Buried in Shades of Night:Contested Voices, Indian Captivity, and the Legacy of King Philip’s War

Description

The captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson| “The Soveraignty and Goodness of God|” published in 1682| is often considered the first “best seller” to be published in North America. Since then| it has long been read as a first-person account of the trials of Indian captivity. After an attack on the Puritan town of Lancaster| Massachusetts| in February 1676| Rowlandson was held prisoner for more than eleven weeks before eventually being ransomed. The account of her experiences| published six years later| soon took its place as an exemplar of the captivity narrative genre and a popular focal point of scholarly attention in the three hundred years since.
In this groundbreaking new book| Billy J. Stratton offers a critical examination of the narrative of Mary Rowlandson. Although it has long been thought that the book’s preface was written by the influential Puritan minister Increase Mather| Stratton’s research suggests that Mather was also deeply involved in the production of the narrative itself| which bears strong traces of a literary form that was already well established in Europe. As Stratton notes| the portrayal of Indian people as animalistic “savages” and of Rowlandson’s solace in Biblical exegesis served as a convenient alibi for the colonial aspirations of the Puritan leadership.
Stratton calls into question much that has been accepted as fact by scholars and historians over the last century| and re-centers the focus on the marginalized perspective of Native American people| including those whose land had been occupied by the Puritan settlers. In doing so| Stratton demands a careful reconsideration of the role that the captivity narrative–which was instrumental in shaping conceptions of “frontier warfare”–has played in the development of both American literary history and national identity.