Stories of women being held captive throughout history evoke feelings of brutality, loneliness, death, and sadness. How did they have the drive to stay alive? Why did they stay when they had the chance to leave? Early relations between the English settlers and Native American Indians were sometimes futile and barbaric. Only a small amount of the narratives showed compassion and love for the prisoner-turned-family member. Women and children were taken away from their families and homes as bargaining chips, to replace the Indian’s lost loved-ones, or just because they could in a time of turmoil. These prisoners adapted to the situations they were put into the best way they knew how. A few of the mechanisms used to survive were coping, conforming, and adaptation. Some used religion as a guiding light for their souls to stay strong and get by day-to-day until they could find a way out. Others joined in and became a part of “their new group”. There are even stories of rare occasions where the person preferred their new way of life and embodied all of the new customs. It is important to understand how a person in captivity found the drive to stay alive and why someone in imprisonment could become satisfied with their position. Mary Rowlandson’s story came from the journaling of her brutal 11 weeks in captivity filled with sad and unfortunate events. She was taken captive by a group of Indians after they surrounded her house and devastated her town. Watching her family be slain in front of her, she herself was shot. Her daughter, which was a little over six years old, was shot in the stomach while Mary held her but still grasped onto life for a few more days (Lincoln, 258). Mary Rowlandson and her child were taken hostage and made to w... ... middle of paper ... ...sed mechanisms to stay alive and have faith in the life they wanted to live. Works Cited Frankel, Glenn. “Between Tow Worlds.” American History 48.6 (2014): 28 MasterFILE Complete. Web. 17 Feb 2014. Jemison, Mary. “Narrative of Her Life.” Narrative of HerLife: Mary Jemison (2009): 73 MasterFILE Complete. Web. 17 feb 2014. Kohn, Denise and Margaret Campbell. “The Captive Female As Biblical her: Rowlandson, Rhetoric, and The Psalms.” Explicator 69.3 (2011) 125. MasterFILE Complete. Web. 18 Feb 2014. Lincoln, C.H. “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol A. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. (2012) 257-288. Print. Michno, Gregory. “NOCONA’S RAID AND Cynthia Ann’s RECAPTURE.” Wild West 23.2 (2010): 36 MasterFILE Complete. Web. 17 Feb. 2014.
Demos, John. The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Native American Captivity Narratives are accounts about people of European decent getting captured by their enemy “the savage” (Hawkes, par. 1). According to the “Encyclopedia of The Great Plains” These accounts were widely popular in the 17th century and had an adventurous story-line, resulting from a conflict between Native Americans and Europeans settling in the New World. A clear message through these captivity narratives is that European American culture was superior to Native American culture. In 1682 the first Native American Captivity Narrative was written by Mary Rowlandson titled “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration.” Some years earlier, John Smith related his experience of being captured in his personal account of the settlement of Jamestown. Their contributions ultimately made a great historical impact on Native American Literature. The captivity narratives authored by Mary Rowlandson and John Smith portrayed the Native Americans as devilish creatures that were simply evil, but the stories also reveal that the natives were frightened of white people and at times treated them with benevolence.
Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later
Significantly, Welch deconstructs the myth that Plains Indian women were just slaves and beasts of burden and presents them as fully rounded women, women who were crucial to the survival of the tribal community. In fact, it is the women who perform the day-to-day duties and rituals that enable cultural survival for the tribes of...
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. Print.
Toni saw this opportunity to write this particular article into a novel to show people how the days of slavery were and the sacrifices those that had run away would make if they stood a chance to be recaptured. The novel also introduces us to the spirits of the souls that were lost and how they never rested in peace until they finished what they had left behind. Toni really captures the audience’s attention in this particular novel.
Slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consisted of brutal and completely unjust treatment of African-Americans. Africans were pulled from their families and forced to work for cruel masters under horrendous conditions, oceans away from their homes. While it cannot be denied that slavery everywhere was horrible, the conditions varied greatly and some slaves lived a much more tolerable life than others. Examples of these life styles are vividly depicted in the personal narratives of Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince. The diversity of slave treatment and conditions was dependent on many different factors that affected a slave’s future. Mary Prince and Olaudah Equiano both faced similar challenges, but their conditions and life styles
Derounian, Kathryn Z. "Puritan Orthodoxy and the "Survivor Syndrome" in Mary Rowlandson's Indian Captivity Narrative." Early American Literature. 22.1 (1987): 82-93. Web. 3 Apr. 2014. .
Indians could remove colonist from their standard of living and thrust them into the unknown, unsettle frontier in the new world. Rowlandson 's narrative describes her being seized when she affirms, "Now away we must go with those barbarous creatures,"(259). Rowlandson also eludes to the virtue she attained from the captivity when she declares, "I have learned to look beyond present and smaller troubles, and to be quieted under them."(288). Rowlandson 's piece A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, in my opinion, does have those attributes and it has become one of the most popular American captivity narratives of its time. Norton 's Anthology makes a annotation in the description that "The account of her captivity became one of the most
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.
The notion of slavery, as unpleasant as it is, must nonetheless be examined to understand the hardships that were caused in the lives of enslaved African-Americans. Without a doubt, conditions that the slaves lived under could be easily described as intolerable and inhumane. As painful as the slave's treatment by the masters was, it proved to be more unbearable for the women who were enslaved. Why did the women suffer a grimmer fate as slaves? The answer lies in the readings, Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative which both imply that sexual abuse, jealous mistresses', and loss of children caused the female slaves to endure a more dreadful and hard life in captivity.
Lee, Desmond. “The Study of African American Slave Narratives “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” and “Narrative of Frederick Douglass”.” Studies of Early African americans. 17 (1999): 1-99. Web. EBSCO
Baym, Franklin, Gottesman, Holland, et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
was narrated by Rowlandson herself. This work, after it was published was the first ever captivity story told and became one of the most popular. It’s believed today that this work is one of the most valued in American History and American Literature as it paved a way to new American genres and historical knowledge of Indians and their cultures. Mary Rowlandson captivity narrative and all the ones that followed hers brought to fruition the “Indian captivity narrative” Genre. Rowlandson, “today is frequently represented in anthologies of American literature” (Greene 24). Today this work of literature is studied in most literature classes around the United States and Europe. The popularity of this story in America and also England, “triggered a wave of Indian captivity narratives and even now her influence is evident centuries later” (Bailey de Luise
Baym, Nina et al. Ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 8th ed. New York: