The Captivity Of Hannah Dustan Analysis

White women were situated in many different ways throughout early American history. Women were used as audiences for progressive movements, imagined as the definition of purity, and even written as a tough, underestimated captive. The stories Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, “Young Goodman Brown”, and “The Captivity of Hannah Dustan”, are three very different examples of how women were situated between 1700 and the mid-1800’s.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written by Linda Brent under the pseudonym Harriet Jacobs in 1897. Brent was born into slavery. She was utilized by white males that either owned her or courted her. Her owner, Dr. Flint, was a cruel man, and when Brent grew into a young woman, he began to prey upon her

Other stories portrayed women as independent heroes in early America. One particularly shocking story is the one of Hannah Dustan. Cotton Mather wrote the appropriately named story, “The Captivity of Hannah Dustan” in 1703. Dustan lived near the town of Haverhill with her husband and eight children. On March 15th, 1697 the area was overrun by American Indians. According to Mather, about thirty-nine people were captured or killed. Dustan was lying in bed when the commotion started. Mather describes this as, “…those furious tawnies coming into the house, bid poor Dustan to rise immediately. Full of astonishment, she did so…” (Mather 1). He shows Dustan as the victim of savagery, making the audience view her as “ladylike” but also setting up her surprising counter play a few nights after the original attack. Dustan’s husband and the seven eldest children were able to escape, but she was not as lucky. Her infant child’s head was bashed into a tree, and she and the family’s nurse were taken captive. The American Indians began to lead their captives back to their town. As the English captives tired, they were killed. “…the salvages would presently bury their hatchets in their brains, and leave their carcasses on the ground for birds and beasts to feed upon. However, Dustan (with her nurse) notwithstanding her present condition, traveled that night about a dozen miles, and then kept with their new masters in a long travel of a hundred and fifty miles, more or less,” (Mather 1-2). While Cotton continues to use language that victimizes the captives, in this quote he begins to use language that empowers them. This makes the readers begin to like them, and the fact that they are both women sheds light on the fact that women can indeed be