Panel: Autobiographical Accounts of Native-White Colonial Encounters
Copanelists: Elzbieta Klimek Dominiak and Arianne Margolin
Superficially, Mary Rowlandson’s autobiographical account The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) is a typically Puritan text. Focusing on her captivity among a band of Narragansett Indians in the wake of King Philip’s War (1775–1776), Rowlandson describes her captors as “wolves,” “hell-hounds,” and “black creatures,” whose devilish presence turns the Puritan Lancaster into “a lively resemblance of hell.” Throughout the text, Rowlandson strictly maintains the dividing line between Puritan Self and Native Other, and the possibility of intercultural reconciliation seems to be elusive as a result.
A closer look at the narrative reveals, however, that Rowlandson does approach the Native Other. Faced with the world of the cultural Other, Rowlandson makes use of two different methods to describe her experiences: translation and linguistic adaptation. While translation facilitates intercultural understanding and exchange in a moment of intercultural contact, it also maintains the dividing line between the two cultures, as it uses the language of the Self to express the world of the Other. In contrast to this approach, linguistic adaptation (i.e., the incorporation of Native terms and expressions into the English text) bridges the gap between these two cultural worlds by incorporating parts of Native expression and thinking into the system of the English language.
In my paper, I will analyze Rowlandson’s use of these two techniques. Drawing on concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s Third Space, I will demonstrate that translation and linguistic adaptations can be used as indicators for Rowlandson’s increasing cultural adjustment and for her growing amount of intercultural agency. While Rowlandson maintains the official Puritan rhetoric superficially, she thus covertly signals intercultural reconciliation through linguistic adaptation, and therefore undermines the binary hierarchy of traditional Puritan writing and thinking.
Bärbel Höttges is Assistant Professor of American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-Universit¨at, Mainz, where her PhD work received the award for best dissertation in 2006 by the Landesbank Rheinland-Pfalz. Her book Faith Matters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Toni Morrison’s and Louise Erdrich’s Fiction is forthcoming from Winter Verlag, Heidelberg.