturing. In this study, I examine three representative narratives of confinement, using close reading and scholarly evidence as support: Mary Rowlandson's 1682 Indian captivity narrative, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Harriet Jacobs' 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself; and Toni Morrison's 1987 fictional neo-slave narrative, Beloved. My examination begins the dialogue regarding the connection between domestic metaphors and narratives of confinement, broadening scholarship to allow more consideration for the subtle, feminized language of domesticity.

Since the publication of Mary Rowlandson's, The Soveraignty 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 the 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.In this work, my aim is to deconstruct and demystify the regime of literary and historical privilege that has become an explicit function of Rowlandson's text and subsequent narratives by presenting a critical perspective that is responsive to the complex array of social, cultural, and historical forces that were converging in the Massachusetts colony during the late seventeenth century. In so doing, I have attempted to present the "Indian side" of the story and examine the events that Rowlandson describes in her narrative from the perspective of Indian people who have been all too often silenced in American historical and literary discourses. I have addressed and attempted to answer some of the nagging questions surrounding the original publication and dissemination of Rowlandson's work in order to shed some much needed light on the complex cultural and social processes at work in Puritan society during the seventeenth century, while illustrating how texts such as Rowlandson's continues to shape our perceptions of others and our own conceptions of historical reality.

Originated by Jacques Derrida, deconstruction analyzes the relationship between text and meaning. This thesis applies Derrida's theory of deconstruction to three early American Puritan figures: John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, and Anne Bradstreet. By questioning the conceptual distinctions known as oppositions in Puritan ideology through the works of these aforementioned individuals, this thesis questions and corrupts the binaries within each text used. The emergence of new meaning through a deconstruction of Puritan ideology establishes a valid site from which to explore radical, repressed, historical, cultural, and theological narratives of religious prosperity. By enforcing narratives from Derrida's Of Grammatology, post-structuralist ideology will presume no absolute truths within a text; therefore, ambiguity is pertinent in a deconstructive critical examination. The argument in this thesis is then—through a deconstructive critical examination of Puritan ideology, are similarities present though different mediums of linguistic discourse, and can this thesis formally decenter the transcendental signifiers present. The critical approach to deconstructing each medium of discourse analytically breaks down the systematic organization of language as a whole and overturns structuralist oppositions—as to displace the authority, and formally find new importance in a text.

<p>"The Afterlives of King Philip's War" examines how this colonial American war entered into narratives of history and literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and investigates how narrative representations of the War restructured both genre and the meaning of the historical event itself. This investigation finds its roots in colonial literature and history - in the events of King Philip's War and the texts that it produced - but moves beyond these initial points of departure to consider this archive as a laboratory for the study of the relationship between genre and knowledge on one hand, and literature and the construction of (proto-) national community on the other. Because of its unique place in the history of the colonies, as well as its positioning within literary studies of Puritan New England, King Philip's War is an example not just of how one community faced a crisis of self-definition, but how that crisis was influenced by, and in turn is reflected in, the literature it produced. In this conception, genre is more than literary form, but represents a social technology with implications for the broader production of knowledge: following the use and production of genre in narrative reveals both literary history and the complicated map of how narrative constructs knowledge in tension with the conventions of genre simultaneously hem in and catalyze reading.</p> / Dissertation

In the aftermath of King Philip's War, Puritan Mary Rowlandson recorded her experiences as an Indian captive. In a vivid story that recollects the details of these events, Rowlandson attempts to impart a message to her community through the use of a variety of literary techniques. The genre of the Indian captivity narrative is a literary construct that she develops out of the following literary forms that existed at the time of her writing. These are the spiritual autobiography, a documentary method meant to archive spiritual and emotional growth through a record of daily activities; the conversion narrative, which made public one's theological assurance of God's grace; and the jeremiad, a sermon form designed to remind Puritans of their Covenant with God. To her contemporaries, Rowlandson served as an example of God's Providence. To later generations and specifically twenty-first century scholars, she represents America's first female literary prose voice.