Biography: Born in Northampton, England, in 1612.
March, 1630, immigrated to Massachussets
1650: The Tenth Muse, published in London
Subjects of her poetry:
Her children, her love for her husband (somewhat against Puritan mores, she strongly declared her dedication, affection, and passion for him), spirituality/devotion, women’s creativity and artistry, Nature (comparing the sun to a deity in “Contemplations”), and her family. She also considers men’s talents and women’s talents, and the differences between them (“The Prologue”). Her poems seem at times self-depracating, or is this merely requisite (or expected) humility?
Style and poetics:
Formal, iambic pentameter. Rhyme scheme in poems? Enjambment, caesuras, couplets. Classical allusions? Biblical references? What is the significance of these? Does she employ these tropes to link her work to that of previous poets, to a poetic tradition? What is the effect on the reader (her contemporaries or today’s readers) of this formal style?
Social circumstances:
Women writing? According to the Norton’s preface, her book was the “first published volume of poems written by a resident in the New World” (115). How was her writing – as a woman, and the book itself -- received? What was her education or preparation for such artistic endeavors? How do the roles of Puritan wife and mother and artist interact in her work? What is her reaction to the assumed conflict between these roles?
Further questions to consider:
• In “The Author to her Book,” Bradstreet compares her book to a child. Identify lines in this poem where this comparison is clearest. How does she inflect her poetry with her experience as a mother and how is birthing and raising a child akin to birthing and raising a poem (to use her metaphor)?
• When do you think Bradstreet found the time to work on her craft as a poet? Consider the circumstances of her life and her role in familial and social life.
• As Pattie Cowell has written, in accompanying notes to the Heath Anthology, Bradstreet’s circumstacnes as an author were relatively favorable, considering that she had received a priviledged education in England and her family was proud of her poetic achievements, to the point of circulating and publishing her work.
Features of the genre of the “Indian captivity narrative”:
• The Indian captivity narrative has been described, by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, for one, as “the first American literary form dominated by women’s experiences as captives, story-tellers, writers, and readers” (xi). In her introduction to the Penguin Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, Derounian-Stodola explains that the captivity narrative usually concerns the captivity of a member of the dominant, or majority, group by a member of the subordinate, or minority group (xi). She writes, “Some critics believe that the Indian captivity narrative functions as the archetype of American culture, or its foudnational text, in which contact between Europeans and Native Americans inevitably evolved into conflict and finally colonial conquest” (xi).
• Narratives of power and powerlessness.
• Influence of religious writing on captivity narratives, including “sermons, providence tales, and spiritual autobiographies” (xiii). Derounian-Stodola writes, “The Indian captivity narrative became a parable of the soul’s thralldom to evil and showed the role of the captivity experience in bringing the erring closer to God” (xiii).
• Sexualization of the woman captive.
Historical context:
• King Philip’s war (1675-1676)
The website http://www.pilgrimhall.org/philipwar.htm provides some interesting and basic information about the war, its causes, and the various ramifications. You will see William Bradford, whose accounts of settling in Massachusetts we just read, mentioned there.
The attacks on colonial settlements, during one of which Rowlandson was taken, happened in the conext of King Philip’s war. The war was the “direct result,” according to the Norton, of the “execution of three of Philip’s Wampanoag tribesmen” (135). Yet, there were other contributing factors. Please discuss the social dynamics between the Native people of the Northeast and the White settlers that precipitated the violence of the mid-1670s.
• Clash between cultures in New England and the need for, and conflicting usage practices of, land.
Further questions to consider:
• Rowlandson frequently describes the Native people as “infidels,” “murderous wretches,” “barbarous enem[ies],” merciless enem[ies],” and inhumane beings. How does she contrast the Native people with the whites, then?
• What is the function of the insertion of biblical references and scripture in to Rowlandson’s narrative?
• Does Rowlandson portray any Native people as individuals? Or do Natives function monolithically in her narrative, as embodiments of all of the “evil” characteristics the words above connote?
• Discuss Rowlandson as Puritan wife and mother. How does her identity as wife and mother inform her day-to-day life as a captive, according to her description of this experience?
• Like Bradstreet, did Rowlandson defy some cultural taboos, concerning women’s societal roles, by writing her narrative?
• This is probably easy to answer – why was Rowlandson’s narrative a commercial success?
“Advanced” questions:
• Consider the long-established tradition of the “exchange of women.” How do women taken as captives – like Rowlandson – function within this tradition? Is the story of American culture the story of the exchange of women?
• From Rowlandson’s account, can you deduce the Natives’ motives for taking captives?
• Rowlandson insists that she was the same woman after her captivity, that she had not been raped or abused sexually. Why does she make this plain?
Interesting tidbits:
• There was only one printing press in New England at the time, so that Rowlandson’s narrative was printed was most significant. Thus, its publication was endorsed and was also political.
• I have pasted
below a link to the cover of Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, which
we discussed in class:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/9e/Jane_McCrea.jpg/300px-Jane_McCrea.jpg
The painter was John
Vanderlyn and the subject is the death of Jane McCrae at the hands of two
Algonquin men in 1777. Her death was
used as anti-British propaganda, as she was a Loyalist and the Algonquins
involved in her death were allies of the British.
Vanderlyn painted his version
of her death in 1804.
As we discussed in class,
this image is sexually charged and protrays the violation of a white woman at
the hands of the “dark Other.” This
fear reverberated throughout American literature and art, as Vanderlyn’s
painting demonstrates. As the
archetype of purity, domesticty, and innocence, the white woman’s death at the
hands of those deemed “savages” further galvanized and intensified the anti-Indian
attitudes of white Americans.
